One of the Eighties’ Places: The Story of Colorado’s Westminster Mall
For many adolescents on the north end of town, the Westminster Mall, throughout its 34-year history, was the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night. With eleven theaters and eleven different movies to choose from, young people would arrive early to cruise the mall on foot, checking out and flirting with the opposite sex, before seeing their chosen films. While the mall was all of this to me, it was also — with its record stores, see-and-be-seen vibe, sexually-charged atmosphere, and youth-gone-wild feel — a rock ‘n roll mall of sorts, one of those “have-to-be-there” places during the joyous, magical eighties.
Eyeing a neglected market when he placed his newest department store at 88th Avenue and Sheridan Blvd. in Westminster, Joslins president Donald Chabot had to “convince the [site’s] developer to build a mall to attach to the store rather than the other way around” (Barnhouse 45). Construction began in 1975, with Joslins and the mall proper opening in 1977. The Westminster Mall, with its numerous stores and six movie theaters, attracted patrons from Arvada to Broomfield, quickly becoming the center of activity for the fast-growing suburban community surrounding it. The mall originally stretched from east to west, from Joslins on one end to May D&F (added in 1980) on the other. J.C. Penny (arriving in 1987) sat between the two anchors, immediately south of the mall’s centerpiece: hot air balloons rising and falling above shimmering pools of water. A few stores doing business in this original configuration were Musicland, Record Bar, Foot Locker, Helzberg Diamonds, KG Mens Store, Waldenbooks, Wilson’s Leather, and Orange Julius.
My first memorable interaction with the Westminster Mall was buying Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” at Musicland in early 1980. I soon began buying other records at Musicland, most notably the Moody Blues’ Long Distance Voyager and Mick Fleetwood’s The Visitor in late 1981 and the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat (choosing the LP over Ambrosia’s Road Island) in early 1982. But seeing Fast Times at Ridgemont High at Westy was the event that cast the mall as a rock ‘n roll locale in my mind. Shortly after I ran into high-school friend and El Chico-coworker Victor in August of ’82, the two of us renewed our friendship by going to a movie, Fast Times, at the Westminster Six. Stirred by the film — which coincidentally featured a mall as a hub of activity and boy-girl meeting place — we were further excited by finding the same sort of activity taking place at the mall on weekend evenings. Barely three years removed from high school, we too began making regular Friday or Saturday night visits to the mall, buying tickets to late movies in order to walk around beforehand and eye and flirt with girls.
In 1986 the mall expanded northward, with Broadway Southwest halfway up and Mervyn’s at the north end. Sam Goody, Fanzz, Famous Footwear, Frames Plus, Off the Wall, 5·7·9, and Glamour Shots, among other stores, joined the mall’s roster of retailers. A food court and five more theaters (in a stand-alone building on the mall’s west side) were added as well. As the decade progressed and we immersed ourselves in eighties’ culture — embracing the music, cruising Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, and, most visibly, growing our hair long — the mall remained an important place. It was where we saw memorable films like Trading Places, The Breakfast Club, La Bamba, and Mystic Pizza. Where we heard local bands like the Mechanix (on the stage in front of the mall’s balloons). Where Victor had his ear pierced. And where we bought our $200 heavy-metal leather jackets.
But as the eighties gave way to the nineties, the Westminster Mall’s character changed while its role in our lives changed too. May D&F became Foley’s, Joslins became Dillard’s, and Montgomery Ward and Sears moved in while Broadway Southwest moved out. At the same time, the mall became less a weekend hangout and more a place to see movies and shop. Still, Victor and I loved to people-watch: During the holidays, when our shopping was done, we would often spend entire Saturdays or Sundays at the bustling mall admiring women, eating tempting fast food, and simply enjoying the festive Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. It was still, in many ways, the rock ‘n roll mall I knew and loved. By the late nineties, however, the mall, for me, became strictly a place to buy things. I frequented the mall’s major stores — Dillard’s, J.C. Penny, Foley’s, and Sears — but always entered from the outside, never through the mall. And when I did patronize mall stores, I was in and out by the most direct means.
At the close of the nineties, in a move most likely made to keep the mall on par with Broomfield’s new FlatIron Crossing, the Westminster Mall invested nearly $10 million in a major makeover. The remodel lifted the mall to its best financial year ever in 1999, but its fortunes shifted quickly thereafter and its decline was swift. While the mall rallied after longtime tenant Fashion Bar closed in 1997, it could not do the same when Wards and Mervyn’s left in 2001 and 2005, respectively. [3] (It didn’t help that the mall’s owners blocked discount retailer Burlington Coat Factory from occupying the space vacated by Mervyn’s.) Then, in 2009, Macy’s (formerly Foley’s) closed while Dillard’s converted its store to a clearance outlet. Refusing to sell its space to the city, Dillard’s continued until 2011, which in turn kept the mall open for two more years. When Dillard’s finally closed, and Sears soon after in 2012, all that remained was J.C. Penny, which the city planned to incorporate into its redevelopment project — a new downtown Westminster, dense with residences, retail shops, and offices, that would serve as a “civic, cultural, and economic hub” for the community (“Downtown”).
The last time I set foot inside the mall proper was 2010, after knowing the place was slated for closure and future demolition. While walking through virtual emptiness, trying to reconcile images from the past with realities of the present, I crossed paths with a young man no more than 23 years old. There doing the same as I — paying his last respects with one last look around — he said, “This was our place. I can’t believe they’re tearing it down.” To which I replied, “I know. We used to come here all the time too.” We then headed in opposite directions, two generations of north-end mallgoers momentarily lost in silent disbelief.
Time and events had slowly separated me from the mall, just as time slowly took its toll on the place and events led to its downfall and eventual destruction in 2011–12. But that separation was and remains only physical, for the mall, once a big part of who I was, endures as a small part of who I am. Still associated with girl-watching, movies, record stores, youth, freedom, rock ‘n roll, happiness, and the eighties, the well-remembered Westminster Mall lives on inside me, more bright, clear, and colorful than I ever could have imagined.
Above piece excerpted from the forthcoming It’s Only Music: A Musical and Historical Memoir.
[3] When FB’s Westminster Mall store, a clearance center in its last days, finally called it quits on January 31, 1997, the Fashion Bar name disappeared after 64 years in business. Lost Department Stores of Denver (History Press, 2018), 148.
