Cinderella Can't Go to the Ball Anymore

On the corner of my block is a building that is now a house but which used to be a corner grocery store. You can tell by the architecture that it was once so, but for years the sign on the sign of the building has been painted over. Today I noticed that either the owner of the building is trying to remove layers of paint to expose the old sign, or else the hot weather is causing the paint to peel off. The word "GROCERY" is now clearly visible. There are a lot of these old buildings in my neighborhood. Some are now houses, and others are shops selling all kinds of useless, charming things. None of them sells food anymore, because now we have grocery stores. The old buildings' original purpose has become obsolete.

That got me thinking about obsolete uses for commercial buildings (yes, I do think about things like this--I'm a real estate nerd). I'm 43 years old, which is not old enough to be old, but is older than young, and I can now look back and see how things have changed in my home town. The Denver in which I grew up is largely gone. It's not just that the metro area has added more than a million new people since I was a child (in fact, the area has just about doubled in size). It's that the malls of my youth are, for the most part, history.

Those of you who know me know that I wrestle all the time between being a complete materialist and castigating those in our society who seemingly live to spend. Lately I've been swinging more toward the latter position (as in last week's post about Flatiron Crossing), but from time to time I swing back and spend more than I should. I like to embrace this contradiction, because to be completely consistent is to be boring.

I've always been fascinated by shopping malls. When I was ten years old my favorite after school activity was to go with my mother and my friends Kevin and/or Marty to a shopper's paradise known as "Cinderella City" (yes, I know what you're thinking, and it's true!). People who have moved to Denver in the past decade have no idea how important this mall was to the Denver area's collective psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. This mall was the BIG TIME--the largest mall between Chicago and Los Angeles, the place where everyone went shopping for everything. It was torn down about a decade ago, after a long twilight period where the mall's vacancy rate slowly got higher and higher.

But oh, how wonderful this place was in its heyday. It had four anchor stores upon opening: Joslin's (a Denver chain later absorbed by Dillard's), JC Penney (known then as "Penney's"), The Denver Dry (a Denver chain later absorbed by the May Company, and now known as Foley's), and Neusteter's (Denver's answer to Saks). There was a two-level Woolworth and a Twin Cinema (Denver's second multiplex, after the Villa Italia Twin). There was high-end (Joseph Magnin, Lillie Rubin) and low-end. There was the magical odor emanating from Orange Julius, a mixture of hotdog and citrus and malt. There was Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, and Taco Bueno (a fast-food subsidiary of Casa Bonita), and Burstein-Applebee Records. There was Hatch's Gifts (with a window filled with futuristic fiber-optic lights) and Hatch's Books (in the pre-Tattered Cover era, Denver's best independent bookstore chain). And there was that thundering fountain in the very center of the mall that was so loud that you couldn't speak in a normal tone of voice, and that moved so much water that that part of the mall was always more humid (and chlorinated) than the rest of the center.

The mall failed mostly for the usual reason that malls fail: changing times. Southwest Plaza opened in 1983 and pulled most of the middle class shoppers out, leaving only lower-income shoppers (this was long after most of the higher-end stores such as Neusteter's had gone away).

But it also failed because it was hard work to shop at Cinderella City. Instead of the dumbbell design common in the 1960s, with anchor stores at each end, with one or more in the middle, Cinderella City was a giant "W." To get from Joslin's at one end of the W to Neusteter's at the other required a 15- to 20-minute walk on concrete floors. You'd walk the length of the Gold Mall (each segment was color-coded so you couldn't get lost, unless you were colorblind). After a left turn at Penney's, you'd enter the the Blue Mall, at the center of which was the double-height Blue Room with its thunderous fountain and Orange Julius. From the Blue Room you'd turn right and go past The Denver Dry (in 1974 or so shortened to just "The Denver"). Finally you'd turn left again at the start of the Rose Mall, at the far end of which was Neusteter's.

Ah, but there was also downstairs. Below the Rose Mall lay the Shamrock Mall--but you'd never know it, because the architect didn't put in any visual connection--the Shamrock Mall was (ironically, since it was named for a growing thing) subterranean and self-contained, with connecting escalators only at one end. Never full, at its peak the Shamrock Mall probably boasted 80% occupancy. Below the Gold Mall was (originally) the also ironically-named Sunflower Mall (and to get from Shamrock to Sunflower you had to ascend stairs, go through the Blue Room, and then go back downstairs after traipsing down past Penney's again). But that name didn't last, because the mall ownership could never quite get anyone to sign a lease there (except the Barbizon School of Beauty--a heavy advertiser on Channel 2, during its re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, and Hogan's Heroes).

So beginning in about 1972 (the mall had opened in 1966 or 1967) they changed course. They carved out little Olde English streets in what had been unused retail space to create "Cinder Alley." This quaint little village was filled with tiny little shoppes--not much bigger than suburban family rooms. You could buy bratwurst and ginger beer from a tiny German restaurant, or fine batch-roased coffees and teas. There was a seashell shop at which I was a regular customer. It was extremely charming, and so successful initially that the mall management expanded it greatly, filling most of the old Sunflower Mall.

But it didn't last. Like the process I described last week, slowly things began to fail. Cinder Alley was filled with small businesses, and when the economy got weak under Nixon, Ford and Carter, they couldn't make it. The rest of the mall started losing its chain stores, and it filled up with lava lamp emporiums and places to buy waterbeds, role-play board games, and bongs. In the 1980s the mall ownership attempted to revivify the mall by slapping down oak parquet over the concrete. They also removed the fountain to create an opening down into a new food court that linked, for the first time, Cinder Alley and the Shamrock Mall (in space previously devoted to parking). To replace Neusteter's and the Twin Cinema, both long since shuttered, they brought in Broadway Southwest, a fairly upscale department store chain from Phoenix that tried to make a go of it in Denver for a few years. But the writing was on the wall.

After The Denver was absorbed by May D&F (pre-Foley's), the new owners decided to shut the store, leaving a big, empty hole. Broadway Southwest shut down just a few years after it opened. Cinder Alley was long gone, the quaint streets and lamps having been ripped out to install a giant children's indoor playground called "Nathan's Funtastic," or some such. Montgomery Ward (remember them?) replaced the Denver for a few years, but ultimately people just stopped coming.

The City of Englewood worked out a deal with the owners of the mall, and (except for Broadway Southwest) the whole giant pile was torn down and replaced by a Wal-Mart-anchored neighborhood center and some apartments. The Broadway Southwest was turned into Englewood's City Hall and Library. RTD installed a stop at the western end of the property when they extended Light Rail down Santa Fe Drive in the mid-1990s. Except for the odd diagonal orientation of City Hall (diagonal to the city streets, that is), there's no trace of what used to be the pride of Denver.

Okay, that's now two postings about malls. I promise not to make this a mall blog.