This fall, as thousands of University of Iowa students flood back into downtown bars, three of Iowa City’s bustling nightlife spots will enter the semester with a new tool: the SAFE Bar Network.

The three bars under the Harmonic Hospitality Group – Roxxy, The Stuffed Olive, and Double-Tap – announced in June they had joined the SAFE Bar Network. The program, launched in 2020, trains staff to recognize and safely de-escalate uncomfortable or unsafe situations – from a rowdy drunk guest to a student being harassed.

Conor Schley, executive general manager of Harmonic Hospitality Group, said the active bystander training is an approximately hour-long workshop that brings together a bar’s front line team, from bartenders and servers to security staff, to learn minimally disruptive deescalation techniques.

“We’re not beating anybody up — our security guys are not doing that,” he said. “Most of the safe network training is just how to recognize that somebody might be in an uncomfortable situation, and what we can do to help that without throwing somebody out of the bar or creating a big scene.”

Schley said the active bystander approaches that staff members take can be as small as diverting a rowdy, intoxicated guest away from other customers and offering them water.

Bars around the city prepared for the return of UI students, bracing themselves for one of the busiest days of the year, the back-t0-school bar crawl on Aug. 23.

“I’m hiring like a madman right now,” Schley said. “I got 48 applications last week alone. I’m trying to get people hired ASAP.”

The spring 2025 semester saw 29,178 UI students crowding around lecture halls, labs, and the lively streets of Iowa City, according to the UI Office of the Registrar. The summer slashed that number down to 8,693.

At Brothers Bar & Grill, slower foot traffic during the summer is expected, but that doesn’t make the customers feel any less welcome.

“I would say that foot traffic and number of the people staying in town did seem a little lighter than past [summers],” General Manager Trey Jennings said. “But we’ve had a little bit more lively weekend nights.”

On an average summer night, Jennings said, the bar can expect to serve anywhere from 600 to 800 customers. During the school year, conservative estimates range anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 customers a night.

However, the UI’s growing incoming freshman numbers could make bars around the city experience foot traffic whiplash, pivoting from standard summer sales to more patrons than the bars can count.

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UI’s 2024 incoming class brought in 5,208 students, replacing 2022’s batch as the third-largest class size in the university’s history. Trends like these point to 2025’s class, and possibly future classes, kicking off the year with increasing numbers of students.

As the freshmen classes become the legal drinking age or inevitably slip through the cracks of ID checks, bars must navigate rising numbers of patrons.

“I will definitely say you can feel the demand is higher to come into the bar,” Jennings said. “There’s longer lines everywhere. It definitely seems like any given night, more and more of the bars are completely full than not.”

In his 13 years of working downtown, the biggest change Jennings has noticed is timing.

“It used to be that more people would come in for afternoons and evenings, and then it would be decently busy during that time. It would still be pretty busy at night, but not quite as many people out and about only at night,” he said. “Now it seems like everybody waits till like, 9:30, 10 o’clock to go out.”

Schley also kept his fingers to the bars’ slow, beating pulse during the summer.

“Summertime is just a tough battle,” Schley said. “I do really like the guys over there at the Iowa City Downtown District, because they really do pack the summers with events that bring foot traffic downtown. When fall comes around, we don’t really need much help. It happens naturally.”

Joe Reilly, director of operations and nighttime initiatives at the Iowa City Downtown District, or ICDD, explained the summer as a cycle, with vacations in July bringing in low foot traffic downtown, preceded by “festival season” in June, bringing heavy foot traffic from events such as the Iowa City Pride Festival and the Downtown Block Party. The latter brought in roughly 35,000 partygoers, Reilly said.

“The block party, for a lot of our nightlife businesses, is a boom for them,” Reilly said. “That’s their little nest egg that they can coast on until the fall when classes are back in session. During the summer, you really have to plan to either save your money and know what events there are to make money.”

Reilly said for some longtime residents, the slower summer nightlife sales work well for them.

“There are some who really appreciate the summertime when students are not here at such a great number because they can find it’s easy to get to their favorite bar or restaurant. There’s still nightlife going on. It’s just not as many people, and I think some folks appreciate that.”

Reilly and ICDD look forward to the foot traffic magnet that is football season, which invites a healthy number of customers back to the bars after a dry summer season.

“It’s always exciting to see people wander when they come down here, maybe they haven’t been here at all, or haven’t been here a long time, and just see what’s changed,” he said. “And so we’re always eager to welcome those folks back, or welcome them for the first time.”

Correction: The previous version of this article referred to the SAFE Bar Network as the Bar Safety Network.