The Comeback Season: What's Reopening Around Colorado Springs This August

What does it mean when the busiest construction site in your neighborhood isn't a new building, but an old one getting its name back?

That's the question worth asking this August. Drive past 5710 S. Carefree Circle and you'll see crews finishing out a restaurant that isn't new so much as returning. The address belonged to Jose Muldoon's for thirteen years before it closed in January 2024, and now Denver-based Homegrown Tap and Dough is remodeling the same shell for a late-summer opening. A few miles away in Ivywild, the same thing is happening under a name locals already recognize. Layer in the fact that this is also the month Colorado turns 150 and the city has built its biggest civic calendar of the year around looking backward instead of forward, and a pattern emerges. This August in Colorado Springs isn't defined by what's new. It's defined by what's coming back.

The Restaurants Are Moving Back In, Not Building New

Homegrown Tap and Dough's move into the former Jose Muldoon's space is the clearest example. The chain, known for hand-tossed pizzas and a local beer list, is treating the address as ready-made rather than starting from bare ground, with only minor modifications needed according to the plans it submitted to the city. It's the chain's first Colorado Springs location after opening in Castle Rock in late 2025, and it's landing in a spot with more than a decade of neighborhood memory already built in.

The bigger comeback is in Ivywild, where Joe Coleman is bringing back The Blue Star. Before the city's dining scene went through its renaissance over the past decade, The Blue Star was already the neighborhood's version of elevated, approachable cooking, and its 2017 closure left a real gap. The renovation has been underway for the better part of a year, with the team eyeing a third-quarter opening and hosting intimate wine tastings in the meantime for anyone who wants a preview.

The exception that makes the pattern visible is Guthrie's Chicken Fingers, which opened its first Colorado location on July 14 at 1520 S. Nevada Ave. Guthrie's is genuinely new to the state, not a revival, but it's landing on a corridor that's already home to Angry Chicken, Birdcall, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chick-fil-A, Chicken Salad Chick, Daddy's Chicken Shack, Dave's Hot Chicken Wings, KFC, Popeyes, Raising Cane's, and Slim Chickens, with the chain itself acknowledging it's joining an already crowded lineup. Even the true debut this month is filling in an existing pattern rather than breaking new commercial ground.

The 150th Birthday Already Peaked Once, and It's About to Again

Colorado's sesquicentennial and the country's 250th anniversary have compressed most of the year's civic programming into a narrow window, and the first big push already happened this past Saturday, August 1: the United We Rock Festival took over Rock Ledge Ranch from 2 to 8 p.m., the Indian Food Festival returned to Liberty High School from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the Pioneers Museum marked 150 years of statehood with a 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. celebration alongside the opening of a new exhibit.

If you missed all three, the momentum isn't over. This week brings a second, smaller wave:

The August 1 wave was the loud, ticketed version, three scheduled events stacked into one afternoon. This weekend is the quieter version: a nature center walking tour in the morning, a flower farm in the evening, and the neighborhood market bookending both. And if neither weekend fits your schedule, the anniversary isn't confined to a single date at all. Hey Neighbor's 150 Tables Across COS effort is inviting residents to host their own community gatherings, from driveway potlucks to larger neighborhood events, anytime from May through October.

Even the History Programming Is About Return

The walking tour at Bear Creek Nature Center makes the month's real theme explicit. It's built around exploring how we have marked time throughout the history of Colorado Springs, a 90-minute, roughly one-mile guided walk that asks participants to reflect on their own memories against the built environment rather than learn something entirely unfamiliar. It runs twice on August 8, costs $10 per person, and requires preregistration.

The Pioneers Museum opened a new exhibit that same Saturday, Freedom to Thrive: The American Experiment in Colorado Springs, timed to the 150th anniversary celebration on August 1. Even the Indian Food Festival, one of the freshest additions to the city's food calendar in recent years, was billed this year as a festival that returns, not one that's launching. The city's biggest civic push of the summer isn't introducing anything new to residents. It's asking them to look again at what's already here.

The Weekly Backdrop Nobody Announces

Underneath the anniversary programming, the same weekly rhythms that carry the neighborhood through every summer are still running, and they don't need a press release to matter:

• Bancroft Park Saturday Market, Old Colorado City, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Saturday through October 17, with more than 80 vendors and food trucks
• Acacia Park Farmers Market, downtown, Sundays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. through October 25
• Acacia Park Summer Concert Series, free, every Thursday night since early June
• Food Truck Tuesdays, on the south side of Alamo Square Park, with ten trucks rotating through
• First Friday Downtown, free, art and live music at dozens of venues on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 9 p.m.

These aren't new either. They're the same fixtures that show up every year once the weather holds, resumed rather than reinvented. That's part of what makes them dependable: nobody has to check whether they're happening, because they always have been.

The Zoo's Century Is the Clearest Version of the Pattern

The cleanest example of the whole month sits at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, which is marking its 100th year with the opening of a new Giraffe Center this summer, complete with a weeklong celebration once the doors open. The center itself is new construction. But it's an expansion of an institution that's been on that mountainside for a century, built by an organization that isn't introducing itself to the city so much as adding a room to a house it's occupied for generations.

That's the throughline for the whole month. The restaurants filling storefronts are mostly filling ones that already had names. The city's biggest calendar push is a museum asking residents to look at their own history rather than someone else's. Even the genuinely new chicken restaurant on South Nevada is new mostly in the sense that it's the newest entry in a lineup that keeps growing on the same stretch of road. Living here well this August isn't about tracking down what just arrived. It's about noticing which comeback you actually want to be part of, whether that's Saturday morning at Bear Creek, a plate at the new Blue Star once it opens, or just the same market stall you've been visiting since June.

If any of this has you thinking about what a move into or within Colorado Springs might look like down the road, Blue Magnolia Homes is always glad to talk through it. Let's Connect.