Walk down West Colorado Avenue on a Saturday morning this August and you will pass a hand-lettered sign in a spice shop window announcing a move to Minnesota, a new smokehouse serving brisket where a taproom used to be, and permits taped to the door of a restaurant that closed years ago and is now, apparently, coming back. If you only glance at the storefronts, it looks like the strip is in the middle of a shakeup. Look at who actually holds the keys, and a different picture forms: almost everyone changing addresses on this street already worked on it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A neighborhood where local names keep trading spaces is doing something very different from a neighborhood where outside chains are filling empty storefronts. Old Colorado City is doing the first thing this year, and the contrast with what is happening a few miles away in the rest of Colorado Springs makes the case on its own.
The Three Storefronts Everyone's Asking About
Start with the one that made the most noise. Stage Stop OCC Bar & Smokehouse opened on May 29 in the former Trail's End Taproom space at 2925 W. Colorado Ave, and the barbecue-focused menu, smoked Gouda mac and cheese, brisket flatbread, four house sauces, closely mirrors what the same owners already serve at their original location. Mark Childers and Eve Trabandt Childers have run Stage Stop Cantina, Rentals & Stables at 6620 Old Stage Road for years, with Eve as chef. This isn't an outside operator testing the westside market. It's a family business that already had a following expanding onto a busier block, and it already runs food trucks at Mash Mechanix Brewing Co. and Urban Animal Beer Co., so the name was circulating on the westside long before the new address.
Then there's the loss everyone is asking about. Gather Food Studio & Spice Shop, the cooking school and spice shop at 2011 W. Colorado Ave that Cortney Smith and David Cook built into a neighborhood fixture since opening in 2019, is closing and relocating to Minnesota. The owners announced it directly to customers, writing that the move is about carrying Gather with them into the next season of life. It is a genuine loss for anyone who took a class there or stocked a spice rack from that shop, and it is not a story about the block failing. It's a family choosing to leave on their own terms after building something that worked.
The third storefront is the strangest kind of return. The Blue Star, which first opened in Old Colorado City back in 1995, is coming back to its own former space at 1645 South Tejon Street in the Ivy Wild neighborhood. The Pikes Peak Regional Building Department confirmed permits for the remodel earlier this year. Whatever reopens there will carry three decades of westside history with it, even if the address isn't on Colorado Avenue itself.
Here's how those three line up side by side:
| Business | New or returning address | Who's behind it |
|---|---|---|
| Stage Stop OCC Bar & Smokehouse | 2925 W. Colorado Ave, former Trail's End Taproom | Mark and Eve Childers, already running Stage Stop Cantina on Old Stage Road |
| Gather Food Studio & Spice Shop | Leaving 2011 W. Colorado Ave for Minnesota | Cortney Smith and David Cook, closing a business they built since 2019 |
| The Blue Star | Returning to 1645 South Tejon St, Ivy Wild | The original westside restaurant, first opened in 1995, remodeling its own old space |
Two of the three names on that list were already local before the sign changed. The third is a business that has simply chosen to leave rather than fail.
The Farmers Market Just Proved the Same Point
If the restaurant changes felt like a coincidence, the Old Colorado City Farmers Market removed any doubt. The market has run at Bancroft Park for more than 40 years, and this season it changed hands for the first time in recent memory. The new owner is Zack Quintana, a longtime vendor known around the market for his Palisade peaches. He didn't buy his way in from outside. He was already there every Saturday, and now he's running the thing.
Under his ownership, the market opened this season with an unusually early bloom of cherries and peaches thanks to a dry, warm winter, and it's still drawing more than 80 vendors and food trucks to Bancroft Park every Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. through mid-October. The person who took over the market is the same kind of insider who took over the smokehouse and is remodeling the old Blue Star space. Nobody new actually arrived. Somebody who already belonged just moved up.
Why This Is Different From the Rest of the Springs
To see how unusual that pattern is, look at what's happening elsewhere in the city this year. Guthrie's Chicken Fingers, an Alabama chain with 70 locations across 14 states, opened its first Colorado location entirely at 1520 S. Nevada Ave in July. Homegrown Tap and Dough, a Denver-based chain that had never operated in Colorado Springs before, is remodeling the old Jose Muldoon's space at 5710 S. Carefree Circle for a late-summer opening. Mountain Mike's Pizza has landed here too. None of those businesses had any prior connection to Colorado Springs before this year. They are outside operators filling space in a growing market, which is a normal and unremarkable thing for a city this size.
Old Colorado City's turnover this year is the opposite shape. The people filling the new spaces already had a stake in the old ones. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's what a mature, walkable business district tends to do when it works well: the operators who know the street best get first crack at the next storefront, and the businesses that leave tend to leave by choice rather than by attrition.
What's Actually Still Ahead This Season
None of this changes the calendar that's coming, and residents planning their fall weekends should know what's ending soon and what's holding steady.
- The farmers market at Bancroft Park continues every Saturday through mid-October, which puts roughly ten more weekends on the calendar under Quintana's first season running it.
- First Friday Art Walk keeps its usual rhythm along West Colorado Avenue, with stops like Hunter-Wolff Gallery, currently marking artist John Sherman's 35-year career after two decades of showing his work, and Squash Blossom, which hosted watercolor artist Eric Fetsch during a recent First Friday. The galleries are the one part of this story that hasn't changed hands at all.
- Pumpkins in the Park, Old Colorado City's fall festival at Bancroft Park, runs Saturday, October 24, from noon to 6 p.m., with a pumpkin patch, fall crafts, and the neighborhood's Spooky Magic Town setup, and it's free.
Line those dates up and the season's real shape appears. The market's remaining Saturdays and the fall festival bookend a September that will look, from the sidewalk, almost identical to last year's, even with three new names on three storefronts.
The Actual Shape of the Neighborhood
None of this is a story about instability. It's a story about how a neighborhood with real depth handles change. The people who take over a smokehouse or a farmers market or a thirty-year-old restaurant space here tend to be the same people who were already standing behind the counter somewhere else on the same street. That's a harder thing to build than a strip of open storefronts waiting for the next chain to sign a lease, and it's worth recognizing while it's happening rather than after the fact.
I've spent years watching how these small westside patterns play out, on this street and across the towns further down the Arkansas River corridor, and the businesses that stick tend to be the ones with roots already in the ground. If you're curious how a specific block or property here fits into that longer pattern, or you just want a straight answer about a piece of the westside you've been watching, reach out to Colorado Foothills Properties and work with John.
