By Sunday morning, the folding chairs were still out on half the porches along North Corona Street. A cooler sat wedged against somebody's front steps. If you walked the neighborhood the day after Porchfest, Patty Jewett's annual block party held this year on September 13, you'd have seen the leftover evidence of a production that runs almost entirely on volunteer labor: sign-up sheets for setup and teardown, a lineup of food trucks, live music staged on porches instead of a stage. It's free. It's been happening for years. And it is the most visible version of something Patty Jewett does quietly all the time, which is solve its own problems before anyone outside the neighborhood notices there was a problem to solve.
Most people who don't live here know Patty Jewett for one thing: the golf course. That's fair. It's the third-oldest public course west of the Mississippi, dating to 1898, and it's the visual anchor of the whole area, the green wedge that gives the neighborhood its name and its eastern border. But the golf course is the postcard. It's not what's actually holding the neighborhood together on a Tuesday in October when nobody's golfing. What does that is a 25-year-old volunteer association that has, more than once, stepped in to fund or fix things the city budget didn't quite reach. Porchfest is the fun version of that habit. The trash trucks are the unglamorous one.
The Alley Problem Nobody Else Had to Solve
Earlier this year, residents in Patty Jewett did something most Colorado Springs neighborhoods have never bothered to coordinate: they picked a trash hauler together. Not because the city required it, but because having a different truck rumble down the alley every weekday had become its own kind of tax on the neighborhood. Resident Leslie Patterson, who helped drive the effort, told the Gazette that the constant truck traffic was tearing up the unpaved alleys behind homes, especially after rain or snow, leaving divots that never really got fixed before the next truck came through.
The fix wasn't a city ordinance. It was residents agreeing, informally and then more formally, to consolidate around two haulers, Infinite Disposal and Apex Waste. According to Apex's own sales team, the program now covers more than 700 homes and has grown past Patty Jewett's original boundaries, stretching west toward Interstate 25 and south into the Middle Shooks Run area. Roughly 80 percent of those homes use Apex, at a coordinated rate of $18 a month for trash and $5 a month for recycling. Apex requires at least 100 participating homes before it will set up a neighborhood program at all. Patty Jewett cleared that bar with room to spare, and did it the same way it does everything: by getting people talking to each other first.
Patterson was candid about why this was easier here than it would be elsewhere. Patty Jewett is the kind of place that hands out gift baskets to new residents and holds community meetings often enough that pitching a shared trash program to your neighbors doesn't feel like a cold call. That's not marketing language. That's the actual mechanism.
An Association Older Than Most of the Houses' Renovations
None of this is new behavior for the neighborhood. The Patty Jewett Neighborhood Association was started in 1999 by a resident named Paulette Flohr, and it picked up formal 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 2003. It's still an all-volunteer operation today, currently led by President Tim Burke and Vice President Debby Van Orden, and its stated purpose hasn't changed in over two decades: build community, enhance the neighborhood, and take up whatever issue needs taking up.
That mission has had concrete, dollar-figure results before. In 2018, the city funded a new playground at the corner of Corona and Columbia through its TOPS parks budget, but the project only got built because the neighborhood association kicked in its own financial contribution alongside the city money. It's a small line item in the city's broader Legacy Loop planning documents, easy to miss. But it's the same pattern as the trash program: city infrastructure gets the neighborhood partway there, and Patty Jewett residents supply the rest, in cash or in coordination.
The physical neighborhood carries that same layered history. A 1902 grocery building and a 1920s filling station still stand at the intersection of Columbia and Corona, relics from an era when the neighborhood needed its own corner store because driving to a supermarket wasn't yet a normal errand. Taylor Elementary, named for philanthropist and Fine Arts Center co-founder Alice Bemis Taylor, has been educating neighborhood kids since 1952. And on the site of a former greenhouse that once supplied fresh flowers to the region, the neighborhood recently gained Casa Verde Commons, Colorado Springs' first co-housing community, a modern layer added onto a very old street grid.
Shooks Run Is the Other Infrastructure Nobody Funded Alone
The golf course borders the neighborhood on the east. Shooks Run does the same on the south and west, and it's worth understanding as more than a nice place to walk the dog. The trail follows Shooks Run Creek along a corridor that was originally the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad line, and at its southern end it passes through a rail underpass built in 1887, one of the oldest built structures tied to the neighborhood's transportation history. Today it's part of the city's broader Legacy Loop plan, a roughly 10-mile trail and park system that eventually ties Shooks Run to the Rock Island Trail to the north and the Pikes Peak Greenway to the west, encircling downtown.
None of that connectivity happened by accident or entirely on the city's dime. Individual segments of the Legacy Loop, including work near Shooks Run, have leaned on funding from the city's TOPS sales tax alongside state and federal grants. It's the same funding pattern as the playground: public money doing the heavy lifting, with local contribution filling the gaps. Whether or not the average dog walker on the trail thinks about any of that, it's the reason the path they're on exists at all in something better than raw dirt and old rail ties.
The Golf Course Still Matters, Just Not the Way You'd Guess
None of this is meant to undersell Patty Jewett Golf Course itself. The city logged roughly 119,000 rounds there in 2025, according to the Colorado Springs Parks Department's own annual report, nearly double the 62,000 rounds recorded at Valley Hi, the city's other municipal course. That's a serious amount of daily foot and cart traffic moving through the neighborhood's eastern edge, and the on-site Patty Jewett Bar & Grill, with its patio view toward Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain, has become as much a neighborhood hangout as a golf clubhouse. You don't have to play a round to end up there for a Saturday prime rib special or a Wednesday plate of crab legs.
But the golf course was a gift long before it was a business. William K. Jewett, an early member of the private club that occupied the site, purchased the course and donated it to the city in 1919 as a self-sustaining public facility, naming it in honor of his wife, Patty Stuart Jewett, an avid golfer in her own right. It's a century-old example of the exact same instinct that shows up in the trash program and the playground contribution: a resident deciding that public infrastructure works better when private people are willing to put something into it.
What This Adds Up To
The golf course gets the name and the photographs. The neighborhood association, mostly invisible unless you've served on it, is what actually makes the streets, the alleys, and the trail behave the way residents expect them to. Porchfest is proof the same volunteer muscle that fixes alley divots can also throw a genuinely good party once a year. Neither one works without the other, and neither one is something you'd learn from driving past the fairway.
If you're a longtime Patty Jewett resident, none of this is a surprise. If you're just getting to know the neighborhood, or thinking about what makes a place like this hold together over decades, it helps to understand that the answer usually isn't the landmark everyone points to first.
If you ever want a straight read on what your Patty Jewett home is worth in today's market, or you're curious how a neighborhood like this one compares to nearby options, the Behr and Behr Team has spent years working these blocks and is always happy to talk it through, no obligation attached.
