The city of Aspen hosted Mall Fest 50 on Saturday, a celebration of 50 years since the city’s pedestrian mall was constructed.
But as the city commemorates what Lara Whitley — who leads Aspen’s public art program — called “Aspen’s living room,” officials are also thinking about the next 50 years and beyond of the mall as the city’s reserve of historic bricks continues to dwindle and the existing bricks that make up the 144,000-square-foot mall are starting to crumble.
“As with all bricks, they do age and they do fail, and the ped mall is certainly nothing like it was the day it was installed,” said Mike Tunte, a landscape architect and construction manager in the city’s parks department. “It’s kind of evolved and bricks have been changed and when things settle, they get replaced, so [the] parks [department] has maintained that stockpile of brick. We do the work to keep the mall in as good a condition as it is, and the reality is that those bricks, those historic bricks, our stockpile is dwindling so we’re kind of at the end of that.”
Aspen’s pedestrian malls on Hyman Avenue, Mill Street and Cooper Avenue were built in 1976 using bricks the city bought from St. Louis. It was a blend of old bricks — some that are now over 100 years old, Tunte said — that were brought to Aspen by train to construct the pedestrian mall.
The city has since maintained a stockpile of bricks to replace existing ones when they age or get damaged. Right now, the city has about 16,000 bricks remaining, Tunte said. It’s enough to cover about 3,200 square feet, Tunte told Aspen’s Historic Preservation Commission in April.
Bricks at the Wheeler Opera House corner (Mill Street and Hyman Avenue) and in front of the former Bidwell Building (an RH construction site across Galena Street from Paradise Bakery) are seeing significant degradation and impacts to accessibility.
“The minute you touch [the brick], it’s very poetically returning back to the earth, which leaves us in a bit of a predicament of how to put it back,” Tunte told the HPC.
It’s not a new issue. In 2016, the city began a comprehensive study of the pedestrian mall to eventually develop a mall schematic design, Tunte said. The city completed the study in 2020. But it’s getting to a point where more bricks need replacing than the city has in its stockpile.
The goal is to keep the “nodes” of the mall — where the pedestrian mall meets the streets across from the Wheeler and across from Paradise — built with historic bricks while the rest of the mall eventually is replaced with modern bricks.
Two years ago, the city replaced the bricks in the Wagner Park pedestrian alleyway after upgrading some of the underground utilities in that area of the mall. It was a chance for the city to see what replacing the historic bricks with modern ones would look like, Tunte said, and understand how they wanted to adjust the pattern of the bricks, and what colors and sizes they wanted when it was time to replace more of them.
“You’re not trying to recreate history, you’re trying to meet the challenges and replacing that brick is the best way to do that,” Tunte told the Aspen Daily News. “So you still have the character of brick in the ped mall, you still have historic brick in these key locations, and the rest of it gets replaced to a modern standard.”
Since the mall is a designated landmark and located within a historic district, the HPC has review authority over permanent alterations, Gillian White, the city’s historic preservation officer, told the Aspen Daily News in an email.
The city still needs to finalize specifications of the replacement brick and receive formal approval from the HPC before moving forward with the larger project, White said.
“As with all historic resources, there comes a time when historic material may need to be replaced if it is beyond repair; sometimes the historic material is no longer available,” she said in the email. “This is the case with the Pedestrian Mall, an AspenModern historic resource. We have a limited supply of the historic brick to be used for repairs and replacement. At times the form and aesthetic of AspenModern resources are more significant than material integrity, leading to flexibility in material replacement.”
“Replacement of the historic material is appropriate as long as the replacement brick has similar attributes to the historic brick, such as color variation and size. While replacement is appropriate in this scenario, the historic brick played an integral role in the creation of the pedestrian mall and has contributed to Aspen’s sense of place,” she added.
But a large majority of the bricks that line the mall today are still historic, and just in time to celebrate the mall’s 50th anniversary, Whitley said.
“It’s literally the crossroads of our community, the living room of our community,” she said. “The Mall Fest 50 is also the crossroads of community, creativity and history.”
Saturday's Mall Fest 50 celebration honored six people who she called “pedestrian mall visionaries”: Richard Lai, who first planted the seed to the Aspen City Council about the pedestrian mall; Margot Dick and Katie Dutcher, who were teenagers in the 1970s and collected signatures for the mall project; Joe Edwards, a longtime advocate who assisted Dick and Dutcher on their mall referendum; and Travis Fulton, the co-creator of the dancing fountain.
“It’s easy to take [the pedestrian mall] for granted, but if it weren’t for these small visionaries, it wouldn’t be here,” Whitley said. “It is the place where everybody can hang out and they’re free from the pressures of traffic, but also the pressures to pay to play. It’s truly a space that makes everyone welcome."
