Richardson Square is an open-air shopping center on South Plano Road in Richardson, Texas. For almost 30 years the same land held Richardson Square Mall, a one-story enclosed mall.
The mall opened in October 1977 with Sears, Montgomery Ward, Dillard's, and Titche-Goettinger. At the end of the 1980s it listed 110 specialty stores along one long concourse.
Occupancy fell to 29 percent by the end of 2006. So Simon closed the mall that year and demolished the concourse in 2007. The center came back in 2008 without the word Mall.
Lowe's, Ross, and Shoe Carnival face the parking lots now, each with its own door. The old Sears is the last building left from the mall, and it closed in 2019. Its rebuild is still underway.
Richardson Square Mall grows around Sears
On March 6, 1974, Sears opened on South Plano Road in Richardson. For more than three years it had the site to itself.
Then the Edward J. DeBartolo organization built Richardson Square Mall onto the store.
The mall opened on October 20, 1977. Montgomery Ward was already there, having opened that summer.
Dillard's and Titche-Goettinger occupied two-story buildings, while the enclosed mall itself stayed on one level.
Sears anchored the northwest end of the long concourse, with Ward, Dillard's, and Titche-Goettinger completing the department-store lineup.
The next day General Cinema opened a three-screen theater inside the mall with Oh, God!, The Other Side of Midnight, and Young Frankenstein.
The enclosed mall ran until 2006.
Since 2008 the land has held Richardson Square, an open-air shopping center in Richardson, Texas, and the old Sears building is still on it.
Two Dillard's under one roof
By the mid-1980s Richardson Square had competing chains in several categories: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton sold books, while Camelot Music and Musicland sold records.
A video-game arcade operated near the cinema.
Snacks clustered toward the mall's ends, with Chick-fil-A and Orange Julius near Montgomery Ward and Karmelkorn, Bresler's ice cream, and Hot Sam Pretzels near Sears.
Sundays came later.
The mall stayed closed on Sundays until Texas repealed its law restricting retail sales on both Saturday and Sunday, effective September 1, 1985.
By the end of the decade Richardson Square opened at noon on Sunday and closed at 6.
The department stores were changing under the same roof. Titche-Goettinger became Joske's in the mall's early years.
Dillard's already had a Richardson Square store when it acquired Joske's in 1987.
The former Joske's then took the Dillard's name too. Richardson Square had four department stores, and one company ran two of them.
From small shops to big boxes
The theater went first. In 1989 General Cinema opened the six-screen Richardson 6 across Plano Road.
For a while, both theaters operated at once. The mall theater closed on April 23, 1995.
The second Dillard's, in the old Joske's building, closed too, so Richardson Square lost two of its biggest spaces in 1995.
Simon Property Group, which took over the mall through its 1996 merger with DeBartolo, filled the gaps with bigger stores.
Its 1998 renovation brought in Old Navy, Stein Mart, and Ross Dress for Less and added a food court, so the counters by the entrances gave way to one place to eat.
Barnes & Noble moved into space pieced together from old storefronts, including the theater.
At the end of the 1980s the mall had listed 110 specialty stores. By the early 2000s it had 80.
Montgomery Ward liquidated in 2001, and its Richardson store closed with the chain.
The building came down, and a SuperTarget opened on the site in 2002 with its own entrance and its own parking. It could run without the concourse.
Firewheel opens in Garland
Barnes & Noble left the old theater space in October 2005 for Firewheel Town Center in Garland, which had opened on October 7 as an open-air center.
Firewheel's lineup included Dillard's, Barnes & Noble, and Old Navy, and all three disappeared from Richardson Square in the same stretch.
The vacancies came fast. At the end of 2004 the mall was 80 percent occupied. A year later it was 55 percent.
By the end of 2006 it was 29 percent, and Sears, Target, and Ross were still open around an emptying middle.
By spring 2007, Simon had closed the enclosed mall. Demolition followed that year.
The concourse went, and so did the food court and the old rows of storefronts. Sears and Target were left standing on the cleared ground.
Richardson Square goes open-air
The center that opened in 2008 dropped the word Mall. Richardson Square was now a set of stores facing surface parking, each with its own front door.
Lowe's built a new store at 501 S. Plano Road, the address the enclosed mall had used, and Ross and Shoe Carnival went in next to it.
Sears kept its 1974 building, and Target kept the old Ward site. Shoppers could drive straight to one store and park in front of it.
The new layout filled up.
In 2010 and again in 2012 the rebuilt center was 100 percent occupied, a few years after the old mall had sunk to 28.6 percent.
Sears was the last store from the first mall still trading there.
The chain announced another round of closings in December 2018, and the Richardson store closed in March 2019.
For the first time since 1974, the Sears building was empty.
The council and the empty Sears
About 135,700 square feet of empty Sears space sat at the southeast corner of Plano Road and Belt Line Road.
In 2019 a developer brought the city a plan for four new pads in the parking lot, three for drive-through restaurants, while calling for the Sears box to return to retail use.
On June 3 the Richardson City Council tabled the zoning change. Members wanted a clearer Sears plan before they approved the drive-throughs around it.
The developer went to the neighborhood.
After meetings on June 27 and 28 the plan was revised, and the Berkner Park Neighborhood Association, which had withheld full endorsement of the first request as too open-ended, came out in support.
The council approved the revised plan unanimously on July 22, 2019.
The pads went up first.
By September 2020 four buildings were under construction and a Chipotle was open, and Jersey Mike's opened at 205 S. Plano Road on April 28, 2021.
The Sears building next to them was still waiting for its new stores.
A new owner's plan for the old Sears
By 2022 the Sears tract had a new owner and a different plan.
That September the owner set out a $5 million renovation: keep the shell, redo the facade, and strip the inside to an empty white box, with the work due by November 2023.
That date came and went, and in February 2024 the owner presented a bigger version.
Japanese grocer Aeon was named as the anchor for its first U.S. store.
Instead of one Sears box, the plan called for four buildings linked by open-air walkways. A March 2026 plan added a covered promenade and a food hall.
The old Sears still hasn't reopened.
The main shell work is due to be finished by December 31, 2026, and in April 2026 about 50,000 square feet inside was still being marketed to tenants.
No opening has been confirmed for Aeon or the food hall.
The rest of Richardson Square runs around it. Lowe's, Ross, Shoe Carnival, Jason's Deli, and Jersey Mike's are open along South Plano Road.
At 601 S. Plano Road, where Montgomery Ward opened in 1977, Target still calls itself Target Richardson Sq Mall, and people shop there seven days a week under the name of a mall that came down 19 years ago.
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