Anyone who walked past 118 N. Tejon St. this winter watched Oskar Blues Grill & Brew go dark without much warning. The brewery closed abruptly on Dec. 30, leaving one of downtown's anchor game-day spots empty right as football season was winding down. If you assumed that corner would sit vacant for a while, or that downtown was quietly losing its capacity for watch parties and Saturday tailgates, you'd have been wrong on both counts.
By the time the leaves turned this year, downtown hadn't just replaced what it lost. It had added a second new sports bar on top of it.
What Actually Filled the Space
Stoney's Bar & Grill opened its first Colorado Springs location on Sept. 1 inside the historic DeGraff building at 118 N. Tejon, the same address Oskar Blues vacated eight months earlier. The Denver-based chain, founded in 2010 and now running three Denver locations plus one in Winter Park, is owned by Stoney Jesseph and William Trautman. Jesseph called the opening a chance to bring "the tried-and-true Stoney's experience to Downtown Colorado Springs," and the timing wasn't incidental. A ribbon-cutting was scheduled for that Friday, and the release announcing it leaned hard into football season, promising trivia nights, live entertainment, daily specials, and a pumpkin-carving party already on the books for fall. Stoney's is also positioning itself as a watch-party home for select college teams and NFL fan groups, with more partnership announcements expected.
Downtown Partnership CEO Chelsea Gondeck put the opening in context for what Tejon Street already does well: the street works "when people are here to meet up, catch a game, listen to music or just spend time together," and a new sports bar arriving "especially with football season getting underway" fit that identity rather than competing against it.
That's a fair read of what was already on the block. Stoney's joins a lineup that includes:
- Benny's Restaurant & Lounge
- The Brit Pub
- Tony's
- Trainwreck
Four established names, all within a short walk of each other, all built around the same audience of people looking for a screen and a seat on a Saturday.
The Part Most People Missed
Here's the detail that changes the story. Stoney's wasn't the first new arrival this year. Three months earlier, in June, The Sportsbook Bar & Grill, another Denver-grown concept, opened on the first floor of the SpringHill Suites by Marriott at 402 S. Tejon St.
Line that up against the Oskar Blues closure and the arithmetic looks different than "one bar closed, one bar opened." Downtown lost a single game-day venue in December and gained two within the following nine months, both of them regional chains choosing Colorado Springs as an expansion market rather than a fallback. That's not replacement. That's downtown's sports-bar capacity growing faster than it shrank, at exactly the moment of year when that kind of seating matters most.
It also says something about how outside operators are reading this stretch of Tejon Street right now. Two different Denver-based groups picked the same four-block radius in the same calendar year, one of them taking over 15,000 square feet in a building with actual civic history behind it. That's a bet on foot traffic and repeat weekend business, not a hedge.
It's Not Only the Bars
The same week Stoney's was settling into its new space, a very different kind of expansion was underway across town. The Chuckwagon 719 BBQ, at 6453 Omaha Blvd., has spent months serving a line that circles the building, and owners Deidre and Jared Hammond are close to opening 2,400 square feet of new dining room space to go with it. The upgrade includes two carving stations and two registers in place of the single point of sale that's been bottlenecking the line. Deidre Hammond said the goal is simple: give people a room to actually sit down and eat instead of navigating the pickup crowd.
Chuckwagon isn't chasing a football audience the way Stoney's and Sportsbook are, and it's not downtown proper. But it's the same signal from a different direction: local, established operators expanding physical capacity in the same window that outside chains are opening new locations. Restaurants and bars don't add square footage on a hunch. They add it because current volume already justifies it and they expect that volume to hold or grow.
What This Looks Like on a Saturday
None of this changes what downtown Colorado Springs already does on weekends, it sharpens it. The Sunday market at Acacia Park still runs 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. through Oct. 25, and Downtown Partnership's Saturday sidewalk sales, with live music from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., are still the daytime rhythm through the end of September. What's different this fall is what happens after that market wraps and the afternoon games start. A resident who used to have four solid options within walking distance on Tejon now has six, split across two buildings that didn't have sports bars in them a year ago.
If you live in this stretch of downtown, the practical read is straightforward. The DeGraff building is worth checking out even if Stoney's wasn't on your radar before, both for the space itself and because a ten-year lease suggests it's not a short-term bet. The Sportsbook Bar & Grill inside the SpringHill Suites is easy to overlook if you don't think to look inside a hotel for it. And if none of the newer arrivals suit you, the four names that were already anchoring the block, Benny's, the Brit Pub, Tony's, and Trainwreck, haven't gone anywhere.
The bigger takeaway is less about any single bar and more about what the sequence tells you. A closure that could have read as a downtown vacancy problem turned, within nine months, into a net gain in game-day seating, backed by two outside operators willing to sign long leases in the same small footprint. That's a market reading itself as healthy in real time, not one hoping to look that way in a press release.
If you're weighing what a stretch of downtown like this says about where Chaffee County and the wider Front Range corridor are headed, or you're curious how a market's day-to-day texture, who's opening, who's expanding, who's signing ten-year leases, shows up in property values long before it shows up in a listing description, that's exactly the kind of read Coldwell Banker Collegiate Peaks Realty does for clients looking at Colorado Springs alongside the mountain communities further west. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through what we're actually seeing on the ground.
