Stanley Marketplace

Stanley Marketplace in Aurora occupies a building with a very specific past. Robert Stanley was a Navy test pilot and aviation pioneer who founded Stanley Aviation in nineteen forty-eight. He moved the company to Aurora in nineteen fifty-four, next to Stapleton Airport, and built a factory to design and manufacture ejection seats for military jets.

The plant grew to about one hundred forty thousand square feet and went on to develop supersonic escape capsules and other high-performance safety systems for pilots. Stanley Aviation operated the facility until two thousand seven, when the factory closed. The building sat idle before a major renovation transformed it into a public marketplace.

It reopened on December twentieth, two thousand sixteen. Today about fifty locally owned businesses operate inside, a mix of restaurants, coffee shops, fitness studios, and retail boutiques. One of the restaurants, Annette, is run by James Beard Award winning chef Caroline Glover.

The original industrial structure is still visible throughout, the exposed concrete and steel of a building designed to save pilots' lives now sheltering neighborhood life in Aurora.