Drive down Main Street in Fountain this week and the street tells two different stories at once. On one block, a storefront that sat empty for years now has a new sign, new inventory, and a family running it who didn't grow up anywhere near southern Colorado. A few doors down, the building everyone in town has been watching for two years still doesn't have its doors open.
That second building is the interesting one. It's not a story about decline. It's a story about a town whose quiet, unglamorous turnover has started outpacing its own headline project, and the gap between those two speeds tells you more about how Fountain is actually changing than either fact does on its own.
The Building Everyone's Watching Still Isn't Open
Woodman Hall has stood at 102 N. Main Street, next to City Hall at the corner of Main and Ohio, since 1905. Over the decades it has cycled through nearly every use a small-town building can have: a general store, a post office, a movie theater, a roller rink, an arcade, apartments, and most recently a pantry and thrift store. In late August 2025, Fountain's City Council voted to designate it a local historic site, the first property to go through the city's new local designation program, which makes it eligible for a State Historical Fund grant toward finishing the ground floor's HVAC, electrical, and construction work.
The Fountain Urban Renewal Authority, which has owned the building since 2018, found its next tenant well before the vote. In February 2025, FURA announced that Sonora's Prime Carniceria & Taco Shop, a family-owned Mexican grocery and restaurant that started as a single Pueblo storefront in 2015, would take 100 percent of the ground floor as its fifth location. Owners Jazmine Fletes and Omar Teyechea have since expanded to Colorado Springs and Falcon. The chain built its following partly on how it cuts its meat: thin, carne asada style, sourced from USDA Prime Black Angus beef, sold at prices closer to wholesale through an attached mercado with its own separate entrance.
The timeline has already moved once. FURA's own February 2025 announcement pointed to an early 2026 grand opening. By the time the City Council took up the historic designation that August, FURA Director Kimberly Bailey was telling reporters the business intended to open by the second quarter of 2026. Both windows have now closed without a confirmed opening date on public record. That's not a red flag. Historic rehabs run behind schedule constantly, and a building with six different past lives usually has surprises behind the walls that a strip-mall buildout never would. But if you've been waiting to see what finally goes into Woodman Hall, the honest answer as of late August is: not yet, and the target date has already slipped once in public view.
What Filled In While Everyone Was Watching the Marquee Property
While Woodman Hall works through its rehab, smaller storefronts around it have quietly turned over. A few blocks over, Loco Promos, a print and engraving shop, opened in a space that had sat empty for a stretch of Old Town. Founder Jennifer Rodriguez moved her family to Fountain from Guam, where she ran a similar print and awards business for more than sixteen years, after her granddaughter's cerebral palsy diagnosis meant the family needed health care access Guam couldn't provide. She'd pass the empty storefront regularly before she ever had the keys to it.
Main Street's eight-block historic district predates the interstate. Before I-25 existed, this stretch served as the primary highway connecting Pueblo to Colorado Springs, which is part of why the block still holds an old 1903 jail as a landmark, a relic from when cowboys drove livestock through town and needed somewhere to sober up overnight. Fountain Hair Society, run by owner Marla Gingerich, operates out of one of the same original-era buildings, the kind where nobody's entirely sure what's still behind the older walls.
Further south, off the Santa Fe exit at I-25, Fountain Creek Winery & Eatery has anchored 606 S. Santa Fe since owners Susan and Don Quintana opened it, pouring wines made in-house alongside bottles from other Colorado producers in a stretch of town that used to be almost entirely fast food. Back toward the center of town, Rookies Taphouse and Eatery has built its own following as a locally owned bar and grill pouring Colorado craft beer. Neither business needs a festival crowd or a news hook to be worth a stop. They're just part of what's grown in around Main Street over the past several years.
The Number That Explains the Pattern
The turnover isn't random and it isn't small. According to Kimberly Bailey, who serves as Fountain's Economic Development Director and also directs the Urban Renewal Authority, Olde Town Fountain has added roughly 14 new businesses a year since pandemic recovery, a pace she describes as unprecedented for the district. Some of that growth came with public investment behind it: wider sidewalks, new outdoor patios, greenway connections, and a series of pocket parks along Ohio Avenue, funded in part through the city's urban renewal program, which has also remediated four blighted properties into new job-generating businesses.
Fourteen new businesses a year, on an eight-block street, means the storefront you pass on a Tuesday might not be the same business by Christmas. Some of that churn is closures, which Bailey calls a normal part of any business cycle. But a district losing tenants doesn't usually also fund pocket parks and sidewalk widening. The investment pattern only makes sense if the demand behind it is real, which is the part that's easy to miss when you're only tracking one building at a time.
Here's a quick snapshot of how a few of these properties have turned over:
| Property | What It Was | What's There Now |
|---|---|---|
| Woodman Hall, 102 N. Main St. (built 1905) | General store, post office, movie theater, roller rink, arcade, apartments, thrift store | Historic landmark since August 2025; Sonora's Prime Carniceria & Taco Shop slated but not yet confirmed open after two missed target dates |
| Storefront near the 1903 jail | Vacant for a stretch of years | Loco Promos, print and engraving shop |
| 606 S. Santa Fe Ave. | Mostly fast-food corridor | Fountain Creek Winery & Eatery |
| Central Main Street | — | Rookies Taphouse and Eatery |
What's Left on the 2026 Calendar
Summer's public events already wrapped. The last Movie Night in the Park ran August 21 at Metcalfe Park, and the farmers market there keeps going every Saturday through September 26, so there's still time to catch it before it closes out the season.
The next big date is the one that runs directly past Woodman Hall's front door.
If you're planning around it: the Fountain Valley Chamber of Commerce lists the Fall Festival hours as 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., while the city's own calendar lists 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Small mismatches like that are common with long-running community events, so it's worth building slack into your morning rather than planning around one posted hour.
The 56th Annual Fountain Fall Festival & Parade lands on Labor Day, September 7, at Metcalfe Park, and it regularly draws thousands. This year's theme hasn't been announced yet, which is normal timing, past years have carried themes like Blues and BBQ and Victory in the Valley, decided closer to the date. If the parade runs its usual route down Main Street, it passes directly across from Woodman Hall, meaning a fair number of people that morning will be getting their first real look at whatever state the building is in.
After that, the fall and winter calendar keeps going:
- Oh, My Gourd & Nightmare on Main Street Dance: Saturday, October 17
- Trunk-or-Treat: Friday, October 23, 5 to 7 p.m.
- Tree Lighting: Friday, November 20, 6 to 7 p.m.
- Miracle on Main Street: Saturday, December 12
Why This Is Worth Tracking If You Live Here
The easy version of this story is "new businesses opened in Fountain," which is true but not particularly useful. The more accurate version is that Main Street's comeback isn't being driven by one project everyone's betting on. It's being driven by roughly 14 small, individually unremarkable decisions a year, a print shop here, a winery there, a taphouse that's been quietly building a regulars list, while the one building with the most attention on it takes its time.
That's worth knowing whether you're grabbing a taco or a glass of wine on Main Street next month, or just trying to figure out why the block looks different than it did two years ago. The town isn't waiting on Woodman Hall to have a Main Street worth walking. It already has one, and it's been building it a storefront at a time.
If you're curious how any of this shows up in what a home on or near Main Street is actually worth, that's the kind of question DogHouse Real Estate Group fields regularly for Fountain buyers and sellers. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through it with you.
