Addison wrote:What bothers me about this whole thing is that the Galleria is still, on the whole, a healthy & vibrant mall. It's not as though the place is on its death bed like Music City Mall or Shops ar Willow Bend. Trademark is essentially throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Despite some of the dour posts on here, both the Macy's and Nordstrom's there are still the 2nd best performing in the Metroplex, the mall is still managing to attract/retain prominent national retailers, and it's still in an ideal/central location (the affluent Tollway corridor) to remain successful in the coming years.
The mall could definitely use a huge renovation, and the sewage/parking problems we've heard reports about should be addressed, but when I see neither Stonebriar or NorthPark having discussions about shrinking retail space nor having trouble attracting new stores, I find it hard to believe the Galleria's can't thrive in its current state going forward with just a bit of TLC.
Thank you Addison for this post. I also think that the Galleria has high potential. It’s a great location. It already has many of the things that other malls are trying to incorporate: office, hotel, etc. The current concept from Trademark adds even more of these uses to a very constrained site and seems overkill. The south end 4 tower proposal needs to be looked at in 3D before any decisions are made. Some of the Galleria’s challenges do need to be addressed however: lack of surface parking, awkward ramping parking garages, awkward ingress/egress from garages into mall, site lines within mall, lack of restaurants accessible from both surface parking side and mall side. If it takes removing some retail and the awkward Blue Garage to address the above, so be it. Even creating 80-100 surface parking spaces for restaurants and a new smaller garage for new office/hotel/restaurant uses would help. How ‘bout instead of 4 new towers, 1 or 2 mixed use towers with underground parking to reduce overall footprint? Some creativity or pop (that I didn’t see with this proposal) would be nice…