Walk into Ivywild School this month and you can order from five different counters and pay for the whole thing on one tab. That change landed the same week the two businesses that built the place, Bristol Brewing and Blue Star, started pulling their operations apart for the first time in almost thirty years.
The tab is the easy part to explain. For years, getting a meal at the old Cascade Avenue schoolhouse meant a separate transaction at Decent Pizza Co., another at Gold Star Bakery, another at the bar. Starting this fall, Bristol is consolidating that into one central tab across the building's vendors. "You'll be able to come in and order any of these options and have a central tab, rather than going around to each counter and having a different transaction every time," Bristol's team told the Gazette. "We just want to make it a little more seamless."
That's the version of the story where Ivywild gets simpler. The other version, happening at the same time, is where it gets more complicated. Bristol and Blue Star, the two names that turned a shuttered 1916 elementary school into the west side's best-known food and drink stop, are formally separating as businesses. The relationship dates back almost thirty years, to when the two operated as neighboring ventures near South Tejon Street and East Ramona Avenue, long before the Ivywild building itself went up for sale a few blocks away at 1604 S. Cascade Ave.
Nine Years, Then a Different Address
Blue Star closed in 2017. Owner Joe Coleman never intended it to stay closed this long. "When Joe closed it in 2017, he had no intention of it taking this long," marketing consultant Lindsey Hafemeister told the Gazette this month, "but with COVID and all the things with the economy and everything over the past several years, it's just taken a little bit longer."
What's changed is where the comeback is actually happening. A new building has been under construction directly across South Tejon Street from Ivywild School, and as of mid-September it was nearing completion. No grand reopening date has been set yet. But the location answers a question longtime regulars have been asking for years without quite realizing it: Blue Star isn't coming back into the schoolhouse. It's getting its own address across the street.
That matters for anyone who assumed the eventual reopening would just mean a new tenant sign inside Ivywild's existing footprint. It won't. The team behind it has been clear about the intent: "We want to reopen the Blue Star in a way that honors what it has meant to this community while creating something that feels completely right for where Colorado Springs is today." A new building, on a new footprint, run separately from the brewery it spent three decades sharing a story with.
The Morning Comes Back First
While Blue Star's return is still under construction, the change you can actually walk into right now is happening at The Principal's Office, the bar and cafe inside Ivywild School. Its hours are being dialed back from the 11 a.m. opening that's defined it for the past several years, and as of September 21 it's serving coffee all day again alongside a new cocktail menu.
Bristol's team framed it as a return to what the space used to be before the pandemic reshuffled everything. "When we opened, and up until COVID, really, The Principal's Office was a place to come and get coffee, get pastries, get breakfast," they said. "One of the first big changes that people will see is, we want to bring back the morning program here. The Principal's Office will be open earlier for coffee service, and we're working with Loyal Coffee to really set up a nice coffee program."
A second, newer concept is joining next month to cover the same early hours. Bluebird Breakfast, a new Bristol project, is set to open in October inside the school, giving the morning crowd a dedicated breakfast spot alongside the returning coffee service at The Principal's Office.
What Hasn't Moved
The rest of the Ivywild lineup is holding steady through all of this. Decent Pizza Co. is still serving its Detroit-style pies, Gold Star Bakery still has its bourbon pecan pie by the slice, Ivywild Kitchen still handles burgers, and Spark BBQ still runs out of the old schoolyard. Axe and the Oak Whiskey House keeps its tasting room downstairs, and Odds & Ends Emporium still anchors the retail side of the building.
That continuity is the point of the single tab. The building is being run to feel more like one stop even as the two businesses most responsible for its identity untangle their finances and their real estate. You can spend a Friday evening moving from pizza to a cocktail to a pastry without breaking your visit into four separate checkouts, while a few hundred feet away a brand new structure is going up specifically so Blue Star can be its own business again, on its own lease, answering to its own tab.
A Few Blocks West, the Calendar Doesn't Change
If you're already planning a night around Ivywild's changes, it's worth knowing that a few blocks over on West Colorado Avenue, nothing about the fall rhythm is different at all. The First Friday ArtWalk in Old Colorado City runs the first Friday of every month from April through December, free except for parking, along the stretch between 23rd and 27th streets from 5 to 8 p.m.
The restaurant lineup along that stretch does most of the same work it always has. Mother Muff's remains the reliable stop for neighborhood pub food and live music, and Thunder and Buttons across the street handles the quieter version of the same idea. One long-running favorite, Front Range Barbeque, was still closed for renovations as of this spring, so it's worth a quick check before you build an evening around its pork sandwiches specifically.
At the east end of the walk, near Bancroft Park, Michael Garman's Magic Town sculpture museum is still worth the stop, and Second Floor Studios, tucked up an easy-to-miss staircase, still has local artists working and displaying in the same space it always has. None of this changed while Ivywild was rewriting its own rules down the street. That's part of what makes the west side work as a single evening out: one corridor can rebuild its identity from the ground up while the other keeps its monthly rhythm exactly where it's always been.
Between the two, this is a good fall to eat your way through the west side before deciding which changes are permanent and which are just this season's version of the schoolhouse figuring itself out.
If you're weighing a move to this side of Colorado Springs and want to talk through what a neighborhood like this actually looks like day to day, Brent Patterson is happy to walk you through it.
