Ask anyone who has mapped the route from a driveway in Colliers Hill to a stool at Cellar West Brewery how far it actually is, and the honest answer starts with a creek, a set of RTD tracks, and until this spring, a shrug. The straight-line distance was never the issue. Getting there on foot meant either a long loop around to a road crossing or driving three-quarters of a mile to park somewhere you could have walked to in ten minutes, if there had been a way across.
That gap closed on May 16, 2026, when the Town of Erie opened the Colliers Crossing pedestrian bridge with a ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. on the east side, opposite Coal Creek Park. The timing wasn't an accident. The trail leads straight into the 29th Annual Town Fair in Old Town, which meant the first people to walk across it did so on their way to the town's biggest weekend of the year. For a project years in the making, that's the kind of detail that tells you the town understood what the bridge was actually for.
What Was Actually in the Way
Coal Creek and the RTD tracks running alongside it have separated Colliers Hill from Historic Downtown Erie since Colliers Hill was built. There was a low-water crossing near Cheeseman, but Public Works staff ruled it out for the new bridge because it overtops during major storms and isn't safe for pedestrians or vehicles when it matters most. Instead, the town engineered something built specifically for walking and biking: a 225-foot span with a 12-foot clear path, rated to H10 vehicular loading so a maintenance truck can use it but built with foot traffic as the point, not commuter shortcuts.
The engineer's opinion of probable construction cost came in at roughly $4.56 million, and construction began the week of August 18, 2025, with site work and abutments going in that fall before the bridge itself went up. A 16-foot concrete crossing at the RTD tracks rounds out the connection, tying into the Colliers Hill Spine Trail on one end and Coal Creek Park on the other. None of that shows up on a real estate listing, but it's the reason a walk that used to require a car now takes about as long as parking used to.
What's Actually on the Other Side Now
The bridge would matter less if downtown hadn't given people a reason to cross it. Cellar West Brewery moved into a 100-year-old bungalow at 445 Briggs Street, converting the house and garage into a taproom with a back patio beer garden and an accessory building available for private rentals. The Lafayette-based brewery was founded in 2016 by Zachary Nichols, a Wisconsin transplant who started as a home brewer and helped launch Sanitas Brewing Company before setting out on his own. Cellar West's kitchen is run by Cosmic Coyote, the same culinary partner that handles scratch-made food at the brewery's Lafayette location, and the Erie taproom held its grand opening in mid-October 2025. Since then, the space has added a pop-up sandwich counter run by Weedhart Pies, open Fridays and Saturdays, which turns a Friday beer stop into something closer to dinner.
A few blocks over, 24 Carrot Bistro has built a menu around seasonal ingredients sourced from Colorado farms and picked up the Slow Food Snail of Approval, a distinction tied to sustainability and community sourcing rather than a star rating. The restaurant also runs monthly speakeasy dinners that require stepping behind a bookcase to find the room, the kind of detail that rewards people who already live close enough to make a reservation on a whim.
Neither of these were built because of the bridge. Both existed before it opened. What changed is who can reach them without getting in a car, and that's a different question than whether they existed at all.
What's Still Catching Up
Not everything downtown is finished, and it's worth being straight about where things stand instead of promising dates the town hasn't confirmed. Johnny Bechamal's, a planned Italian restaurant at 656 Kattell Street across from Coal Creek Park, has been through a longer build than the town initially expected. Construction costs ran higher than budgeted, and the Town of Erie Urban Renewal Authority approved additional tax increment financing reimbursement, up to $725,000, to help close the gap. The most recent timeline from the town sets completion for December 2027, with construction required to begin by the following June 30. The three-season patio facing the park is part of the plan, but there's no firm opening date yet, and earlier town updates that pointed to a fall opening didn't hold.
Little Grove, a children's play space and coffee bar planned for 512 Briggs Street, is further behind. As of the most recent town updates, the concept was still in the planning and lease stage, with no construction timeline attached. It's the kind of project worth watching rather than counting on this year.
Why the Bridge Changes the Calculus, Not Just the Route
Erie's downtown already draws a crowd for events that don't have dedicated parking. The Erie Chamber's annual EB Brewfest, which features Cellar West alongside more than a dozen other Front Range breweries, relies on scattered parking through the residential streets of downtown, a nearby church lot on Holbrook Street, and another at Calvary Bible Church on Evans Street. That's the kind of event where driving in from Colliers Hill used to mean circling for a spot within walking distance of the festival gates. Now it means walking the bridge instead.
The same logic applies on an ordinary Friday. A trip to Cellar West for a Weedhart Pies sandwich, or a seat at 24 Carrot Bistro before a speakeasy dinner, no longer requires deciding whether the drive and the parking are worth it for a meal that's a ten-minute walk away once you're not fighting the creek and the tracks to get there. The bridge didn't add a new reason to go downtown. It removed the reason people were driving instead.
If you're weighing what a project like this means for a home near Coal Creek Park or the Colliers Hill Spine Trail, Marie Jacobs tracks these kinds of changes across Erie as they happen, not after the fact.
