Downtown Colorado Springs Got Its Record Store Back the Same Week It Lost Two Restaurants

Every local outlet ran the same headline in early September: downtown had a record store again. Easy's Records + Vintage, founded by Ryan Fowler and Erica Dunford, held its grand opening on September 10 at 327 N. Tejon St., ending a run of eight years without a standalone shop selling vinyl inside the downtown core. The last one, Independent Records, closed in 2018 after 45 years, mostly on cash flow. Fowler and Dunford had been building toward a full storefront for two years, running a 300-square-foot pop-up inside C.O.A.T.I. under the name Vintage and Vinyl before landing four times that space on Tejon.

It's a good story, and it's a true one. But the same week the cameras showed up for Easy's, two bigger names quietly packed up and left downtown for good: Jax Fish House and Oskar Blues. Nobody ran a segment on that. If you live in the Old North End or walk Tejon on your way downtown, the record store reopening and those two closures are not separate stories. They're the same story, and it tells you more about what downtown is becoming than either headline does on its own.

One Address, Four Tenants, Three Years

Start with the building itself. Before Easy's moved in, 327 N. Tejon housed Alpine Tools, which opened in May 2025 and moved out by August 1, 2026. Before Alpine Tools, it was Crafted Colorado, a handmade gift shop, and before that, Entwine, a fiber arts studio. That's four different small, owner-run businesses cycling through one storefront in roughly three years.

That turnover rate isn't a warning sign. It's closer to a rhythm. None of those four tenants was backed by outside capital or a regional restaurant group. Each was a person or a couple trying an idea in a small space, and each eventually gave way to the next one. Easy's is simply the tenant that stuck, in part because they doubled their footprint and finally had room to carry vinyl, cassettes, VHS, and vintage clothing under one roof instead of splitting attention across a pop-up calendar.

The Same Week, Two Anchors Left for Good

Set that turnover against what happened to Jax Fish House and Oskar Blues. These weren't first-time local operators testing a concept in a small storefront. They were established, multi-location brands that had already proven themselves elsewhere before downtown Colorado Springs was ever on their map. When they closed, the Downtown Partnership itself described it as signaling a transition for the district, not a one-off.

The numbers around that transition are still catching up. The Downtown Partnership doesn't yet have finalized 2026 statistics, but the most recent full-year figures, from 2025, show 37 new businesses opened downtown while the vacancy rate still climbed 1.9 percent from 2024 to 2025. Read those two numbers together and the story isn't collapse. It's replacement at a pace that hasn't fully caught up with departures, especially among the larger tenants that need more square footage and more foot traffic to break even.

That's the pattern worth naming: small, owner-operated shops are filling storefronts faster than bigger, brand-backed restaurant and bar concepts are willing to commit to them. Downtown isn't shrinking. It's re-sorting itself toward businesses sized like Easy's and away from businesses sized like a regional fish house chain.

Why a Record Store Picked This Block

Fowler and Dunford weren't vague about why they chose North Tejon specifically. The location sits close to new apartment construction, Palmer High School, and Colorado College, and the owners have said they expect students and new residents to be the customers who keep the shop running. That's a different bet than the one a destination restaurant makes. A restaurant chain needs people to drive downtown and choose it over other dinner options. A record shop on this block just needs the neighborhood that's already there, walking to class or walking home, to wander in.

If you live in the Old North End, that's the version of downtown you already recognize: a five-minute walk or bike ride from Colorado College, close enough that Tejon functions less like a destination strip and more like an extension of the neighborhood's own sidewalks. Easy's is betting on that proximity the same way the fiber studio and the gift shop before it did, on a smaller scale than a chain restaurant ever could.

A Neighborhood That Already Knew This Building Would Turn Over

If you want a longer view of how many times a single block downtown has already reinvented itself, the Downtown Partnership's Ghosts of Downtown walking tour departs from Story Coffee on October 3, running about an hour through the historic buildings on and around Tejon. It's framed as a Halloween-season novelty, some true stories mixed with invented ones, but the premise underneath the theatrics is accurate: this stretch of the city is more than 150 years old, and its storefronts have never sat still for long. A record shop moving into a former fiber arts studio inside a building that's outlasted four different small businesses in three years isn't an aberration. It's just this decade's version of what Tejon Street does.

Downtown's own planning reflects that instinct. Officials adopted a new 10-year strategy this year, called the Elevate Plan, aimed partly at improving retention so that turnover like this happens less by accident and more by design. Whether that changes the pattern on blocks like 327 N. Tejon is still an open question. For now, the block keeps doing what it's always done: losing a tenant, gaining a different one, and staying occupied more often than not.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this requires you to do anything. You don't need to plan around a record store opening or worry about two restaurant closures changing your commute. What it does mean, if you're the kind of resident who notices these things, is that the next time a storefront on Tejon goes dark, the smart bet isn't that downtown is struggling. It's that something smaller and more locally rooted is probably about to take its place, the same way Easy's just did.

That's the version of downtown that the Old North End has always been positioned closest to anyway: not the version built around driving in for a big-name dinner, but the version built around walking to a shop that knows its regulars by name. The record store getting its lease is a small data point. The pattern behind it is the real one.

If you're curious how these shifts in the Old North End & Downtown corridor connect to the neighborhood's older bones, our guide to the area's historic home styles is a good next stop. And if you're weighing a move into this stretch of the city, or already own here and want a second opinion on what these changes mean for your property, Lisa Cheponis offers the kind of grounded, neighborhood-level read that doesn't come from a headline. Schedule a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.