North Boulder vs Central Boulder: What Makes 80304 Its Own Place
North Boulder Is Not a Smaller Downtown
In 1985 the Daily Camera called the stretch of North Broadway from Iris Avenue to U.S. 36 "Boulder's last frontier." Reporter Kurt Chandler described it as "a realm of contrasts and contradictions — intimate yet secretive, often coarse, sometimes refined, and never predictable." Forty years later, North Boulder has a library, a planned arts campus and new parks, but it still feels different from central Boulder. This piece looks at why, using the city's own planning records and a 2024 history of the area by Boulder Weekly.
Where "North Boulder" Is
Even the name has moved. Boulder Weekly reported in 2024 that twenty years earlier, "North Boulder" meant the area around North Boulder Park and the Ideal Market, near the old hospital on Broadway between Alpine and Balsam. That area is now called Old North Boulder. What people today call North Boulder — the 80304 area along upper Broadway — used to be called "North North Boulder," or sometimes "the Dogpatch."
Central Boulder, by contrast, is easy to define. Its center is the Pearl Street Mall, four pedestrian blocks from 11th to 15th streets, which the city calls "a nationally renowned historic pedestrian mall and city park." It opened in 1977.
The "Last Frontier"
The 1985 article described a North Boulder that is hard to picture today. Boulder Weekly lists some of what was there: a strip club called the Bustop next to an RV storage lot, a seven-acre Colorado National Guard base, unpaved roads, and backyards with donkeys, rabbits and roosters. Homes being built at Jay Road and 26th Street then cost about $80,000.
Much of that is gone. The Army base became an apartment complex. The old Bus Stop building became affordable rentals. Farms and fields west of U.S. 36 are mostly built over, and those $80,000 homes are now worth about ten times as much.
North Boulder Was Planned on Purpose
The biggest reason North Boulder looks different is planning. In 1989 the city decided it needed plans for areas smaller than the whole city but larger than one site, which it calls "subcommunities." According to the city's planning history, North Boulder was chosen first because it still had vacant land that could be built on, and the city needed to decide its future. Planning began in the fall of 1992, with residents, city staff, a large steering committee and consultants.
The city adopted the North Boulder Subcommunity Plan in August 1995. Its stated vision is a "beautiful, diverse, inclusive and adaptive" North Boulder, and the city says it "has shaped the area there today." It was amended in 1996, 1997, 2020 and 2024.
The 2024 amendment shows where the area is heading. Planning Board approved it on August 6, 2024, and City Council on August 15. It changed the plan for an area near Broadway and Violet Avenue to make room for a "Creative Campus," described as part of the "Village Center," with a wider range of uses and more density. It also added a map and description of the North Boulder Art District to the plan. And it gave the Ponderosa community, which the city annexed and improved through its Ponderosa Community Stabilization project in 2019, a medium-density residential land-use category.
It was not a quiet process. Boulder Weekly quotes former City Council member Lisa Morzel, who took part as a resident: "People were out with pitchforks: 'We don't want the city, we don't want your streetlights, we don't want your codes.'" North Boulder had pushed back before — in the mid-1960s, county residents tried to form their own city on 4,500 acres north of Jay Road.
From a Drive-In to a Neighborhood
The Holiday neighborhood shows how the area changed. It began as the Holiday Drive-In Theater, which opened in 1953 at 28th and Colorado and moved to Lee Hill Road in 1969. The first film at the new site was Easy Rider, and a street in the neighborhood is now named after it. The drive-in closed in the 1980s, and the field sat empty until the early 2000s, when the nonprofit housing authority Boulder Housing Partners led its redevelopment. Boulder Weekly reports that Holiday now has one of the highest shares of rent-capped homes in the city.
Industry, Artists and Emerald City
North Boulder still has older industrial buildings, and that is a big part of its character. At the north end of Broadway, a group of warehouses that tenants call Emerald City — after the property management company that runs them — has become a center for artists. Boulder Weekly lists tenants including The Crowd Collective gallery, the Boulder Metalsmithing Association, Drum Mountain, The Photo Center, the clothing brand Atrévete and Boulder Sports Recycler. Owner Andrew Ghadimi called it "the heart of the arts community."
Emerald City is on county land, not in the city. In 2024 it was on a septic system and had water trucked in. Joining the city would mean more than $3 million in new infrastructure, which Ghadimi said would push rents up.
North Boulder is also home to the NoBo Art District, which began in 2009 and holds First Friday art walks along Broadway every month except January. Boulder Weekly calls the area Boulder's official arts district. In 2024, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art hoped to move to a planned cultural campus on Broadway in North Boulder. As of 2024, the museum had rented a city building downtown, at 1750 13th Street, for 48 years, for $1 a year.
Who Lives Here
Boulder Weekly reported that North Boulder has the largest Latinx population in Boulder. East of Broadway, from Lee Hill Drive to Iris Avenue, one in four residents is Hispanic, according to census data. Ghadimi pointed to Carnicería La Zacatecana, at 4483 Broadway, as "the only market that far up in the neighborhood," and one that serves the Latinx community. The area also includes two mobile home parks; at one of them, trailers are slowly being replaced with new, energy-efficient homes on fixed foundations.
New Public Places
For years North Boulder had few public buildings. A small corner library opened in 2014 in just 576 square feet at 4600 Broadway. Library director David Farnan told Boulder Weekly that the community checked out every book in less than a week — twice. A full North Boulder branch library, discussed since the city began planning for the area in the late 1980s, was due to open in June 2024. Mayor Aaron Brockett, a North Boulder resident, called it "the dream of decades."
More is coming. The new Primos Park on Violet Avenue is now planned to open fully in 2029, with a new bridge and underpass. Boulder Weekly also reported plans for the North Sky Trail, a 3.5-mile trail for bikes, hikers and horses from Foothills Park to Joder Ranch.
Why the Difference Matters
Central Boulder grew up around the university and the Pearl Street Mall. North Boulder grew up as the edge of the city — farmland, industry, a drive-in, a National Guard base — and then was planned deliberately, from scratch, in the 1990s. That history is why North Boulder still has warehouses next to new apartments, a working arts scene, and a mix of incomes and backgrounds that the center of the city does not.
"There's some realness" to North Boulder, BMoCA deputy director Gwen Burak told Boulder Weekly. "It's a little more organic … You see less buttoned-up stuff up there."