Parts of the Crystal Palace building being demolished in 2019 were shown in this photo printed in October of that year in the Aspen Daily News, which reported: “The Monarch Street-facing wall will be preserved as the Crystal Palace building and the adjoining lot are redeveloped into a hotel.”
The Aspen community often finds itself split over housing, transportation and other issues. At the center of the latest division is a wall.
Recently in city meeting rooms and the court of public opinion, the fate of one particular building’s wall — on the old Crystal Palace’s west side facing Monarch Street, recognizable for its fabled Owl Cigar mural — has stoked more than just debate over historic preservation and significance in this once-mining town.
It also has touched off some frank conversations about what led to the Aspen Historic Preservation Commission’s 4-3 vote earlier this month granting approval of developer Mark Hunt’s application to raze and reconstruct the last remaining wall on the former dinner theater building. As part of the reconstructed wall, the mural would be replicated and relocated to its center.
The HPC’s original approval granted to the project in 2017 allowed for demolition and reconstruction of the building’s east and north façades, which were rebuilt in the 1970s. Construction started in 2019.
Into the construction project, Hunt’s team discovered the west wall actually was not historic and instead reflected a lagniappe of changes in materials over the years. The team concluded they would need to reconstruct the structure’s west-facing exterior wall in order to complete the project. It would be the last part of the building to come down as part of the redevelopment. The entire building’s structural framing, which includes the third level, is complete.
“The Crystal Palace as we all know it is gone,” Hunt told the HPC at the Oct. 2 special meeting. “It’s gone and it turns out, it was gone long before we made the decision based on what we thought the Crystal Palace was. I don’t want to be viewed that I’m looking to take away or destroying pieces of Aspen’s history. I want to be ultimately known that I’m adding to it.”
Experts hired by the hotel project to examine the building determined in their reports, according to Hunt’s application seeking a substantial amendment to previous HPC approvals, “that the foundation underneath the west wall is not structurally sound, the composition of the west wall indicates that it is not original 19th century construction, and the repainted Owl Cigar mural has lead paint. Removal of the west wall and the lead paint is required at the very least to proceed with the project. According to the experts, the west wall cannot feasibly be lifted in place and relocated back to its current location based on the structural stability of the wall, and furthermore, the technical reports demonstrate that there is a mix of repaired historic and new brick and mortar throughout the wall supporting the hypothesis that the wall has been rebuilt before.”
Two people walk along the sidewalk adjacent to the Crystal Palace building on Friday.
Scrutiny of the vote
The outcome of the Oct. 2 vote hasn’t aged well for some people, including one HPC member who did not vote on the matter because she was observing Rosh Hashanah, a High Holy Day in the Jewish religion. Rosh Hashanah began at sundown Oct. 2. The HPC meeting started at 4:30 p.m. and went past 8 p.m.
HPC member Jodi Surfas sounded the conflict alarm to her volunteer colleagues over email and then at a Sept. 25 meeting, but the board nonetheless settled on the proposed October date for the special meeting. At the meeting, which was requested by Hunt’s development and planning team, alternate Riley Warwick, who filled in for Surfas, voted in favor of the application, potentially swinging the outcome differently.
In an email she sent its members on Wednesday, Surfas asked the Aspen City Council to exercise its authority to call up the application the HPC approved when she was absent. By doing that, the council could review the application in a public setting and either uphold the HPC’s decision or remand the application to the HPC with instructions. Remanding it to the HPC would return Surfas to the voting mix.
“I was told that this is a high-profile project with a lot of community interest, I was also told that this was the only date that this meeting could take place as the City wanted to make sure the two architects on the board were present,” said Surfas’ email to council members. “I tried to explain the significance of Rosh Hashanah and that having a meeting on this night would be equivalent, in my opinion, to holding the meeting on Christmas Eve.
“Despite my, and several other HPC board members’ efforts to persuade staff to change the date, the meeting was held. As a member of our community and dedicated member of the HPC, I would like to ask that City Council call up the project that was held on October 2, 2024 to determine if the approval should be upheld or remanded back to HPC at a regular meeting.”
Developer Mark Hunt, speaking at an Oct. 2 special meeting of the Aspen Historic Preservation Commission, expressed his frustration with completing the RH Guesthouse boutique hotel on the old Crystal Palace building site. “The Crystal Palace as we all know it is gone. It’s gone and it turns out, it was gone long before we made the decision based on what we thought the Crystal Palace was.”
While it remains to be seen whether Surfas’ letter influences the council — its next meeting is Tuesday — the city’s elected officials expressed their positions on the HPC decision when they deadlocked at their Oct. 8 meeting over entertaining a call-up. The topic surfaced when Councilman Ward Hauenstein made a motion on the matter.
As part of a technicality-laden procedure, Hauenstein’s motion proposed directing city staff to supply the council with information for notice of call-up purposes at the upcoming Tuesday meeting, where the council would vote whether to call up the HPC decision.
“Upon review, you have the option to either approve of HPC’s action or either rescind it with direction,” Assistant City Attorney Kate Johnson told the council. “So it can go back to HPC or ultimately you could decide it doesn’t need to go back to HPC. You have a variety of options there.”
Mayor Torre’s living proximity within 300 feet of the property in question, located at the corner of East Hyman Avenue and Monarch Street, represented a conflict of interest that precluded him from voting on Hauenstein’s motion. That left four councilmen to decide on whether they should vote at their next meeting to review the decision for call-up. Three votes were required to advance the issue to the next meeting. They tied 2-2.
Supporting Hauenstein’s motion was Councilman John Doyle.
“Based on the people that have reached out to me about this issue,” he said, “I would like to see more information about this, and I would like to see a call-up.”
Councilmen Bill Guth and Sam Rose said they trusted the HPC’s decision and opted against voting later to call it up; their remarks, however, came before Surfas emailed her concerns to the council last week.
“I’m personally not interested in sending it back to HPC, who I trust as a body and who has done this for years — especially on this issue,” Rose said. “So I don’t feel like delaying it, even if I don’t necessarily agree with what they did. We appointed them and I respect their decision.”
The wall cannot be torn down until the 30-day call-up period after the HPC’s decision expires.
These two renderings show what the west wall of the old Crystal Palace building looks like now and what it will look like with a reconstructed wall and a replicated and repositioned mural.
Rose and Guth said they had no appetite for revisiting the decision — with a caveat.
“The only way I would change my mind on that if is I heard, and it sounds like we have 30 days so we could try again at the next meeting anway, but the only way I would change my mind on that is if the missing member from HPC told me they wanted it called up,” Rose said, adding “that’s the only sympathy I have toward this decision. Otherwise, HPC has made their decision.”
Referring to Surfas, Guth said that “unless the member of HPC that was not present feels very strongly about us revisiting it, I’d like to maintain our confidence in our board, so I do not support the motion tonight but I understand where it’s coming from and appreciate it.”
Surfas is not alone. HPC members opposing the application — Roger Moyer, Barb Pitchford and Chair Kara Thompson — also voiced displeasure at the Oct. 9 meeting over how the decision was made one week earlier. Thompson, who could not be immediately reached Friday, said at the meeting she also would be asking the council to call up the HPC decision.
“I wish, I hope going forward we can make sure we give the applications the amount of attention they deserve and make sure we don’t make mistakes,” she said, “In my opinion, this was a mistake.”
Dissenting HPC members cannot ask for the vote to be reconsidered.
“The only way you can bring it back up, the vote was 4-3, if you were a person who voted in a favor of the approval, you have the right to ask for reconsideration of that topic, of the approval. But the motion must be made by somebody that voted for the approval,” Johnson said at the HPC meeting Oct. 9.
Moyer urged the four members who cast the supporting votes to consider a motion, but the will was not there.
“I would ask one of you who did that to please bring that back up,” he said. “I was incredibly disappointed and in fact I didn’t even sleep that night. It was a disaster.”
Pitchford as well expressed dismay. “A resounding message” from the Hunt team at the Oct. 2 meeting, she said, “was to do something now; don’t delay. The majority of the commission heeded those two messages and voted as if the designated historic resource is not historic. That property has not been delisted. It is still designated historic, and therefore the guidelines for demolition apply. This property is either historic and follows the city guidelines for that designation, or it is not historic and follows another set of guidelines. You can’t have it both ways.”
Attending her first meeting as an HPC member on Oct. 2 was Dakota Severe, who voted in favor of the application.
Moyer, without naming names, wondered out loud: “My question is: How do we deal in the future with a new person, all of the sudden come to your first meeting and you have a vote, but you really aren’t there yet. In the future, how do we do that? … It’s not just bricks and mortar, it’s the feeling of the community, it’s what people have seen for 50 years — it’s all of those issues that are complicated and it takes some understanding about.”
Near the end of the conversation, Severe defended the HPC’s overall decision.
“I think that it was a hard topic,” she said, “but I really think that we did do the right thing because there wasn’t anything other than a wall and it was so many different things.
It was such a hodgepodge and I think at the end of the day, what they did present really did homage to the historical nature of that mural, but it was not the original mural, it was not the original wall. And the brick work he did, he kept the street in mind, the original era of the building in mind. I don’t think it was the wrong decision.”
Thompson replied: “We can respectfully disagree.”
The developers of the RH Guesthouse are preparing to reconstruct the west-facing wall of the old Crystal Palace building and replicate the Owl Cigar mural. This rendering depicts the building with the relocated mural.
Struggling all around
At the fateful Oct. 2 HPC meeting, the city’s director of community development, Ben Anderson, cautioned the HPC from deciding on the application then because of the richness in complexity and significance of the old Crystal Palace building.
Anderson suggested the HPC digest the information in the application and entertain options offered by the community development department, with collaboration with the Hunt team, to get the project back on track. Anderson agreed that the wall was problematic, but he did not support the proposed solution.
Previous HPC approvals were contingent on the west wall not being demolished. But as construction progressed, according to Hunt’s development team, the wall was discovered to be not-so-historic after all.
“I think staff are struggling thinking about these considerations because the community understood that to be an important part of the project,” Anderson told the HPC.
Said Hunt: “The hardest thing that we’re struggling with, is we never designed a building off of a, quite frankly, compromised west wall. We designed it off the Crystal Palace, the interlocking yin and yang. What we are left with is a piece of certainly Aspen’s history with the wall that’s standing there. And we have done what we could with a way that was not structurally sound. What we had done is propped the wall with the structure we actually built. Typically the wall would hold the building up; in this case, the superstructure is what is holding the wall in place, albeit out of plumb.”
The Crystal Palace structure was built in 1891 and developed into a wholesale produce house by S.B. Clark. The original Owl Cigar wall goes back to around 1908, but the building underwent multiple iterations over the years. Mead Metcalf bought the building in 1958 and opened it as the Crystal Palace dinner theater, which it would operate as until 2008. The original Crystal Palace opened in 1957 in the Motherlode building next door on East Hyman Avenue.
Soon after the hotel remodeling project started in 2019, the building’s south-facing wall was replaced and replicated when “it became evident that historic materials on the south façade (along Hyman) were substantially absent. It was allowed to be demolished and construction (allowed under a new building permit) … proceeded as approved to its current state,” Anderson’s memo says.
“We were proud of it and excited about it,” Hunt said. “It was a long process and wonky and kind of a weird building. And it made sense. There was logic to it in how we were building it and how the old and new came together.”
The city administratively granted the developer’s request in 2020 for minor modifications to the project, which then settled on a total project floor area of 21,931 square feet, lodge floor area of 17,121 square feet, commercial floor area of 4,810 square feet and commercial net leasable space totaling 3,137 square feet.
In January 2021, Hunt and Corte Madera, California-based RH, announced the redevelopment of the former Crystal Palace building into a boutique hotel and the former Bidwell Building at Galena Street and East Cooper Avenue into an RH Design Gallery with retail and dining.
The RH Guesthouse is slated to have 20 guestrooms, an RH Bath House and Spa and a restaurant, cafe and rooftop terrace. The hotel rooms will average 449 square feet in size, and conditions of approval require a minimum occupancy of two guests per room.
The projects are part of a larger RH-Hunt endeavor heralded as the “Aspen Ecosystem” with residential and retail components.
