MALL LIFE.

• Author: ROZANSKY, DAVID A.

CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT -- RETAIL RESORT, DISCOUNT MALL, DEMOLISHED LANDMARK - SHOPPING CENTERS MUST STAY UP - TO - DATE TO STAY COMPETITIVE

Has America's love affair with the mall come to an end? New malls go up, bigger and flashier than ever, while the old ones decline. Broomfield's FlatIron Crossing opened in August to much fanfare, only a few weeks after Englewood opened its new City Hall on the redeveloped Cinderella City site. Does one mall's rise spell the demise of another?

"That depends on the context," said Sarah Pulley-blank, task force and project manager for the Congress of the New Urbanism (CNU), a San Francisco-based advocacy group. Where there's competition from new suburban malls, older malls closer in can suffer.

Mark Falcone and Will Fleissig of Continuum Partners LLC in Denver are co-chairing a study on how to rescue aging shopping centers by converting them into mixed-use, pedestrian environments. The CNU-sponsored study was set for a September release at the International Council of Shopping Centers meeting in New York City.

Falcone and Fleissig founded Continuum Partners in 1997 and have developed some major projects, including the recently completed Sixteen Market Square, a $55 million project in lower downtown Denver that mixes condominiums, office space and retail stores. They also developed the 120-acre Bradburn project in Westminster, another mixed-use property.

To Falcone, mixed-use neighborhoods are the wave of the future. Malls that don't create a mixed-use, pedestrian environment likely will falter within two or three decades.

Of course, a prime local example of a mall that withered and died is Cinderella City. When it opened in 1968, it was the largest mall west of the Mississippi. Thirty-two years later, it's gone, replaced by the CityCenter Englewood complex designed around RTD's new light rail station at Santa Fe and Hampden Avenue.

Falcone explained, "Cinderella City was every bit as exciting as Park Meadows (Mall) is today. However, the new roads in Denver changed the malls. U.S. Route 285/Hampden Avenue changed. The ring of highways pulled people away from there. The malls that have survived are in areas where the transportation structure stayed intact."

Falcone points to Chapel Hills Mall in Colorado Springs as one that had a hard beginning but has seen a natural renewal due to changing traffic patterns. More people traveled north to I-25 as development pushed up Academy Boulevard, and now the mall is...