Cañon City’s Main Street makeover is eating into peak tourist season. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. ...Middle East

CAÑON CITY — It’s midsummer and DiRito’s Italian restaurant and Boudreauxs BBQ are still running on winter hours. 

Driftwood and Clay Makers Market and Plant Shop took to closing early because, why stay open when there’s little chance a customer will make it over dirt piles and around orange barricades to your door? Yarned and Dangerous had a sign on the front door directing customers to the back alley — if you could get to the front door to see it.

One of the city’s signature events, the Blossom Parade, had to start a block east of its usual kick-off point at Third and Main streets.

More than five months into a makeover of the westernmost blocks of Main Street in Cañon City the end of construction is in sight — but so is the end of summer and the tourist season that accounts for a significant chunk of income for many businesses. 

Initial projections were for the street to be open in time for the early May Cañon City Music & Blossom Festival and for most construction to be completed before Memorial Day weekend.

But as the Fourth of July weekend approached, workers still were laying pavers between sidewalks, finishing planters and other decorative touches, and rebuilding sidewalks over old subterranean store fronts.

“There are 100 tourist days a year and that will be half over before it’s done,” Beki Javernick, co-owner of Driftwood and Clay, said in mid-June, when it was nearly impossible to reach her front door. “I just have to suck it up and lose that revenue.

“I have about 50 local artists who display work here — it’s maybe a couple hundred extra dollars a month for them and they haven’t been getting it.”

Despite the hardship, Javernick and several other business owners and managers said they were happy for the love finally shown to their end of the street a decade after Main Street improvements began.

LEFT: Construction crews work along Main Street in Cañon City June 12, 2025. Businesses like DiRito’s Italian Restaurant have been impacted by the project’s delays. RIGHT: Owner Greg DiRito said business is off 30% and has had to cut employee hours due to the construction, which was supposed to be done in early May. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“Without change you don’t have the potential for better,” said Greg DiRito, owner of DiRito’s Italian restaurant at the corner of Third and Main streets. He just wished the timing had been better.

“It’ll be done, and it will be an improvement,” he said. “Mostly I just want to get life back to normal for my employees and my customers.”

Main Street makeover

Upgrades to make Main Street more attractive and pedestrian friendly began in 2014 when city crews remade the intersection with Fifth Street, said Ted Dell, city engineer.

Over the next couple of years contractors remade the street from Fourth Street to Seventh Street, adding bump outs at intersections, planters, trees, accessible parking spots and ramps, and double sidewalks separated by brick pavers, planters and benches.

That work was completed by 2017, Dell said.

“The city has promised for a long time that we’d finish Main Street,” city administrator Ryan Stevens said. Along with the blocks from First to Fourth streets that are near completion, the city also plans to upgrade intersections at the 700 and 800 blocks with bump out and improved sidewalks.

This year’s $2.5 million in improvements at the west end of downtown were paid for with $1.5 million from special city road taxes voters approved in November 2016 (called 2A projects) and a $1 million Main Street revitalization grant from the Colorado Department of Transportation, Stevens said. 

The city has a particularly long downtown area for a city of about 17,000 residents, and 81 buildings, mostly along Main Street from Fourth Street to Ninth Street, are in a designated National Historic District. 

“It’s the longest historic Main Street in Colorado,” Stevens said.

U.S. 50 passes through town one block south, running between Cañon City’s Main Street and the Arkansas River, and the city has renewed its efforts to get travelers to turn off the highway and visit the shops and restaurants downtown.

CDOT added medians planted with trees, shrubs and flowers to U.S. 50 in the spring and summer of 2024, along with more wayfinding signs pointing tourists to downtown and other attractions.

The city has asked CDOT to do a traffic survey at First Street and Royal Gorge Boulevard (as U.S. 50 is called in town) to see where traffic is entering or leaving the downtown area. The Colorado Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility is on the west side of First Street, and the popular Museum of Colorado Prisons entrance is off First Street.

City Hall anchors the south side of the block between First and Second streets.

The city also plans to turn a makeshift parking lot with an old clock tower at the intersection of Third and Main streets — across from DiRito’s and adjacent to Boudreauxs BBQ — into a plaza. It would have a small stage area, shade structures and public restrooms.

That project is part of the “Main to the Train” effort on Third Street to tie the Royal Gorge Route Railroad depot, the 7-mile-long Arkansas Riverwalk, the whitewater park area and nearby cycling and hiking trails to the downtown area so that people who come to the region for recreation might also visit local businesses, Dell said.

Some people wanted the Clock Tower lot to remain a parking area, but 75% of those who attended an open house about the potential design favored a plaza, Stevens said.

That parking will be replaced with a paved lot midway down the next block where the city purchased and demolished a condemned former laundry building. It will be paved later this year and striped for 40 parking spaces, Stevens said.

“Part of the goal of the plaza is to draw people to that part of town,” he said.

The nearby business owners just hope it draws people to eat and shop and not simply loiter in a park with restrooms.

Surviving construction

DiRito said he was worried when construction, initially set to begin in fall 2024, didn’t start until Jan. 27. It was a big project in an old city so he knew they were likely to run into issues.

Like old lead water lines. Natural gas lines that weren’t where they were expected. Water lines that needed to be lowered on the south side of Main Street for the new, lower street level.

LEFT: Cañon City’s plans to have the last stretch of Main Street upgrades were slowed by the discovery of lead water service pipes and gas lines found in unexpected places. The city also had to lower water lines to match the new grade of the street. RIGHT: Deep snow and heavy rain turned the open street into a river that needed to dry out before work could continue.(Handout photo)

The city also allowed building owners to add designated water lines for fire suppression, separate from regular water lines to their businesses for the budget price of $5,000. Urban Renewal kicked in the other $25,000 per line. Six building owners took advantage of that — more than the city expected, Stevens said.

And then, of course, there were weather delays, especially the heavy snow in late April and torrential spring and summer rains that turned unfinished sections of Main Street into muddy rivers.

At least one business didn’t suffer financially, although getting her customers in the door was often a challenge for Tammy Cox, the owner of Yarned and Dangerous, a fiber shop.

“I’m the only local yarn store within a two-hour radius, so people find me,” she said, noting the closure of a Colorado Springs yarn shop and the closure of Joann fabric and craft stores in Pueblo and Colorado Springs in recent months.

She was fortunate to have a back door that customers could access off Third Street, and a regular loyal contingent of knitters and sewers who filled her comfy sitting area.

DiRito posted Facebook updates throughout the construction to help customers figure out where to park and how to get to his door. He posted humorous videos of rubber ducks floating down the street in front of his business — one even posed atop a “sub” sandwich.

As the project dragged on he questioned why there were so few construction workers on the job. “I got fairly vocal when there were days that there were no workers.”

He used a covered golf cart to ferry customers from street parking in adjacent blocks to his door because long-time customers were trying to be supportive. His dad opened DiRito’s in 2001 in the building built in 1863 and it has been a family enterprise ever since.

“My customers have been amazing and supportive,” he said, even as tourists passing through didn’t venture into the construction zone. Still, he had to trim hours of all his 38 employees and has remained closed on Mondays into the summer.

Others joined in the social media barrage or posted large signs to let people know they were indeed open to salvage what business they could. They all encouraged people to visit all the businesses in the affected blocks.

And customers responded with encouraging and often sarcastic posts, including one that suggested the street would be open by Blossom Festival 2026. 

“Our customers are mainly people who know they can get in here,” said Chester Schmidt, manager at Boudreauxs, which is in its second year. “If I was a tourist passing through, I wouldn’t pull in here (construction zone).”

McCasland Glass had frustrated posts about all three of its entrances — the front door on Main Street, the vehicle bay off Third Street and an alley delivery entrance — being blocked at the same time.

Driftwood and Clay, a retail store that stands alone at the end — or the beginning — of Main Street at First Street on June 19 posted an artsy photo of “where the sidewalk ends,” stranding the shop in the midst of a construction zone.

“We’re down 35% which is huge for a small retail business,” Javernick said, noting that she’s survived because her landlord has worked with her.

She’s already locked in a Built for Success Sidewalk Party on Aug. 2 to encourage people to explore the west end of Main Street. And planning is underway to close the street there Oct. 4 for an Oktoberfest party with live music, a pottery throwdown to design a mug for the next Oktoberfest, hoping to make it an annual event, and a soap box derby because Main Street slopes down toward her shop and, why not?

The only thing to do, she said, is look to the future because “it’s going to be wonderful when it’s done.”

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