Commentary: Pearl Street vs. Tejon Street

Colorado Springs Business Journal, Apr 4, 2008 by Lon Matejczyk

There has been some community discussion and CSBJ letters to the editor about the two-way Tejon concept, and arguments made that Tejon should be made into a blocked off street mall, a la the 16th Street Mall in Denver or the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder.

I recently took a short scouting excursion to the Pearl Street Mall. After donning my fedora and paste-on mustache (No, I didn't wear my Focus on the Family T-shirt or Amendment 2 baseball cap to Boulder. I thought it would have been in bad taste.), I strolled up and down Pearl Street.

There was plenty of foot traffic, panhandlers, loiterers and businesspeople -- not dissimilar to our own Tejon Street.

Come to think of it, those people that I thought might have been from the homeless contingency might have been regular residents or even businesspeople. The dreadlock, tie-dye look is definitely in vogue in Boulder.

I found the hip, trendy shops kind of interesting, but they seemed to have an employment problem. It took me a half hour to get four small ice cream cones at Ben & Jerry's. Ben and Jerry must have been on vacation and left a busy store to one young man who, though quite polite, could not keep up with the steady stream of customers.

So what would Tejon be like if the center stripes were bricked over, some large rocks and fake bridges replaced the parking slots and kiosks replaced some of the turn signals? It could work.

There would be a natural transition into Pedophile Park, er ... Acacia Park. Sorry, the nickname for Acacia Park came from a soccer mom. I thought it was interesting that the park had that reputation and an online search for sex offenders showed that quite a few live in the Acacia Park area.

Tejon would become more of a destination venue able to compete with the Promenade Shops at Briargate, which has the outside shopping experience pretty well defined.

Bottom line, would it help our street level retailers? Possibly. But we would need to spend a bunch of money to research the possibilities.

For now, let's see how the two-way Tejon thing works out and with the U.S. Olympic Committee moving downtown, things look pretty bright for one of my favorite places ... downtown Colorado Springs.