It's a Thursday night, and the parking lot at the new Stanley Marketplace in Aurora is full.

Business owners inside the urban market say the opening months of what used to be an abandoned manufacturing building -- have exceeded their expectations.

They wouldn't have predicted it two years ago.

When Stephanie Shearer, owner of the Pandora on the Hill gift card shop in Denver, was invited to open a business in what used to be an old manufacturing site in Aurora, she had one reaction: Heck no.

“They want us to come to rusty old building with tumbleweeds in a field in Aurora?” she said.

But Mark Shaker, one of the owners and developers of that old building, was persistent. His vision was an urban marketplace with 50 independently owned Colorado businesses, a big event center, and a community garden.

“He started talking about collaboration and community, and that’s what we do,” Shearer said.

Over the next two years, what was once Stanley Aviation and a primary employer in Aurora was transformed into the Stanley Marketplace – 100,000 square feet of restaurants, breweries, yoga studios, clothing stores, barbershops and hair salons and co-working office space.

“I really think of Stanley as a celebration of independently owned Colorado businesses that we, from the beginning, decided we wanted to focus on small businesses that were local,” said Bryant Palmer, a member of the Stanley Marketplace development team and its “chief story teller.” “And we’ve done a pretty good job of bringing in some fantastic operators.”

'A really innovative dude'

Palmer said the developers originally just wanted to open a cool beer hall in the Stapleton neighborhood. The word got out, and City of Aurora officials reached out and showed them the 70-year-old Stanley Aviation building, located on the east edge of Denver's former Stapleton International Airport, where the owner and his crew made airplane ejection seats.

“We learned a lot about Bob Stanley who was a really innovative dude,” Palmer said. “He invented several kinds of ejection seats and he was the first American to fly a jet aircraft. We felt this was a place that was built for innovation.”

A sign on the fence around Stanley Aviation once said: "Road ends; world class manufacturing begins."

The theme of the market is aviation and aircraft. The 18,500-square-foot event center at the complex is called The Hangar at Stanley. The doors of the event center open onto what used to be a smaller runway just for Stanley, where Bob Stanley and Stanley test planes took off and landed, Palmer said.

Stanley Marketplace, at 2501 N. Dallas St. in Aurora, borders Denver’s Stapleton neighborhood. The space is 100 percent leased with 54 businesses on board.

About half of those businesses are open and half are under development and expected to open within two months. All of the 54 businesses are first-time operators in Aurora and 37 have existing businesses in metro Denver.

And the marketplace developers did open their beer hall: Stanley Beer Hall with 30 Colorado beers on tap.

“This started as a place where we wanted to create an interesting concept that was an ecosystem of like-minded business,” Shaker said. “We wanted people who thought about more than the bottom line. We wanted local, independent business.”

If a business was interested in moving into the marketplace, Shaker would secret shop in their store before ever taking a meeting with them.

Within the business lease is the “Stanifesto” – a mission statement that details the beliefs of the business community.

It’s part of what eventually sold Shearer on the space.

She and her husband Chris Bacorn are the owners of the successful Pandora on the Hill and Soul Haus in Denver. But the idea of working around 53 other small businesses that shared her ideas about collaboration allowed her to see past the tumbleweeds two years ago.

“The Stanifesto is in all of our leases – we signed a legal binding contract that says we are going to do this,” she said.

Her new store in the marketplace, Trunk Nouveau, has been open for seven weeks, and despite only half of the stores being open, Stanley Marketplace appears to be a hit, she said.

“We can’t keep it stocked – I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never been in a situation where I can’t keep the store stocked.”