THORNTON TOWN CENTER
Thornton Town Center is one of the three LJ Hooker malls. Now, all three are closed except one which isn't doing well at all these days. Deadmalls has stories on the other two: the infamous Forest Fair Mall and the lesser known Richland Fashion Mall in South Carolina.
Unfortunately, I've never been to Thornton Town Center and will never be. Information on this mall is extremely hard to find on the Internet.
It was a relatively small mall and opened in 1989 with bigg's, a large Ohio-based hypermarket. At the time, it was a very novel idea to have a massive building selling both groceries and general merchandise. Kansas City and Dallas tried Wal-Mart's "Hypermart USA", French-based Auchan was an interesting curiosity to those in Houston. Of course, Meijer was always offering a variation on this, but only in a small pocket of the United States.
The 250,000 square foot store occupied a large portion of the mall and occupied several storefronts. There was a 300,000 square foot amusement park called Time Out on the Court (operated by Sega and very similar to Forest Fair Mall).
Unfortunately, paired with the failure of LJ Hooker, and two nearby competing malls: Northglenn Mall (which was catty-corner to Thornton) and Westminster Mall (farther north) destroyed Thornton Town Center. In 1995, a portion of the mall was razed for The Home Depot. bigg's continued, but it never achieved major success (it was supposed to expand throughout the western U.S., but it didn't happen). Anyway, as time went on, Westminster cleaned house on the malls, and by the time bigg's closed in 2003, Northglenn had been demolished for a strip mall and Westminster, ironically, was starting to suffer.
By the end of 2005, Thornton Town Center was gone. The arcade was closed, the carousel sold off, the remaining part of the mall (the rest had been torn down for Wal-Mart Supercenter and other shops) had been gutted and turned into Bally Total Fitness.
Image and information courtesy of the City of Thornton.