Pick a Friday night in Briargate this summer and you had an actual decision to make. Not the abstract kind, the literal one: drive to Chapel Hills Mall and let a seven-year-old press her palm against a stingray, or walk the Promenade Shops with a burger in one hand and a lawn chair in the other while a local cover band works through its set on the Pikes Peak Patio. Or skip both, load up the cooler, and park at John Venezia Community Park until the splash pad shuts off at dusk.
All three options are new to the neighborhood, or new enough. And looking back at the season now that August has arrived, the interesting part isn't any single opening. It's that Briargate's two shopping centers spent 2026 solving the exact same problem, foot traffic that doesn't want to just shop anymore, in opposite ways. One went indoors and strange. The other went outdoors and social. Neither one, it turns out, beat the free park up the street.
The mall that bet on stingrays
Chapel Hills Mall has been reinventing itself in fits and starts for a while now. Its Kmart anchor closed back in 2009 and eventually gave way to an AMC theater, one of several signs that a traditional enclosed mall on the north side of town had to keep finding reasons for people to park there. This spring it found one nobody would have guessed: an interactive touch aquarium.
Jungle Reef opened to the public on March 20, 2026, tucked behind the Dick's Sporting Goods on the mall's first floor. It's the first attraction of its kind in Colorado Springs, and it did not arrive quietly or on schedule. The project hit a stop-work order in December 2024 over permit issues, pushing a planned summer opening back by months. Owner Jon Hepworth has said the delay came down to unexpected construction needs, and once the doors finally opened, the buildout justified some of the wait: a 60,000-gallon shark tank, a 30,000-gallon stingray tank, and a 10,000-gallon koi tank, all built around animals sourced from rescue and rehabilitation facilities rather than commercial suppliers. Hepworth has talked about the whole idea coming from wanting to bring more activity back into malls, and there's something fitting about a shark tank filling a retail bay that spent over a decade waiting to be something else.
For Briargate families, the practical version of this story is simpler: there's now an air-conditioned, rainy-Tuesday, too-hot-for-the-splash-pad option a few minutes from home, and it didn't exist a year ago.
The shopping center that bet on Friday nights
A couple miles away, the Promenade Shops at Briargate took the opposite approach. Instead of building something new inside four walls, it leaned into what an open-air lifestyle center can do that an enclosed mall can't: put people outside, together, for free, on a predictable schedule.
That's Music Under the Mountains, the Promenade's Friday-night concert series that ran from June 26 through July 31 on the Pikes Peak Patio next to Ted's Montana Grill, sponsored this year by Audi Colorado Springs. No cover, no tickets, just lawn chairs and a rotating lineup of local acts, including Martini Shot, The Runners, Final Eyes, Mimic, and Sofa Killers, with a rain-check date in early August covering the one Friday weather knocked out. Six weeks of built-in reasons to eat dinner outdoors on a patio instead of driving somewhere else for it.
The Promenade paired that with actual new anchors. Shake Shack opened its second Colorado Springs location on May 14, 2026, at 7465 N. Academy Boulevard in the Shops at Falcon Landing just up the road, the chain's twelfth location in the state. It's a small detail with a bigger point: national brands are still choosing to expand into this stretch of Briargate rather than around it, which says more about where people are actually spending time than any single opening does on its own.
Where everyone actually ended up
Here's the part that complicates the tidy story of two malls fighting over the neighborhood's attention: on the hottest days, most of Briargate still went to John Venezia Community Park.
The park sits at Briargate Parkway and Union Boulevard, named for a former city council member, and it's been the north side's default family gathering spot since it opened in 2017. Its farm-themed splash pad, officially called the Watering Hole, draws crowds thick enough that locals know to show up right at opening if they want a good spot before it fills in by midmorning. The rest of the park backs that up with a universally accessible playground, soccer fields, pickleball and tennis courts, and enough interior sidewalk and trail mileage to make it a legitimate dog-walking loop, not just a stop. In June, National Mill Dog Rescue used the park for its Festival in the Bark, bringing adoptable dogs and local vendors out for an afternoon, which tells you something about how the park functions as more than a playground. It's a place organizations choose specifically because they know people will already be there.
None of that costs anything to use, and none of it required a construction permit fight or a national franchise deal to exist. It was already the neighborhood's answer to a hot Colorado summer before either mall spent a dollar this year.
What this summer actually tells Briargate
Two shopping centers just ran two different experiments on the same audience, and a nine-year-old city park won the attendance contest anyway. That's not really a knock on Jungle Reef or the Promenade Shops. It's more of a reminder about what actually pulls a neighborhood together: sometimes it's a stingray tank behind a Dick's Sporting Goods, sometimes it's a free Friday concert, and sometimes it's just shade, water, and a place the dog can come too.
What it does tell you, if you're paying attention to Briargate the way residents do, is that this stretch of the city keeps finding new reasons to stay local instead of driving south for dinner or entertainment. A mall willing to gut a retail bay for an aquarium and a lifestyle center willing to sponsor six weeks of free concerts are both making a bet that people here want more excuses to stick around, not fewer. Combine that with a park system that was already doing the job for free, and you get a neighborhood where the options multiplied this year without anyone having to leave it.
That kind of steady, layered investment, a new attraction here, a concert series there, a park that's been quietly excellent since 2017, is the sort of thing that tends to matter more over time than any single headline opening. It's also the kind of detail that's easy to miss unless you're watching the neighborhood closely and often, which is exactly how the Behr and Behr Team approaches every corner of the Pikes Peak region we work in.
If you're curious what any of this means for your own Briargate home's value, or you just want a conversation with people who actually track what's changing in this neighborhood, we'd love to talk. Request a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready, no pressure, no obligation, just a straight answer from a team that pays attention.
