There comes the point in time for everything when it’s out with the old and in with the new, and that concept especially holds true for shopping malls. Of course, sometimes that means a little more than shuffling the deck of tenants. Take the case of the Valley View Center in Dallas. The venerable mall has seen better days, and it was going to take a little more than adding some new faces to make the place hop again.
As the Dallas Business Journal shares, Scott Beck and the Dallas-based family-owned company Beck Ventures acquired the majority of the property last year with the intention of transforming it into a corporate destination. Those plans are finally set to get underway, as the North Dallas shopping center is being demolished to make way for the initial $500 million phase of what will become part of a larger $4 billion mixed-use development that has been proposed by Beck Ventures.
“Today is a bittersweet moment,” Beck said at a ceremony marking the project’s milestone. “The mall has seen better times, and we are poised to breathe life into these grounds using a vastly different vision.”
The project is known as Dallas Midtown, and phase one alone sounds like more than enough to pack the people in. Plans call for over 200,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space on the ground-floor, a 10-screen, 600-seat Cinepolis luxury theater, an 18-story, 440-room luxury hotel, and 500,000 square feet of office space. Additionally, Lifetime Fitness plans to develop an 183,000-square-foot facility will include attached living spaces and 20,000 square feet of collaborative workspace.
“We are going to start work on the garage and then move to the anchors and mall area,” Beck added. “It’s really going to be a de-construction process.”
Texas Rep. Linda Koop has been a longtime advocate of the project, and she shared some thoughts on what this project is finally getting going means. “This will change the face of North Dallas,” she said. “This will have amenities we don’t often see in Dallas, not the least of which is the park that will be a centerpiece and drive people to come to this area much like Valley View mall when it was first built.”
We’ll concur with Koop, as it sounds like this stunning project will drive boatloads of traffic once phase one is completed.
