The Corners Colorado Springs Has Been Waiting On Finally Reopen This Fall
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Drive past 5710 S. Carefree Circle any time in the last two and a half years and you'd have seen the same thing: a dark restaurant, a dumpster out front, a sign for a place that used to be somebody's Friday night. That corner sat empty since Jose Muldoon's northeast location closed in January 2024 after 13 years in business. It is not empty anymore. Neither is the old Blue Star space on South Tejon, or the storefront on North Nevada that Amore Italian Grille just took over, or the space at 118 N. Tejon that spent months as a shuttered Oskar Blues.
That's the thing worth understanding about this particular fall in Colorado Springs. It isn't that new restaurants opened, restaurants open every season. It's that several specific spaces the city has been staring at, empty, for one to thirteen years, all came back into use inside the same few months, alongside two civic projects that took a decade to finish. If you've been driving the same loop through Old Colorado City and Garden of the Gods for years because that's just where things are, the map underneath you shifted this fall. Here's what actually changed and where.
Homegrown Tap and Dough, a Denver-based pizza and beer chain owned by the Gastamo Group, opened its first Denver location back in 2011 and has grown to five locations around the metro. It opened a Castle Rock location in late 2025, and this year it's moving into that long-dark east-side pad on Carefree Circle, converting the old Jose Muldoon's with what city planning documents describe as only minor modifications. The new location is expected to employ roughly 120 people. That number matters less for the jobs report and more for what it tells you: a corner that had been treated as a write-off for two years just got enough investment behind it that a regional chain is betting on foot traffic there again. If your east-side dinner rotation has been thinning out because the sit-down options kept closing, this is the first real reversal of that trend in a while.
The Blue Star first opened in Old Colorado City in 1995, before later settling into a space at 1645 South Tejon Street in the Ivywild neighborhood. That location closed, and the building sat unused until March 2026, when the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issued permits for a full remodel. The restaurant is moving back into its own old space. This is a different project from Ivywild Kitchen, the burger counter the Blue Star Group has run inside the Ivywild School food hall since that building reopened in 2019. Both are Blue Star Group properties now, but the Tejon Street reopening is the standalone restaurant coming back, not an addition to the existing food hall.
If you moved to Colorado Springs after the original Blue Star closed, the amount your neighbors talk about this might seem out of proportion. It isn't really about the menu. It's that Ivywild's identity as a dining destination was built around a restaurant that hasn't existed in years, and its actual return, not a tribute concept with the same name, is a different kind of event than a new restaurant opening cold.
Stoney's Bar & Grill, a Colorado-themed sports and music bar that started in Denver in 2010 and now has locations across the state including a Winter Park spot, opened its first Colorado Springs location on September 1 inside the historic DeGraff building at 118 N. Tejon Street, taking over the space Oskar Blues Grill & Brew abruptly vacated at the end of last December. It joins an already crowded downtown sports bar lineup that includes Benny's, the Brit Pub, Tony's, and Trainwreck, plus the Sportsbook Bar & Grill, another Denver import that opened inside the Springhill Suites on South Tejon back in June. Stoney's has already announced a pumpkin-carving party for the fall calendar, which tells you it's positioning itself as a neighborhood fixture rather than a pop-in-and-out concept.
North Nevada Avenue's addition is quieter but arguably more significant for the corridor's long-term identity. Amore Italian Grille, a modern Italian concept from the team behind Ambli Kitchen & Bar and Latin Social, opened at 5278 N Nevada Ave. North Nevada has been the subject of a formal city renewal effort for years, aimed at turning a stretch the city itself has classified as blighted into something closer to a walkable commercial corridor. A sit-down restaurant with local ownership behind it is a small data point, but it's the kind of tenant that corridor plan is explicitly trying to attract, not the fast-food and quick-serve businesses that have filled most of the recent vacancies there.
None of the restaurant openings above are the biggest thing that happened in Colorado Springs this year. That distinction belongs to the General Bradley and Zita Hosmer Visitor Center at the Air Force Academy's North Gate. The project was first envisioned in 2013 as part of the City for Champions initiative, and construction was delayed for years by the pandemic and the 2020 bond market collapse. It finally opened to the public on May 16, 2026, after more than $100 million in combined investment. The 34,000-square-foot building is free, requires no base access, and holds seven themed galleries walking visitors through the 47-month cadet journey, capped by a 108-foot atrium. By early summer it had already welcomed nearly 30,000 guests. As a graduate of the Academy myself, I'd point out that this is the first building in the Academy's history designed specifically so the public doesn't need base access to understand what happens inside it. For a city that has spent decades explaining the Academy to visitors from a distance, that's a real shift, and it's the single best answer now if you're tired of the same Garden of the Gods and Broadmoor tour for every out-of-town guest.
The other anchor is Cheyenne Mountain Zoo's 100th anniversary. The zoo, which traces back to 1926 when Spencer Penrose moved his private animal collection up the mountain from the Broadmoor, is marking the milestone with the grand opening of its International Center for the Care and Conservation of Giraffe, scheduled for September 15. The new center expands feeding access from three stations to eleven, a real change for anyone who's stood in line on a busy Saturday to feed the herd of 13 giraffes currently living there. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was also ranked the second-best zoo in the country in USA Today's 2026 10Best Readers' Choice Awards, tying its highest-ever ranking for the second year running.
None of this requires you to do anything. But if you're planning a fall calendar, a few of these are worth building around rather than treating as background noise.
The bigger pattern is the one worth sitting with. A city doesn't usually unstick five separate stalled spaces in the same season by accident. Some of it is coincidence of timing. Some of it is that Colorado Springs has been quietly building toward this for years, on East Carefree Circle, on North Nevada, on South Tejon, and outside the Academy's North Gate, and this is simply the season it all landed at once.
If you're weighing what a season like this means for the neighborhoods you drive through every week, or whether it's time to think differently about where you'd want to live given what's opening around you, Harrison McWilliams is happy to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation, and let's plan your next move.
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