The Daily Mall Reader: Big Town Mall Coming Down

A daily dose of mall-related reading...

"Mall was 'the place to be'"
Long past its prime, Big Town coming down in Mesquite

The Dallas Morning News - Friday, July 28, 2006

(Excerpt) MESQUITE – Big Town was big news.

The first enclosed and air-conditioned shopping mall in the Southwest, the 77 ½-acre "City of Shops," drew crowds too big to count when it opened on a Thursday in late February 1959.

The Mesquite icon boasted not only a shopping utopia, but a small amusement park and a cartoon theater for kids. The Dallas Morning News ran a 24-page section on the opening, making that day's edition the largest weekday publication of the newspaper to date.

But through the decades, the crowds that once formed human traffic jams thinned to clusters of bargain shoppers and strings of mall walkers. Eventually, it attracted more folks thrilled to sneak inside an abandoned mall for snapshots of its morgue-like corridors than consumers ready to open their wallets at the remaining stores. When demolition crews began knocking down the peripheral walls late last week, it was a formality for a destination long ago declared dead.

Read the full article here.

Mall Sign: Big Town Mall

Mesquite, Texas

Not the shopping center's original classic sign (which you can see in another post here), but still quite a bold and distinctive one that I kind of dig, as it sits here at the then-abandoned, now-demolished Big Town Mall (pic courtesy of this blog). I enjoy seeing Montgomery Ward listed there as well. I'm not sure when the mall switched to this particular signage design--probably sometime in the 1980s, I'm guessing. A few Big Town Mall Wikipedia notes:

"Big Town Mall was constructed in 1959 and was the first enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall in the Southwest. Some of the surrounding facilities included Bowlanes, A&R Course, Horse and Rider, an Exhibition hall, and a half price shoe store. At one time up to three major chain stores such as JC Penney, Sanger-Harris, and Neiman Marcus were part of the complex. The attached Woolworths was also quite popular due to its sizable inventory and food court.

This once popular spot in Mesquite that housed department stores, retail shops, an early form of arcade, and even a movie theater, has since become a derelict building after Montgomery Ward went bankrupt in 2001 and Town East Mall had long since become the new 'hotspot' for local and national retailers. For several years the mall stayed active with privately owned shops targeting urban young."

Mall history: 1959 - 2006 (dead)
Developer: Gerri Von Frelick
Current aerial view
Info from Wikipedia
Resource articles: 1, 2, 3, 4
Previous entries: 1, 2