There will be no more slices of spring fling cake and cappuccino. On Tuesday, one of Denver’s iconic businesses, The Market at Larimer Square, announced its permanent closure.
Dana Crawford founded The Market in 1978, and for 42 years it survived as a specialty grocer, bakery and deli, a gathering place and coffee bar before coffee bars were on every street corner. Mark Greenberg, who bought the business from Crawford in 1983, said that the pandemic sealed his decision to retire and close.
“Life is so uncertain now,” Greenberg said, “and I want to have a few more moments (with family) … . I just wanted to be able to pay my employees what I owed them and not have to go bankrupt. I’m closing like a gentleman, and I feel good about some things and really desperate about other things.”
For years, Greenberg ran The Market with his brother, Gary, who died in 2000. They opened with $5,000 in a checking account, according to Greenberg. “We stretched $5,000 to pay who we needed to pay and we continued on,” he said.
In the early 1980s, he and Gary were working in the cheese and specialty food importing business and supplying The Market, when Crawford called to say she would have to close it. “No,” was Greenberg’s response to that.
“I managed to lose a lot of money, and then sold it,” Crawford told The Denver Post in an interview Tuesday.
“Dana was too far ahead of herself,” Greenberg said of Crawford’s concept.
In the 1970s, when Crawford still owned Larimer Square, she struggled to find tenants, which she said she desperately needed to appease her financers at New York Life Insurance. It didn’t help that the city of Denver had closed down Larimer Street to put in a “giant sewer,” Crawford remembers, “so I signed some of my own leases and became my own tenant.”
“Because there was such a mountain of dirt in the street, we put out a poster that said ‘Ski Larimer Square,’ ” she said, laughing, “and we started working on getting the market open.”
Crawford said she saw people moving in to Larimer Place and the surrounding downtown buildings. Those city dwellers would need a place to shop, she thought. So Crawford and her team went to New York to see what was happening at places like The Cellar in Macy’s basement and Dean & DeLuca. There, she trained her staff to run a “high-style deli.”
Back in Denver, “The city couldn’t decide if we were a grocery store or a restaurant,” Crawford said of her permitting for the new concept, “so they made us put in three-hole sinks all over the place.” The sinks eventually got torn out, and the higher-priced market couldn’t compete with chain grocers, according to Crawford. But a coffee shop “really worked out well” there, she said.
“It became a social gathering place … and it was kind of the beginning of community markets.”
When the Greenberg brothers bought The Market, they focused on the espresso bar business, on daily-baked cakes and a fresh deli case. They grew to employ 20 full-time bakers and sold 700 spring flings a week. But business was difficult.
“I can’t tell you how many sleepless nights I had about whether I was going to pay my rent,” Greenberg said. “It’s just too hard these days. If you’re an independent restaurant, there’s no leeway.”
On Tuesday, he said he didn’t consider selling the business now to a new owner: “Nobody wants my high rent, my high labor. To run an independent restaurant is not a very profitable thing right now,” Greenberg said.
Both he and Crawford admit they wonder about the future of independent restaurants in Denver, especially after the coronavirus shutdown.
On Sunday, Greenberg and his two daughters and grandson ate one last breakfast at The Market. They were the only ones there since about a month earlier.
“It’s a lot of teamwork every day at the market that I’m gonna miss now,” Greenberg said. And he’s not sure yet what he’ll do in retirement.
“I don’t have any hobbies. I had the market; that was my love.”
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