Top Things to Do in Southwest Colorado Springs
Drive down South Tejon Street past the building at 1645, and until recently you'd have found scaffolding, papered-over windows, and a storefront that had gone quiet in 2017. Drive four blocks over to Ivywild School on South Cascade Avenue on the same evening, and you'd find a parking lot too full for its own good, a line at the pizza counter, and a bar pouring pints of Laughing Lab. Most people standing in that line have no idea the two buildings share an owner.
That's the detail worth knowing before The Blue Star reopens this year. The restaurant that built its name in this part of Colorado Springs never actually left the neighborhood when it closed in 2017. It consolidated into the kitchen down the street instead. What's happening on Tejon this year isn't a new business filling an empty storefront. It's the same operator turning the lights back on in a room it left dark for nine years.
Joseph Coleman opened the first Blue Star in Old Colorado City in 1995, then relocated it to 1645 South Tejon Street three years later, where it spent the better part of two decades as one of the city's more ambitious dinner reservations. A monthly-changing menu, a serious wine list, a bar that filled up on its own merits without needing the dining room to carry it. The restaurant closed abruptly in 2017, catching regulars off guard, and the Tejon address sat as one of the neighborhood's more visible unanswered questions for the better part of a decade.
Coleman's company, Blue Star Group, didn't disappear during those years. It had already built a second home a few blocks north, inside the old Ivywild School building, a former neighborhood schoolhouse converted into a food hall that has been cultivating a following at the table since 2019. The Principal's Office bar, Ivywild Kitchen, Decent Pizza Co., and Gold Star Bakery all operate under that roof and that ownership, alongside independent stalls like Spark BBQ and Salad or Bust, Bristol Brewing Co.'s taproom, Loyal Coffee Roasters, Axe and the Oak Whiskey House downstairs, and Odds & Ends Emporium, a women- and LGBTQIA+-owned gift and local arts shop. Order coffee from Loyal in the morning, browse Odds & Ends at lunch, and close the day with a burger from Ivywild Kitchen and a pint from Bristol. The same building carries a resident through most of a day without needing to move the car.
If you've eaten a Detroit-style pie at Decent Pizza or a burger at Ivywild Kitchen anytime in the last several years, you've already been a Blue Star Group customer. Most diners never made the connection, because nothing about the marketplace's counter-service, come-as-you-are format resembles the white-tablecloth restaurant it grew out of.
A restaurant closing and a company retreating are not the same event. In this case, one address went dark while the other kept absorbing walk-in traffic three blocks away for nine years.
The Pikes Peak Regional Building Department confirmed in March 2026 that permits had been issued for the Tejon Street remodel, and that it's the original restaurant moving back into its old address rather than a new tenant leasing the space. Renderings shown during an earlier walkthrough describe a large bar and lounge just inside the entrance, with the dining room separated from it by a long, see-through fireplace. Coleman has not released a firm opening date. The company's own reopening announcement first pointed to 2025 as the target year. As of this summer, that target has moved to 2026, a reminder that restaurant construction timelines rarely survive first contact with permitting.
While Tejon Street waits on inspections, Bear Creek Regional Park has kept running on its own schedule, and its numbers say something about how this corner of the city actually spends a weekday morning. The 25-acre off-leash dog park inside the 545-acre regional park was established in 1997 and now draws more than 100,000 visitors a year, making it El Paso County's single most-visited park site. A volunteer group called Friends of Bear Creek Dog Park maintains a memorial there for dogs who've passed, a small sign of how many households treat the park as a daily fixture rather than an occasional outing.
The dog park's three-quarter-mile primary loop connects to secondary trails within the park's broader ten miles, and eventually to the Section 16 and Palmer Trail network in the foothills, giving residents a route that starts at a fenced gate and ends on a switchback with a view back toward downtown. Gold Hill Mesa sits within walking distance, and its own community center runs a calendar of potluck picnics and neighborhood gatherings throughout the year, layering a second, quieter kind of daily anchor on top of the trail system.
A few things worth knowing if this corner of the city is part of your regular week right now:
What ties both stories together isn't coincidence. Southwest Colorado Springs has never built its identity on volume of options. It runs on a small number of institutions that carry disproportionate weight: one restaurant group operating most of the sit-down dining within a half-mile radius, one dog park absorbing the bulk of the neighborhood's daily foot traffic, one nature center setting the pace for how newcomers learn the trail system. When one of those anchors goes dark, as Tejon Street did in 2017, the neighborhood doesn't fracture. It leans harder on whatever's still open.
That's the real story behind a restaurant reopening nine years after it closed. It isn't a gap finally being filled. It's a network that's been running on one working half for almost a decade, about to run at full strength again.
For residents who've watched the scaffolding come down piece by piece, the return of The Blue Star will likely register less as news and more as a long-delayed exhale. For anyone newer to the neighborhood, it's a useful reminder that the businesses holding this part of the city together are fewer, and more connected, than they first appear. If the fall version of this corridor interests you, our earlier field guide to the Southwest's quiet season covers how the neighborhood's rhythm shifts once the crowds thin out.
Southwest Colorado Springs rewards people who pay attention to it over years, not weeks. If you're curious about what else defines this part of the city, from Gold Hill Mesa's newer streets to the older blocks nearer Ivywild, explore our Southwest Colorado Springs neighborhood guide, and know that Lisa Cheponis has spent two decades tracking exactly these kinds of details along the Front Range. Reach out any time you want a longtime local's read on a specific block, long before you ever need an agent.
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