Walk down Second Street in Monument on a Tuesday at noon and it feels like the historic downtown everyone talks about: cars nosing into diagonal spots, people ducking into shops, the kind of small-town foot traffic that makes you glad you live here. Come back at 6:30 and the same block has gone dark. Half the storefronts are shuttered, the sidewalks are empty, and unless you already know which door to knock on, there is not much reason to linger.
That gap between daytime Monument and evening Monument is not something residents imagined. The Town put a number on it this month, in the draft of its new Downtown Master Plan, and the number explains more about how this town actually works than any list of shops or restaurants could.
Here is the thesis worth sitting with: downtown Monument is not short on businesses. It is short on the kind of businesses that give people a reason to stay past five.
The Number the Town Put on Its Own Problem
The Town of Monument released a draft Downtown Master Plan on September 9, part of the larger Monument 2040 comprehensive planning process, and it is unusually candid for a government document. According to the plan, downtown supports 70 unique businesses, which sounds like a healthy commercial core for a town this size. But officials go on to say that most of those businesses are service-oriented, and that mix is exactly what limits after-hours traffic.
That is a polite way of saying downtown Monument is full of insurance offices, salons, financial advisors, and professional services that keep banker's hours. Useful businesses, the kind you need on a Tuesday afternoon. Not the kind that fills a sidewalk at 7 p.m. on a Friday.
The plan's stated fix leans on a few concrete moves: more pedestrian-friendly spaces, stronger downtown branding, more seasonal events, and extended business hours. Officials also want to build stronger ties between downtown and Monument Lake, use the Santa Fe Regional Trail as a connector rather than a bypass, and actively diversify the kinds of businesses that get recruited to Front Street and Second Street. The study area itself is specific: the Historic Downtown Monument commercial core, the Second Street gateway corridor running between Interstate 25 and Beacon Lite Road, the Santa Fe Regional Trail trailhead, and Limbach Park.
Three particular sites are already flagged in the draft for redevelopment potential, including a parcel at Front Street and Third Street and a site owned by Lewis-Palmer School District 38. Nothing is finalized. This is still a draft that went in front of the Planning Commission this week as part of a public open house, and the Town has said as much on its own calendar.
What Local Business Owners Actually Want
The plan is not just a wish list from Town Hall. Jason Mezey, who owns the outfitter and tavern shop on Front Street, put the tension in plain terms when asked about the draft:
"We would love to see this area grow with good, small-town character. That doesn't mean it grows slow and small. It just means that I think it should grow. It should grow in such a way that complements the kind of character and charm of Monument in general."
That is the needle the plan is trying to thread. Monument's downtown draws its visitors overwhelmingly from within El Paso County, including northern Colorado Springs and Palmer Lake, according to the Town's own findings. People are already coming. The question the plan is wrestling with is whether they have a reason to stay once the shops close.
The Nights That Already Prove the Case
Here is what makes the plan's diagnosis credible rather than theoretical: downtown Monument already knows how to draw a crowd after dark. It just does not do it every night.
Monu-Palooza, the town's homegrown music festival, ran its tenth edition at Limbach Park on September 6, pulling eight acts across nine hours for fifteen dollars a ticket in advance. The Downtown Art Hop, a recurring fixture that runs roughly May through September, turns participating shops into pop-up galleries with live music and evening hours that would not otherwise exist on a weeknight. Monument Pours in the Park brings local breweries, distilleries, wineries, and cideries into Limbach Park for an afternoon that regularly draws people who would otherwise be nowhere near Second Street after 5 p.m.
Even the food scene shows the same pattern in miniature. Arlene's Beans, a family-run Mexican kitchen, outgrew its original Palmer Lake location and moved onto Second Street in downtown Monument, where it now runs dinner service five days a week. That is a small business betting its own growth on downtown foot traffic holding up into the evening, not just at lunch.
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens every day of the week either. That is precisely the gap the master plan is naming: the demand shows up reliably for a festival, a market, or an Art Hop night. The plan's bet is that better hours, better branding, and a business mix built for evenings rather than nine-to-five could make that energy an every-week occurrence instead of a once-a-month one.
Down at Baptist Road, a Very Different Bet
While the Town works through what to do with its historic core, a very different kind of retail is rising a few miles south. Legacy at Jackson Landing, a 225,000 square foot retail and restaurant development at the northeast corner of Interstate 25 and Baptist Road, broke ground this year with Target confirmed as the anchor tenant and Marshalls, HomeGoods, Chick-fil-A, and Firehouse Subs among the other confirmed names. Grand opening is scheduled for October 2027.
Monument's mayor, Mitch LaKind, was candid about the motivation when the project was announced: he hoped it would keep local shopping dollars in town rather than sending residents south to Colorado Springs or north to Castle Rock. That is a real and reasonable goal for a town's tax base. But it is also a fundamentally different bet than the one the downtown plan is making. Jackson Landing is drive-to, big-box, parking-lot retail built around national chains. The historic core the master plan is trying to reshape runs on walkability, local ownership, and the kind of evening foot traffic that a Target parking lot was never designed to create.
Both bets can pay off at the same time. A town this size can support a big-box retail node at its highway interchange and a walkable, evening-friendly downtown a few miles away, and the master plan is explicit that it wants downtown to complement that growth rather than compete with it storefront for storefront. What the plan makes clear, though, is that downtown will not get there by accident. It took a specific number, 70 businesses and most of them closed by dinner, for the Town to say out loud what a lot of residents had already noticed on foot.
If you already live in Monument, the practical takeaway is simple: the version of downtown you know now, quiet by six most nights of the week, is the version the Town itself is trying to change. Whether that means a new restaurant on Front Street, longer hours at the shops you already visit, or a fuller events calendar built around Limbach Park, it is worth watching how this draft plan moves from paper to sidewalk over the next year.
We track this kind of thing closely because it shapes what it actually feels like to live here, not just what a listing says about the neighborhood. If you are weighing a move within Monument, curious what a specific block might look like in five years, or just want someone local to talk through what this plan means for a particular street, Brent & Jen Patterson are happy to walk through it with you. Start Your Home Search whenever you are ready, and we will bring the local context with us.
