Colorado Real Estate Journal -
The former Buckingham Square mall in Aurora, renamed as the Gardens on Havana, is emerging as a huge success story, five years after it was razed. “I know it is a corny phrase, but it is true. This is a case of a Phoenix rising from the ashes,” said Dean Insalaco, a vice president of Englewood-based Miller Real Estate Investments, the owner of the 61-acre development at Mississippi Avenue and Havana Streets. In 2007, Miller (then Miller Weingarten Realty) took over the failing mall, which was launched more than 40 years ago. “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” said Insalaco, as the go-go days of commercial real estate were about to be replaced with the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Today, however, Insalaco, who is in charge of leasing the center, said about 97 percent of the space in the Gardens on Havana is spoken for. “Not only were we very successful in leasing a significant amount of space during the harshest retail environment in my 30-year career, we transformed what was literally a dead mall into a thriving hub of retail activity,” Insalaco said. “And it is a thriving center. Tenants are doing well.” About 38 tenants either occupy or have signed deals for about 473,000 square feet in the center. Some of the bigger tenants include a 142,500-sf Target, a 92,000-sf Kohl’s, a 50,484-sf Dick’s Sporting Goods, a 46,737- sf Toys “R” Us/Babies “R” Us, a 26,308-sf Sprouts Farmer Market and a 15,390-sf Office Depot. Other retailers that have inked deals there include Lane Bryant, Noodles & Co., Wells Fargo, Starbucks and Jackson Hewitt, to name just a few. “We have a really nice mix and a lot of strong, national tenants,” Insalaco said. A number of tenants are moving from elsewhere in Aurora, as they find this location more attractive. “This is quickly becoming the epicenter of this part of Aurora,” Insalaco said. He said the downturn actually might have worked to the center’s favor since retailers now must be more selective about their locations than they were when stores couldn’t seem to expand fast enough, often taking space in less than stellar sites. “The difference here is that this is fundamentally great real estate,” Insalaco said. “It is really is at Main and Main. A lot of other big projects across the country that were started in the 2007-2008 time frame still have not recovered.” In many ways, he said, the Gardens on Havana is recapturing the luster it had when Buckingham Square first opened more than four decades ago. When Buckingham Square opened its doors in 1971, it was heralded as an innovative, modern mall. It had a Safeway store that sold gourmet foods, a Montgomery Ward that introduced stores within the store to sell hard goods, soft goods and home furnishings and a Fashion Bar designed by a well-known Denver architect, Richard Crowther. But the following decade wasn’t kind to the mall. The Safeway closed, and on the roof of the former grocery store, developers installed a giant waterslide and tried to rebrand Buckingham as the “fun mall.” As time went on, Buckingham Square was anything but fun, as owners tried to breathe life into it. In the 1990s, Woolworth closed, as well as a Dave Cook Sporting Goods store, after it was bought by competitor Gart Brothers. The next decade brought more closings. The first was Montgomery Ward. It was followed by Mervyn’s and then Dillard’s. It was officially one of the dinosaur malls in the metro area. Others included Southglenn Mall, now the Streets at SouthGlenn; Cinderalla City, now a mixed use, transit-oriented development that serves as the municipal center for Englewood; and Villa Italia, now Belmar in Lakewood. Typically, the new uses are public-private partnerships, with tax increment financing used to make the redevelopments economically viable. The Westminster Mall is the most recent mall that the city hopes to turn into vibrant, high-density, mixed-use center. The former Buckingham Square seems destined to enjoy the success of many of the other Denver-area malls that fell on hard times before being redeveloped. “You know, after knocking this mall down five years ago, we started coming out of the ground at the worst possible time, but through a lot of hard work, good real estate, the help of the city and a resurgence all along the Havana corridor, this has turned into a pretty good development,” Insalaco said. “It is a true success story.”