Mills Corp. building at Denver West site.(Brief Article)

It might have not been the shopping center that Greg Stevinson originally envisioned for the site, but a shopping center nonetheless is going up on his family's property on Colfax Avenue, across the street from the Denver West Village shopping center.

The Mills Corp. decision last year to build a new shopping center in Lakewood is. the winner of the Denver Business Journal's Groundbreaker of the Year award for the retail category.

Initial plans for the site on Colfax Avenue at Indiana Street, just east of 1-70, were for a regional shopping center to be constructed. Upscale department stores such as Nordstrom and other tony retailers were envisioned coming to site. In 1994, Lakewood voters approved a financing plan that allowed the developer to keep 25 percent of sales taxes collected at the new center to pay for public infrastructure costs at the center site. Voters also annexed the land into the city from unincorporated …