Walk south on Broadway from Iris Avenue and you pass two shopping centers within about sixty seconds of each other, one on each side of Alpine. On your left, the roofline breaks into a series of sharp angles. On your right, it curves. Most people who've lived in Newlands for years never register buildings this way. But once you notice the two rooflines, you can't stop seeing them, and it turns out the difference isn't just design flourish. It's a signature from the same architect, applied to two buildings that are now aging on two very different clocks.
One side of that corner is turning over faster than it ever has. The other side, so far, isn't.
One Architect, Two Buildings, Two Years Apart
Both plazas came from the same person. Boulder architect Hobart Wagener designed the jagged-roofed building on the west side, originally the North Boulder Shopping Center and now known as Ideal Broadway Shops, in 1958. Two years later he designed Community Plaza across Alpine Avenue, giving it the curved roofline that still sets it apart from its neighbor, as Boulder Reporting Lab reported in February 2026.
When the first plaza opened, Newlands and the surrounding blocks between Alpine and Iris avenues were still just "North Boulder" on paper, and the center was built for exactly the households living there. Residents no longer wanted to ride the bus downtown for groceries, and they wanted somewhere to park. The North Boulder Shopping Center followed Arapahoe Village, which opened in 1955 east of downtown, and Basemar, which opened in 1956 to the south, making it Boulder's third suburban shopping center. Ownership of most of the storefronts fell to Dr. H. H. Heuston, a former Boulder mayor and councilmember who also ran the Boulder Medical Center up the street. Ideal Market was a separate arrangement, owned by Clark Chapman and a business partner.
That history isn't trivia. It explains why the plaza feels stitched together from different eras even though it opened in a single year: it was never one deal, it was several, layered under one roofline.
The Corner Unit That Keeps Changing Hands
If you want to see this plaza's rent history compressed into a single address, look at the storefront next to Ideal Market that has held a pharmacy or wellness business for most of its life. Gene Lang's Pharmacy anchored that space for 45 years before Pharmaca took it over in 2003 and held it for roughly two decades. The current leaseholder is Alive and Well, a wellness chain based in Austin, Texas, and its arrival is when the corner's rent history stopped following its old rhythm.
In 2024, Alive and Well's expansion plans forced the closure of Alpine Barbers, the shop generations of Newlands men and boys still call "Charlie's." Within about two years, the same pressure reached the shop next door.
Then Pekoe
Pekoe had been part of that plaza well before its current owners took over, occupying the storefront once rented by the Beauty Centre and, later, by a shop called Pekoe Sip House. Jeff Rommel and Alisha Mason bought the business in February 2020, just before Covid arrived, and kept the shop going for the neighborhood from there. Rommel has described what an ordinary afternoon there looked like: a father and daughter at a table with no phones out, having a real conversation, or a parent thanking him for giving their kid somewhere safe to land after school.
By February 2026, Boulder Reporting Lab reported that corporate ownership and climbing rents were pushing Rommel and Mason out, with no renewal in place and no new address confirmed. Rommel told the paper he hoped to land somewhere else in Boulder.
"Somewhere where there is respect for the community."
By this spring, the shop's Alpine Avenue location was showing as closed. Add it up: 45 years at that corner, then roughly twenty more, then a ripple that reached two more storefronts in about two years.
Across Alpine, a Different Clock
None of this has touched Community Plaza, at least not in any reporting so far. Breadworks, Moe's Broadway Bagel, and Vic's still hold down the curved-roof building across the street, on a lot that opened two years after its neighbor with its own now-vanished original tenants: Plaza Cleaners, Plaza Drug Mart, and Miller's Supermarket. Whether that side has stayed quieter because of different ownership, a different anchor tenant, or plain timing isn't something the reporting settles. What's clear is that "the shops at Alpine and Broadway" isn't a single story right now. It's two buildings under one architect's hand, running on two different rent cycles, and only one of them is running hot.
What's Worth Watching From Here
For a neighborhood that's walked to this corner for coffee, a haircut, or a prescription since before most current residents were born, that distinction is worth holding onto. The next storefront to turn over on the west side probably won't be random. It'll be whatever's still standing next to a wellness chain with room left to grow. If you're the kind of Newlands resident who tracks these things the way you'd track a favorite trail's condition report, that block is the one to keep watching through the rest of 2026. Community Plaza, for now, looks like the calmer half of the corner.
Neighborhoods change in a lot of ways that never make it into a listing description. Rooflines, rent cycles, and who's still standing at the corner store a decade from now are part of what makes a place feel like itself, or feel like it's shifting under you. If you've noticed changes on your own block and want to talk through what they might mean, Marybeth Emerson is always glad to compare notes over coffee, wherever in Boulder that coffee happens to be poured these days. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics about Newlands or any corner of Boulder County you're watching closely.
