Twenty years ago, Boulder Weekly did a story about a rash of business closures including a number of well-liked, locally owned shops and eateries. The Pearl Street Mall was particularly hit hard back in 1994-95 as many long-term leases were expiring around the same time and landlords were more than tripling the rents in some cases because… well, they could and that’s what landlords do when they can. It all made for a disappointing transition that saw the Mall go from almost entirely locally owned shops to a mix, including a good number of national chain stores.
So here we are again some 20 years later with Boulder experiencing the loss of, or at least the relocation of, some of its best-known and most beloved businesses. The reasons for these latest changes are more varied this time around. Landlords are still the source of change in most instances but gouging the price on leases seems to be only one of the problems. Another culprit is that owners are increasingly deciding to sell off affordable commercial property so it can be redeveloped into not-so-affordable commercial property. In other instances, business owners are simply shutting down because they have been at it for so long they just feel the need to ride off into the retail sunset.
While some businesses have definitely decided to close, others have chosen to relocate, leaving a hole in their old neighborhoods that isn’t likely to be filled. Still more business owners aren’t yet sure of their future, likely to close but still pondering whether they might move if they could find a suitable new location they can afford. But that’s a big “if ” in Boulder these days, as the new and very expensive are replacing the old and slightly less expensive on the commercial real estate front at an alarming pace.
We looked around the county, and this latest round of business upheaval seems to be primarily a Boulder issue as the other communities in the county are simply booming, adding new businesses almost daily while still offering much more affordable space to existing and new businesses because the supply of commercial space is still adequate. That could change, of course, as East County commercial property continues to heat up, but for now, seeing successful businesses forced to close or relocate because of development and lease price increases seems to be a Boulder phenomena and a serious one at that, at least from a community perspective.
That’s because the businesses that are closing or at a minimum relocating are some of our favorite restaurants, our neighborhood place to go for this or that or the only affordable store left in town that sold the stuff we actually needed.
Boulder’s eclectic collection of businesses and restaurants has always added greatly to the quality of life for the community, but over the past 30 years there has been a continuous effort on the part of developers and landlords to upscale the Boulder market, and that evolution has come at a price. Every decade or two we have to say goodbye to places that we have grown to love, places in which we have created collective memories.
Maybe something just as good or better will fill the space being left behind by these businesses, but then again, maybe not. Can you actually think of a local business you would trade to have more Google in your neighborhood?
As for the businesses that are going away, you can never replace a spot where you first fell in love, hoisted a last beer with a friend not knowing it would be the last time you ever saw him, ate breakfast after finally making it up the Naked Edge or maybe found your all-time favorite jacket hanging on a used-clothes sale rack in the back corner for 10 bucks. As for those businesses that are being pushed out of your neighborhood, now you’ll have to drive across town to work out or wash your clothes. And nothing feels worse than no longer being able to walk to your favorite neighborhood restaurant. It’s like losing a friend. Admit it, we all have a little “Norm” inside of us.
This is why BW would like to take a little time to reflect on at least some of the changes to some of the places we care about that are currently in the works or that have already occurred in the last few weeks or months.
J.D. Salinger got it right when he wrote in The Catcher in the Rye, “Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
We ought to be able to but it just doesn’t work that way in real life. Sometimes we just have to say thanks and goodbye.
—Joel Dyer
BOULDER CAFÉ
BY JOEL DYER
I can still remember the first time I met Dave Jablonski, the owner and founder of Boulder Café. It was 1994 and I was standing in front of his place on the Pearl Street Mall at the corner of 13th. I was chatting with my friend, street musician Eugene “Lucky” Hudson, when all of a sudden this high-energy fellow in a crisp, yellow shirt appeared from the front door of the restaurant. He walked right up to me with a plate of some oddball concoction he’d just cooked up in the kitchen and told me to try it and tell him what I thought. I indulged him, not being one to say “no” to free food or social experiments.
I can remember it was good and that it was something unusual, but for the life of me I can no longer recall what I ate that day. It became a blur, because over the years such field-testing of gastronomic experiments aimed at the menu of Boulder Café occurred with some regularity. It’s still part of the Jablonski process of running an interesting restaurant. I was hooked from that first experience.
Jablonski liked to talk. Lucky liked to talk. I liked to talk. So the front steps of Boulder Café became like a second office for me as I was always traipsing past with my camera bag and reporter’s notebook. This was particularly true in the early days as I was either going to or coming from the old BW offices that were located upstairs between Where the Buffalo Roam and Falafel King.
I always found good conversation by day and good wine, beer and food when 5 o’clock rolled around, or sometimes 4:30 … or maybe a little before that. Whatever the hour, we made some good memories.
We buried our saxophone-playing friend Lucky back in December of ’97. The whole town mourned. I remember Dave Jablonski organizing memorials, helping with expenses and contacting Lucky’s family and friends from Denver to Mobile, Ala., and pretty much all over the South. I wrote the obit for the Weekly, and some of my photos of Lucky were hung on the south wall of the Boulder Café bar as a tribute. I’m pleased to say that they are still there more than a decade and a half later. Loyalty has always been on the menu at Boulder Café.
I was saddened to hear that the restaurant will be closing this June because the owners of the building have decided not to renew Jablonski’s lease even though the business is prospering. Last year was the best financial year in the restaurant’s 23-year history. How do you measure that in ways that all of us can understand? The Boulder Café sold 47,000 oysters at happy hour prices last year, along with a whole lot of other great stuff. Business is good.
The building is owned by Tebo/ Karakehian LLC, a partnership made up of Boulder County real estate baron Stephen Tebo and Boulder City Councilman George Karakehian. When asked if the decision not to renew the lease was mutual, Tebo reportedly told the Daily Camera, “it’s mutual in that the lease was mutually agreed upon when it was negotiated 20 years ago.”
Nice. It’s always good to see such sensitivity when dealing with people’s dreams and livelihoods.
Jablonski wasn’t quoted in the Camera article so I thought he might have a comment or two about his landlords and lease situation when I sat down with him recently. I should have known better. He didn’t have anything negative to say about the lease not being renewed or the people who made the decision. In fact, while acknowledging that he wished they would have let him keep the restaurant going for at least another five years, he was looking at their decision not to renew as a positive opportunity. After all, he said, he still has his health, his family, his garden and more than a few pretty interesting business ideas to launch in the future. And I’ll add one more, way too much energy for somebody who is 73 years old.
The Boulder Café was born in June 1991. Jablonski had been living in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked for Stouffer’s, the famed restaurant corporation that owned numerous operations all across the country. By that time, Jablonski had held many titles within the company and had been involved in turning around some of its money losing operations in the past.
Eventually Stouffer’s decided to sell off several of its under-performing properties. Of those available, Jablonski was interested in striking out on his own by buying one of three available restaurants, which were located in Fort Meyers, Fla., Vinings, Ga. and Boulder. So how did he choose? Jablonski says he allowed his young son to choose where he wanted the family to live. His kid chose Boulder and the rest is history… literally history come June.
Thanks to Jablonski’s giant garden and green thumb, Boulder Café was doing farm-to-table before Boulderites had ever heard the term.
He says, “I started the garden in 1993 and was using as much of what I grew in the restaurant as I could. But I was really doing it back then to cut food cost. It turned out to be a good idea for a lot of reasons.”
If it was good in the garden it was good in the café. For instance, Jablonski grew a lot of nice lettuce in recent years so lettuce wraps hit the menu. Like the oysters, they’ve done really well.
“That’s really the fun part,” he says. “Experimenting, hearing about some new food and giving it a try. Letting my chef try something completely different. If people like it, it makes it to the menu.”
As the end for the Boulder Café draws near, I asked Jablonski what he will miss most. The words were hardly out of my mouth when he blurted out, “the people.”
He reminisces about his employees over the years while recalling how the Super Bowl parties he throws annually for employees past and present and their friends and family has grown. This February will be the last such party, and that’s hard for him to think about.
He says he kept the emails between him and his landlord so he could show his employees that he really did try to keep the restaurant going.
“I showed them that I wanted to stay. I wanted to keep it going for them.”
And so it goes in the world of business. The Boulder Café came to town. Over a couple of decades, it became the best place on the Mall to have a drink on a patio and watch Boulder’s vibrant culture explode before your eyes. It was a front row seat to hear Lucky’s rendition of “Bluebird” or to watch a tightrope walker, the zip-code man, fire-eaters, juggling unicycle riders or a very bendy Jamaican in a box. It was certainly the longest happy hour in town (3 p.m. to close) and thousands of happy customers would tell you the best happy hour.
How many memories have been made in this place? It’s countless. I know I have quite a few.
Come June when the doors close for the last time and the photographs of Eugene “Lucky” Hudson come down off the barroom wall, who will do the remembering then? Who will make sure that the joy that Dave Jablonski created with his café isn’t forgotten? Who will guarantee that Lucky’s contributions to the culture of Boulder, his kindness to so many and his sheepish grin aren’t lost forever, the victim of redevelopment or a trendy new cuisine concept?
I can’t answer that, but it’s the kind of question that will, no doubt, keep coming up as some of our favorite places are pushed out to make room for more profitable ones.
But don’t despair just yet. The Dave Jablonski show is still playing at the Boulder Café pretty much every day from now until June. So make sure you stop in and say hello, order up some oysters or something unusual off the best happy hour menu in town and drink one last toast to Lucky.
Don’t forget to say goodbye on your way out. And don’t forget… any of it.
THE BOULDER ARMY SURPLUS STORE
BY ELIZABETH MILLER
Pat Long came to work at the Boulder Army Surplus Store in the mid-’80s expecting to work there for a couple weeks — and a few months later Shannon Long, his brother, walked in and said he was going to work there for a while, too. Both were there 30 years later when the store closed its doors for good on Jan. 17.
Long’s father, who had purchased the store when its previous owner retired, asked Long, who had a degree in business and experience working as a store manager, to come help out after he’d had to fire a manager. The Boulder Army Surplus Store had given him a chance to test out some of the things he’d learned in college, and seemed to run at just the right level of challenging, without being too intense. Long and his brother took over management of the store when their father retired 15 years ago.
By the time the store shuttered, having done everything from run the register to sweep the floors, Long says, “It’s like family — it’s different, but it’s sort of like family. It’s your business family, so you do whatever’s next right along.”
He doesn’t remember it being particularly hard, he says, though he concedes there was probably a time right after his father retired that making sure everything had been handled was a bit frantic.
“During that era I didn’t mind, I was kind of excited about it,” Long says. “Really it wasn’t a hardship, it was kind of fun at the time. … I look back at it, I don’t have anything like ‘yeah that was hard.’ It was just one more thing, so it was all doable.”
He found the outdoor gear interesting, he says, and for a long time used much of it, going backpacking, hiking and skiing.
Family advice followed all the way through to the finish line.
“I grew up in a retail merchandise family, and we had an old saying: Don’t be fond of the merchandise,” Long says. “I think that maybe sums it up. It’s merchandise. It’s business. The people, though, that’s different. I have a lot of long-term people — and I think they’ll be fine. I’m very confident of that. I think I’ll be fine. My brother will be fine. I think we’ll all be fine, and in fact there is a good side to saying, ‘OK, now I’m making a change in my life and let’s see what opportunity presents itself.’”
That idea of not getting attached to the store didn’t carry over for hundreds of people who have shopped there over the years, and stopped in during the weeks since the announcement that the Army Surplus Store would close and said they were sorry to hear the news.
“Literally thousands of people have told us, ‘We’re so sorry you’re going,’” Long says.
On the store’s penultimate day, shoppers stopped in to ask sales staff about the closure and to wish them luck. Many of the employees have been there more than 10 years, and some as many as 25 years.
Despite these loyal patrons and employees, Long says, they’ve seen a shift away from shopping downtown, and business has taken a hit.
“The way people shop in Boulder, we’ve watched it change over the years, and downtown, they don’t come downtown to shop like they used to,” Long says. “They come downtown, I believe, to go to restaurants, to go to the mall and watch the world go by, but to come downtown and shop for a lot of people, a lot of local people, their habits have changed and they’re going other places.”
He lists parking among the complaints he hears from customers when they do come downtown, and that’s part of why they’re going to big-box stores and the Internet.
Whatever merchandise wasn’t sold by the time the store closed was redistributed over donations and to the Glenwood store the Longs will continue to run. The building itself is more than 100 years old and considered historic, so the exterior will remain the same, regardless of what moves into the interior next.
“Everything has a shelf life and this store’s done very well, it’s been a good store over the years and I didn’t see it having a lot of problems going forward but I also didn’t sit here and think that this is still a good opportunity,” Long says. “Without going into details, it was a lot of different things, and it all summed up that it’s time. When we put it all together, it’s time.”
TABLE MESA SHOPPING CENTER
BY CAITLIN ROCKETT
You can’t call the Table Mesa Shopping Center desolate — cars still fill the center’s northern parking lot while folks shop at King Soopers, bank at Elevations Credit Union, eat at Under the Sun or flow through a class at the Yoga Loft. But the south side of the shopping center sets a different scene, with the recent loss or relocation of five businesses creating a noticeable void in this once-full development.
The changing face of South Boulder’s only hub for business and entertainment has been emotional for business owners and residents alike who say they worry the recent, forced exodus from Table Mesa Shopping Center will spread and degrade the diversity of the center’s collection of businesses.
* * * *
The first domino fell in March, when Shannon Derby, co-owner of Mountains’ Edge Fitness, says property management company W.W. Reynolds told the gym their lease wouldn’t be renewed for their tucked away, southern corner of the shopping center.
“I had been at [the Table Mesa] location for 15 years,” Derby says. “It was, for me personally, such a huge change in my life.”
Derby says she was surprised by the news that their lease wouldn’t be renewed — and scared of the future of her business.
“Nobody moves a gym,” she says. “We knew that the business would take a hit, but we also believed that in the long run the business would be fine.”
And history was on their side. Derby took over as co-owner of Mountains’ Edge in 2009 when the gym was on hard times. On the brink of closing its doors then, members and staff pooled money and kept the beloved facility open. When news came that the gym was again facing difficult times last year in the face of lease non-renewal, members rallied together and helped move the 13,000-square-foot fitness center to its new location in the former restaurant and bar of the Broker Inn.
But Mountains’ Edge was only the beginning at Table Mesa Shopping Center. Not long after the gym had vacated the premises, a chain reaction began in November when Savers thrift store, a staple at the shopping center since 1997, closed its doors at 695 S. Broadway. Albertsons, the chain grocer that previously occupied the 40,000 square-foot space, still owns the property. The sale of the Savers building spelled trouble for three other businesses that sublet in the structure: Dollar Tree, Table Mesa Laundry and one of two locations of Theatrical Costumes, Etc. & Trendy Boutique.
“Everyone got their notices — Savers, Dollar Tree, us and the laundry people — we have to be out by the 31st of December,” says Debra Ordway, owner of Theatrical Costumes, Etc. “I’m coming in, as the costume store, into our season. We got our letter at the end of September. I had to make some very rational decisions to say, ‘OK, I don’t know how my Halloween’s going to turn out, but I do know this, we’re going to have to put sales up.”
Ordway’s business was served two blows as W.W. Reynolds decided, as they did with Mountains’ Edge, not to renew the lease of her second location, just diagonally adjacent to her corner unit in the Savers building.
Theatrical Costumes is currently the only business from the Savers building to find a new home after the sale. Ordway and her employees are still setting up shop in their new digs on Baseline Road in the Williams Village Shopping Center, and while Ordway says she believes her business will prevail in its new location, she says that the restructuring of Table Mesa Shopping Center reminds her of the grey and desolate town Dr. Seuss describes in The Lorax — a town created by greed and corporate business interests.
“The empty hole has happened in South Boulder. People are very down. The morale is pretty low,” Ordway says of business owners in the center.
The rapid change at Table Mesa Shopping Center has made room for plenty of speculation about the impetus for it all. When news that Savers was closing surfaced, many business owners in the center reported hearing that the building would be torn down and replaced, ostensibly with a Whole Foods, but Whole Foods has denied the claim. Some have suggested that Caffé Sole would extend its space back into Ordway’s old unit, but Sole manager Tim Bowers says that’s not the case.
Derby says that the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts will be expanding into the former Mountains’ Edge space. Multiple calls to the cooking school were not returned to confirm.
Regardless of speculation, and even regardless of the truth, one thing holds true — business owners and South Boulder residents are feeling the loss of their community hub.
“This town will be really angry that the [Savers] building didn’t have to go down,” Ordway says. “It could have been administrated in different holding patterns until they could find other refuge and not destroy four businesses and destroy lives, from business owners … to even the community. And it’s just bad timing, man — Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
For many residents, Savers represented something rare in Boulder — affordable shopping.
“Think about it: We’ve lost the dollar store, now there’s no dollar store in Boulder. We lost Savers, and there’s nothing like Savers. You could argue that Goodwill is like savers but they are two different animals,” says Tim Newbury, South Boulder resident and former local business owner. Newbury, who lives just a few blocks from the shopping center on Ithaca Road, says he will also miss walking with his 3-year-old child to Ordway’s former location at Table Mesa.
“I think the sad truth is that commercial real estate’s interest isn’t about serving the community. It isn’t,” Derby says. “And I guess if I had an opinion, I would prefer a shopping center that is a neighborhood shopping center,” as opposed to something like the 29th Street Mall.
“I am worried about the loss of ‘character’ and of businesses that support their local community,” South Boulder resident Joel Parker said in an email to Boulder Weekly. “South Boulder has been growing in a wonderful way with neighbors and business owners that know each other, and I hope that whatever businesses replace the ones that have left or been forced out will be places that continue to foster that environment of people gathering and interacting.”
Parker added that from his understanding, “development choices in Boulder are being advised by ‘stakeholders’ that consist mostly of developers, and not the majority of real stakeholders, i.e., the people who live in the affected areas whose lives will be impacted by these decisions for years to come.”
PEARL AND 30TH (PROPOSED GOOGLE CAMPUS)
BY AMANDA MOUTINHO
Billy Hoke has been playing the drums for 55 years and touring the area with multiple bands. He’s lived in Boulder for 45 years, and for the past 12 he’s owned the local music store The Drum Shop, taking over from the store’s previous incarnations Boulder Drums and Sandy’s Drum Store, which opened in 1993.
“Any time I was out there playing anywhere, I would look if there was a music shop or a drum shop to hang out in during the day,” Hoke says. “I was always thrilled to find them. I always wanted to have a drum shop when I was growing up — I liked them so much. To me it’s more than a business. … It’s a labor of love.
But unfortunately that labor of love is being forced to relocate. Aspen Plaza, which holds the Drum Shop and is located on the southwest corner of 30th and Pearl, was one of the properties bought up in 2013 by Pearl Place Associates, a subsidiary of Brickstone Partners and Forum Real Estate Group. Along with other neighboring properties, the buildings are being cleared out to make room for the proposed four-acre Google campus. Already with over 300 employees in Boulder, Google plans to bring in around 1,500 more.
Hoke’s has spent nine years at his current location, 2065 30th St. He’s set to leave the place by March 31, moving to a new spot a few blocks away. He says he’s sad to leave this location that’s complete with plenty of storefront parking, big sunny windows and visibility on a busy street.
“I will never find anything this nice ever again,” Hoke says. “And my heart goes to all the small business people that are getting run out.”
Turnover is nothing new for Boulder, but the stakes are getting higher as richer companies move in. Hoke says the billionaires are coming in to buy out the millionaires and calls the development, “Google’s hostile takeover of Boulder.”
“The floodgates are open — you just can’t stop the migration here,” Hoke says. “[Boulder] is so beautiful and wonderful. A friend of mine once said, ‘The secret’s out. We’ve been discovered. There’s no going back.’ But from being a quiet rustic town with down-to-earth country folk living here, now it’s just overrun by… let’s just say that it’s lost its charm. And as a longtime Boulderite, it’s very disheartening.”
Along with the Drum Shop, several other businesses in the area are being displaced. Some businesses have dispersed around Boulder like HB Woodsongs, D&K Printing, Quality Pools & Spa and Karliquin’s Game Knight.
Some companies are biding their time to decide about their future. Ethiopian restaurant Ras Kassa’s has been a Boulder staple for over a quarter of a century. Owner Tsehey Hailu still hasn’t made any concrete plans but wants to relocate. Despite having to move, Hailu says she’s not discouraged and has no near-future plans for retirement.
“I still have it left in me, and I want to continue,” she says. Before she gets out the next sentence, Haliu is up and seating a new batch of customers for the lunch buffet. She runs in and out of the kitchen grabbing water or bills and clearing dishes for the various customers before sitting down again. “My business means a whole lot of things to me. It’s culture, cooking, customers — they’re just the most beautiful people. I enjoy every minute that I’m here. It’s so much fun; it really is.”
Long-time customers of the restaurant are concerned about the fate of the restaurant and are anxious to know where the new location will be.
“They’re very worried. They want to make sure that I’ll keep in touch with them. People have been saying that I could come cook in their homes,” Hailu says with a laugh. “They’ll follow me wherever I’ll go. I’ve seen so many people grow up over the years and gotten to know their families.”
Hailu says she wants to stay in Boulder, but if there aren’t any options she’ll look into expanding to surrounding cities like Longmont or Lafayette. At this point, Dorothea Mardick comes in for lunch, and Hailu springs up to give her a big hug. They’ve been friends for almost 30 years, and Mardick has been eating at Ras Kassa’s since it opened in 1988.
“I watched Tsehey and [her husband] Richard build this,” Mardick says. “I worry that if she moves to another place or has to relocate further away from Boulder, it’s going to affect her clientele.”
Other companies have set their sights on new locations even farther than Boulder county limits. Crescendo Fine Audio, also displaced by the acquisition, opened a new store in Wheat Ridge.
“There’s only so much room and only so many people in Boulder,” says Matt Alterman, an owner of Crescendo. “It mainly came down to there weren’t many spaces available for rent, and the spaces that were available were overpriced. We could have found a space, but it would have been small and boutique-ish.”
Alterman says the Boulder community is kind to small businesses and that customers wanted to establish a relationship with him and ask his advice. But the plans he had for his business, he says, required more space. He also found more incentives for small businesses in Wheat Ridge.
“We didn’t want to feel the pressure in Boulder of having this huge $3,000- 4,000 overhead,” he says. “We wanted to stay in Boulder but it just wasn’t feasible in terms of finance. … With all the high rises and forcing everyone out, unless you’re some Versace or Gucci company, it’s turning into Beverly Hills. What was appealing [about Boulder], at first, was these unique establishments like Albums on the Hill and Mountain Sun. They are distinct establishments that are part of the culture, an integral part of Boulder. But a lot of those companies starting to get forced out.”
With the current troubling marketplace for small business in Boulder, some restaurants are choosing to shut their doors permanently, like Dennis Oviatt, owner of Cafe Food. After working hard for over 20 years as the owner, Oviatt says he’s looking forward to the break.
Closing was never his initial plan, but after the building got bought out in 2013, he says he saw the writing on the wall. He knew he had some options to keep the business going, but says he was discouraged.
“It’s always been tough running a small business in Boulder, and I don’t think it’s getting any easier,” Oviatt says. When asked if Boulder was a good place for small business, “If you’re trendy and cool,” he says. “But if you want to feed the masses, you don’t get a whole lot of support.”
Cafe Food had been around since the ’70s; Oviatt being its fourth owner. He says he’s sad to see it go and so are the shop’s slew of fans — Oviatt says that at least 75 percent of his customers were repeat business. The hole Cafe Food left is already missed, especially for Hoke who loved Oviatt’s chef salads. But moreover, the two had cultivated a friendship, Hoke says.
Devoted local customers are also upset about the shifts in Aspen Plaza. Tom McKee says he’ll miss Oviatt’s sandwiches. One of the Drum Shop’s frequenters, McKee says he specifically likes the store because it’s not a big chain.
“Billy’s great; he’s even met my kids. You go in there and you know you’re going to be well taken care,” McKee says. “I used to eat at Dennis’ place all the time and he always knew your name when you’d go in there. Small businesses really depend on loyal people to come and shop at their places. You’re rewarded by someone who knows you, as opposed to being another person walking through a door.
McKee calls the relocations and closings of businesses unfortunate. He says he wishes the owners of the area saw the value in what they already had and did not try to make some more money from a big company.
The effect of the new Google complex will surely cause some economic massaging in Boulder. It will also lead to higher real estate prices and even less affordable housing. One of Hoke’s main concerns is the unavoidable spike in traffic from the high increase of employees. He says already on his corner he sees standstill traffic from 4:30- 6:30 p.m., but the development will only cause more traffic branching out to jam up the entire town.
Hoke places most of the blame on the City Council, saying they have an obligation to the city of Boulder.
“Quite frankly, it sucks,” Hoke says. “It’s just appalling what’s happening to our town. If you can’t stop growth you can at least stop a company like Google coming in and taking over. [Is the city council] really going let them put a Denver Tech Center on this corner? These office buildings should be out of our town and located elsewhere.”
Hoke remembers when his concern first started for Boulder in the early ’90s when chain restaurants started trickling in. He continues to worry for the future as the face of Boulder changes.
“Bye, bye, Boulder,” he says. Citing the change from Mile High Stadium to Sports Authority Field at Mile High, Hoke wonders, “Are they going to rename our town The City of Boulder @Google.com?”
NORTH BOULDER CAFE
BY MATT CORTINA
Now Julie Colo is back at Dot’s Diner. She picks at a plate of breakfast enchiladas and talks about what it was like to run North Boulder Cafe for 10 years, and what it was like to let it go.
“I cried for four months,” Colo says. “I was so attached to that place.”
Colo first came to Boulder on her honeymoon almost 30 years ago. It was her first time out of a small pocket of the world north of Pensacola, Fla., about a quarter mile from the Alabama state line. It’s where she says she got her outgoing personality.
“I had never been out of the South,” Colo says of her first visit to Boulder. “I had never been out of the humidity. I had no idea the world could feel so great. I came out here on my honeymoon and said, ‘We’re moving here.’ We found a little plot of land on Magnolia and built a little house there.”
She had three children, two girls and a boy, and spent time waitressing at many Boulder restaurants now lost and gone forever — Mother’s, The Aristocrat, Joe’s Spoon, The Buff (still around), North Broadway Coffee Shop, and Dot’s when it was on Pearl Street.
When a building in an old strip mall on the west side of Broadway in north Boulder came available, Colo offered to manage any new restaurant Dot’s owner Peter Underhill wanted to open. Underhill did her one better and the two went in 50-50 on the venture and opened the North Boulder Cafe in 2004. Within five years, Dot’s had expanded and Underhill was ready to pass off the cafe. Colo bought out Underhill’s share and took sole ownership of the restaurant, quickly employing her children to work for her.
The place became a bastion for low- and middle-income folks, Colo says, amidst the new condos and high-end restaurants that were rapidly taking up North Boulder real estate in the late 2000s. Her place was also a frequent stop for climbers.
“I’m not a famous climber but I know tons of them,” Colo says. “I just infiltrated with the good ones. I know some of the best climbers in the world but climbers are not at all rich — gear is expensive and we don’t want to work; we all want to go climbing. But I felt hugely supported by the climbing community.”
Throughout the restaurant, Colo hung photos of those very same climbers that stopped in alongside photos of peaks in Patagonia and deserts in Asia. She even got famed local climber, the late Steve Dieckhoff, to paint a mural on a wall near the entrance of the restaurant.
When North Boulder Cafe closed in early 2014, Colo cut the mural out of the wall.
“I spent 13 hours sawing this giant moon mural painted by Steve Dieckhoff; it was the only mural he ever painted. We got it off that wall, and I said, ‘I’m not leaving her,’ and I took it with me when we left,” Colo says.
The other main group that supported the restaurant were folks in Lyons and Jamestown, Colo says. When the flood hit in September 2013, it not only closed the restaurant for a week due to repairs, spoiling entire shipments of food, but it also closed off some of her most regular customers from giving her their business for months. That, coupled with declining visitors, was the death knell for the cafe.
“Once the flood came through in September, I was already struggling, and I was really struggling after that, so I didn’t make my December rent and that was it for me,” Colo says. “We got hit hard up at the end of town. There was a lot of mud and we were closed for seven days. I had to do my own cleanup — there was 3 feet of mud out the back door so we couldn’t get our deliveries. We couldn’t get to the dumpster.”
Colo, who rented the space, says she didn’t have insurance for her damaged goods and also didn’t receive governmental financial assistance because she didn’t own the building and she couldn’t prove that she could pay back any loans.
Three months of little to no business was too much to overcome, and she closed the business and moved out. Colo says she left a $6,000 commercial refrigerator in order to help pay off the rent she owed, but that she’s still battling the building owner to determine “what amount I still owe, and what they think I owe.”
Colo says she had numerous offers to help her pay to keep the North Boulder Cafe open but they weren’t close to the amount she needed. Some have since suggested a move to Louisville or Longmont, but she’s just not confident it’ll be any better there.
Now as she has moved on to a waitressing job back at Dot’s, Colo reflects on the changing nature of Boulder — a change she’s seen in the businesses that have come in, the money it takes to live here and the people who now roam its streets.
“It’s so sad to me. Boulder’s losing a lot of its nostalgic businesses,” Colo says. “I feel like our place was kind of special because it was really about community. Everybody knew everybody and everybody’s right at home there, and I think that that is missing huge in Boulder. It’s sad to watch all the businesses go and just how expensive it is getting.”
As businesses are forced to move because of high rent, so is the case for renters in Boulder, says Colo. The same reason she couldn’t afford to operate a business in Boulder is the same reason her customers can’t afford to live in Boulder, she says.
“I just feel like Boulder has changed a lot, and a lot of my customers have moved out further east to afford to live, so I think we’ll see more and more of the old Boulder dying,” Colo says. “I miss the old Boulder. I always will.”
And the businesses and people who have replaced a lot of what “old Boulder” was, Colo says, aren’t the kind of folks who support what she offered at North Boulder Cafe. Reflecting on a restaurant career that has allowed her to converse with Boulder residents for 30 years, Colo says the population has simply changed.
“Never have people in Boulder been so rude as they are now — all you have to do is drive through town,” Colo says. “I’m all for the Whole Foods and the healthy thing but the people that go in there are not very polite.
“It’s just not as friendly and… I don’t know. I feel like it was kind of this cool, hippie little college, artsy fartsy, rock climber town, and now it’s changed to the rich and entitled. I mean, I don’t really want to be dissing people in Boulder because I’m not really trying to. It’s just any time big money moves in and the small little people move out, there’s a change in attitude. Because people who have to work hard for their money, life is different; it’s a different value system because you value the meal in front of you. I don’t know what to make of this town any more.”
Colo says losing the North Boulder Cafe is like “losing a part of my soul,” and she sees the forces that caused her business to close as the same ones that have forced others and will force more to go out of business. Colo’s final thought, her breakfast plate half eaten, comes unprompted.
“I think it’s really important that if you love a place that you support it,” she says, “because someday it will be gone.”
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
