Downtown Colorado Springs Just Turned a Wedding Venue Into a Grocery Store

For more than two decades, walking into the event space next to The Warehouse restaurant usually meant you were there for someone else's big night. Chef James Africano still keeps a running list in his head: the wedding receptions, the birthday parties, the families who came straight from the courthouse after finalizing an adoption. "So many people got married here," he told Colorado Public Radio earlier this year. That room, tucked into a 139-year-old brick building at the corner of Cimarron and Sahwatch, doesn't host receptions anymore. On July 18, it opened as a grocery store.

The building's arc tells you more about downtown Colorado Springs right now than any list of new restaurant openings could. It started as a railroad storage warehouse. It became a restaurant and event venue. Now it's the Warehouse Urban Grocer, a full-service market at 29 W. Cimarron Street with a butcher case, a seafood counter, and a bakery that turns out bread every morning. The event business that used to fill that room never fully came back after COVID. Something else did instead: neighbors.

A Room Built for Once-a-Year Nights

Event space works on a specific rhythm. It fills up for a few big occasions a year and sits empty most other nights, which is fine when a neighborhood's economy runs on people driving in for something special and driving home afterward. That was downtown Colorado Springs for a long time. First Friday brought crowds in. The Warehouse's old venue hosted the milestones. Then everyone left.

Africano has talked about knowing at least three families who celebrated finalized adoptions in that room, kids who are grown now. It's the kind of use that only makes sense if a building's job is to be rented occasionally, not visited daily. Africano and his wife Shaundy had been sitting on the idea of converting that space into a grocery store for roughly seven years before they actually did it. What changed wasn't the idea. It was the number of people who'd need to use it on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday in June.

Six Hundred Units in a Year Changes the Math

Downtown Colorado Springs added more than 2,000 residential units in the city center between 2016 and the end of 2025, with more than 1,000 additional units expected to open by the close of 2026. Zoom into the downtown core specifically, and the count was already past 3,000 apartments and condos as of January 2026, with roughly 600 of those units absorbed in 2025 alone.

For years, the only grocery option inside that footprint was Bread & Butter Neighborhood Market on South Nevada Avenue, a small shop built around upscale produce rather than full weekly shopping. Everything else meant driving. That math works fine when downtown is mostly offices and event venues. It stops working once six hundred households move in over twelve months and start asking where they're supposed to buy dinner on a Wednesday.

Africano put it plainly when the permits went in: people are always going to need a place to buy food. The grocery store isn't a bet on downtown's future. It's a response to downtown's present.

What's Actually on the Shelves

Urban Grocer isn't trying to be a discount option, and it isn't pretending to be Whole Foods either. The prepared foods are deliberately different from what's on The Warehouse's dinner menu next door: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, braised short ribs, beef stroganoff, curried chicken bowls. Comfort food, made in the same kitchen that also handles the restaurant's more adventurous plates, priced for a weeknight rather than a special occasion.

The counter still carries some of the restaurant's signature sourcing. On any given day you'll find:

• A butcher case stocked with yak, rabbit, elk, beef, and pork
• A rotating cheese selection built up to 62 varieties, sourced from Colorado producers and international importers the restaurant never had the volume to buy from before
• A full seafood counter alongside house-made pasta and sauces
• Fresh bakery items baked on site each morning
• Pantry basics that range from a can of Starkist tuna to a $28 tin of Spanish tuna poached in butter, shelved side by side on purpose

The store is open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., which matters more than it sounds. A grocery store that closes at 6 doesn't work for anyone who commutes. One open until 8 works for a resident walking home from a First Friday gallery stop who wants to grab dinner on the way.

First Friday Still Happens. It Just Ends Somewhere Different Now.

The rhythm of Downtown's monthly art walk hasn't changed. What's changed is what happens after.

This September's First Friday receptions ran on the 4th. Gallery 113, at 125 N. Tejon Street, opened "Allure of Autumn," featuring new paintings by gallery artists April Stark and Pattie Bowler alongside work from 17 other local artists. The show runs through the end of the month. A few blocks over, Cottonwood Center for the Arts at 427 E. Colorado Avenue has its own show up through September 23, with two floors of studios open to walk through beyond the formal gallery spaces. Neither show requires you to catch the opening reception. Both are hangable through the rest of September during normal hours, and the next First Friday reception lands October 2.

Here's how the stops line up if you're building an evening around them:

None of those three addresses require a car to reach from the other two. That's the actual shift worth noticing. A First Friday route that used to end with everyone driving home to find dinner somewhere else now has a stop built into the walk where you can pick up short ribs or a rotisserie-style chicken bowl and actually eat before you get home.

The Building Didn't Change. The Neighborhood Around It Did.

None of this is really about one restaurant's real estate decision. It's about what happens to a building's purpose once enough people live close enough to use it every day instead of once a year. The event space at 29 W. Cimarron didn't get torn down or gutted for something flashier. It got repurposed for the same reason a neighborhood's identity eventually catches up to its population: because six hundred new households in a single year don't need another place to host a wedding. They need a place to buy groceries on a Tuesday, and downtown finally has one.

If you're curious what else has shifted in the Old North End and Downtown corridor, or you want a closer look at how the neighborhood's historic housing stock fits into all this new residential density, Lisa Cheponis has a standing guide to the area worth a look, along with a deeper piece on the historic home styles that define Old North End. Whether you already call this neighborhood home or you're just watching it change from a few blocks over, it's worth knowing what's actually behind the storefronts.