When Vinegar Syndrome shut the doors on its Aurora shop, The Archive, last September, manager Theresa Mercado figured the break would be brief. Instead, nearly a year passed before the film restoration and distribution company found its new home on Denver’s west side.
“We never anticipated that we would be closed for all intents and purposes for almost a year, which is crazy,” Mercado says. “Moving was a lot for our team and not something that we were necessarily prepared for. There were some hiccups and delays with getting the new space ready, but that’s also just how it goes. Everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take.”
That long pause left Mercado wondering whether patrons would still be there when the lights came back on. “We were afraid that our customers were not going to be here when we reopened, that they had moved on,” she says. “That they had moved on and didn’t believe we’d reopen.”…