Boulder gets a ‘shopping district,’ it’s second one as a matter of fact

There’s no Boulder in the name. There’s no mall in the name. And there certainly is no Crossroads in the name.

With TV cameras rolling and media gathered, superlatives rained down on the packed Boulder Chamber room this week as the long-awaited new name was unveiled for Boulder’s redeveloped shopping mall.

But wait! It’s not a mall at all — it’s a retail district.

And the envelope please: It’s Twenty Ninth Street. That’s not, by the way, 29th Street, something sure to give us newspaper editors fits.

“We didn’t want it to be a cookie-cutter image of downtown Boulder & we didn’t want it to be an echo of FlatIron Crossing,´ said Richard Foy from Boulder’s Communication Arts, the design team working with Westcor to develop the project’s new look and feel.

Twenty Ninth Street, if case you’re wondering, will be the new thoroughfare smack through the center of the shopping mall & I mean district. And yes, there’s never been a 29th Street before perhaps the reason for the perplexed looks back at the office when I told them the name.

“Where is 29th Street?” I immediately was asked.

Rather exuberant phrases like “a fantastic and fabulous place,” “natural but with a little rugged look to it,” “a cultural mecca” and the “magic” of Boulder gushed from both the Phoenix-based

Westcor team as well as Boulder branding experts as they announced their plan.

I don’t blame them at all — this has been years — and I do mean years — to get to this point. The promotion got me excited about the whole scheme of things.

With the Daily Camera having fun by asking residents for their name suggestions and our own cartoonist getting into the game, it came back to me about how important a “brand” really can be.

According to the naming experts, it all started with a hot and heavy hours-long “branding” workshop weeks ago. Westcor flew several of its own team members up, while Foy and his partners huddled with Bob Morehouse of Vermilion; Paul DesRosiers, who recently merged his design firm into Vermilion; Stacey Schumen of Word for Word and Aaron Dignan of Brandplay.

These are all Boulder companies by the way — a good thing to see since it’s such an important Boulder decision.

“This was like getting to name your firstborn child,” Morehouse said.

“We didn’t want it to be a plastic village dropping from the sky. We want this to be organic.” Way to go Bob, now you’re talking Boulder speak.

And after all, Morehouse pointed out, 29 is a cool kind of year. “We’d all like to be 29 years old again!” Being young, going on dates, taking in a movie, shopping — are you warming up to this yet?

The four squares in the new Twenty Ninth Street logo reflect four seasons, maybe even the different quadrant “neighborhoods” of the district. Kind of a stretch, but maybe.

Apparently the “district” aspect emerged quickly in the branding session. “I don’t think people wanted just another shopping center name,” Word for Word’s Schumen told me. But she admitted it’s a name that will need to grow on people. Maybe an understatement.

So many possible names just seemed too contrived, Schumen said. “There were a hundred canyon this and canyon that,” Morehouse added.

Once the name was picked, the branding team used what they call “trusted” advisers, both in Boulder and outside, to test out the name. I suspect the “advisers” were friends who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. “We took their car keys and driver’s licenses,” Dignan joked when I asked how they kept it secret.

By branding the project as a “shopping district” rather than a regional mall, retailers will be able to promote their own brands — Starbucks at Twenty Ninth Street, etc.

There was no shortage of name dropping as all of the name hubbub swirled. Lodo, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, New York’s 42nd Street and least we forget, Boulder’s Pearl Street.

At one point, a Boulder downtown retailer meekly asked if there were any plans to somehow connect the project to Pearl Street. “We think ideas like that are great,” Westcor’s David Scholl answered. But this was Westcor’s day in the limelight and long overdue.

obert “Bobby” Williams, Westcor’s senior vice president in charge of the merchandising and retail leasing, said he’s assembled a team that will visit cities like Seattle, Portland, Berkley, Calif.

Austin, Texas and Madison, Wis. to look for retail concepts that can work in Boulder, while at the same time not competing directly with FlatIron Crossing in Broomfield.

He’s searching for “retail tenants that feel like locals, and locals that tend to feel like nationals.” That’s become his team’s “mantra,” he said. Good job Bobby, you’re talking the Boulder talk, too.

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