The Lot Everyone in Woodland Park Watched for Years Is Finally Full Every Night

Drive into town on Highway 24 from the east and you pass the spot before you even register it as a spot. A stretch of ground just south of the old Woodland Station depot, roughly six and a half acres that sat empty through more than one false start. A few years back, two development groups pitched competing plans for the land. One offered $200,000 for the site plus a $1.8 million reserve fund for infrastructure. The other, led by a local entrepreneur named Derek Waggoner, offered $800,000 in cash. The town's Downtown Development Authority went with Waggoner's bid.

That decision is why, as of this September, the corner at 120 S. Center St. is the busiest address in Woodland Park. Tava House opened this spring, and the general manager told the Gazette in late May that the restaurant had been packed every day since its soft opening, with the Taphouse running a wait list on a night the River Room was hosting the mayor's retirement party.

If you've lived here through the years of watching that lot sit empty, or if you remember the skepticism about whether anything would actually get built on it, the fact that it's now the kind of place where you might not get a table on a Tuesday is worth sitting with. It says something about what kind of investment downtown Woodland Park is actually attracting this year, and it isn't the only address proving the point.

What actually opened at Tava House

Tava House isn't one restaurant. It's three spaces built into a single two-story building with floor-to-ceiling glass facing Pikes Peak's north face, the side locals and the Ute Tribe both call Tava, or Sun Mountain. The ground floor holds a pour-your-own Taproom with an open seating policy and a beer wall running twenty taps deep. Upstairs is Firebrand, a reservations-only steakhouse that seats sixty to sixty-five people around a solid-walnut community table, with a see-through fireplace set into the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. Behind both sits the River Room, a banquet space now booking weddings for up to eighty guests.

The person behind all three is chef Victor Matthews, who isn't new to this. He's spent more than two decades running Black Bear Distillery in Green Mountain Falls, after buying the forty-year-old Black Bear Restaurant there in 2000 and turning it into a four-star destination for Louisiana-style fine dining within his first year of ownership. He's also the dean of Paragon Culinary School. When he talked about why he chose Woodland Park for this project, he put it plainly: the town needed a banquet facility, a culinary hub, and a taproom with food people actually wanted to eat, and every local he asked said the same word back to him: steakhouse.

The sourcing backs that local framing up. Matthews has partnerships in place with PBJ Farm in Divide, Lazy YK Ranch in Riverton, Wyoming, and Ranch Foods Direct in Colorado Springs, and the plan is for chef's tables and specials that change daily based on what those partners bring in, not a static seasonal menu that gets reprinted twice a year.

The other corner: 110 W. Midland Ave

A few blocks away, on the town's main drag, a different kind of continuity story played out over the Fourth of July weekend. The Woodland Social opened at 110 W. Midland Ave, the address longtime residents will know as the former home of 110 Reserve, the spot with the big outdoor patio that used to be the default meeting place downtown.

The new owners are Levi and Miranda Kleeb, a husband-and-wife team who already run The Salty Cow food truck and Red Beard Coffee around southern Colorado. Miranda told the Gazette that the patio and the mountain view were what pulled them toward the space specifically, and that within two weeks of signing the lease, they were serving their first customers. The menu right now leans casual: burgers, including a pimento bacon cheeseburger, and a four-layer chocolate cake for dessert, with salads, more starters, and possibly pizza planned as the kitchen builds out. Current hours run 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Miranda has been candid that hiring in a mountain town moves at a different pace than it does at the coffee shop, where a single job post can pull in hundreds of applicants overnight.

Two different bets, the same conclusion

Neither of these is a chain moving into an open storefront. Both are locals who already had a track record here, betting real money on downtown addresses that other operators either walked away from or ran into the ground. Waggoner beat out a competing developer with a cash offer to build something new on a lot most people had stopped expecting anything from. The Kleebs took over a space with a built-in local following and kept the thing people loved about it, the patio, the view, the role as a gathering spot, while putting their own kitchen behind it.

That pattern matters more than either opening on its own. It tells you something about who's willing to put money into Center Street and Midland Avenue right now, and it's a different answer than you'd get from watching a national brand backfill a vacancy. If you've wondered whether downtown's recent momentum is a fluke or a direction, two locally owned kitchens investing at the same time, months apart, is closer to an answer than a single headline would be.

What that means for the next six weeks

The city's Main Street Program is leaning into the same momentum with its own fall push. Storefronts around downtown finished entering the annual Fall Window Decorating Contest earlier this month, and public voting is open now through October 9, with winners announced October 10 in categories for Best Overall Display, Best Fall Theme, and Most Creative. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that makes walking Midland Avenue this month worth doing on purpose rather than by accident.

The bigger date on the calendar is Creek Week, set for Saturday, October 3, at Cavalier Park. It's part of the largest watershed-wide cleanup effort in the state, run in partnership with the Fountain Creek Watershed District, and it runs from 8 a.m. to roughly 1 p.m. Registration is required, closed-toe shoes and gloves are the ask, and it's open to families, church groups, and anyone else who wants to spend a Saturday morning doing something for the section of Fountain Creek that runs through town.

Layer the Main Street program's "Wander Woodland" shop-local rewards on top of that, and the picture is a downtown that's asking residents to show up for it in the same season two new kitchens showed up to invest in it.

The version of fall worth planning around

If you live in Woodland Park, the practical version of all this is simple. Grab a table at Tava House's Taproom on a weeknight before word spreads further, or book the River Room early if there's a wedding or milestone on your own calendar this year. Walk down to 110 W. Midland Ave and see what the Kleebs have done with a spot that already meant something to a lot of people. Register for Creek Week if a Saturday morning at Cavalier Park with your kids or a group from church sounds like a good use of a fall morning. Vote in the window contest once the storefronts start filling in.

None of this requires a real estate decision. It just requires knowing what's actually happening two blocks from wherever you already live, which is the kind of thing easy to miss if you're not paying attention to Center Street and Midland Avenue at the same time.

If you're weighing a move in or around Woodland Park and want a read on what a particular block or neighborhood is like day to day, not just what a listing photo shows, Blue Magnolia Homes is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.