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In truth, it was already a long time gone. Perhaps it was the memories that sent me there, a refusal by the brain to simply abandon what it knows has been gone for at least a decade. Still, I will miss Westminster Mall. The big yellow machines on Thursday continued to slowly eat away at it, yanking down brick, walls and rafters, leaving behind in dusty and random piles what was once the heartbeat of a city, of a region. I remember the dogs and their friendly, hopeful faces behind the glass windows of the pet shop I always visited. It was, I think, the first mall I visited when I got to Colorado. I went to say goodbye. A lot of people do tha


t now. They sit in their cars in a corner of a roped-off parking lot next to the abandoned movie house and watch the machines go at the 34-year-old shopping center. "I went there a lot, actually," said Bernard Vonfeldt, 54, an off-duty Westminster police officer. He first visited the mall in 1986, when it was thriving, and continued through the years as merchant after merchant closed up shop, leaving only 12 at the end. "It was definitely outdated," he said. "But I'm old-fashioned. I hate to see a good building being demolished. Time, I guess, just caught up to this one."

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