Pearl Street Mall: Four Blocks That Saved a Downtown

By the middle of the nineteen seventies, downtown Boulder was hollowing out. Retailers were following shoppers to the suburban strip malls then being built along the eastern edges of town. The city had a stretch of Pearl Street, four blocks between Eleventh and Fifteenth, that was losing ground fast.

The plan that emerged was borrowed from Europe: close the street entirely to cars and convert it into a pedestrian mall. One of the architects, Richard Foy, took inspiration from an unlikely source: a nineteen forty-five French film called Les Enfants du Paradis, about the theatrical culture of a Paris boulevard. He wanted a street that performed, that was animated by people, not by traffic.

The Boulder City Council voted to approve the project in January nineteen seventy-five. Ground broke in June nineteen seventy-six. The mall opened on August sixth, nineteen seventy-seven, having cost about one million eight hundred fifty thousand dollars, funded through a combination of a federal grant and a special assessment on nearby property owners.

It worked. Restaurants and shops came back. Street musicians established themselves on the brick pavers, the buskers of Pearl Street became a civic institution, performing in all weather. In the decades that followed, the mall became the living room of the city: where people gathered after concerts, where tourists arrived expecting to find what Boulder was, where the university and the town mixed.

The mall also appeared in the opening credits of Mork and Mindy, giving it a brief moment of national television recognition. But that story belongs to the next block or two.