When Prestonwood Town Center opened in Far North Dallas in 1979, one ticket to its ice rink was good for up to 12 hours of skating. Most shoppers just called it Prestonwood Mall.
Through the 1980s it had five department stores, a five-screen cinema, and corridors with a Mrs. Fields and a Musicland. When Montgomery Ward closed in 1984, Mervyn's was already lined up for the building.
By 2001 the last department stores had left for a new mall in Plano, and in 2004 the whole building came down. In 2006 the Prestonwood name went up again over an open-air center, with Walmart and Barnes & Noble among its first big stores.
That leaves those big stores, and how they have held up on the old mall's ground since.
An ice rink opens inside Prestonwood Town Center
In August 1979, one ticket to the Ice Capades Chalet bought up to 12 hours on the ice.
Skaters 16 and older paid $3, younger ones paid $2.50, and rental skates cost another $1.
The rink opened to the public at 10 a.m. and stayed open until 10:30 p.m. on weeknights and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Sundays it ran from noon until 10 p.m.
The rink was part of Prestonwood Town Center, a mall that had opened only days earlier, in the summer of 1979, at Belt Line Road and the Dallas Parkway in Far North Dallas, Texas.
It was a $93 million enclosed mall on two levels, widely called Prestonwood Mall, and an older rival, Valley View Center, had been trading a few miles to the south since 1973.
The Chalet was a destination of its own inside the mall.
Clubs, churches, and parties could book it at group rates, and its skating school taught classes as well as private lessons.
Mervyn's and Dillard's move in
In the early 1980s Prestonwood held five department stores: Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, JCPenney, Joske's, and a two-story Montgomery Ward.
Galleria Dallas opened nearby in 1982 and brought Saks Fifth Avenue into the same part of North Dallas.
Montgomery Ward closed after business on November 17, 1984.
Mervyn's had already been named for the building, and it opened there in April 1985.
Joske's went another way: Dillard's bought the chain, and in 1987 the Prestonwood store took the Dillard's name.
By then the mall covered more than 1.1 million square feet of retail space, department stores included, and through the late 1980s all five of its department-store buildings were trading.
Between them, the late-1980s corridors held a Mrs. Fields Cookies, a Musicland, a Kay-Bee Toy & Hobby, and a Luby's Cafeteria, and the Prestonwood 5 Theatres showed films on five screens.
Down on the lower level, groups could rent the whole rink for $100 an hour after public skating ended at 11 p.m. in 1983.
A separate party room held about 40 people and cost $25 an hour, with alcohol prohibited.
In 1994 the rink was the scheduled site of the Cannon Texas Open figure-skating competition.
DART riders get part of the mall parking lot
DART opened its Prestonwood bus transfer center beside the mall in 1985, but the mall's parking was not part of it.
Riders left cars in Prestonwood's private spaces anyway, and mall management warned that they could be towed.
The dispute was public by December 1985, and the property manager was still objecting the next year.
Commuters eventually got a limited part of the lot. By 1988 it was available for park-and-ride parking.
That arrangement later disappeared for a time in the mid-1990s, then returned.
DART shut the Prestonwood transfer center in 1999 and moved its bus service to the newly built Addison Transit Center.
Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor leave for Plano
By early 1998 Prestonwood's advertising named just two department stores, Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor.
Of the five the mall had held through the late 1980s, they were the only two left by 1999.
Around 1999 Prestonwood began to wind down. Farther north, new regional malls were already being planned in Plano and Frisco.
Stores went out through 1999, 2000, and 2001, with no single last day for the mall.
Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor both announced moves to the Shops at Willow Bend in Plano.
Stonebriar Centre opened in Frisco in 2000, and when Willow Bend opened in 2001, both stores left Belt Line Road for it.
Prestonwood had no department store at all.
Data centers planned, then the mall comes down
The shell was not supposed to come down.
By April 2001, after the property had changed hands three times, Archon Group, a real estate subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, was developing it as Genisus Dallas North.
Web-hosting and data-center operators would put both equipment and staff inside most of the old mall building.
Archon was also considering shops, townhouses, and higher-density rental or condominium housing around the perimeter, putting new development along stretches dominated by mall walls and parking.
The plan was given up.
Archon announced plans for a new retail center on the site in October 2003, and the old mall was demolished the next year.
Nothing from the 1979 mall survived it: the rink, the department-store buildings, and the indoor corridors were all gone.
Barnes & Noble and Best Buy open on the old site
The name came back in 2006 on an open-air center.
Its stores opened straight onto the parking lot, and restaurants, banks, and service businesses took pads of their own around the tract.
Walmart, Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, Circuit City, Michaels, Petco, and Ulta were the first big stores.
Barnes & Noble opened on October 20, 2006, replacing the chain's store on Preston Road.
The chain announced close to 200,000 titles in books, music, DVDs, and magazines, a cafe pouring Starbucks coffee, and about 45 jobs.
The night before, part of the sales at a preview party went to the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district's education foundation.
Circuit City had a 34,300-square-foot electronics box in the center.
After the chain failed nationally, the box was renovated inside and out, with a new facade and entry, in work scheduled from December 2009 to mid-2010 at an estimated $1.1 million.
Best Buy, announced for the space in June 2010, moved in that year.
HomeGoods takes over the Best Buy space
InvenTrust took full ownership of the center in July 2021, buying it for $52.8 million from a joint venture it already had a stake in.
About 84 percent of the space was leased then, and Office Depot was among the biggest stores.
The box that had held Circuit City and then Best Buy was fitted out for HomeGoods in 2022 and 2023, at an estimated $1.7 million.
HomeGoods trades there in about 32,000 square feet.
Burlington has about 20,000 square feet elsewhere in the center, and Office Depot is gone.
Prestonwood Town Center is an open-air shopping center of about 235,000 square feet, with a Walmart next door that stands outside the owner's part of the property.
DSW, Michaels, Petco, and Ulta trade among the larger stores.
The smaller spaces lean toward services: eyeglasses, dentures, massage, haircuts, nails, laser hair removal, chiropractic care, tax preparation, a men's primary-care practice, and a bank branch, along with nine places to eat.
DART returned to the district by rail in October 2025, when the Silver Line opened Knoll Trail Station, north of Belt Line Road near the Dallas North Tollway, within a walk of the center.
The station was built for riders being dropped off, with no large park-and-ride lot.
In 2001 the plan for this ground was to keep the empty mall standing and fill it with data centers.
Nearly all of the center's space is leased now, and the Barnes & Noble that opened with it in 2006 still keeps a calendar of events.
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