Community Building
Brook Casillas
“My dad, Jim Moore, didn’t like the merry-go-round tenants and neither do I,” says Tom Moore, manager of The Monarch Building, that distinctive brick structure with the arches at the corner of Monarch and Main. “So we always sit down with our tenants and come up with a rent they can live with. We don’t rent by the square footage. In fact, I don’t even know the square footage of most of the shops.”
It’s an altruistic approach to landlording that has cemented the Moores’ reputation as perhaps the most fair and reasonable building owners in Aspen. Most tenants have been with the Moores for years; some for decades.
Chester and Judy Goss, who own the Gypsy Woman leather shop, have been with the Moores since about 1966. Sandy Munro had his Great Divide Music Store from 1971 until last year. Now the music store—reinvented as Two Old Hippies—is owned by Molly and Tom Bedell. A sandwich shop has been there in one form or another since 1969. Today it’s the Grateful Deli.
“The frame shop has been there a long time,” says Tom. “So has the pet shop. Peter Rizutto had his barbershop and beauty shop in the corner for years before he sold it. It’s still a beauty shop. Wendy Blakeslee’s flower shop was [my] dad’s barbershop years ago. Then it was a shoe shop and now a flower shop.”
In the newer part of the building, which adjoined the brick portion in 1950 and has storefronts along Main Street, there was a
pottery shop for many years. The space recently rented to Ute City Cycles. Stitch Works, a clothing and fabric store, has been in place since 1998.
Alberta and Jim Moore, Tom’s parents, came to Aspen on December 26, 1936. They had been married the day before and drove over Independence Pass in a Model A behind Paul Frost, who was plowing the road. Jim was originally from Arkansas and Alberta from Longmont, Colo.
They stayed in the Hotel Jerome, where Jim had agreed to run a barbershop. Alberta looked out the window at the falling-down buildings and dirt streets and said, “I’ll give it five years. … That’s all I’m staying here.” She’s been here ever since, a mainstay at the nonprofit Aspen Thrift Shop for much of her time.
Jim bought the first part of The Monarch Building in 1938. Then he persuaded an aunt in Arkansas to lend him the money to buy the rest. Through the years, the building has been known as Moore’s Court, Moore’s Motel and finally The Monarch Building.
Plumbing went in around 1946, about the same time the Moores started renting apartments. “Then it was a motel quite a few years, until mom got tired of washing sheets and making beds,” says Tom. “We never had maids.”
Tom got out of college in 1964 and married his wife Carolyn that same year. By 1968, “the building was falling down,” he says, so the Moores remodeled. That’s when the arches were built over the doors and windows. “They just sort of happened,” Tom says. “In 1969, we started renting the spaces to businesses.”
Tall and lanky with a full head of graying, sandy hair, Tom looks like a real westerner. Living on the McLain Flats Ranch, he irrigates every day and puts up hay. He’s had a cabinet-making business in his big red barn for 23 years.
In 1991, when Jim Moore died, Tom took over the family business. “Since 1991, I’ve spent all my time getting things out of my mom and dad’s estate,” he says. Everything is now owned by the Moore Family Trust. “When I die, it won’t go away as long as the trust exists,” Tom says “Maybe one of the kids will run it. But who knows—eventually, nothing stays the same.”
Fortunately, “eventually” has not yet arrived. “In this recession, I’m not raising the rents in The Monarch Building,” Tom says. “Even though the property taxes have doubled in the past eight years, I try not to raise the rents.”
The Moores’ tenants are surely thankful for that. And so is Aspen.
