Lara Silversmith, director of leasing strategy for the firm that owns The Promenade Shops at Briargate, said new stores there "reinforce The Shops as the region's premier lifestyle destination." That's a fair description of what's happening on that stretch of Briargate Parkway. It's also only a third of the story. This fall, Briargate has three separate waves of new openings running at the same time, in three locations that don't share so much as a stoplight, and each one is being driven by a different landlord who has no reason to coordinate with the other two.
If you've been checking one shopping center's Instagram and assuming you've seen what's new in the neighborhood, you've probably missed two of the three.
Three Nodes, Same Season
Here's the split, as it stands this September:
| Location | What Landed | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| The Promenade Shops at Briargate (1885 Briargate Parkway) | Mendocino Farms, L.L.Bean, American Eagle, Kendra Scott | Late September through end of year |
| Chapel Hills Mall (1710 Briargate Blvd) | Jungle Reef touch aquarium | Open since March 20 |
| Shops at Falcon Landing (7465 N. Academy Blvd) | Shake Shack, Colorado Springs' second location | Open since May 14 |
None of these three properties are owned or managed by the same company. The Promenade Shops belongs to Asana Partners, a retail real estate firm running the leasing calendar you'd expect from an outdoor lifestyle center. Chapel Hills Mall is a different ownership structure entirely, and its general manager, Ed Beane, has spent the past year filling space with something a traditional mall wouldn't have tried a decade ago. Falcon Landing, further north on Academy Boulevard, operates on its own leasing timeline again. Three landlords, three calendars, one neighborhood.
What The Promenade Shops Actually Added
Mendocino Farms is the one to watch this week specifically. The Southern California sandwich chain, known for gourmet sandwiches, salads, and wraps built around fresh ingredients, opens its first Colorado Springs location at The Promenade Shops on September 27. The company started in 2005 and has grown to more than 100 locations across Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington, so this isn't a test kitchen. It's a chain that already knows what it's doing, landing on Briargate Parkway.
That's the opening happening this weekend. Behind it, the leasing calendar keeps going. L.L.Bean is set to open in the fourth quarter with its outdoor apparel and gear lineup. American Eagle is bringing denim and casual wear before the end of the year. Kendra Scott, the jewelry and accessories brand, is also slated to open before 2026 closes out. None of these are speculative additions. They're leases already signed, with Asana Partners framing the push as an effort to keep the Promenade as a full-day destination rather than a strip you drive past.
The Promenade Shops also runs the neighborhood's most visible seasonal programming. The free fall movie series on Pikes Peak Patio, next to Ted's Montana Grill, showed Zootopia 2 on September 17 and returns October 22 with Hocus Pocus, both starting around sunset with a 5 p.m. arrival window for pre-movie activities. Audi Colorado Springs sponsors the series. Bark at Briargate, a dog adoption event run with the LovePup Foundation, brought pet-focused vendors and on-site adoptions to the Promenade on September 19. Coming up, Boo at Briargate on October 24 handles trick-or-treating from 3 to 5 p.m., and a Winter Coat Drive runs at the property management office from September 7 through November 13.
That's a lot of calendar activity concentrated in one place. It's also the reason a Briargate resident who only follows the Promenade's programming can reasonably believe that's where all the neighborhood's new activity is happening. It isn't.
What Chapel Hills Mall Did Instead
While the Promenade was signing sandwich and apparel leases, Chapel Hills Mall took a stranger bet: an aquarium. Jungle Reef opened to the public on March 20 on the mall's lower level, behind Dick's Sporting Goods, and it's the first interactive aquarium to operate in Colorado Springs. Co-founder Jon Hepworth built the space around rescue animals rather than farmed stock, and the tank sizes back up the ambition: a 60,000-gallon shark tank, a 30,000-gallon stingray tank, and a 10,000-gallon koi tank, spread across exhibits that include 87 different species. Visitors can touch and feed stingrays, walk into a bird room, and see reptiles and exotic fish up close.
Hepworth has talked about the project as partly a response to what's happened to malls generally, describing his own interest in bringing activity back into spaces that used to be anchored by department stores. Chapel Hills Mall has been through exactly that kind of churn. Its Kmart anchor closed back in 2009 and was eventually replaced by an AMC theater, and the mall has kept adjusting its mix as national retailers have pulled back from physical space nationwide. An aquarium is an unusual answer to that problem, but it's also the kind of tenant a sandwich chain or apparel brand can't be, since nobody drives across town for a shirt they could buy anywhere.
The result is that Briargate's newest family attraction isn't at the shopping center running the seasonal event calendar. It's a quarter mile away, inside a mall that took a different kind of risk to solve a different kind of problem.
The One That's Not on Either End of Briargate Parkway
The third piece sits furthest from both of the above. Shake Shack opened its second Colorado Springs location at the Shops at Falcon Landing, 7465 N. Academy Boulevard, on May 14. The first Colorado Springs Shake Shack opened in late 2023 at the InterQuest Town Center, about four miles north. This new location became the chain's 400th company-owned restaurant nationally and its 10th in Colorado, part of a broader expansion the company's CEO described to investors as adding 55 to 60 new locations throughout 2026 after opening 45 in 2025.
Falcon Landing isn't part of either the Promenade's event calendar or Chapel Hills Mall's retail mix. It's its own retail node, built around Academy Boulevard traffic rather than Briargate Parkway traffic, and it picked up the neighborhood's biggest single restaurant opening of the year without any of the fanfare the Promenade puts behind a store opening. If your mental map of "new in Briargate" runs through the Promenade's marketing, this is the one you'd have missed entirely.
Why the Split Doesn't Resolve Itself
None of this is coordinated, and there's no reason to expect it to be. A retail real estate firm managing an open-air lifestyle center has different incentives than a mall general manager trying to keep foot traffic through anchor vacancies, and both are different again from whoever leases pad sites along Academy Boulevard. Each one is solving its own occupancy problem on its own timeline, and Briargate's residents are the ones left checking three different addresses to find out what's actually changed nearby.
That's not a complaint about the neighborhood. It's the practical shape of a place that's grown past the point where one shopping center's newsletter covers everything happening within a five-minute drive. Briargate has enough retail density now that its openings don't cluster, and a fall this active, a sandwich chain opening this weekend, an aquarium six months into operation, a burger counter that's already had its debut buzz come and go, only reads as one neighborhood's story if you're checking all three parking lots instead of one.
If you're weighing what living near this kind of retail mix is actually like day to day, from three separate shopping nodes to the seasonal events layered on top of them, I'm happy to talk through what that looks like on the ground. Kevin James Bond works Briargate and the rest of the Pikes Peak region directly, no team hand-offs, so you're always talking to the person who actually knows the block.
