For five years, Skydance Brewing Co.'s best seat sat above everyone else's head. The Eagle's Nest, a loft tucked into the mezzanine of the brewery's flagship taproom at 1 NE 7th Street, was where regulars climbed a short flight of stairs to watch the room from above while everyone else ordered from the bar below. On August 1, 2026, that seat moved down to street level, and it took a wall with it.
Earlier in the year, Skydance began absorbing the storefront next door, a space known as Suite B, and stitching it into one continuous room with the original taproom. The two spaces had shared a single patio for a while, an arrangement the brewery's own team later described as a source of confusion about which door belonged to which business. That confusion is gone now. So is the divided patio. What's there instead is roughly 2,000 additional square feet, a full kitchen, a new brewpub license, and an Eagle's Nest that no longer requires stairs to find.
By square footage, this is a modest renovation. For a two-block stretch of Broadway Avenue that has spent thirty years rebuilding itself one merged storefront at a time, it is not a small event.
What Suite B Actually Solved
Jacob Keyes, who founded Skydance in 2018 with his wife and business partner Bobbi, opened the Automobile Alley taproom in 2021 and has since added a second location in Midwest City. That second location already had a kitchen running before the flagship did. The Auto Alley expansion, in other words, wasn't the brewery getting ahead of itself. It was the original room catching up to what the newer one already offered.
Keyes has talked about why the timing mattered.
"Especially when you look at the way the industry of craft beer has changed, and what's needed now is more than just beer. You can't just say 'we're local and we make beer' and people just show up."
The new kitchen was quietly serving food for a few months before the official August 1 opening, which means anyone who wandered in over the summer already knew something had shifted before the rest of the block caught on. The beverage program changed too. Skydance moved from a straight taproom license to a brewpub license and picked up a mixed beverage license alongside it, adding a curated cocktail list and a small selection of bourbons, tequilas and whiskeys. Keyes has been clear that the cocktail list will stay short and specific rather than turning into an open request line. Craft beer is still the point. The kitchen and the bar program are there to give people a reason to stay once the beer brought them in.
A Brewery Row You Can Walk
Skydance sits in the part of the district known as East Auto, and the brand's own materials point out that it is within walking distance of Prairie Artisan Ales, Vanessa House and Twisted Spike, three more breweries clustered along the same stretch of Broadway. The block is also just a few minutes on foot from the OKC Convention Center and Paycom Center, home of the Thunder.
A neighborhood named for car dealerships has turned into one of the more walkable pours in the metro. Nobody needs a car to work down that list of four breweries in an evening, which is a fairly specific irony for a district whose name comes from the fifty-plus dealerships that once lined this same avenue.
The Building Logic Automobile Alley Never Dropped
Skydance folding two storefronts into one isn't a new move for this block. It's the same move Automobile Alley has been making since the mid-1990s.
The district's original dealership buildings were built with wide bays and large glass fronts so showroom cars could be seen from the street, and those same proportions turned out to work just as well for restaurants, lofts and taprooms decades later. The first residential conversion, the Garage Lofts at NW 13th and Broadway, took a former Buick service garage and turned it into apartments. That project was still under construction when the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building damaged buildings throughout the district, collapsing roofs and shattering windows along Broadway. The neighborhood rebuilt from there, and the next wave brought destination restaurants: the Colcord Oyster Bar relocated into an Automobile Alley storefront from downtown, followed by the Iguana Lounge Grill and Red Prime Steakhouse, the district's Zagat-rated steakhouse that now occupies the 1911 Buick Building at 504 North Broadway, the very first dealership showroom built along this strip.
Every one of those conversions worked because the original buildings were designed to be opened up, combined, and repurposed without much structural fuss. Skydance closing the gap between its taproom and Suite B is that same instinct showing up in 2026 instead of 1996. The building type hasn't changed in a hundred years. What goes on inside it keeps turning over.
The Calendar Line Already Waiting For It
Automobile Alley runs a standing monthly event called the Auto Alley Shop Hop on the third Thursday of every month, when shops along Broadway stay open until 8 p.m. and sidewalk entertainment turns the block into something closer to a small festival. A finished kitchen and a ground-floor Eagle's Nest give that monthly walk a clearer stopping point than a shared patio and a stairway ever did.
Later this fall, the district also puts up Lights on Broadway, its annual light display that typically wraps the block's historic facades in somewhere around 180,000 to 200,000 LED strands starting in late November. The timing means Skydance's new room will be running at full capacity right as the neighborhood heads into its busiest and most photographed stretch of the year.
The Room That Became a Blueprint
The expanded space got its first real stress test on August 29, when Skydance ran an Oktoberfest with live music from the Flannels alongside German-style food and its usual lineup of pours, the kind of event the old shared-patio layout would have struggled to host cleanly.
That test run matters beyond Broadway Avenue. In May, Skydance announced a partnership with the Fort Sill Apache Tribe to build a full brewery, restaurant and bar inside the Apache Casino Hotel in Lawton, slated to open in the first quarter of 2027. The plans include a speakeasy-style lounge, also called the Eagle's Nest, explicitly modeled on the upgraded flagship layout on Broadway. The room that just got bigger in Automobile Alley isn't only a local hangout anymore. It's the prototype another Skydance location is being built to copy.
That's the part worth sitting with next time you're at the bar there. The stairs to the old loft are gone, but the name stuck around, and it's about to show up two hundred miles southwest, built from the same floor plan this block has been reusing since the Buicks left.
If you're weighing what a corner like this one, where a single storefront merger reshapes how a whole block runs, might mean for property nearby, Matthew Simms Realty is happy to walk Broadway with you and schedule a complimentary consultation.
