The food court dining area is shown in El Mercado, a shopping and dining area inside the Boulevard mall, Thursday, Feb.17, 2022.
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Angelina Palma was laid off from her job on the Strip during the pandemic.
That’s when she decided to take her hobby — carving pieces of soap into roses, butterflies or skulls — and make it into a business. And so Angelina’s Made of Soap was launched at El Mercado, a massive Latin American-themed marketplace and food court with close to 190 storefronts inside the Boulevard mall.
“I knew that I could do this,” Palma said. “I love the people here, and I love coming here every day. I’m so happy now.”
Take one walk through El Mercado, which occupies the mall space where JCPenney was housed, and you get the sense you are shopping in a street market in a Latin American country. There’s the distinct smell of authentic dishes being cooked, salsa music playing in the background and tons of colorful decorations.
“I lived in Guatemala for a time when I was student teaching, and this reminds me a lot of those days,” said Stan Hahn, a retired teacher who lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Paulette. “We’ve been here 10 or 11 times now, and we love it.”
An explosion of Hispanic culture, the market — which is what Mercado translates to in English — is a place where shoppers can buy anything from an alpaca blend poncho made in Ecuador to the latest in urban streetwear, and just about anything else in between.
The bright colors and hand-made specialty items — from soaps and pieces of artwork to jewelry made out of silver from mines in Mexico — have the ability to draw shoppers in instantly.
Though weekends are typically busier days, a recent weekday at the market attracted shoppers from a wide range of different ethnic backgrounds.
The first phase of El Mercado started in early 2020, just as the pandemic had started to cause major problems for the brick-and-mortar retail economy.
The final phase was wrapped up in October, just over four years since JCPenney announced the closure of its former space.
Timo Kuusela, the mall’s general manager and the brains behind the specialty market, said El Mercado has gone better than he could have hoped.
“It’s been a big success,” Kuusela said. “To take the JCPenney space and not only replace it with something, but to also come out on top financially, that was good.”
At a time when many U.S. malls have struggled to remain afloat as the online marketplace has tried its best to take over, Boulevard Mall has blazed its own trail.
Also in 2017, Macy’s announced the closure of its Boulevard store. That space is now a regional office for Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield. On the second floor of the mall is a call center.
“We’re now basically anchorless,” Kuusela said. “You would assume that if a mall goes anchorless, it would be dead, but we’re very much still going and thriving and adapting to the situation.”
A big part of that, Kuusela said, has been the success of El Mercado, which cost about $5 million to complete. The idea was hatched in 2015.
“I had seen this work in Texas and Georgia,” Kuusela said. “We do have something like this in Vegas because of the swap meets, but we wanted to do it on a little bit better scale. We were finally able to convince ownership that it was a good idea. They went out and looked at these other mercados, and they came back and agreed that we needed to do this.”
Kuusela, who has been in his role for about a decade, has been through multiple ownership changes. The mall is now owned by Boulevard Ventures LLC.
Kuusela said the group had been receptive to new ideas and outside-the-box thinking.
It’s the type of strategizing that has been needed as the American shopping mall has taken a back seat over the years to online retail options like Amazon and standalone big box stores like Target or Walmart.
At one time, Boulevard, which opened its doors as Parkway Mall in 1963, was perhaps the most popular shopping destination in the Las Vegas Valley. After trudging through two major recessions in 15 years, Kuusela says he thinks the mall is largely back on its feet, though its movie theater offering has continued to lag.
“Real estate is not dead, and malls are the perfect real estate for diversifying what you have,” Kuusela said. “Look, certain things, you just can’t get unless you’re there in person. In Vegas, it’s hard to compete with the Strip, but we’re doing our best.”
One of the big draws at El Mercado — which has a predominately Hispanic client base — is the food court, which has nearly a dozen restaurants.
There, patrons can get a gordita stuffed with carne asada at Patron Cravings or a plant-based enchilada at SoyMexican, a vegan eatery. And, of course, there are plenty of churros to be had.
Kuusela said it was important for mall management to offer kitchen equipment inside the small restaurant spaces.
It was also important, he said, for management to charge the same base monthly rent — about $1,000 — to all tenants, except those with a partially-obstructed front.
“All of what we have here is local, none of it is big corporate greed,” Kuusela said. “These are local people working, many times with their family members. This is a market, but it’s also an incubator of sorts.”
Before setting up shop at Espiritu de Mexico at El Mercado, Laura Feldman used to sell jewelry items at craft shows around Las Vegas, many times at Station Casinos properties.
When she heard about El Mercado, she partnered with some other jewelry saleswomen to open the shop, which specializes in handcrafted silver jewelry that comes from Taxco, a mountain town of about 60,000 residents southwest of Mexico City.
“The Hispanic community was very eager for a place like this,” said Feldman, who was born in Mexico City but has lived in Las Vegas for over two decades. “It’s been good, it’s worked out very well.”
While El Mercado is the perfect place to shop for a Quinceanera — a traditional coming-of-age party in many Latin American cultures for teenage girls — it’s also a place that offers diversity.
There are Asian American storefront owners, and also an urban streetwear shop called Stay Fitted Clothing Co., which is owned by Los Angeles transplant Adrian Eppinger.
Eppinger had a store in Los Angeles, but he said he had to close it because of multiple hardships related to the pandemic.
He saw the greater Las Vegas market as an opportunity and El Mercado as a diamond in the rough within that opportunity.
“I looked around this place and thought it was nice, and I thought my store would stand out to people as they walked past,” Eppinger said. “This is a niche for me. I came here in August. My whole store was shorts and tank tops, and I was selling like crazy.”
In fact, Eppinger said he might need to get a bigger location inside Boulevard Mall soon, though he said El Mercado was the perfect place to jump-start his Las Vegas operation.
As he gazed over the food court space at El Mercado after finishing a burrito from 911 Taco Bar recently, Kuusela thought back to when he accepted the Boulevard Mall general manager position.
“When I started, I thought this would be a two-year job for me until I could find something better,” Kuusela said. “I figured that if something opened at Miracle Mile, I’d be out of here, but I’ve been genuinely surprised. We’ve just kept going and going and going. It’s been a pleasant surprise.”
