so... I know of the outlet mall down there - it's ok, but too far to drive for most of what I need. There's also Aspen Grove, which is an outdoor mall-ish thing about halfway to Castle Rock. I used to work in the Apple store down there. It was one of the first outdoor malls in the SW Denver area. now they're bloody everywhere.
Link related Lake City Way in Seattle used to be a thriving retail district. Restaurants, retail, you name it. It was mostly kept alive by a thriving teen scene; the kids from Nathan Hale and other high schools would cruise up and down all night long. Then they instituted a no-cruising ordinance. When I moved there, in 1996, Lake City Way was used car dealerships and strip clubs. If you want to see the pinnacle of the indoor mall, it's in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Cameron Crowe's classic portrays the Sherman Oaks Galleria as the absolute epicenter of teen culture, the place where high school simply wouldn't happen. However, between America's Most Wanted, To Catch A Predator and the whole of the 80s/90s Stranger Danger epidemic, business and media managed to convince Americans that Dick and Jane were likely to be abducted if they were out too late. Meanwhile the retail establishments didn't like the way the teenagers loitered and never bought anything so let's do what we can to drive them out - after all, this is a family establishment. Outdoor malls, oddly enough, are modeled on outlet malls... which are modeled on strip malls. The difference is a strip mall is not a destination. An outlet mall is, and generally one of suffering. The outdoor mall - and trust me, I used to design for them - is basically a gutting of an indoor mall in order to reclaim marketshare through novelty. Typically you destroy your old parking, put up the outdoor mall, then destroy your old mall and put up parking for your new mall. this gives you a chance to flush out all the old, passe brands (Sbarro, Wherehouse) and put in new, fancy brands (Panera, fuckifiknowIdon'tgotomalls). It's still a mall. Not mentioned in this article - the malls that are dying are the ones that were part of a retail overexpansion 20 years ago. As the teenagers flock to Facebook (because their parents won't let them out) they don't support that which was built to feed off them and the outliers die. The majority of malls that are being reinvigorated were destination malls back when malls were new. It takes fewer of them. Sherman Oaks Galleria? Yeah, that got refaced and "outdoored" a decade ago. I've had to suffer through meetings at the Cheesecake Factory there like a dozen times.