Ask a stranger what defines Patty Jewett and they will say the golf course. Ask someone who has lived on Franklin or Corona for more than a season and they will say something more specific: the second Sunday of September, when the street closes, three porches turn into stages, and a dozen food trucks line the curb.
That one afternoon does more work than the rest of the calendar combined. The routines residents actually keep — the Shooks Run loops, the Wednesday coffee at Stir, the sunset drink at the clubhouse — all quietly orbit it. This is a playbook for the weeks leading in and the ones that carry the momentum out.
The weekend that anchors the year
Porchfest started here in 2017 and stuck. Since 2017, neighbors have gathered in the streets of the Patty Jewett neighborhood to celebrate live music, movement and community, and there's good reason it's called "the happiest block party in Colorado Springs." The Patty Jewett Neighborhood Association runs it, and the format has held: Porchfest returns to Corona Street with bands starting in the 1600 block, then the 1500 block, and finally on the patio of Good Neighbors Meeting House, plus food trucks, kids activities, and Porchfest schwag for donations.
The date moves a week or two each year. Porchfest 2025 landed on September 14. In 2024 the big block party ran on North Corona Street from 1 to 5 on September 8. Watch pattyjewettneighborhood.org in mid-August for the 2026 announcement, then block the calendar.
A useful thing to know if you are new to the block: the streets close in the immediate vicinity of each concert, and residents in the affected numbers coordinate parking days ahead. Walking or biking in is not just recommended, it is faster.
An afternoon route that actually works
The temptation is to plant a chair on one porch and stay. Residents who have done this a few times move. A working sequence for a 1 p.m. start:
- Park north of Madison or south of Uintah and walk in. Streets inside the closure fill by noon.
- Catch the first set on the 1600 block of Corona. Stand rather than sit for this one so you can drift.
- Move south a block for the second set. This is where the food trucks cluster densest.
- End at Good Neighbors Meeting House. The third band plays on their patio and the crowd stays through the last chord.
- Walk one block west to the Bon Shopping Center for a nightcap when the porches wind down.
Bikes are the local default. All those bikes are the preferred method of transportation to and around the neighborhood festival, and you can catch the Shooks Run Trail and roll right into Patty Jewett.
The Bon block does more than you think
The Bon Shopping Center sits on the west edge of the neighborhood and quietly picks up the overflow all year. There is a neighborhood Safeway in Patty Jewett, a super convenient amenity for residents, plus a smaller newly remodeled Bon Shopping Center that accommodates small businesses such as Sasquatch Cookie Company, Whistle Pig Brewery, Joeys Pizza and Humble Coffee.
A few notes on how residents actually use it:
- Stir Coffee and Cocktails works as a morning-to-evening pivot. Shoppers can pick up frittatas and lattes at the locally-owned Stir Coffee and Cocktails.
- Whistle Pig Brewery is the after-round-of-golf and after-Porchfest room. Whistle Pig serves up 17 craft brews and is known for their welcoming and neighborly vibe.
- Good Neighbors Meeting House functions as the unofficial living room. Good Neighbors Meeting House serves quinoa salads and tuna melt sandwiches, and on Porchfest afternoon it extends the show past the last porch set.
- BJ's Velvet Freez is the answer to "where do we take the visiting grandparents." BJ's Velvet Freez is a 1950s establishment selling classic banana splits and burgers, right in Patty Jewett, a favorite since 1954.
If your default coffee is on the east side of the neighborhood rather than the west, locals grab coffee at Life Perks on Patty Jewett's east side. Between Life Perks, Stir, and Humble Coffee, most homes in the neighborhood are inside a ten-minute walk of a proper morning.
The Shooks Run spine
The reason Porchfest works logistically is the same reason the neighborhood works day to day: a paved trail runs the length of it. Shooks Run Trail is a central Colorado Springs urban trail that follows Shooks Run Creek through historic neighborhoods, community spaces, and growing arts and garden corridors, providing an easy accessible route for walking, biking, and everyday recreation, running approximately 4 miles north to south along Shooks Run Creek from Lilac Street to Fountain Boulevard.
For residents, the useful thing to know is the connections. The northern end of the Shooks Run Trail meets up with the Rock Island Trail two blocks north of Jackson Street and one block east of Nevada Avenue, behind the Bon Shopping Center between Wahsatch and Weber. That corner is one of the more useful pieces of infrastructure in the neighborhood: it stitches the Bon Shopping Center directly to a car-free route north and south.
A few practical loops from inside the neighborhood:
- Coffee-and-back: Franklin Street to the Shooks Run access, south to South Shooks Run Park, back up. Roughly a 45-minute round trip.
- Bon loop: south on Shooks Run, west through downtown side streets, north on the Pikes Peak Greenway, cut back east through the Old North End. About 90 minutes on foot.
- Full Legacy Loop: an approximately 10-mile trail, park and recreation loop around downtown Colorado Springs defined by the Pikes Peak Greenway on the west and south, the Shooks Run trail on the east, and the Rock Island Corridor to the north. Do it once a season on a bike.
The trail is quietly getting better. Recent improvements include new pedestrian crossing signals at major intersections, and older sections of cracked asphalt have been upgraded with new concrete and a gravel shoulder.
When Porchfest ends, October picks up
The trap with a big September weekend is that it can flatten everything after it. Patty Jewett has a hedge. In October, locals gather in the Middle Shooks Run neighborhood south of Patty Jewett for the Neighborhood Arts and Crafts Crawl, where almost 20 artists and crafters set up tents showcasing their work along North Institute Street and East Cache La Poudre Street near the U.S. Olympic and Paralympics Training Center.
The Crawl is smaller, quieter, and walkable from most of Patty Jewett along the same Shooks Run corridor you would use for a morning run. Treat it as the Porchfest hangover cure: same footprint, different tempo.
The clubhouse patio as the year-round backstop
When there is no event on, there is still the patio. The historic clubhouse and banquet room at Patty Jewett Golf Course was built in 1910 to feature the most spectacular view of Pikes Peak, and over 100 years later this site is open to the public seven days a week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You do not need to play, you do not need to book. Residents use the lower patio for early breakfast when the course is still in shadow and the upper deck for sunset when Pikes Peak turns pink.
One detail worth holding onto: in 1919, four years after his wife's death, William Jewett deeded the course to the City of Colorado Springs for just $1 with the condition that it remain a public course named in her honor, and that legacy continues today with the course operating entirely on its own revenue with no tax dollars. The patio is public because a widower wrote it into the deed a century ago. That is the kind of fact that makes a place feel like more than an address.
The thesis, restated
The generic Patty Jewett post talks about tree-lined streets and a historic golf course. The lived version is more specific. It is one Sunday in September that closes Corona Street and pulls the whole neighborhood outside, and it is a set of walk-to habits — the Bon block, the Shooks Run spine, the clubhouse patio — that are shaped by that Sunday whether residents notice it or not. Once you see the pattern, you stop planning your fall around the calendar and start planning it around the porches.
If you already live here and you have been treating Porchfest as one afternoon rather than the anchor of a season, this is the year to try it the other way.
If you are thinking about what a next move inside this neighborhood might look like, or you are a longtime owner wondering what your block looks like from a buyer's perspective right now, the team at Erik Galloway knows Patty Jewett block by block. Reach out for a Free Home Roadmap and we will walk through it together.
