Stripmalls: Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek
No blog dedicated to the greatness of Colorado Boulevard would be complete without a thorough and complete breakdown of one of CB’s most ubiquitous features (NO, not the traffic, very funny!) - the STRIP MALL! Colorado Boulevard’s strip malls are many and varied, from a two-store huddle to the many-square-block behemoths. While there are many strip mall-heavy streets in America, CB is special in that the age of the shopping centers as well as the kinds stores within the malls vary hugely. You have the new, fancy malls such as Glendale’s “City Set” with nice restaurants like Jax and also old, less flashy ones such as Wellshire Plaza a few miles south. You have brand new Targets cheek to jowl with OGs like Poppies. You have Michaels and you have Daddy Danks.
As you can imagine, there are way too many malls to cover all in one post. So I am breaking it down shopping center by shopping center, one at a time. Don’t you worry, each and every mall will be getting its due via a clear-eyed, completely unbiased review on this very blog. But, for now, I thought we should kick off this feature by celebrating the shopping center that is probably one of the largest and weirdest - Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek!
The name may not ring a bell (I had no idea this shopping center even had a name until, uh, today when I was doing research for this post - that’s right, I do research! These posts take WORK, folks!) but I assure you that you know the place. I personally spend an unfortunate amount of time there. It’s sandwiched between the golden office building (also a subject for another post) and the car dealerships, and is home to some of the biggest heavy hitters along CB. You know what I mean: the shopping center with Home Depo, Cost Plus World Market, Staples, Whole Foods, DQ, and, of course, Chili’s on Colorado and Ohio. Oh yeah!
As an initial matter, I would be remiss if I do not address the highly bizarre parking lot complexes of Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek. It’s a big mish-mash of enormous lots, interior streets, and very few ways to get from said interior streets to the lots. For example, if you want to get over to the Whole Foods from the light at Ohio, you have to immediately turn into the 1st Bank parking lot, cross in front of the drive through ATM, go down a weird little hill, and then drive through the Home Depot parking lot over the Whole Foods. And does anyone else feel they make it extremely challenging to both get into and get out of the Cost Plus lot? Plus, Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek’s sheer size makes it hard to park and hit all your stops in one go - do you really want to park at the Whole Foods and walk across a massive parking lot, across a “street,” and through another massive parking lot to get to Cost Plus? Not really! Or at least, I don’t. So you can imagine what I do - I drive . . . across the parking lot. It’s embarrassing but true.
Also, the Home Depo parking lot is, objectively, one of the worst places on the planet at certain times, such as Saturday mornings in May. It may even be worse than the Cherry Creek Whole Foods’ parking lot. First, it’s huge, and not in a good way. I think you can park a full city block away from the store itself and still be in the Home Depot parking lot. And then to actually get into the store from the lot, you have to run the gauntlet of rental equipment, sheds, landscaping stuff, people selling oranges from the back of their truck (true story!), everyone parked in front of the Garden Center to load their flowers, the Garden Center itself, and, finally, the hot dog seller who is reeeeeal hard to resist some days. Then after you shop, you’ve gotta wheel your always-precarious cart filled with plants and shit back through the maze to your car half a mile away. It’s a process, or a journey, if you will, and it pretty much always pisses me off even when everything goes smoothly. In fact, I’m a little riled up just writing this down. GRRR.
BUT. Ahem. Back to the matter at hand! Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek and all its glory! And the real glory here is the vast and varied shopping experience Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek offers. Let’s talk shop(s). This place has some of my most frequently-visited shops, all in one place. For example (and this may be a comment more on my sad mom-life than on the glory that is Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek, but never mind!), my bank, my kids’ haircut place, an urgent care, Whole Foods, and Cost Plus are all there. Sometimes we even make a family day out of it and and two of us will hit the Green (as we call Whole Foods in our house) and two of us will hit the hardware store (as we call Home Depot in our house, clever, right?). Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek also has a bona fide smoothie store, an all-hospital scrub store, H&R Block, a ramen place, an Orange Theory, Buffalo Wild Wings, and, deliciously, Las Delicias.
Crucially, it also has a Chili’s and a drive though Dairy Queen. Oh, DQ, how I love thee. Let me count the ways. One - CB has not one but two (and possibly three soon!) DQs. Two - Blizzards (heath bar, if you are curious). Three - Treatza Pizzas. Four - Peanut Buster Parfaits. Five - Orange Julius! Six - Chili Dogs. Just kidding. I do NOT love hot food from DQ. I’m pretty sure that is the ticket to the nearest toilet, and I say this as someone who regularly risks catching norovirus to eat at Chipotle and who will scrape the mold off the cheese and then eat the cheese. Everyone’s got a line in the sand, and hot food from DQ is mine. Setting the bar high, folks!
I also wanted to note that Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek contains one of the few (but not the only! Oh no!) multi-level shopping experiences along CB. That’s right, the building along the North-West corner is a two-leveler. I’d like to say it’s quaint, but really, this sort of retail experience is just not that great. So, I will say it is fitting - for the blog and certainly this street - and leave it at that.
One more thing - who has noticed the always-empty parking lot in the Northeast corner of Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek? It’s big, its empty, and it’s . . . odd. Which is saying something considering the subject matter of both this blog and this post in particular.
Finally, I must talk about what used to be located in Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek - Celebrity Sports Center! Ah, Celebrity’s! We will never see your kind again, I’m afraid. For the uninitiated, Celebrity’s was a huge indoors “recreational complex” boasting multiple arcades with video games, skee ball, 80 (!) bowling lanes, a restaurant, a billiards room, bumper cars, and a 50 meter indoor pool with not one, not two, but three VERY BIG water slides. To get to the two big ones you had to run up these indoor walkways and then wait your turn shivering with the other kids, and then promise the lifeguards that you would never, EVER turn upside down or go backwards in the slide, or stop and wait for your friend, which, naturally, everyone then did as soon as they were out of the lifeguard’s eyesight. It hosted more kids’ birthday parties than you can count (including mine). Competitive swim leagues would hold their practices there (which I always found dubious due to the near certainly that pool was peed in multiple times a day, see kids birthday parties). Alas, it was torn down in 1994 and Denver will never be the same.
Wow! I think this may be the most comprehensive breakdown of all that Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek has to offer ever written, both the good and the bad! It may also be the only breakdown ever written of Skyline Plaza @ Cherry Creek, but that’s ok! I do it with love for my vast readership. Until next time, CB 4-eva!