"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 café, describing why he and business partner Alisha Mason are leaving the Alpine Avenue storefront they've run since February 2020. A few hundred feet away, across the same intersection, Larry Domnitz said something similar after 30 years running Breadworks Bakery & Cafe: his landlord wanted a longer lease than he could commit to, and "the timing just wasn't right for me."
Two business owners, two different reasons, one corner. If you've walked from Ideal Market to Moe's Broadway Bagel any time in the last year, you've probably already noticed that both of Old North Boulder's original shopping centers are down a café. What's less obvious is that this happened to both of them, on both sides of Alpine Avenue, inside roughly the same twelve months. That's not a run of bad luck. It's the same commercial math landing twice on the same two blocks.
Two Centers, One Architect, One Original Idea
The shopping centers at Alpine and Broadway weren't built as strip malls. They were built to solve a specific problem. When the North Boulder Shopping Center opened in 1958, on the site now known as Ideal Broadway Shops, Boulder was expanding north past Alpine Avenue and residents in the new subdivisions didn't want to keep riding the bus downtown for groceries and a haircut. Architect Hobart Wagener designed the center with a distinctive jagged roofline, and two years later he designed its neighbor across the street, Community Plaza, with a curved roofline instead. Different shapes, same job: give the new North Boulder a place to shop without leaving the neighborhood.
For close to seven decades, that job got done by a rotating cast of small, independently run businesses. Ideal Market anchored the east end from the start and still does, now under Whole Foods ownership. Gene Lang's Pharmacy, Ruble's Barber Shop, Tasty Bake Shop and half a dozen others came and went as the decades turned over. The pattern held because whatever left got replaced by something similar: another bakery, another drugstore, another barber. Through the 1960s and 70s, this was a family-scale ecosystem of tenants who lived in Boulder and worked the counter themselves.
What's happening now is different in kind, not just in degree.
The West End: A Corporate Landlord and a Rent Pekoe Couldn't Match
Pekoe occupies the space at 1225 Alpine Ave that was originally the Beauty Centre in 1958, and more recently the Pekoe Sip House before Rommel and Mason bought the business in February 2020, right before Covid hit. According to Rommel, corporate ownership of the center and increasingly high rents are what's pushing them out now, not a lack of customers. Many of Pekoe's regulars have already told the owners they'll follow wherever the café lands next.
Pekoe wasn't the first tenant on that stretch to go. In 2024, the wellness chain Alive and Well, headquartered in Austin, Texas, expanded into the space next door, a move that forced the closure of Alpine Barbers, the shop longtime neighborhood men and boys still call by its old name, Charlie's. Two storefronts down from Ideal Market, in other words, a national chain has now displaced two locally run, walk-in businesses inside two years. Pekoe's lease was ending anyway, and as of this writing no new tenant has been announced for the space.
The East End: A 30-Year Bakery Meets a Lease It Couldn't Sign
Cross Alpine Avenue and the story looks different on the surface but rhymes underneath. Breadworks opened at 2644 Broadway in Community Plaza on Valentine's Day 1995, when founder Larry Domnitz started baking bread by hand in a stone-hearth oven imported from Spain. The bakery grew into a wholesale operation supplying restaurants and grocery stores across Boulder, and Domnitz never moved production out of the neighborhood. "Having everything right in the neighborhood was, I think, a big part of what Breadworks was all about," he said.
That wholesale business never fully recovered from the shutdown in 2020. Domnitz told Axios Boulder his roster of roughly 130 wholesale customers a week dropped to about 10 within 36 hours of the pandemic closures, and many of those accounts either left Boulder or never scaled orders back up. By late 2025, at 72 years old and without a succession plan, Domnitz found himself facing a landlord who wanted a longer lease commitment than he was willing to make without a partner to hand the business to. Breadworks closed for good on November 22, 2025, after nearly 30 years of never missing a day except the two after his father's death.
What's Still There
Neither corner emptied out entirely. If you're running your usual errands, here's what you'll still find:
- Ideal Market, still anchoring the east end of Ideal Broadway Shops under Whole Foods ownership
- Moe's Broadway Bagel and Vic's Espresso, the surviving independent food counters in Community Plaza
- Pharmaca's former space, now leased to Alive and Well
- The two shopping centers' original architecture, Wagener's jagged and curved rooflines, still visible on either side of Alpine Avenue
What's gone is the specific kind of tenant that made these centers feel like a neighborhood rather than a commercial strip: an owner-operator who knew your order, kept the same address for decades, and answered to nobody but the landlord and the customers walking in the door.
The Same Math, Twice
Rommel's exit and Domnitz's exit look like unrelated stories if you only read one of them. Put side by side, they describe the same pressure from two directions. On the west end, a corporate ownership structure raised rents to a level a small café couldn't sustain, the same dynamic that pushed out Alpine Barbers a year earlier. On the east end, a landlord's lease terms outran what a single owner nearing retirement, without a wholesale business to fall back on, could responsibly sign. Different mechanisms, same outcome: the kind of tenant who could afford a 1958 storefront on a neighborhood-serving lease can no longer afford a 2026 one on Broadway frontage.
That's worth sitting with if you live in Old North Boulder, not because either closure is a tragedy on its own, but because it changes what the daily walk to the corner actually offers. For almost seventy years, whatever left this corner got replaced by something similar in scale and character. This time, the replacement pattern is national chains and vacancies, not another bakery run by someone who lives three blocks over. Whether that holds for Pekoe's and Breadworks' empty storefronts, or whether another independent operator steps in, is the open question worth watching if you spend your mornings on this stretch of Broadway.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a move in the neighborhood, that's a longer conversation, and one Kimberly Fels is glad to have when you're ready. For now, if you're just looking for where to get your coffee on a Tuesday morning, Moe's and Vic's are still there, and that's not nothing.
