(The following story by Ryan Morgan appeared on the Boulder Daily Camera website on January 15.)
BOULDER, Colo. — In the near future, people on their way to get groceries or books at the shopping center at 30th and Pearl streets are going to glance at the northeast corner of the parking lot — and then they’re going to look again, because that oddly out-of-place stone building with the pagoda-like roof won’t be there.
If all goes as planned, the Union Pacific Depot, which was built in 1890, will undergo the second move of its life sometime in March. It will be moved across 30th Street to the site of Boulder’s planned Transit Village, said Brad Power, the city’s redevelopment director.
The depot started life at the corner of 14th Street and Canyon Boulevard in downtown Boulder. Historic preservation advocates hoping to save the building from demolition in 1973 helped raise money to move the building to its current location — which, at the time, was the city’s Pow Wow Rodeo grounds.
Development pressure is once again bearing down on the 3,000-square-foot building. Regency Centers, which owns the land the depot sits on, has agreed to pay to relocate the building to make room for an expanded Whole Foods. In return, the city has agreed to refund some of the developer’s use fees.
So far, Power said, the price tag for the move looks like it will come in around $700,000.
Power said work has begun to move the building. Right now, he said, contractors are trying to shore up the inside of the building to make sure it doesn’t fall down during the move. Once that’s done, workers will excavate under the building and eventually install giant I-beams, which already are sitting on the site, beneath the structure.
At one time, city officials had raised the possibility of taking the building apart brick-by-brick and storing it on pallets until they could find a permanent home for it.
There had also been talk of moving it to a temporary holding place and then moving it again. But Power said the city is now going to move the building onto a concrete foundation — and keep it there while they figure out a function for it.
“The idea is to move it once to a permanent location,” Power said.
That has historic preservation activists very pleased. Abby Daniels, a spokeswoman for Historic Boulder, said her group is thrilled that the move is finally happening after more than two years of discussion.
And it’s fitting, she said, that a building that began its life as a train depot it will end up in the Transit Village, which will see commuter rail arrive in 2014.
“The new location really is excellent, because we think it will call attention to its past,” she said. “We’ve just been really pleased with the efforts of the city to make that happen.”