Drive down Briargate Parkway on any given month over the past two years and you'd catch maybe one new sign going up. Chicken Salad Chick opened near the Promenade Shops in April 2025. Shake Shack didn't follow until May 2026, more than a year later. That's the normal rhythm here: a single tenant lands, settles in, and the corridor goes quiet again for a while.
This fall broke that pattern. Within the same stretch of months, six storefronts along Briargate Parkway are either opening, expanding, or finishing buildouts, all inside The Promenade Shops at Briargate. That's not a trickle. That's a corridor doing in one season what it usually spreads across two or three years.
The Usual Pace, For Comparison
Before getting to what's changing, it helps to know what "normal" has looked like. Chicken Salad Chick's Briargate location opened in April 2025 as the second location for a local mother-daughter franchise team. Shake Shack followed more than a year later, opening its second Colorado Springs store in Briargate in May 2026, thirteen months after the chicken salad shop. Two tenants, thirteen months apart. That's the baseline this neighborhood has run on for a while.
What's Landing In The Same Quarter
According to Asana Partners, the retail real estate firm that owns and leases the center, here's what's converging on The Promenade Shops between late summer and the end of 2026:
- Mendocino Farms, a Los Angeles County-based sandwich and salad chain, is opening its first Colorado Springs location at 1765 Briargate Parkway, Suite 807. Early reports from local outlets pegged the opening for Sept. 27, and at least one wrote it up as already open that Sunday. The Gazette later issued a correction pushing the date to Oct. 27, so if you swing by expecting it open based on the earlier coverage, you may find it still finishing up.
- L.L. Bean is opening a 13,000-square-foot store at 1925 Briargate Parkway in late October, its outdoor apparel and gear lineup arriving in a space sized for a full assortment, not just a sampling.
- Kendra Scott is opening a location before the end of the year, bringing its jewelry and accessories line to the center.
- American Eagle is also expected to open before year's end.
- Lululemon is expanding its existing footprint in the fourth quarter to handle demand for its athletic wear.
- Apple has already moved into a newly expanded space at the center, having outgrown its original footprint.
Lara Silversmith, Asana Partners' director of leasing strategy, framed the wave as intentional positioning, telling Springsmag the changes reinforce the center as "the region's premier lifestyle destination." Whatever the marketing language, the practical effect for anyone who shops or eats there regularly is a corridor that looks different by December than it did over the summer, and looks different in a way that happened all at once rather than store by store.
Down The Road, Chapel Hills Already Had Its Turn
The Promenade Shops isn't the only retail anchor in the neighborhood, and it isn't the only one that changed in 2026. A few miles away at Chapel Hills Mall, Jungle Reef opened in March, becoming the first interactive touch aquarium in Colorado Springs. The exhibit space sits on the mall's lower level, tucked behind Dick's Sporting Goods at 1710 Briargate Boulevard, and it's built around a 60,000-gallon shark tank, a 30,000-gallon stingray tank guests can touch and feed, and a 10,000-gallon koi tank alongside reptile and bird exhibits.
The opening wasn't quick. Permit issues triggered a stop-work order in December 2024, pushing what was originally planned as a summer 2025 debut into a soft launch in March 2026. Chapel Hills Mall general manager Ed Beane called it "something special for Colorado Springs" when the project was finally nearing completion, a comment that reads less like hype and more like relief after more than a year of delays.
Put those two data points together and a pattern emerges. Chapel Hills got its makeover in the spring, after months of setbacks. The Promenade Shops is getting its makeover now, in the fall, on a tighter and more compressed timeline. Two different retail hubs on the same corridor, each going through the kind of change that usually happens once every year or two, both landing within the same twelve months.
What This Looks Like If You're Driving Through
None of this is dramatic on its own. A sandwich shop opening a few weeks later than announced isn't news anywhere else. But taken together, it explains something that might otherwise feel hard to pin down: why the Briargate Parkway corridor has felt like it's mid-transition for months now, with construction fencing in one lot, hiring signs in another, and a steady rotation of grand-opening banners that never quite seem to stop.
If you're headed to the center this fall expecting the same layout you remember from earlier in the year, a few things worth knowing. The Mendocino Farms opening date is still not fully settled between local reports, so calling ahead or checking the location directly before a special trip is a reasonable move. Lululemon's current storefront may look mid-renovation through the fourth quarter as the expansion proceeds. And the L.L. Bean space at 1925 Briargate Parkway, at 13,000 square feet, is large enough that its buildout has likely been visible from the parking lot for weeks before the late-October opening.
For a neighborhood that usually adds one new name to its retail directory every several months, six changes landing in overlapping windows is the kind of thing that's easy to miss store by store and obvious once you see it laid out together. The corridor isn't done changing. It's just changing faster than it has in a while.
If you're curious what else is shifting around Briargate this season, or want a closer read on how retail activity like this tends to ripple into the neighborhood around it, The Elite Team keeps a running eye on the corridor and is always glad to talk through what we're seeing.
