20th Anniversary: As dot-com bubble burst, FlatIron Crossing soared

BROOMFIELD – Do you remember the year 2000?

It may seem like ancient history now, but it was last year. And business, for the most part, was never better.

Nationally, the economy was beginning to feel the burp of the dot-com bubble beginning to burst, but unemployment rates were at historic lows and the word recession was still only a whisper on economists’ lips. The top story of the year was political. The presidential election had ended with both sides claiming victory. Up for grabs for what seemed like an eternity, but wasn’t, it took a Supreme Court decision to confer the mantle of responsibility for the world’s most powerful nation on George W. Bush.

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In Boulder County, the top story was economic. Business was still booming. Everyone who wanted one had a job, and county consumers with healthy bank accounts were anxiously awaiting the opening of what was promised as the premier regional shopping mall north of Denver’s Cherry Creek. Its name? Flatiron Crossing. True to the tenor of the time, the new high-end shopping center’s opening became the top story of 2000 in Boulder County.

The story of Flatiron Crossing actually begins some 16 years before its opening. Indeed, in 1984, while the county reeled from massive high-tech layoffs and the outlook for the local economy was glum, the city of Broomfield quietly annexed the Flatiron Crossing mall site, saying the annexation was necessary to expand the city’s fledgling economic base.

At the time, Broomfield had next to no retail sales tax revenues.

“We ranked 15 out of 17 suburban cities per capita,” recalls Broomfield Assistant City Manager Charles Ozaki. “We were always half way between Denver and Boulder and because of that we had minimal retail development.”

In 1988, Broomfield conducted a shopping mall feasibility study and identified the area adjacent to U.S. Highway 36 and 96th Street as a potential site for the mall. But it wasn’t until the early ’90s that the city and the Broomfield Economic Development Council (BEDC), actively began recruiting developers.

Clif Harald, BEDC executive director from 1990 to 1995 and current corporate affairs manager for Broomfield’s Sun Microsystems campus, remembers the time well. “My marching orders were clear, to work on expanding Broomfield’s retail base,” he says.

Toward that end, Harald says he immediately began contacting both retailers and shopping center developers to push the city’s U.S. 36 site, which at that time had no 96th Street interchange. “I was trying to work both sides of the street,” he says.

Harald figured that if Broomfield could capture the attention of a retail anchor, the city and the BEDC could find a developer. “Then it dawned on me to ask (the retailers) who were the developers they would want to work with,” he recalls.

Enter Nordstrom. Harald was referred to Phoenix-based Westcor, the mall’s ultimate developer, by the head of real estate at Nordstrom. Nordstrom, along with Dillard’s, Lord & Taylor and Foley’s, would become the upscale mall’s premier anchor tenants.

Westcor and Nordstrom knew each other because they had been in talks for years about the prospect of getting the high-end retailer into one of the shopping malls it owned in the Phoenix area.

In 1993, when officials from Westcor first saw the Broomfield site, they saw potential, but only that. “We said, it’s probably premature today, but things may change,

and there is no reason why we shouldn’t maintain our relationship with you, Clif,” recalls Westcor Senior Vice President David Scholl.

Years passed. Then two pivotal events occurred in 1996 that galvanized Westcor’s commitment to the Broomfield site. The first was the groundbreaking for the 96th Street interchange. The second was the announcement that Dillard’s and Nordstrom would put their first stores in the Denver metro area in the Park Meadows shopping center, miles south of the Denver Tech Center.

Westcor had been studying the metro Denver market and had identified two sites for an upscale regional mall. When the Park Meadows project developer was able to land Dillard’s and Nordstrom as anchors and thus get its financing to go forward with construction, developing a mall on the southern reaches of the market no longer made sense for Westcor. The Broomfield site, however, was ripe.

“We said to Dillard’s and Nordstrom, ‘You can’t serve the metro area with one store on the southeast extremity,'” Scholl recalls. “We said, ‘We’ve been watching the site in Broomfield, we’re going to go see it again and we’ll be back to you.'”

Westcor liked it what it saw. The mall would have great access from U.S. 36 because of the new interchange, the city of Broomfield was ready to be an active partner and Interlocken, the technology park that was giving the city an address on the north metro map, was ready, in Harald’s words, to explode. Icing on the cake was the announcement that Sun Microsystems would build a huge campus in the park.

Nordstrom and Dillard’s were convinced and ground was broken for Flatiron Crossing in 1998. In August 2000, the mall opened its doors, wowing customers with its 1.5 million square feet of space and 130 stores. On its opening weekend, it hosted almost a quarter of a million people who spent almost $2 million — probably more because all stores in the mall didn’t report their first weekend sales — on mall offerings.

It’s early in the game, but so far, the mall project has been a resounding success for the city of Broomfield. Sales tax revenues generated from Flatiron Crossing are expected to amount to about $13 million in 2001. Half will be reinvested in the infrastructure of the mall area — roads, landscaping and transportation. The other half goes into city funds like parks and recreation and open space.

But has it been a success for Westcor? “Standing here today, a year afterward and knowing that the mall would end up doing $400 per square foot its first year, yes, it’s a smashing success,” Westcor’s Scholl says. “I think it is probably the most courageous thing this company has ever done.”