BOULDER CULTURAL ARTS

V I L L A G E

Boulder Center for Performing Arts

Since Colorado was admitted into the Union in 1876 as the 38th state, Boulder has been on the leading edge of education, science, culture, sports, health, and spirituality. What has made Boulder the most cosmopolitan small city in America, indeed some say the Athens of the West, has been accomplished through a history of the fortuitous accumulation of seemingly disparate pieces. The vision set forth herein is essentially the synthesis of these segments into a cultural arts village with the main library and a proposed performing arts center as its pillars.

146 years ago Boulder citizens donated 52 acres and $15,000 to attract the new State’s university. It is hard to imagine Boulder without the University of Colorado.

In the 1890’s Boulder wooed the Texas-Colorado Chautauqua by offering 40 acres of prime land, facilities and public utilities. On July 4, 1898, over 4,000 people gathered for the opening day of the Colorado Chautauqua.

In 1905, when Boulder was home to 8,000 residents and twenty-six automobiles, City Council, in cooperation with Boulder's Commercial Association (today’s Chamber of Commerce), launched the "hotel proposition,” to raise funds in the form of $100 subscriptions to build the Boulderado Hotel, which opened its doors on New Year's Day 1909.

In 1908 City of Boulder hired the landscape architecture firm of Fredrick Law Olmsted, the designers of Central Park in New York, to do a master plan for the development of Boulder. Can you imagine New York without Central Park?! Now imagine Boulder with its own Central Park. The 27.5 acre Civic Area is already a reality under development, with its West Bookend a potential home for a Performing Arts village.

The outmigration of families to the suburbs in the 1950’s and 1960’s gutted Boulder’s commercial core. In 1976 Boulder citizens came together to design and construct the Pearl St. Mall, the most successful urban-pedestrian outdoor mall in America, measured by sales per square foot.

The US National Center for Atmospheric Research, designed by architect I. M. Pei on land donated by citizens of Boulder, was an instant landmark attracting many scientists to Boulder.

For many years, the 2.6 acre “ People’s parking lot,” located on the NE corner of 9th and Canyon was legally designated as a “blighted site” in the Boulder Creek flood plane. A cooperative public-private partnership assembled the land to build Boulder's largest under ground parking structure, with the St. Julian Hotel located on top.

Add to this list other great community projects like the Dushanbe Tea House, Long’s Gardens, and Boulder Community Hospital, along with major planning decisions like the greenbelt, blue line and height limit, and it becomes evident good design and well-planned growth is built into the DNA of Boulder. We are the fortunate recipients of this foresight and generosity.

How do we plan to pay these gifts forward?! What are we planning to build today that will be considered a landmark of the future?

For decades City of Boulder has designated the ~27.5 acres bounded by 9th and 14th streets, Arapahoe and Canyon, as Boulder Civic Area. The plan calls for the transfer of City offices to the old hospital site at Broadway and Alpine, tearing down five existing obsolete and/or under utilized buildings, and removing ~540 surface parking structures to create a Central Park with multiple pedestrian access points to the Pearl St. Mall and University of Colorado.

In 2008 a group of Boulder citizen-philanthropists formed bouldercenter.org, a 501-C (3) non-profit, to design and build a state-of-the-art cultural arts center on the west bookend of the proposed Civic Area. Twelve years and ~$225K later, a new group of citizen-activists are continuing the plan to build a cultural art village on the west end of this area.

The new board of Boulder Center plans to raise $500,000 as follows:

• $25,000 each from ten citizen activists

• $10,000 each from ten local Art supporters

• $2,000 each from fifty Friends of the Arts

• $1,000 each from fifty Art Patrons