Hyde Park Jewelers founders Michael Pollak, left, and Steven Rosdal in 2001. (Courtesy Michael Pollak)
Steven Rosdal, who turned a passion for Native American jewelry into Hyde Park Jewelers, which expanded from Denver around the region, has died.
Rosdal was 77 when he died on April 6, according to his obituary posted on Feldman Mortuary’s website. His son told BusinessDen Rosdal had neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis he had not widely shared, but attributed Rosdal’s death to a combination of factors.
Rosdal, or “Rosie,” was born in New York in 1946 and graduated from Cornell University with an economics degree. After a few unhappy years working on Wall Street, he decided to leave the city.
“I already decided to move to either Denver or Atlanta,” he said in an interview posted online in 2016. “Then I saw the Robert Redford movie, ‘Jeremiah Johnson’, that was filmed in the Colorado Rockies and thought, ‘I like the four seasons and I’m a skier’ so I came to Denver.”
Steven Rosdal in the 1970s (Courtesy Aaron Rosdal)
In Denver, Rosdal met a doctor who collected Native American jewelry, and accompanied him on a trip to buy some from a pawn shop in Frisco, Rosdal recalled in the interview. Interest in the jewelry was booming at the time, and Rosdal was fascinated. He started going to New Mexico regularly to buy jewelry to resell, eventually moving to Albuquerque for a time.
“We had a system,” Rosdal recalled in the interview. “I would take this shoulder bag and about $10,000 or $20,000 in cash every day, go to the reservation, and spend it. I would then go to the Albuquerque airport, pack it all up, and put in on a Continental Airlines jet. They would open the package in Denver and there would be people that were there to buy.”
Michael Pollak was a junior at the University of Denver when he met Rosdal, who was seven years older. He started working for Rosdal’s wholesale business Turquoise Trading Co. and was eventually made a partner in the company.
“He was the coolest guy I knew and all I wanted to do was be his wingman,” Pollak, now 70, told BusinessDen Tuesday.
Interest in Native American jewelry eventually faded, Pollak said, and he pushed Rosdal to reposition the business. In 1976, the pair founded Hyde Park, which offered more traditional fine jewelry. The first store, where originally nothing cost more than $300, was 1,000 square feet and located in the Tamarac Square Shopping Center in southeast Denver.
At the time, other jewelry stores “were either multigenerational or chains,” Pollak said. Hyde Park sought to be different.
“We had doves at our store,” Pollak said. “And we sold not only jewelry, we sold Famous Amos cookies and The New York Times.”
The company gradually expanded. A second location in the Brown Palace Hotel downtown operated from 1984 to 1990, when it was replaced with a Hyde Park store in Cherry Creek, according to the company’s website. Watches were added to store inventory along the way.
“We were doing designer bands and things that today are commonplace, but back then people weren’t doing it,” Rosdal said in the 2016 interview. “The 1980s were a very opulent, fashion-forward time, and we were the guys.”
In the mid-1990s, Hyde Park moved outside the metro area for the first time, opening stores in Aspen and Las Vegas. In 1999, both Denver locations were consolidated into a new 10,000-square-foot flagship store in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, where the brand still operates.
Rosdal and his ex-wife Lynn had one son, Aaron Rosdal, who works locally for the industrial real estate company Prologis.
“What he preached to me was show up for your customers, be there for them,” Aaron Rosdal said. “You’re helping them make some of the biggest purchases of their life.”
Aaron Rosdal said he’s “never seen someone who was better with names, with remembering details.”
As a father, Steven Rosdal wanted to be better than his own, who left when he was young.
“He carried that experience — and how could you not — his whole life, and he was very careful not to come close to that,” Aaron Rosdal said.
Rosdal sold his stake in Hyde Park to Pollak in 2007. Pollak said Rosdal “was satisfied with making his life simple.” Aaron Rosdal said his father and Pollak may have had different visions for the company, and different risk tolerance in part due to their age difference. But the partners remained close.
“I think he was happy with the execution of the sale, and I think a year and a half later he was like, ‘Oh, thank God,” Aaron Rosdal said, referring to the Great Recession.
Rosdal stayed active in the jewelry scene after the sale, opening Steven Rosdal Jewelers, or SHR Jewelry, in Cherry Creek in 2012. It operated for about a decade.
Pollak, meanwhile, said he sold Hyde Park last year to The 1916 Company. By that time, the business had hit $100 million in annual revenue, he said. It had 14 stores at the time, including the Hyde Park and multiple watch stores in the Cherry Creek mall, and a number of other signed leases.
“I want to give Steven all the credit in the world,” Pollak said.
A service will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday at Temple Emanuel at 51 Grape St., followed by interment at Emanuel Cemetery within Fairmount Cemetery, according to the obituary.
