A historic building with affectionately incongruous optics, and a chef with a boundary-pushing farm-to-table vision, are coming full circle in Colorado Springs this spring — by getting back to basics. 

The Warehouse Urban Grocer, a corner market-style shop offering high-end delicacies as well as everyday staples, is on track to open in March inside former gallery and event space adjacent to The Warehouse Restaurant at 25 W. Cimarron St.

The store is the vision of The Warehouse owners James Africano and his wife, Shaundy, who assumed ownership of the decades-old fine-dining operation in 2015.

The envisioned 4,000-square-foot grocery store — bounded by Weidner Field to the west and a densifying and increasingly peripatetic south downtown at every other compass point — will sell a spectrum of “fully curated and crafted” items (the elements of dishes appearing on the menu of the award-winning restaurant next door), as well as staples that James Africano said may ring in a bit higher than at a big-box store, but won’t break the bank.

“Urban Grocer is … a full service, small scale neighborhood grocery with … everything from meat and cheese to dairy and eggs, but we’ll also have toilet paper and razors, at affordable prices, if that’s what you need,” said Africano, whose store will sell beer and wine, but no spirits.

“Are we going to offer 48 rolls of toilet paper? No, but we’ll have four-packs,” he said.

The store’s “primary target” audience, he said, is “this new population that’s downtown, that we’ve never had before” — a population that might be visiting, sans car, or simply unexcited about the idea of getting behind the wheel for a schlep to the ‘burbs for a big-box shopping trip.

Austin Wilson-Bradley, director of economic development for the Downtown Partnership of Colorado Springs, said The Warehouse Urban Grocer will continue to help address the changing needs of a changing city, where it lives.

“This is a major need for our fast-growing residential sector downtown,” a “core” of the city that’s now home to more than 3,000 apartments and condos, Wilson-Bradley said.

“Most of them (those units) are already occupied, and the brand-new buildings are filling up fast — about 600 new units absorbed in 2025 alone,” he said in an email. “These residents will value having a high-quality, locally run grocery store within a short walk or bike ride from their doorstep.”

For generations, locally owned grocery stores were the heartbeat of a community geographically and metaphorically (which makes sense given food is the language of love and … well, existence). The Springs’ first grocery store, True & Sutton, was established around the time of the city’s founding, in 1871, at the northeast corner of Pikes Peak Avenue and Tejon Street. 

Other historical grocery stores/mercantiles followed, including one inside the current location of Shuga’s Restaurant, off South Cascade Ave., said The Downtown Partnership’s Carrie Simison. And though outside the boundaries of downtown, Stellina Pizza Cafe, at 749 E. Willamette Ave., is in a historic building that previously housed a neighborhood market “for decades, first as the Little Market & Deli (around 1910) and later as the Willamette Market & Deli.” By the mid-20th century, the rise of car and fridge/freezer ownership, and of chain grocery stores with big parking lots, built along then-city fringes, had shifted the cultural and shopping landscape and dulled the pulse of a heretofore vital connective community organ.

Before 2020, downtown had zero walk-able options for those whose fresh produce shopping list extended beyond convenience store red delicious and underripe bananas. 

The opening of Bread & Butter Neighborhood Market, an independent local grocer owned by Aubrey Day and Stacy Poore, at 602 S. Nevada Ave., was a game changer for Colorado Springs, said Simison.

“We do know that both residents and employees downtown frequent Bread & Butter for groceries and wine/beer/alcohol,” Simison said in an email. “When they opened it really gave downtown our first market and grocery availability in decades.”

James Africano said he sees his Urban Grocer as a “complement” to Bread & Butter, serving an underserved neighborhood where enough demand exists already, and more is poised to come.

“I’m really glad we didn’t do this seven years ago, as we originally talked about, but I am really excited to do it now, particularly with the continuing development in this area,” Africano said.

The new retail identity at The Warehouse also reconnects the site to some historic touchstones. 

Built in 1896, 25 W. Cimarron originally served as a railroad storage warehouse before cycling through a number of renovations and iterations, including storage for the city’s first general mercantile/department store, Giddings, and the base of Palmer Lake Brewing Co., which operated out of a portion of the building from the mid 1990s through 2006.

The modern grocery store remake will include a new west-side entrance, and possible changes to what has become something of an iconic, if maybe confusing, mural along the building’s western flank, created to replace an aging mural Africano said depicted the city’s more industrial past with neoclassical imagery invoking its identity as “Olympic City USA.”

The earlier mural had “steel workers sitting on beams and eating lunch. And it was really cool,” said Africano.

“The current mural is … non-representative of what actually happens in the building, but people know it, and it’s huge, and it’s right as you come over the bridge,” he said.

But identities evolve; you hold onto, and return to, what works.

“Colorado Springs isn’t the city it was, even five years ago,” Africano said, gazing through a picture window at the sweeping architecture of Weidner Field next door, erstwhile site of a “steel mill .. and big empty lot.”

“People are always going to need a place to buy food” he said.