What do you call a 150-foot tower nobody asked for? Douglas County staff settled on "Chopsticks" while it was still under construction, and the name stuck well enough that the construction firm building it now uses it in its own project updates. Ground broke on the tower in November 2024, part of the Central Park development going up as an expansion of Highlands Ranch's Town Center. Three steel legs leaning into each other, tall enough to double as an emergency communications tower for Douglas County responders and to anchor a new community park and plaza. Two Augusts later, it's still one of the more visible things under construction if you drive past the Shops at Central Park.
Most residents still picture a different Town Center when someone says the words out loud: the clock tower, the village green, Target and Home Depot anchoring a retail strip built to look like it had always been there. That picture isn't wrong. It's just no longer the whole map. Over the past year, the businesses choosing to open in Highlands Ranch have quietly stopped choosing that original core, and a look at where they've landed instead tells you something the clock tower never will.
The Blueprint Everyone Still Pictures
The original Highlands Ranch Town Center was designed on purpose to feel like it had always been there. The architecture firm that designed it in partnership with RLA Design describes a 20.1-acre site built around brick masonry facades and sandstone detailing modeled on Denver's LoDo warehouses, with the whole thing symbolically anchored by a clock tower fronting a village green. It's a retail center dressed up as a town square, and it's done the job ever since it opened: farmers markets, an Oktoberfest, the kind of Saturday-morning foot traffic a mixed-use development is supposed to generate.
That design intent matters here because it's the baseline everyone in Highlands Ranch is measuring against, whether they realize it or not. When something new opens somewhere else in the neighborhood, the comparison is automatic. And this year, several somethings did.
The Restaurants Already Voted
Egg Harbor Cafe, a Chicago-area breakfast chain founded in 1985, opened this year at 9579 S. University Blvd., in a space that used to hold HopsnDrops brewery before that brewery closed in the spring of 2025. It's one of the company's first moves into Colorado, and it picked a University Boulevard storefront over a Town Center address.
A few miles over, Graze Craze is finishing build-out inside the Promenade Shopping Center at 2670 E. County Line Rd. As of this spring, the charcuterie-board concept hadn't announced an opening date, but the signage on site was already promising it was coming soon. Founded in 2020 by Air Force veteran Kerry Sylvester, the brand's Highlands Ranch location will be overseen by local franchisee Sara Clay.
Neither business chose the clock-tower corridor. Both chose retail centers built around the University Boulevard and County Line Road growth that's happening now, not the "old town" retail buildings finished decades ago.
| Original Town Center | Central Park / Promenade corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor landmark | Clock tower fronting a village green | 150-foot Central Park Tower, nicknamed "Chopsticks" |
| 2026 activity | Established retail: Target, Home Depot, longtime tenants | Egg Harbor Cafe now open, Graze Craze charcuterie concept finishing build-out |
| Civic role | Hosts Oktoberfest and the farmers market | Doubles as an emergency communications tower for county responders |
A Stadium Got a Sponsor Before the Tower Got a Name
Here's the detail that makes the tower's nickname more interesting than a punchline. While Chopsticks has been rising without an official name since late 2024, another Highlands Ranch landmark just got one handed to it. Douglas County School District, working in partnership with the Highlands Ranch Metro District, recently finished a synthetic turf replacement at the stadium inside Redstone Park. Along with the new field came new signage: the stadium is now called Canvas Credit Union Stadium at Highlands Ranch.
Put those two facts side by side and you get a small but real signal about where outside money is flowing into the neighborhood's everyday infrastructure. A stadium that used to just be "the field at Redstone Park" now carries a bank's name. A brand-new tower built with county emergency-communications equipment inside it is still only known by a nickname staff gave it during construction. Naming rights are showing up in places that didn't used to have them, and it's happening at the same time new restaurants are choosing addresses that didn't exist five years ago.
Two Saturdays, Two Versions of Town
If you want to see the contrast for yourself instead of taking a blog's word for it, the calendar hands you almost the same weekend to do it. Prost Brewing Company runs its own Oktoberfest-branded event on Saturday, September 19, with a live GenX rock set from Vinyl Nation. A week later, on Saturday, September 26, the Highlands Ranch Oktoberfest Celebration takes over the original Town Center starting at 1 p.m., the same clock-tower green that's hosted it for years.
Go to both and you're not just drinking two different beers. You're standing in two different versions of what "downtown Highlands Ranch" means, one week apart. One is the legacy civic event on a green designed to look like it had always been there. The other is a brewery's own branded night out, closer to the newer growth corridor than to the green.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this means the original Town Center is fading. Target and Home Depot aren't going anywhere, and the clock tower will keep hosting Oktoberfest for years to come. What's changed is that Highlands Ranch now has two centers of gravity instead of one, and the newer one is where the growth is actually landing. If you've noticed new construction near University and County Line and weren't sure what it added up to, now you have the throughline: a tower with a nickname instead of a name, a stadium with a bank's name instead of a nickname, and two new restaurants that picked the newer address over the old one.
That's the kind of shift that doesn't show up on a for-sale sign, but it does show up in property values, foot traffic, and which streets feel busiest on a Saturday. If you're weighing what any of this means for your own corner of Highlands Ranch, whether you're watching the market from the sidelines or actually thinking about a move, that's exactly the kind of question T.J. Gordon fields every week. Reach out for a free home valuation, or just to talk through what a changing neighborhood map might mean for you.
