NOBO RULES

North Boulder Grows Up

By Amy Brouillette, 5-20-05

Here, at the edge of town in North Boulder, cool things are afoot. Boulder’s experiment in sustainable living, festively called the Holiday neighborhood, is finally taking root, transforming that once-bleak stretch of dilapidated storefronts strung out along North Broadway into the city’s hip new locale.

A compact mixed-use eco-village, a town within a town, that combines residential with commercial properties, affordable housing with $400,000-plus lofts, it’s Boulder’s first and wildly-successfully stab at “new urbanism,� a growing trend in sustainable community building. The neighborhood’s recent debut sent swarms of young Boulder yuppies to the town’s north end who helped christen the area with a cultural identity all its own: NoBo.

A string of upscale hangouts now line the east side of Broadway—Proto’s Pizza, Spruce Confections and Amante, the chic new coffee shop/lounge where you’ll be more apt to see a Fendi purse than a pair of Birkenstocks. The place teems with Boulder’s sophisticated crowd—no Penny Laners in sight—who cavort here for more than just great Italian coffee (they serve booze).

Getting here involved a decade-long, often-contentious battle by city planners, local developers and residents who together wrangled the area from clutches of a mega grocery store chain. For years, the scraggly, undeveloped plot near Yarmouth and Broadway, the site of the old Holiday Drive In Theater (the sign for which still stands), was a hotly contested piece of real estate. When Safeway bought the 12-acre parcel in 1995 and announced plans to erect a goliath 40,000-square-foot grocery store, Boulder residents, true to form, cried foul. The company eventually caved, pulling its plan off the table and parceling off small plots to local developers and the city.

Holiday is the result of years of planning between public and private, a collaboration that in many ways reflects a new kind of eco-chic Boulder. While growing neighborhoods from the top down is perhaps not as organic as most Boulderites might have it, at least it’s not a Safeway (one eventually opened up in Kmart’s old spot on the business stretch along 28th Street where it belongs).

This is the first installment of an ongoing, occassional series on NoBo.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.