Boulder’s Maclaren Markowitz Gallery closing

BOULDER — Maclaren Markowitz Gallery, a Boulder fixture for 25 years, is closing.

The decision occurred when looking at the upcoming budget.

“It just wasn’t practical anymore,´ said owner Marilyn Reynolds. The store would need a 6 to 8 percent increase in sales just to break even, and she knew, given the past few years, that was unlikely.

Reynolds cited a combination of factors leading to her financial woes, including four years of a soft economy, the city of Boulder’s lack of responsiveness to downtown businesses and the local community’s shopping less in Boulder and more at Broomfield’s FlatIron Crossing mall.

When the gallery’s business began to flag, Boulder philanthropists Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor invested in the store. Feld would not disclose financial details of the investment.

Responsibility for the general economic downturn since 9-11 can’t be placed locally, Reynolds said, but she blames the city for ignoring the pleas of business owners.

“They didn’t do anything although they knew for years that Crossroads was dying,” Reynolds said. “I was writing them and getting petitions from downtown business owners saying, ‘We can’t compete with this.’ It’s come to reality.”

Reynolds had a store, which has since closed, at the Village at FlatIron Crossing as a safety net.

“I had to do something else because I couldn’t put all my eggs in the Boulder basket with the city being so unresponsive.”

A saleswoman at Maclaren Markowitz said opening the second store was an expensive mistake because of the capital investment involved, but Reynolds said even with taking that piece out of her financial picture “we would have ended up in the same spot.”

Reynolds, who has been in the same location for 15 years, tried negotiating with the building owner — Chicago family trust Sax Family LLC — for a rent reduction to no avail. Since there is another year left on the lease she would like to sublet the 1,800-square-foot space at 1011 Pearl St.

Ellen Spiller, director of the Boulder Arts & Crafts Cooperative on the Pearl Street Mall, called the closure “a loss and unsettling. You want to think the community is able to support this. It’s always scary when you see that the line is so tenuous because she has been so successful for so many years.”

Spiller especially appreciated Reynolds’ organizing art-related events including First Friday art openings and ArtWalk.

“She set a really high standard for what a gallery atmosphere should be,” Spiller said.

According to Spiller, the co-op is in good financial stead. Last year’s sales were up between 7 and 8 percent, and January 2004 sales were up 18 percent over January 2003.

Investor Feld said that although he’s “very sad” by the closing of what he called “by far the best high-end gallery in Boulder,” it didn’t make business sense to keep it in operation. “We all collectively concluded that the gallery was simply no longer working from an economic perspective, and, at the end of the day, it is a business that must make money to survive and in today’s environment, this was not happening,” he said.

Feld also said he thinks the Maclaren Markowitz’s closing is part of a trend that will be “a steady stream of failures of locally owned businesses in Boulder, especially those that are niche oriented.”

Reynolds does not intend to drop out of the art scene entirely, she said. Her corporate art firm, Art Consultants of Colorado, remains in business.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail csellis@bcbr.com.

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