"We're incredibly excited to bring the tried-and-true Stoney's experience to Downtown Colorado Springs," Stoney Jesseph said the week his sports bar opened its doors at 118 N. Tejon St. It's a standard line for a ribbon-cutting. What it doesn't say is more interesting than what it does: Jesseph runs his business out of Denver, and the space he just filled had been empty since a different Colorado brewery walked away from it in the final days of last year.
Oskar Blues Grill & Brew closed that space on Dec. 30. Eight months later, on Sept. 1, Stoney's Bar & Grill opened in the same storefront, inside the historic DeGraff Building, with a ribbon-cutting hosted by the Downtown Partnership merchant group the Friday after. Same corner, same foot traffic pattern on Tejon Street, different ownership structure entirely. Oskar Blues built its name in Colorado's craft beer scene starting in the mountains. Stoney's Bar & Grill started in Denver in 2010 as a sports and music concept, and this is its first Colorado Springs location.
That distinction, Colorado-brewery-culture versus Denver-sports-bar-chain, is easy to skip past if you're just glad the corner isn't sitting dark anymore. But it's the second time this year a Denver-based concept has picked downtown Colorado Springs, and the pattern is worth naming.
Two Blocks, Two Denver Names, One Season
In June, The Sportsbook Bar & Grill opened on the ground floor of the Springhill Suites by Marriott at 402 S. Tejon St. It's a fourth Colorado location for that brand, also homegrown in Denver. Roughly three months later, Stoney's took the DeGraff Building space farther up the same street.
Two Denver sports-bar concepts, one Colorado Springs street, roughly ninety days apart. Tejon Street already carried a sports-bar identity before either of them arrived: Benny's Restaurant & Lounge, The Brit Pub, Tony's, and Trainwreck all operate along the same corridor, all locally rooted in the way downtown regulars think of them even if the ownership behind a given lease has changed hands over the years. What's new isn't that downtown has sports bars. It's that the newest two are being built by companies that already run this exact concept somewhere else and decided the Springs was next.
For a corridor that stretches only a handful of blocks, landing two out-of-town operators in a single season is a signal about the ground floor real estate itself, not just about football. Denver operators don't expand into a market to test it. They expand because the lease terms and the foot traffic already pencil out somewhere else first, and downtown Colorado Springs is now on that list.
What Filled the Space Oskar Blues Left
The DeGraff Building itself didn't change. What changed is what's inside it. Stoney's takes over roughly the same footprint Oskar Blues Grill & Brew occupied, and it's leaning hard into the game-day identity that space always had, just under a different flag. The bar is planning to become, in its own words, the official downtown watch-party home for select college teams and NFL fan groups, with more of those partnerships still to be announced. A pumpkin-carving party is already on the calendar for the fall.
Downtown Partnership CEO Chelsea Gondeck framed the opening as a fit for what Tejon Street is already good at: a place where people gather to watch a game or catch up over drinks, arriving right as football season ramps up. That's not a new function for this stretch of the street. Benny's and the Brit Pub have run that same role for years. What Stoney's adds is a second national sports-media package and marketing budget layered onto a block that used to be filled mostly by independent operators building a following one regular at a time.
The Corridor Downtown Partnership Is Betting On
None of this happened by accident. A merchant group doesn't organize a ribbon-cutting for a business it isn't invested in seeing succeed, and Downtown Partnership's involvement here says the group sees Stoney's arrival as part of a broader story about Tejon Street's health, not just one storefront's turnover.
That broader interest in the corridor isn't limited to bars, and it isn't limited to evenings either. The Acacia Park farmers market runs through Oct. 25 this year, every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., pulling a weekend morning crowd downtown for reasons that have nothing to do with football. Between the market traffic on Sunday mornings and the watch-party crowd Stoney's and The Sportsbook Bar & Grill are both chasing on Saturday afternoons, Tejon Street is now drawing people downtown at hours that never used to overlap. Every new opening on the strip benefits from that baseline traffic, whether the ownership sits three blocks away or in another city entirely.
What It Means for a Fall Saturday Downtown
If you already have a regular spot on Tejon Street, none of this displaces it. Trainwreck is still Trainwreck. The Brit Pub still pours what it's always poured. What's different this fall is the number of options if your usual place is packed on a Saturday afternoon, which it likely will be more often now that two additional operators are actively marketing themselves as the destination for exactly that crowd.
It also changes what "new" means downtown right now. For most of the past two years, new openings downtown have skewed toward independent, chef-driven, or first-time local concepts, the kind of thing a neighborhood claims as its own. Stoney's and The Sportsbook Bar & Grill are the opposite: proven formats imported wholesale from a bigger market, chosen specifically because downtown Colorado Springs looked ready for them. That's not a worse kind of growth. It's a different signal about how the corridor is being read from outside the city, and it's worth knowing which kind of growth you're watching happen on your own street.
For more of what's changing on the ground in downtown Colorado Springs, and the context behind it, Trish Ingels keeps track of the details that matter to the people who already call this city home.
