Downtown Tejon Street Lost Its Oyster Bar and Gained a Record Store in the Same Ten Days

A handwritten notice went up on the doors at 11 S. Tejon St. on August 30. Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, the raw bar that had poured happy hour oysters on that corner since early 2020, was done. Two days later, eleven doors down and across the block, Stoney's Bar & Grill cut the ribbon on its first Colorado Springs location inside the historic DeGraff building at 118 N. Tejon, the same address Oskar Blues Grill & Brew had vacated after closing in late December. Nine days after that, a few blocks north, Easy's Records & Vintage held a launch party that ran past nine at night, the first standalone record store downtown has had since 2018.

Three storefronts. Ten days. Two blocks of the same street. If you walk Tejon regularly, you probably clocked one of these on your own. What's easy to miss is that they happened together, on a compressed timeline, and that the pattern behind them says something specific about what kind of business can survive downtown right now, and what kind can't.

The ten days on Tejon

Jax's closing note, signed by Big Red F Restaurant Group partner Sonya Query, pointed to six and a half years that included the pandemic, a stretch of higher costs the company described as a recession that isn't officially a recession, and a restaurant climate that had gotten harder to operate in. The Boulder-based group said it has no plans to reopen a Jax location elsewhere in the city.

Stoney's, by contrast, opened with a pumpkin-carving party already on the fall calendar and stated plans to become downtown's watch-party home for select college and NFL fan bases. It joins a lineup of existing sports bars on the same few blocks, including Benny's Restaurant & Lounge, the Brit Pub, Tony's, and Trainwreck, plus The Sportsbook Bar & Grill, which opened in June at the Springhill Suites on South Tejon. Downtown Partnership CEO Chelsea Gondeck said in a release tied to the opening that Tejon Street is at its best when people are there to catch a game or spend time together, particularly with football season starting.

Easy's Records rounds out the stretch. Co-owner Erica Dunford told a local television reporter that she and her husband had worked toward a permanent storefront for years through vintage and vinyl pop-ups at local markets before finally landing the space.

What actually left, what actually arrived

None of these three storefronts happened in isolation. The Downtown Partnership's 29th annual breakfast on September 18 at Ed Robson Arena put a number on the year: 24 new businesses have opened downtown in 2026, with more than a dozen still in the pipeline, concentrated mostly along Tejon between Moreno Avenue and Colorado College. The same report named the year's closures.

Line up both columns and a shape appears. What left were sit-down restaurant and wine-bar concepts, the kind with a kitchen brigade, a wine list, and a check that runs higher than a bar tab. What arrived were bars, ice cream counters, a botanical shop, a karaoke room, a board-game and boba concept, and a record store. Downtown isn't shrinking. It's trading one category of business for another, and the trade has a reason behind it.

Why bars keep winning and restaurants keep closing

The mechanics show up in the same reporting that covered the Jax closure. The Colorado Restaurant Association's own data puts statewide restaurant margins at about 3 cents or less left from every dollar spent, once labor, overhead, and food costs are paid. Colorado menu prices run roughly 5.1% above the national average as operators try to close that gap, and state labor department figures show Colorado lost 498 eating and drinking establishments between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025.

A full-service seafood restaurant with a raw bar and a kitchen staff carries more fixed cost than a sports bar built around big screens, a limited kitchen, and drink specials, or a record store with no kitchen at all. When margins get this thin across an entire state, the businesses least exposed to labor-heavy, ingredient-driven menus are the ones that can still make the rent on a Tejon Street storefront. That's not a Colorado Springs problem specifically. It's a statewide restaurant economy problem that happens to be visible, right now, on one block downtown.

There's a second force at work, and it's local. Downtown's residential population nearly doubled in a single year, growing from 2,574 residents in 2024 to 4,860 in 2025, according to the Downtown Partnership's annual report. Total visitation rose 16% over the same period, to nearly 19 million visits. A downtown built around office lunch crowds supports white-tablecloth seafood. A downtown built around residents who live upstairs and visitors who come for an evening supports bars, ice cream, and things to do after dark. The tenant mix isn't randomly shifting. It's catching up to who's actually walking the block now.

The plan behind the timing

This isn't happening by accident. The Colorado Springs City Council approved the Elevate Downtown plan in May, an 8-1 vote with only Councilmember Dave Donelson opposed. The 230-page document updates the city's 2016 Experience Downtown Plan and is meant to guide the next decade of investment across roughly one square mile of the city center, an area that has already absorbed more than $2.6 billion in investment over the past ten years.

The Downtown Partnership isn't just watching this play out either. The organization backed 11 downtown businesses this year with more than $330,000 in grants for signage, lighting, opening inventory, and marketing, the kind of support that lowers the barrier for a bar or a record store to open where a bigger restaurant used to sit. Office vacancy downtown sat at 9.5% at the end of 2025, lower than the citywide rate of 10.4% and far below Denver's downtown office vacancy of nearly 38%. Downtown Colorado Springs is not struggling to fill space. It's actively deciding what fills it, and for 2026 the answer has leaned toward bars, retail, and entertainment over full-service dining.

What this actually changes if you already live down here

If Jax was your regular happy hour spot, there isn't a direct replacement on that block yet. What you have instead is a denser lineup of sports bars within a five-minute walk of each other, Stoney's, The Sportsbook, Benny's, the Brit Pub, Tony's, and Trainwreck, all competing for the same football season crowd. If you've been meaning to dig through actual vinyl instead of scrolling a streaming queue, Easy's Records gives you a reason to walk a few extra blocks north on Tejon. Lolley's Ice Cream and the Karaoke Studio round out a stretch that now has more to do after dinner than it did in August.

The bigger shift is what to expect going forward. With more than a dozen additional businesses already in the Downtown Partnership's pipeline and the Elevate plan setting priorities for the next decade, the churn on Tejon Street isn't a one-time event. It's the visible edge of a downtown that added nearly 2,300 new residents in a single year and is still working out what that many more neighbors actually want within walking distance of home.

If you're weighing what this kind of turnover means for a specific address downtown, or you're curious how a shifting retail mix along one street connects to values a few blocks over, Erik Galloway tracks these changes as part of following the Colorado Springs market day to day, not just at closing time.