Colorado Springs Turns Its Own Streets Into a History Book

You have driven past it a hundred times. That granite building with the domed clock tower at 215 S. Tejon Street. Maybe you circled it looking for parking. Maybe you have never once stopped to think about what it is.

Here is the thing. That building was the El Paso County Courthouse from 1903 all the way to 1973. People got married in there. People got sentenced in there. Now it is the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, and this month it is asking you to do something most of us have completely forgotten how to do. Slow down and actually look.

Two anniversaries, one weekend

So 2026 is a big year for anniversaries. It has been 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and 150 years of Colorado statehood. The museum is marking both with a guided downtown walking tour they are calling "America 250/Colorado 150: Seeing History in Place."

The tours run Sept. 19 and Sept. 26. The first one goes from 9:30 to 11 a.m., and you sign up online at www.cspm.org/events. Free, which I love.

And look, the pitch here is not what you think. This is not a guide standing in front of you reciting dates and names until your eyes glaze over. The whole idea is to use the city itself as the history book. You walk the streets, you look up at the buildings, and you sit with the question of why we even mark anniversaries in the first place. What makes an event worth remembering 150 years later.

The part that got me

Program administrator Meg Yevara has lived in Colorado Springs her entire life. Her whole life. And she said the first time she led one of these downtown tours, she was amazed by the stuff she had overlooked.

Think about that for a second. Someone who has been here forever, walking the same blocks she has walked since she was a kid, and the tour still showed her things she had never seen.

Her point is simple and it stuck with me. We are all in our cars. We drive from the garage to the parking lot to the next parking lot, and we never stop to look at the buildings or think about the stories behind them. The landscape is right there and we are blowing past it at 30 miles an hour with the radio on.

I mean, honestly, Hayley and I are guilty of this too. You get so used to a place that it turns invisible.

About that building

The museum itself is worth the trip before you even get to the walking part. That 1903 courthouse is a real one. It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and here is a detail I love. It was the second property ever listed in all of El Paso County. Second. You know what was first? Pikes Peak. So this building is in the same conversation as the mountain, which tells you something.

The museum moved in back in 1979, and today it holds around 60,000 objects. And it is not just dusty documents in glass cases. We are talking Van Briggle art pottery, American Indian artifacts, quilts, jukeboxes, and motorcycles. Jukeboxes and motorcycles in an old courthouse. That is the kind of collection that keeps a kid interested.

Admission is free. The museum is part of the City of Colorado Springs Department of Cultural Services, it sits inside Alamo Square Park, and it is also home to the Starsmore Center for Local History, which is a manuscript collection and research facility if you are the type who wants to go deep on your own family or your own block.

Why this matters for the people who actually live here

The museum is tying all of this to the landmarks everybody already knows. Pikes Peak, America's Mountain. Rock Ledge Ranch Historic Site. The big stuff. But the walking tour is doing the opposite of the big stuff. It is pointing at the ordinary buildings, the ones you pass on the way to lunch, and saying these count too.

And here is where my brain goes, because I cannot help it. This is a real estate town whether people admit it or not. Every one of those downtown buildings has a story about who built it, who owned it, who fought over it, and what it is worth now. The history of a place and the value of a place are the same conversation. When you understand why a neighborhood looks the way it looks, you understand what you are actually buying into. That is true in Denver and it is true on Tejon Street.

So my honest take. If you live in Colorado Springs, or even if you are up the interstate in Denver and you want a genuinely good Saturday morning, this is 90 minutes and zero dollars. You walk a few blocks you thought you already knew, and a lifelong local shows you the parts you have been driving past your whole life.

Sign up at www.cspm.org/events. Pick the 19th or the 26th. And for once, leave the car parked and look up.