If you drive past the old K-Mart at East Colfax and Chambers most Aurora residents still describe what's inside using the wrong tense. They'll tell you about the food trucks in the parking lot, or the half-built stalls, or the sense that the place has been "almost done" for so long it stopped being news. That description was accurate for years. It stopped being accurate this spring, and most of the neighborhood hasn't caught up.
La Plaza Colorado spent nearly four years getting built, which is a strange thing to say about a project that opened its doors back in March 2024. The market portion opened then, but the 24 kitchens meant to anchor the food hall were still shipping containers and construction tape. What filled the gap was a rotating lineup of food trucks parked outside, which is the version of La Plaza that got fixed in a lot of people's heads and never updated. This spring, on the first weekend of April, the food hall portion finally opened for real. The date doubled as the property's second anniversary. What's inside now is a different building than the one most Aurora residents are picturing.
Four Years Of Food Trucks Was Never The Plan
Developer Doug McMurrain took occupancy of the building in December 2017 and bought it in April 2019, a few months before COVID hit and every plan attached to a 152,000-square-foot former big box store got harder. Investors pulled back. Supply chains delayed construction. Costs on the original buildout doubled. What was supposed to be a straightforward conversion turned into a property owner improvising in real time, which is how the parking lot ended up doing double duty as the food hall while the actual food hall was still being framed out.
McMurrain leaned into the food trucks rather than fighting the delay. He started charging vendors $300 a month to set up in the lot and at one point had as many as fifty businesses running out of it, until Aurora's health department stepped in and the city worked with him to bring the vendors up to code. Tacos Guerrero, now one of the sit-down kitchens inside the finished hall, started exactly this way: a food truck in that same parking lot in 2021, run by Alberto Moreno and Elizabeth Martinez, named for the family's home state of Guerrero, Mexico. Their daughter Fernanda now helps run the stall version of the business, which serves green and white pozole, birria ramen, and pizza birria to people who used to have to catch them in the lot on the right day.
That is the part of the story worth sitting with if you live nearby. The food trucks weren't the vision. They were a stopgap that lasted so long it became the neighborhood's default mental image of the place, and that image is now roughly a year and a half out of date.
What Finished Actually Looks Like
The property sits on close to 13 acres and includes the 25,000-square-foot Ahorra Mucho grocery store, a joint venture between Lever Supermarkets and Save-A-Lot billed as the first of its kind in the country, plus a VASA Fitness location that opened earlier in the property's life and never had to wait on the food hall to function. The 24 kitchens are what took the longest, and McMurrain has said the average visitor now stays more than four hours once they're inside, which tracks with what the property actually offers: food, a full grocery run, an arcade with a VR setup called the Hyperdeck programmed with 225,000 experiences, a women's salon, a med spa, and El Mercado, the property's full-service bar. Westword has reported the completed space as the largest Hispanic food hall in the United States, a claim tied specifically to the finished kitchen count rather than the marketplace as a whole.
The live music that used to happen in whatever open space was available on a given Sunday has also grown into something more deliberate. The stage got relocated and expanded specifically to make room for a bigger dance floor, and McMurrain has talked about adding an outdoor summer concert series on top of what already runs inside.
The Week Now Has A Shape
The part that hasn't made it into most people's mental picture yet is that La Plaza runs on an actual weekly schedule now, not a loose "something's probably happening" assumption. As of this August, the programming looks like this:
- Wednesdays, Family Movie Night starts at 6 p.m., with a rotating film projected in the main hall. Encanto played the first week of August. It's free.
- Thursdays, the Colorado Collectible Show runs a trade night at 5 p.m., built around Pokémon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and the kind of collectible traffic that doesn't have many other regular venues in Aurora.
- Fridays, DJ nights start at 6 p.m. with a rotating lineup spinning reggaeton, bachata, and salsa, free to get in.
- Sundays, live music runs through the evening, and this is when the property tends to layer in bigger one-off events. Earlier this month a Quinceañera Fest ran in the early afternoon with vendors specific to that kind of celebration, followed by two live bands that evening.
None of this requires planning a special trip. It requires knowing that Wednesday looks different from Friday, which looks different from Sunday, and picking the night that actually matches what you're in the mood for instead of showing up at random and hoping something's on.
The Corner Everyone Drives Past
East Colfax doesn't get talked about as a destination corridor the way some other Aurora commercial strips do, and La Plaza's slow, stop-and-start construction timeline didn't help. A building that spends four years looking unfinished trains the neighborhood to stop checking on it. That's a normal response, and it's also the reason the gap between what La Plaza actually is now and what most residents think it still is has gotten as wide as it has.
The practical takeaway isn't complicated. If your read on this stretch of Colfax is still "food trucks and a grocery store," it's worth an actual visit rather than continuing to drive past on the old assumption. The kitchens are open. The schedule is real. The corner earned a second look sometime around April, and most of the neighborhood just hasn't gotten around to giving it one.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what a finished project like this eventually does to interest in the surrounding blocks, that's the sort of shift REBL Home Team keeps an eye on across Aurora and the rest of South Denver. See your home's value now if you're curious where your own corner of the map stands.
