Malled!

Other early metro-area malls suffered the same fate. But dead malls don't disappear; they linger on as monumental eyesores that blight neighborhoods. At one point, Englewood's 65-acre Cinderella City was the biggest mall west of the Mississippi; it was finally demolished in 2000 after a decade of pitiful deterioration, and the area has since been turned into a mixed-use mini-downtown. Lakewood's Villa Italia Mall fell to the wrecking ball in 2002.

Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture at Yale University, has written numerous books examining the often-ignored history of America's suburbs. This omission is strange, she points out, since "most Americans live in suburbs these days, not in inner cities or rural areas." In Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000, she outlines the evolution of single-family housing from the street-car suburbs of the late 1800s to the mass-produced, post-war "sitcom suburbs." One of the critical developments in the creation of modern-day suburbs and, in particular, modern-day malls was the gradual change in tax codes between 1954 and 1986 to include accelerated depreciation for commercial properties, she says. Basically, this accounting trick meant that instead of assuming a property built on a previously undeveloped site had a life of thirty or forty years, you could assume it only had a life of seven years. "It meant that you could have losses -- tax losses, paper losses -- you could set against your profits, and therefore the whole thing was going to be less profitable; you could pay less taxes," she explains.

Essentially, the government had found a way to subsidize new real-estate development in locations far from the core city. "But what did happen as a result was that developers started to build faster and more cheaply since they knew they'd be turning these things over," Hayden goes on. "What was implied [in the tax code] was that there would be dead malls and dead main streets and declining places every time the new one opened up. And what's happening [in Denver] is simply the same process fifty years down the line. I think you see some areas where the older suburbs are in terrible shape, and other places where they are experiencing a revival, especially if they have some type of public transportation and a good location."

At the former home of Villa Italia, for example, Lakewood and developer Continuum Partners rehabbed the hundred-acre pad into Belmar, one of the nation's first attempts at creating a true urban downtown district on the site of an old shopping mall. The raves that Belmar has drawn stand in stark contrast to what's happened in Northglenn. Under pressure from a city council desperate for a boost in revenue, Northglenn Mall was finally demolished in 1998 by Jordan Perlmutter & Co.; the site has since been reconstructed as the Marketplace at Northglenn, an outdoor power center with a Lowe's, a Borders, an Old Navy and several other big-box mega-marts that stare at each other over an amplitude of parking and some obligatory landscaping.

While its longtime rival bit the dust, Westminster Mall celebrated its twentieth birthday as the northern area's supreme shopping destination, with 1.5 million square feet and 170 stores. By now, Joslins had become Dillard's, Broadway Southwest was Sears, and Montgomery Ward had jumped on as a sixth anchor. Sales totaled $289 million in 1998, the second-highest in Colorado per square foot.

Kenton Anderson, Westminster's general manager since 1985, credits the mall's lasting popularity to its tenant mix, which straddles the line between practical-minded purchases and high-end appeal. "We've always been the type of place where middle America shops," he says. But Anderson acknowledges that the lack of competition in the area has contributed to the mall's success, too.

The neighboring cities of Broomfield and Arvada had long watched with irritation as their citizens, guided by the magnetic pull of the Westminster Mall, drove into the heavily retailed town of Westminster to spend their dollars at both the mall and the 4.4 million square feet of surrounding retail space. So in the early '90s, both Broomfield and Arvada began rezoning huge swaths of land at their western boundaries to allow development of commercial and office space, in hopes of landing a large retail project that could compete with Westminster Mall.

Arvada's ambitions for the intersection of highways 72 and 93 were largely blocked by the parcel's proximity to the contaminated Rocky Flats site and Boulder's successful purchase of 1,100 acres for open space at the entrance to Coal Creek Canyon. But Broomfield's efforts were much more successful. The growth of the Interlocken office park along the U.S. 36 corridor added several hundred thousand square feet in office space to the area and, in the late '90s, spurred developers to choose the western tip of the city for a new super-regional mall.

Westminster didn't take the threat of the upscale FlatIron Crossing lightly. In 1999, city manager Bill Christopher proclaimed that Westminster was committed to maintaining its foothold in the northwest retail market. "In order to do this," he said, "aggressive reinvestment in a large economic engine like the Westminster Mall is warranted."