"So many people got married here. We had the courthouses right down the street. I know of at least three different families that came here and celebrated after they'd legally adopted their kids. Some of those kids are 30 years old now and they celebrate that day here."
That's James Africano, chef and co-owner of The Warehouse, talking about the gallery and loft space attached to his restaurant on West Cimarron Street. For years, that room existed for one purpose: the occasion. The reception, the milestone, the day you rented out a beautiful old building because it was worth marking.
As of this summer, that room sells cheese.
Sixty-two kinds of it, along with yak, rabbit, and elk from the butcher counter, and a rotating case of chef-prepared meals you'd never find on The Warehouse's dinner menu, things like meatloaf and mashed potatoes, beef stroganoff, curried chicken bowls. Urban Grocer had its grand opening on Saturday, July 18, at 27 W. Cimarron St., after a construction timeline that Africano had originally hoped would run 100 days and instead stretched well past that once the crew got into the walls of a downtown building that's stood on that corner for more than a century. If you live in Patty Jewett or downtown proper and you've watched that building sit half-wrapped in construction dust since January, this is what it was becoming.
Years Of Receptions, Then Nothing
The pivot didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen because Africano got bored of weddings. It happened because the events business that used to carry that room never came back after COVID, while the number of people living within walking distance of it kept climbing. Africano has said he and his wife, Shaundy, had been kicking around the idea of a grocery store inside the restaurant for seven years, going back to when the Weidner Field development downtown first made parking tight for anyone trying to book the event space. Instead of fighting that trend, they let the events business go quiet and built something people would use on a Tuesday instead of once a year.
The pandemic gave Africano a preview of what that could look like. He started packaging grocery staples into family-sized portions for neighbors during the supply shortages, a habit that turned into the actual business model once the room was free. Urban Grocer is open every day, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., directly across the street from Weidner Field. Before it opened, the only other true grocery option downtown was Bread and Butter Market, a small upscale produce shop that marked its own fifth anniversary last year. Downtown had plenty of restaurants and almost nowhere to buy dinner ingredients. Now it has both, on the same block.
The Same Pattern, Four More Times
Once you notice the shift from occasion to routine at The Warehouse, it shows up everywhere else that opened downtown this year.
- Landmarks Coffee ran as a mobile trailer since 2024, popping up at events around the city. This year it landed a permanent, 2,400-square-foot storefront at 635 S. Sierra Madre St., right next to Weidner Field and the Experience at Epicenter apartments. Owners Brandon and Toni Watts built the new space to be open daily, 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week. A trailer chases events. A storefront with those hours is built for whoever walks past it on a Wednesday morning.
- Slice 420 Express took over the former Bento Heaven space at 107 N. Tejon St., closing times set for 2 to 3 a.m. to catch the crowds spilling out of the nightclubs on Tejon and Kiowa. This is the one opening on this list still built around the occasion, the night out rather than the errand, and it's the third location for a pizzeria that started in Old Colorado City in 2017.
- The Sportsbook Bar & Grill opened at 402 S. Tejon St., tucked beneath the SpringHill Suites and Element hotels, its fourth Colorado location. Co-owner Jeremy Malone said the goal was simple: become part of the neighborhood, not just a stop for hotel guests passing through.
- Perriteaux's opened near Prospect Lake at Memorial Park, in the long-vacant space that used to be Zorbadillos Heavenly Greek. It's a revival of Springs Orleans, the beloved Cajun and Creole restaurant that closed when the Mining Exchange sold in 2022, brought back by owner Perry Sanders and chef Jason Miller. Gumbo, po'boys, beignets, a full bar pouring Hurricanes and Sazeracs. This one leans occasion too, open Wednesday through Sunday, but it's positioned to anchor a side of the lake that's been waiting on a reason to draw people over since Zorbadillos closed.
Four of the five openings this year point the same direction: businesses betting on people who already live nearby, not visitors who need a reason to show up.
The Number Behind All Of It
None of this makes sense without the population growth underneath it. As of late 2025 reporting, more than 2,000 residential units had opened in Colorado Springs' city center since 2016, with another 1,000-plus expected by the end of this year. That's the math Africano was doing when he decided a grocery store made more sense than chasing the wedding business back, and it's the same math behind a coffee trailer deciding it could finally survive as a building with a lease. Neighborhoods surrounding downtown, including Mill Street and Hillside, have been described as food deserts even as the apartments around them filled up. Urban Grocer and Bread and Butter Market are the first real answer to that gap, and they only pencil out now because the residential base finally caught up to the retail.
What The Trail Still Owes Patty Jewett
If you live in Patty Jewett, the fastest way into all of this is on foot, down Shooks Run Trail, which runs directly from the neighborhood into downtown and connects to the Legacy Loop, the roughly 10-mile trail and park system that circles the city center. The trail side of this story hasn't moved as fast as the retail side.
A key piece of that connection depends on the South Downtown Rail Underpass Reconstruction project, which is supposed to replace the existing rail bridge over Tejon Street and finally give Shooks Run Trail a grade-separated crossing where it currently has to fight traffic. BNSF's original schedule called for construction to start in April 2024 and finish that October. As of May 2026, construction still hadn't begun, and BNSF hadn't provided an updated timeline. The city's own project page notes the delay is tied to utility relocation work, with the next community advisory meeting not expected until late summer or early fall of 2026.
So the walk from Patty Jewett into downtown is better than it used to be, thanks to the Rock Island Trail connection that finished linking Shooks Run to the Pikes Peak Greenway, but it isn't finished. The businesses opening on the other end of that trail are moving on a private timeline, driven by a chef with a lease and a coffee roaster with a landlord. The bridge is moving on a railroad's timeline, and that one has already blown past its own deadline once.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
Walk from Patty Jewett to downtown this fall and the errands have multiplied. You can pick up dinner at Urban Grocer, grab a Trailblazer latte at Landmarks before work, and still make it to Perriteaux's for étouffée on a Saturday without any of it requiring a reason beyond wanting to. That's a different neighborhood than the one where downtown was somewhere you went for a game or a wedding and came home from. The buildings changed because enough people moved in to make the daily version worth building. The trail connecting you to it is still catching up.
Neighborhoods change in ways that show up in listings eventually, but they show up on foot first. That's the part of the Colorado Springs market The Lauber Group pays attention to long before it's a data point, because a lease signed on Cimarron Street or a bridge schedule slipping past its own deadline tells you more about where a neighborhood is headed than a median price ever will. If you're weighing what a place like Patty Jewett or downtown actually offers day to day, not just on paper, that's the conversation worth having with someone who walks these blocks regularly.
