RTD sent out the announcement in June: East Colfax Avenue from Broadway to Colorado Boulevard would come out from behind the fencing this fall, about two years after crews first broke ground on the corridor's bus rapid transit line. Bus-only lanes down the center. Passenger cars in the outer lanes. Left turns restricted to signalized intersections. For businesses near Civic Center and Capitol Hill, the worst of it is finally behind them.
If your daily walk to Elm Street runs east instead of west, that announcement doesn't apply to you yet. The stretch of Colfax that borders Mayfair, the one running through the Colfax Mayfair Business Improvement District between Eudora Street and Monaco Parkway, is not reopening this fall. It's entering its most disruptive phase, with construction running on both sides of the street at once and a finish line that RTD has set for fall 2027.
Same project. Same headline. Two very different autumns.
Two Segments, One Street
The East Colfax BRT project was never one continuous construction zone moving start to finish. It was broken into five segments, built in overlapping waves rather than one long march east. As of this fall, here's where each piece actually stands:
| Segment | Streets | Status (Sept 2026) | Target completion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 & 2 | Broadway to Colorado Blvd | Reopening to full traffic | Fall 2026 |
| 3 & 4 | Colorado Blvd to Yosemite St (includes Mayfair's Eudora-to-Monaco frontage) | Active construction on both sides of the street | Fall 2027 |
| 5 | Yosemite St to I-225 (Aurora) | Construction underway | Fall 2027 |
Mayfair sits inside that middle band. It's the same grouping RTD uses for reporting purposes, but it spans a lot of ground, from just east of Colorado Boulevard out to Yosemite Street. Different stretches inside that same segment have hit their hardest months at different times, which is part of why the story on the ground looks so different depending on which cross street you're standing at.
What's Actually Happening on Your Block
Crews are working the Colorado-to-Yosemite segment from both directions simultaneously right now, with traffic squeezed into the outer lanes while eastbound and westbound station work happens at the same time. The center lanes, the ones that will eventually carry the dedicated bus-only service, are still being built out with drainage, utility work, signals, and streetscape improvements. RTD's own construction updates say that work will continue shifting into those center lanes through the rest of 2027 before final paving and station finishes wrap up.
Three new stations are rising inside the Colfax Mayfair BID's own boundaries, at Colfax and Elm, Colfax and Hudson, and Colfax and Krameria, with a fourth planned near the east side of Monaco. They'll carry the same design language as the rest of the line: raised platforms for level boarding and the tall white arch structures that have become the visual signature of the project, the same kind that went up over stops farther west and out toward Aurora. Separately, the Mayfair Town Center, the retail cluster tucked between Colfax and 14th Avenue near Kearney and Leyden, has its own streetscape improvement plan in the works, timed to install alongside the BRT construction rather than as an afterthought.
Notice what's absent from that list: an end-to-end closure. The Colfax Mayfair BID has been explicit that construction is phased block by block, from Elm Street toward Monaco and through the Town Center, rather than shutting the corridor down all at once. Part of the reason is physical. Colfax through Mayfair runs 100 to 120 feet curb to curb, wider than the 80-foot right of way through Capitol Hill farther west. That extra width has given the construction team more room to keep a lane open in each direction and preserve some on-street parking even while station work is underway, something the narrower blocks near downtown didn't have the luxury of.
The Businesses That Already Lived This
A few miles west of Mayfair's stretch, businesses between Monroe and Niagara streets spent 2025 absorbing the roughest months of this same segment grouping. SAME Café, the pay-what-you-can restaurant, saw daily lunch counts drop from 75 to 100 down to 45 or 50 on a good day. The W, a restaurant co-founded by four Park Hill and Cheesman Park residents, lost half its sales and cut its operating days from seven to five. Farther toward Capitol Hill, Savageau Coffee & Ice Cream watched construction fencing block its own entrance and the sidewalk out front, with owner Sean Moore describing days with no business at all. Middleman, along with the James Beard-nominated Misfit Snack Bar it operated inside, closed within the project's first year.
That's the version of this story that shows up when you search "Colfax construction business impact." It's accurate. It's also not the whole picture, and it's not Mayfair's story specifically, at least not yet.
City finance department data tracked openings and closures across three business improvement districts along the BRT corridor since October 2024, the Colfax Avenue BID between Grant and Josephine, the Bluebird BID between St. Paul and Colorado, and the Colfax Mayfair BID between Eudora and Monaco. Combined, ten businesses closed. Nine opened to take their place. Roughly even, not the wipeout the worst individual stories might suggest.
That balance matters for how you read what's coming. Mayfair's stretch hasn't gone through its heaviest construction window yet in the way Monroe-to-Niagara already has. The corridor-wide churn data includes Mayfair's district, but the physical construction on Mayfair's own blocks is still ramping toward its peak, not past it. Whether that balance holds once station work is in full swing here is the open question, not a settled one.
What's New Along the Way
Construction hasn't stopped new business from landing on this stretch. Larry Washington, who's spent three decades building Louisiana and Southern-style barbecue chops, is opening Catfish King at 5454 East Colfax Avenue this fall, with fried catfish, smoked ribs and brisket, and his own Hungry Wolf Wolfie Sauce on the menu. It's a soft opening, watch the Colfax Mayfair BID's channels for the exact date.
Coffee has deeper roots here than most people realize. Copper Door Coffee Roasters, now with cafes scattered from Park Hill to Lowry to the Denver Botanic Gardens, built out its very first Denver storefront right here in Mayfair, funded in part through a Kickstarter campaign under founder Hannah Ulbrich. The brand has since expanded well beyond the neighborhood, but Mayfair is where the woman-owned roaster first put down a physical address.
For business owners riding out the construction, the city's grant program remains open to qualifying storefronts along East Colfax from Broadway to Glencoe Street, which covers Mayfair's stretch. Grants run $7,500 for businesses under $100,000 in annual gross revenue and $15,000 for those above it, a real if modest cushion against months of reduced foot traffic.
Getting Around It
Side streets stay open throughout construction, which matters if Colfax itself is choked with barrels and cones on a given week. Parking near the future Elm Street station has already been removed to make room for the platform, and the BID has pushed businesses with off-street lots, in front, alongside, or behind their buildings, to post visible signage pointing customers toward them. A construction hotline is available for businesses running into access problems day to day.
None of this resolves quickly. Fall 2027 is still more than a year out, and that's the target for finishing the segment that includes Mayfair's own frontage, not a guess about when the fences might thin. The reopening announcement you may have seen this fall belongs to a different stretch of the same street.
What's true is that Mayfair's version of this story hasn't been written yet, at least not the ending. The corridor's early chapters, out toward Monroe and Niagara, read rough. Whether Mayfair's chapter reads the same way once Elm, Hudson, and Krameria are fully built out is something only next year will answer.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address, whether Colfax frontage helps or hurts your home's value once the dust settles, or you're simply curious what a Mayfair property looks like on paper these days, the team at Aaron Linkow knows this stretch of Denver block by block. Start with a Free Home Valuation and get a straight answer, construction and all.
