Malled!

Byron Koste, director of the University of Colorado Real Estate Center, says malls have to distinguish themselves in order to attract a customer base that is increasingly particular and diverse. "In the good old days, all malls were the same," he points out. "Southwest mall was the same as the Northwest mall, same as the Westminster Mall, same as the Crossroads Mall. They had the same tenants, same configuration, and if you were blindfolded, you would have no clue where in the world you were. What is happening is that malls are having to attract customers. How do you do that? You differentiate."

Developers are now trying to understand the specific market they're serving, and designing the atmosphere and tenant mix around that. "Because a good mall for the southeast would be different than a good mall for the southwest," Koste says. "Now, one could say that FlatIron and Park Meadows are similar, but I guarantee that what happens out on I-25 and Colorado 7 is going to be different, because they're serving a different clientele."

And when FlatIron opened ten miles northeast of Westminster Mall, what clientele was it catering to? "Yuppies," Koste says. "I mean, it's yuppie heaven. Look at the restaurants; look at the stores. They have a Bed, Bath & Beyond, a Restoration Hardware. They have three or four that have virtually the same type of product, and they're all doing well because the young, wealthy folks buy that stuff like popcorn."

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When FlatIron Crossing held its grand-opening celebration in August 2000, approximately 100,000 people drove to Broomfield to check out the new mall located off the Boulder Turnpike. Following the pattern of the successful Park Meadows to the south, Phoenix-based Westcor Partners had developed the mall as a "retail resort" with a strong emphasis on high-end shopping and superior architectural design. It took more than two years and $220 million to complete the 170-acre site, which contains enough square yards of asphalt to pave 97 football fields and enough square feet of interior glass to create 4,400 car windshields, and involved moving enough dirt to fill 87 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Anchored by a Foley's, a Nordstrom, a Gaylan's sporting goods store (now Dick's), a Dillard's and a since-defunct Lord & Taylor, the core section of the mall featured 160 stores and restaurants, and the half-mile-long outdoor area had room for another forty stores. Shoppers marveled at the elegant yet earthy space, from the vaulted ceiling with exposed oak beams to the overstuffed leather couches and flagstone flooring. Promotional materials said that FlatIron's designers had been inspired by the beauty of the "mountain canyons, high country trails, and prairies not too far away" and wanted to express "the setting and sensibilities of the landscape where it takes root."

But the same bucolic landscape that marketing rhapsody celebrated was already endangered. Roll Development's FlatIron Marketplace opened just east of the mall in early 2001; the 432,000-square-foot "lifestyle center" featured some thirty chain stores and restaurants and was anchored by Best Buy, Nordstrom Rack and the Great Indoors. And soon more dirt will be moved for Coalton Acres' massive, 165-acre Main Street at FlatIron, with 657,000 square feet of stores, restaurants and office space, including a 200-room Marriott, a DSW Shoe Warehouse and a 206,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter.

The sheer size of the mega-mall and these two neighboring companions makes FlatIron a city unto itself -- an arcadia of shopping where nobody lives, but where everybody goes to get their clothing, food and entertainment. Unlike shopping districts that are designed to serve a specific area, FlatIron leasing agents boast that the mall is strategically located to attract shoppers from as far away as Laramie and Cheyenne, not to mention Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Longmont and the north Denver suburbs. And especially Boulder.

Having long used a city sales tax to purchase open space around city edges, the Boulder City Council faced its own shopping-center dilemma in the late '70s. "The issue wasn't shopping center or no shopping center," says former Boulder County commissioner Paul Danish, who'd authored the city's original growth-management plan as a member of Boulder City Council in 1976. "The issue there was, where does the shopping center go?" Crossroads Mall had stood at two main thoroughfares, Arapahoe Avenue and 28th Street, a half mile from the downtown core, since 1963. But now developers were eyeing Foothills Parkway at the far edge of the city for a new collection of department stores.

"We had done comprehensive planning that showed a compact city, and we wanted it centrally located," Danish says. Developers threatened to take their project to nearby Louisville unless Boulder capitulated, and finally both parties reached an agreement that the city would institute an urban-renewal authority and set up tax-increment financing to pay for the expansion of Crossroads. Completed in 1983, the new, two-story section included several department stores and a Foley's, which was the only large retailer still in operation when the mall finally bottomed out in the late '90s.