A three-acre community park, an Asian-themed food hall, and hundreds more apartments and townhomes.
All are bound for Downtown Westminster — and they’re stoking optimism about the future of the major redevelopment, providing the next building blocks in this suburb’s long-term vision of a city center where a giant shopping mall once sat.
“There’s a whole second phase of development that is about to come online,” said Heather Cronenberg, the city’s real estate development manager. “We think it’s going to be a draw from all over the metro area.”
The realization of Downtown Westminster, an innovative urban infill project rising from the ashes of the old Westminster Mall, has been underway for about 15 years near where North Sheridan Boulevard meets U.S. 36. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing — the redevelopment has weathered hiccups, and even now there are some empty storefronts.
But city officials take a long view. Another 15 years should bring the project to completion, Cronenberg said.
“This was always meant to be a long-term growth project,” she said.
The next big push for the 102-acre site — which boasts about 1,000 dwelling units across four apartment buildings, with 95% occupancy — is now coming into view. Two “large, impactful” residential projects, the details of which are still under wraps, are going before Westminster City Council for approval in the coming weeks.
On the more immediate horizon, the long-awaited Center Park will open to the public this fall at Fenton Street and Park Place, providing a community gathering spot with a splash pad, picnic shelters and a dog park.
And next year will see the groundbreaking for a 49-unit affordable housing project for seniors, as well as the opening of the seven-restaurant Red Lotus Den eatery and entertainment food hall.
Owner Henry Lee just pulled permits for the 11,500-square-foot food hall late last month. He already owns two other restaurants in the downtown zone.
“That’s what I’m trying to do with the food hall — make it more destination-based,” Lee said. “It’s going to pull in a lot of traffic.”
But as the city center buildout reaches its halfway point, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Downtown Westminster.
Marczyk Fine Foods was slated to occupy a space in the Origin Hotel, but that plan went belly up in 2019. The Tattered Cover bookstore, open on Westminster Boulevard for just over a year, closed in late 2023. An anchor tenant, the movie theater chain Alamo Drafthouse, went through bankruptcy four years ago because of the impact of the pandemic, but it still operates a location at the corner of Westminster Boulevard and West 89th Avenue.
A number of retail spaces sit vacant, with a Superfruit Republic shop hemmed in on both sides by empty storefronts.
Rodney Milton, the executive director of the Urban Land Institute of Colorado, said these kinds of growing pains can be expected in the midst of trying to build something ambitious and iconic.
“Being patient to get what you want is a huge challenge,” he said. “You may want it but the development community may tell you the market can’t sustain that. That’s why initiatives like this take time.”
‘Elements of gathering and connection’
Westminster Councilwoman Sarah Nurmela, who has long worked professionally in urban planning and now is Erie’s planning director, was part of the Downtown Westminster effort from the beginning.
She joined Westminster city staff right about the time the Westminster Mall faced the wrecking ball in 2011. For 34 years, it was a 1.2 million-square-foot shopping mecca for northern suburbanites and a high school hangout for teens stealing a first kiss or sneaking into an R-rated movie.
The idea behind turning the old mall site into the sprawling city’s downtown district, Nurmela said, was to keep the area the city’s public gathering spot. It’s bounded by Sheridan, North Harlan Street, and West 88th and 92nd avenues.
“We want to create these elements of gathering and connection for people,” she said. “We want it to be the center of activity, the center of community — like the mall used to be.”
To that end, Downtown Westminster still features a JCPenney department store at the center of things — an eye-catching vestige of the circa-1977 mall of which it was once a part. There’s also a dated Bowlero bowling alley and an Olive Garden restaurant that harken back to an earlier retail era.
“I don’t mind these unique quirks,” Nurmela said. “They are part of the story of downtown.”
Mall redevelopment projects have been on the rise over the last couple decades as giant enclosed shopping centers have fallen out of favor across the country. Westminster’s project is hardly Colorado’s first.
More than 20 years ago, the Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood was replaced by the Belmar Shopping Center after Villa Italia fell into disrepair and became blighted. In 2006, the Southglenn Mall in Centennial made way for The Streets at Southglenn — another outdoor shopping center supplanting an aging mall.
Like Lakewood and Centennial, Westminster was part of the vast post-World War II suburban spread in America. The city never organically developed a traditional downtown, even while other communities in the metro area, like Golden, Louisville and Littleton, did.
“It was more of a farming community with orchards — it just had a different growth model,” Cronenberg said of the city of 115,000.
But Westminster’s attempt at urban transformation is about more than just replacing a shopping center with a shopping center. It started a decade and a half ago with entreaties to three separate developers to build a master-planned, multiuse project at the site, Nurmela said.
“We really wanted someone else to take this on,” she said.
But the Great Recession made commitments to long-term investment difficult to find. So the city’s urban renewal authority bought the land, demolished the mall, built the streets and utilities, and sold off parcels to developers to start shaping its future downtown.
Total investment by the city so far, Nurmela said, is about $100 million.
For that price, she said, Westminster gets to guide the project the way it wants.
The Eaton Street Apartments are priced to be affordable, while 10% of the apartments at both the Aspire and Ascent complexes were required by the city to be priced at 60% of the area median income for lower-income renters, Nurmela said.
And Downtown Westminster’s growth has begun to inject life into surrounding retail centers, the councilwoman said, most notably with last month’s opening of a Trader Joe’s grocery store just to the northeast of the downtown zone — the trendy chain’s ninth location in Colorado.
“We don’t have to rush it. We just have to make sure we’re building a project that supports and feeds that vision,” she said. “This is not a 10-year play, this is a 300-year play.”
$300k dedicated to activation
Downtown Westminster is a purposefully dense mixed-use neighborhood. Think five-story apartment buildings and ground-level retail — where quick access to the Flatiron Flyer bus on nearby U.S. 36 opens up easy travel opportunities to both Denver and Boulder.
That’s proven handy to 31-year-old Austin Tristan, who has lived in the Aspire apartment building for half a year. Walking his dog last week in Downtown Westminster’s Central Square, Tristan said he moved there from downtown Denver and works from home.
“I like how it is right now,” he said. “It’s peaceful and quiet most of the time.”
Venturing into Denver to hit the bars with friends on occasion is on his social calendar, and that’s where public transit makes the choice easy. Tristan said he wouldn’t mind seeing a little more energy and bustle in Downtown Westminster, starting with more restaurants to choose from and a dedicated brewery.
The list of eateries includes a Vatos Tacos, a Tap & Burger location and a Bonchon Korean chicken joint. Salady, a fast-casual restaurant offering salads, grain bowls and wraps, opened its doors less than a month ago.
Joao Zeraick, a Brazilian who moved into a townhome on West 92nd right next to the Bowlero less than two weeks ago, said he would also like to see more places to eat.
“Not chain restaurants but local restaurants,” he said. “I would like a brewery that brings more people to the area.”
In May, the city, in partnership with the Westminster Chamber of Commerce, launched an “activation” effort to “bring increased foot traffic and community engagement” to the downtown area, according to a city press release. It will dedicate $300,000 over the next year, paid through taxes generated by downtown businesses and residents, to stage events that attract people to the area.
Already, the city is pulling in more tax revenues from business activity in Downtown Westminster ($6.8 million in 2024) than the Westminster Mall generated in its final full year of existence ($2.4 million in 2010). Adjusted for inflation, that’s a nearly 96% increase.
And it gives Lee, the Red Lotus food hall owner, reason to be hopeful for the future of Downtown Westminster.
“There’s a lot of potential,” he said.
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