As The Gazette reported, the vault door at 514 S. Tejon Street still swings the way a bank vault door swings, heavy and deliberate, and it now opens onto tarot cards hung in rows against exposed brick instead of a teller's counter. Inside the alcove, dried greenery hangs from the ceiling, black zodiac candle holders sit next to bars of soap, and Carol Smith is restocking shelves that measure eight feet by ten, smaller than the pop-up canopy she used to set up at farmers markets around the city.
This is The Green Magick Vault, and it held its grand opening on September 1 inside CO.A.T.I. Uprise, the food and entertainment hall on South Tejon that gave the shop its name and its literal vault. Smith runs the apothecary, whose herbal balms, spice blends, and candles were sold at pop-up markets for two years, sometimes three or more a week, before it took a permanent address. The Gazette reported that Smith called the opening-day turnout "kind of crazy."
Elsewhere on Tejon Street, the stretch that has anchored downtown shopping for generations, a different kind of comeback was already underway.
Two Restaurants Closed. Three Small Shops Opened.
Jax Fish House and Oskar Blues both closed their downtown Colorado Springs locations this year, a pair of departures local news outlets flagged as a sign of transition for the district. At the same time, the Downtown Partnership's own numbers tell a more complicated story than simple decline. In 2025, 37 new businesses opened downtown, even as the vacancy rate climbed 1.9 percent from 2024 to 2025. The partnership hasn't finalized its 2026 count yet, but when you walked Tejon Street this September, you could watch the mechanism working in real time.
The three businesses took shape in smaller formats than full-service restaurants, and none started as a storefront. Easy's Records and Vintage grew out of a 300-square-foot nook inside CO.A.T.I. The Green Magick Vault grew out of a market tent. Landmarks Coffee grew out of a trailer. Each one proved itself in a format with almost no overhead before taking a lease, which is a different kind of downtown bet than the one a full-service restaurant makes. It's the same undersized-to-established pattern reshaping the city's restaurant scene more broadly, just playing out here in retail instead of dining rooms.
The First Standalone Record Shop Downtown Since Independent Records Closed
According to The Gazette, Ryan Fowler and Erica Dunford spent two years running Vintage and Vinyl out of that same CO.A.T.I. building, packing vinyl, vintage T-shirts, and other music media into a footprint smaller than most living rooms. On September 10, they opened Easy's Records and Vintage at 327 N. Tejon Street, in a space four times the size of what they had before.
The address has its own turnover story. The building most recently housed Alpine Tools, which opened in May 2025 and moved out in August 2026. Before that it was Crafted Colorado, a handmade gift shop, and Entwine, a fiber arts studio. Now it holds shelves of records, VHS tapes, and cassettes, and it's the first standalone record shop inside the downtown core since Independent Records closed after 45 years in business a few years back. Colorado Springs still has record stores, Tiger Records on the west side, Earth Pig Music in Old Colorado City, What's Left Records on Platte Avenue near The Black Sheep, but none of them sit inside downtown's boundaries. Fowler and Dunford are counting on the new apartments nearby, plus foot traffic from Palmer High School and Colorado College, to do for a full storefront what two years of a closet-sized shop already proved was possible. A Newsbreak report quoted one of the owners saying they wanted "a place that you can come poke around."
The Coffee Cart That Finally Got A Door
Landmarks Coffee spent 2024 and part of 2025 as a trailer, setting up wherever Brandon and Toni Watts could park it around the city. This year the couple opened their first permanent location at 635 S. Sierra Madre Street, tucked along the walking path between Weidner Field and The Experience at Epicenter apartments, close enough to Colorado Springs Switchbacks Stadium that a sober gathering spot after a match is part of the pitch.
The shop is open seven days a week, 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a menu that kept its trailer-era signatures: the Trailblazer, a lavender and vanilla latte, the Summit, built on salted caramel and white mocha, a Lavender Matcha, and a line of Altitude Energy drinks that pair caffeine with electrolytes. In Springs Magazine, the Watts described the new space as "building a space focused on community, connection," which is the same language a lot of downtown's newest owners use when they talk about what a physical address gives them that a folding table never could.
A Ten-Year Plan Is Already Watching This Play Out
Downtown officials aren't treating this turnover as background noise. This year the Downtown Partnership adopted a ten-year roadmap called the Elevate Plan, built specifically to guide development in the district and push its retention rate in a better direction than the 1.9 percent vacancy increase suggests it's headed. Whether the plan gets credit for what's happening on Tejon Street this fall or simply caught the wave already forming with Easy's Records, the Green Magick Vault, and Landmarks Coffee, the direction is the same: replace bigger footprints with smaller, tested ones, and let the businesses that already proved demand somewhere else take the next step into a real address.
What This Looks Like On A Saturday
For anyone who already treats downtown Colorado Springs as part of a normal week rather than someplace to plan a trip to, the practical version of all this is a short loop, doable on foot in under an hour.
- Start at Landmarks Coffee on Sierra Madre for a Trailblazer, especially if there's a Switchbacks match that day.
- Head over to the CO.A.T.I. building and step through the vault door at The Green Magick Vault. It's open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m., though it closes one Saturday a month for the Colorado Springs Moon Market, so check before you go if that's your day.
- Finish up on North Tejon at Easy's Records, in a building that's already cycled through four different small businesses, and flip through vinyl in a space that used to fit a quarter as much inventory.
None of these three businesses existed in their current form a year ago. All three now have a door, a lease, and a bet that a smaller footprint proven somewhere else can hold up on one of downtown's oldest commercial blocks.
Leslie Neumann keeps a close eye on what's changing downtown, not because it shows up in a listing, but because it's part of what makes daily life here worth paying attention to. If you've got a favorite new stop on Tejon Street, or you're wondering what else is shifting in the neighborhood, reach out to Leslie. Let's connect.
