Building anything big in Boulder County often has been challenging. The fact that Crossroads Mall in Boulder — which rapidly deteriorated until being replaced by the Twenty-Ninth Street development — got a major facelift 29 years ago seems somewhat miraculous. It must have seemed so then, too — so much so that in 1983, the reopening of the new, expanded and improved Crossroads Mall (“where good things happen”) was the top business story of the year. There were entities to create, a hostile small-business community and generally skeptical public to convince, elections to win, and two major retailers to lure away from a phantom development threatening to appear at the Louisville/Superior interchange on U.S. Highway 36.

Boulder had to act fast. The city council authorized the urban renewal authority and gave it condemnation powers, approved a redevelopment plan, created a taxing district, won from voters a change in the city charter to authorize tax-increment financing for the project, and fended off a lawsuit from a small business in the area that was slated for relocation.

Meanwhile, mall owner Macerich and others wooed May D&F, a department store chain which in later years was absorbed first by Foley’s and then by Macy’s —which occupies the only remaining structure from the Crossroads era today. Macerich had purchased Crossroads Mall, which was built in the early 1960s and was anchored by J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward, and won the bid to redevelop and expand the mall. May D&F at the time was considered the premier anchor for the new north end of the mall and critical to its success. The courtship ended in marriage, and the new Crossroads Mall opened on Aug. 11, 1983.

Crossroads also ultimately garnered Sears and the tax base it believed it so desperately needed. But then began a slow deterioration, hastened by the opening of Broomfield’s FlatIron Crossing mall in 2000. Demolition — and the development of Twenty-Ninth Street — was Boulder’s answer as the new millennium dawned.