An ambitious proposal to build a new Boulder neighborhood around a future passenger train station and a performing arts venue that could be used during the Sundance Film Festival and beyond will be reviewed by city planning officials Tuesday evening.
Conscience Bay Co. is seeking a favorable recommendation from the Boulder Planning Board for a zoning change that would allow the developer to move forward with plans for Pearl Arts District, a project that could also bring a hotel, shopping and hundreds of residences to Frontier Avenue.
“This starts with a simple idea that Boulder deserves a cultural home that reflects its creativity, inclusiveness and bold spirit,” Daniel Aizenman, Conscience Bay Co. director of development, told BizWest in a recent interview.
Key features include:
- Performing-arts center: 1,750 seats (2,500 standing), 40,000 square feet.
- Hotel: 150 to 165 rooms.
- Housing: At least 500 multifamily units.
- Retail and dining: 30,000 square feet.
- Arts and cultural space: 55,500 square feet, including an 8,500-square-foot rehearsal space and rooftop event area.
- Outdoors: More than 2.3 acres of public open space, parks, paths and plazas.
“We’re very serious about creating a quality project that ties in with the urban fabric, that’s perceived as belonging here, that’s embraced by the people of Boulder, that has messy vitality on the ground plane — the storefronts, the activations, the landscaping, the art, all interacting and creating a great atmosphere for people to be comfortable,” Aizenman said.
The performing-arts venue — think dance, theater and music, rather than painting or sculpture — is a key component of Conscience Bay’s vision for the estimated $630-plus-million project, he said.
The Sundance Film Festival is decamping from its longtime home in Park City, Utah and is set to begin a run in January of at least a decade of festivals in Boulder. Organizers have repeatedly stressed the need for more venues and lodging around town to accommodate the high-profile event.
“We’ve been collaborating with the leadership at Sundance on the vision for the venue,” which is expected to include high-end audio and visual equipment for screening films and the flexibility to host a variety of other performances during the 355 days each year when the festival isn’t underway, Aizenman said.
Sundance “left Park City because the facilities were getting old. They were not able to grow the festival, and their goal is to grow the festival,” he said. Festival leaders are “pretty bullish” about growth potential in Boulder, but “without facilities like this, it’s not going to happen.”
Success of projects such as the Pearl Arts District ought to help Boulder retain Sundance beyond the festival’s initial 10-year commitment, Aizenman said.
Because it will have a flat floor, the venue “will also be able to host e-sports matches or maybe even a volleyball match or a pickleball match” when not being used by Sundance, he said. “We are planning roughly 180 events and programs a year — 120 of those at least will be ticketed events by the promoter.”
Aizenman said Conscience Bay has selected a venue promoter and operator but did not identify that company.
Beyond its envisioned role in Boulder’s arts scene, developers expect that the Pearl Arts District will help activate Boulder Junction, a 160-acre, transit-oriented swath of the city’s center.
In 2023, Boulder adopted Phase 2 of the Transit Village Area Plan, allowing greater density and a wider mix of uses around the city’s future Colorado Connector passenger rail train station.
That rail service, nicknamed CoCo, could connect Denver to Fort Collins — with a handful of Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado stops along the way — as soon as 2029.
“We’ve owned this land since 2013 … at the time, we did not know that CoCo was coming,” Aizenman said. The Pearl Arts District property is “practically adjacent to the transit station, a five-minute walk. So it makes us truly a transit-oriented development site.”
Conscience Bay’s goal, he said, “is to have a denser project because density belongs next to transit, and we want to add as many residential units as possible.”
For visitors, the developer hopes that the district’s shops, restaurants and art are “a reason for people to get out of the train and start walking around,” Aizenman said.
Conscience Bay is asking Boulder City officials to rezone the property from its existing industrial land-use designation to a mixed-use designation. The Planning Board will review the request at its 6 p.m. Tuesday meeting and offer a recommendation to Boulder City Council, which will ultimately vote on the zoning at a later date.
Planning officials got their first look at conceptual plans for the Pearl Arts District in February and raised concerns about the Conscience Bay proposal’s adherence to Boulder’s land-use regulations and the phasing of certain elements of construction, specifically that residences could be left unbuilt until later phases of development or not built at all.
“We’re not asking for the city to change any of its vision” for the development of Boulder Junction, Aizenman said. “We’re just asking the city to implement the zoning necessary for achieving that vision.”
Groundbreaking on the Pearl Arts District structures first requires the completion of a stormwater infrastructure project, Aizenman said.
Assuming that Conscience Bay secures the necessary zoning and permit approvals, “the earliest that we believe that (the stormwater) project would be done is sometime in 2030,” with completion of the first phase of Pearl Arts District development — including the performing-arts venue — penciled in for 2031. Full build out of the project is expected to take a decade or more.
