Pekoe Left, Skratch Labs Moved In: What's Actually Changing at Newlands' Corner Shopping Center
"I'm hoping to gracefully bow out or find another place in Boulder where rent is affordable, somewhere where there is respect for the community."
That's Jeff Rommel, co-owner of Pekoe, talking about the lease he and his wife Alisha Mason were about to lose at Ideal Broadway Shops. If you live in Newlands, you already know the address without needing it spelled out. Alpine and Broadway. The strip center with Whole Foods anchoring one end and a rotating cast of small storefronts filling in the rest. The place you walked to for a latte before you had opinions about which of the two shopping centers on that corner has better parking.
By this spring, Pekoe's storefront at 1225 Alpine Avenue had gone dark. But the corner didn't go quiet. A sports nutrition company that started as a bike-race hydration mix moved into a storefront two doors down. A Mexican restaurant with what it advertises as the state's largest tequila bar has been drawing a dinner crowd. The same shopping center that pushed out a twenty-year-old local café is simultaneously pulling in a Boulder-grown brand that used to pay Pearl Street rent. That's the part worth sitting with, because it means the story here isn't decline. It's a rewrite, and the rules of who gets to stay are more interesting than they look from the sidewalk.
Ideal Broadway Shops opened in 1958 as the North Boulder Shopping Center, back when Newlands and the neighborhoods around it were still lumped in as "North Boulder" and residents were tired of bussing downtown for groceries. The whole complex was designed by Hobart Wagener, a Boulder architect known for taking risks with rooflines. Two years later he came back and designed Community Plaza directly across Alpine Avenue, giving it a curved roofline that deliberately contrasts with the jagged one he'd already put on the first building. You can still see both from the same spot on the sidewalk, which is a small detail most people who shop there every week have never noticed.
The original 1958 tenant roster reads like a time capsule: Ideal Market, Gene Lang Pharmacy, Bob Ruble's Barber Shop, the Beauty Centre, Model Laundry, Tasty Bake Shop, Manuel's Sweet Shop, Broadway Fabrics, Johansen Hardware. Within a decade, half of those were already gone. By 1967 the bake shop, the sweet shop, and the fabric store had been replaced by German's Donuts and Sandwiches, a Dairy Queen, and a uniform shop. Turnover at this corner isn't new. It's the operating condition it was built under.
What's changed recently is the pace and the type of tenant doing the replacing. Gene Lang Pharmacy's original space eventually became Pharmaca, and Pharmaca's space is now leased by Alive and Well, a wellness chain based in Austin, Texas. When Alive and Well expanded in 2024, the expansion forced out Alpine Barbers, the shop still remembered by longtime residents as Charlie's, wedged between the wellness center and Pekoe's storefront.
Pekoe itself had been renting the space originally built for the Beauty Centre. When Rommel and Mason took over the café in 2020, they remodeled the interior into what Boulder Reporting Lab described as bright and airy, and expanded the menu past tea into pastries, food, and boba. None of that saved the lease. When Clark Chapman sold Ideal Market to a group of investors back in 1989, a newspaper reporter at the time wrote that the sale symbolized what he called the encroachment of faceless urbanization. Rommel, nearly four decades later, told Boulder Reporting Lab that quote is the truth to a T. It's a strange thing to hear a small business owner reach for a decades-old newspaper line to describe his own eviction, but it tells you the pattern here has a long memory attached to it.
Here's the detail that complicates the easy version of this story. While Pekoe was packing up, Skratch Labs Table was moving in two doors down, relocating from a Pearl Street address to 1245 Alpine Avenue inside the same shopping center. Skratch Labs is the Boulder company founded by Dr. Allen Lim and Ian MacGregor, built around sports hydration mixes made without the artificial ingredients found in most instant drink powders. Their new sit-down concept, developed with Chef Aaron Thebault, serves grain bowls layered with sweet potato, edamame hummus, kimchi, and cucumber, the kind of food built for people training for something. According to the company, the new location offers ample free parking and a stronger sense of neighborhood connection than the Pearl Street spot did.
That's the mechanism underneath everything happening at this corner. Ideal Broadway Shops was built cheap and unglamorous in 1958, and that same unglamorous construction is exactly why its rents still sit below what a Pearl Street storefront commands. For a national wellness chain with capital behind it, that gap is an opening to expand. For a homegrown company like Skratch Labs looking to escape downtown lease costs, the same gap is a reason to move in. And for a small independent café that had been anchoring one end of the block for years, the rising floor under that gap is exactly what priced it out. One shopping center, one rent structure, pulling in two directions at once depending on who's writing the check.
Not everything at this corner is in motion. Ideal Market still anchors the east end of the center the way it has since 1958, even though it's owned by Whole Foods now and has been for years. The Ideal branding stayed local by design, which is more than most acquired grocery chains bother to do. Santo, the Mexican restaurant with stacked enchiladas and blue corn tostadas, has settled into 1265 Alpine Avenue and built a following around its tequila list. Across Alpine Avenue at Community Plaza, the businesses that have anchored that side for years, Breadworks, Moe's Broadway Bagels, and Vic's Espresso, are still running the same weekday rhythm they always have. If your Saturday morning routine runs through that corner, most of it hasn't moved.
What has moved is the texture around the edges, and that's usually where a neighborhood's character actually lives. Nobody picks a neighborhood because the grocery store is still there. They notice a neighborhood because the café where they knew the barista's name closed, and something else, for better or worse, took its place.
None of this changes what Newlands is. It's still a quiet, walkable grid of streets running up against Mount Sanitas, with a shopping corner at its eastern edge that's been reinventing itself in small increments since Eisenhower was president. What's worth understanding, if you live nearby, is that the corner's low-slung 1958 bones are doing something specific right now. They're expensive enough to squeeze out a twenty-year local café, and cheap enough, relative to downtown, to pull a homegrown Boulder brand back out of Pearl Street rents. That's not decline and it's not gentrification in the simple sense either. It's a shopping center behaving exactly the way it was built to behave, just with different names on the leases than it had a decade ago.
If you're weighing what a home near this corner is actually worth, or wondering how a changing retail mix like this tends to shape resale interest in a walkable pocket of Boulder, that's the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a guess. John Canova has spent three decades watching how Boulder's neighborhoods absorb this kind of change, and knows Newlands block by block. Work With John if you want a straight read on what's happening here and what it means for you.
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