Malled!

In partnership with the Westminster Mall Company, which owns and manages the center, the city covered $7.5 million of the $10 million facelift that gave the mall a more contemporary look, with new facades, skylights and seating areas. "Westminster Mall will continue to be a major player in the north area's marketplace," Christopher predicted at the ribbon-cutting in 2000, pointing out that the mall was tied with the then brand-new FlatIron as the second-biggest shopping center in Colorado, behind Park Meadows' 1.6 million square feet.

Despite the city's investment, recent years have not been kind to Westminster Mall. The remodel of the food court promised in 2001 has yet to be done, and most of the eateries have closed, save for an Italian and a Mexican joint. While some stores seem to be prospering -- cell-phone outlets and sports-jersey shops are uncommonly abundant -- the classic hot-air balloons are deflated and the fountain is empty.

From its peak in 1999, sales-tax collection at the Westminster Mall has decreased by 35 percent. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate has risen by 15 percent, and today only 80 percent of the leaseable space is filled. BC Surf and Sport moved from the mall's almost-empty north wing to a spot near the interior earlier this year. "We were so dead up there it was crazy," says assistant manager Zach Romero. Business has since picked up, but the shop isn't doing anywhere near the numbers it was when the mall was hopping.

While Anderson admits that FlatIron has affected the mall's sales, he points to other factors, too. The economic downturn in 2001 had an impact on all metro-area malls. And the big-box discounters and power-center-type developments that transformed the retail landscape in the '90s have hurt his traditional anchors. "You don't have department stores anymore with the strength in the changing retail environment," he says. "Sears is combining with Kmart, Foley's is merging with Macy's, and Target is spinning off Mervyn's. That's quite a change in a short period of time."

In 2001, when Montgomery Ward closed all six of its Colorado stores, he began to see the mall lose strength, Anderson says. But with five remaining anchors, he's confident the mall "has stayed viable and will continue to stay viable."

Brent McFall, Westminster's city manager, doesn't express the same confidence. "Retail is a fickle business, and the tastes of the customers and what they're looking for, the atmosphere, has to be constantly reinvented," he says. "In the case of the Westminster Mall, the ownership has not significantly reinvested in the mall property itself." He would like to see a complete overhaul that would "reposition" the mall to appeal to consumers whose shopping habits have changed; this might entail tearing down certain sections of the structure.

But Anderson believes the $7.5 million the city invested in the mall's facelift has already paid off. Westminster could have done nothing, as Boulder did with the forty-year-old Crossroads Mall, which fell into near abandonment after the opening of FlatIron and was demolished last year. "Nothing was done, and now it's extinct," Anderson says. "It's gone. It has disappeared, and Westminster is still here." The 65-acre Crossroads site is being rebuilt as an open-air, "main-street-style" retail development dubbed "29th Street" by a subsidiary of Macerich Co., the Santa Monica-based real-estate firm that also owns FlatIron.

Zach Romero remembers the slow, painful demise of Crossroads very well. He worked at the BC Surf and Sport outlet there, and recalls dreary times in 2001 and 2002 when only ten customers a day might wander into the store. He's afraid the same fate could befall Westminster Mall, especially after the three new retail developments appear along northern I-25. "Yeah, as soon as those new malls open up, that's going to kill us," he says.

One of those developments, the one-million-square foot Orchard Town Center, is located on the northeast boundary of Westminster. Scheduled to open between fall 2006 and spring 2007, Orchard will feature many of the same anchors now found at Westminster. But McFall says he isn't worried that the new mall might cannibalize its existing mall. "For us, it is really a distinctively different market than the Westminster Mall," he explains. "It doesn't mean there won't be some cannibalization, but we think by and large it will not have a significant impact on the Westminster Mall."

None of the new developments are malls in the traditional sense, because all are variations on the open-air, main-street theme. "But it's going to have an effect on all the malls," Anderson predicts, and that includes Westminster Mall. "The retail pie keeps getting cut up into smaller and smaller pieces, and that effect is just more dilution of the retail market as a whole."