Could Dallas have a "Magnificent Mile"?

[crescentboi]

One city that I love is Chicago, and I have dreams of Dallas becoming as great as that city without the dreadful cold! One thing that they have, which I think we could easily do is their Magnificent Mile/Michigan Avenue. When your down there have you have access to almost every store that you could possibly imagine.

I heard rumors that they would be closing Willowbend Mall in Plano because business has not been what they expected it. Could you imagine if they took all those stores and brought them downtown with street access what downtown would be like!? We already have Neimans to anchor everything, maybe we could get Marshall Fields back to Dallas with a downtown store.

I would be interested what everyone thinks. I would love to walk around downtown, but right now there's really no reason for me to. First of all its hard to get there without a car, and once I do get down with a car, parking is annoying and its also just ugly at street level in most places. Maybe I'm just rambling, but it would be interesting to know what y'all think.

[pariah]

i have not heard about closing Willowbend, just that they were going to try to make it a bit more mainstream, at any rate it would be nice to see anything retail downtown, let alone that grouping of stores. a magnificent mile like run downtown would be awesome, but right now i don't see it in the cards for dallas, very few developers with the means to kick off such a project, are willing to take the risk, i have seen the main street plans and they are nice, however, the only way to make money downtown is still seen as parking lot ownership, i wish i had the money to buy many of these lots, and rip them up in favor of building or better yet, green space. that would force more people to ride DART, i hope. the stories about kroger coming in are encouraging, although i am not up to date on the latest news.

[GarrettCarey]

Chicago's MM is awesome to say the least.

I think that with DT Dallas's current vacancies....a shopping Mecca would be easy to create. Honestly, I think the addition of a few higher profile stores would start an enormous domino effect for DT. Think about, Dallas is already considered a shopping Mecca because of Northpark and the Galleria. If DT turned into a retail center.......man you could shop for anything anywhere......far north (Galleria), Mid-City (Northpark), and DT. It could be something really special.

However, I do not see those kind of investments in the near future, except for maybe Victory (assuming it happens).

We can keep the hopes high though!