Southwest Center Mall (Dallas, Texas)

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Formerly known as Red Bird Mall. Opened in 1975, Red Bird Mall was the first modern indoor mall opened south of the Trinity River and the first modern mall serving the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, as well as the suburban areas of Duncanville, DeSoto and Cedar Hill. Originally a fairly high-end mall, anchored by the then-typical Dallas mall quartet of Sears, J.C. Penny, and the local retailers Titches and Sanger-Harris, the reshuffling of corporate affiliations in the late 1980's led to many changes in the dominant retailers within the mall. Originally envisioned to serve the Oak Cliff area north of the mall, planners constructed the road, highway, and service road access in such a way that access from the southern suburbs and from IH-20, which borders the mall on the South, was both difficult and unappealling. This failure to recognize the growth of Dallas' southern suburbs and the potential market they represented, combined with the proliferation of lower middle class neighborhoods adjacent to the mall, has, over the last ten years, gradually driven shoppers to other malls, particularly the Parks Mall in southern Arlington. (The massive gravitational pull of the Parks Mall also helped to doom both Forum 303 Mall in Grand Prarie and Six Flags mall in northern Arlington during the same time frame).
As of summer 2006, the renamed Southwest Center Mall has become something of a ghost-mall, with large swaths of the building, particularly the western end almost totally empty. While Sear's, Dillard's and Foley's remain as the mall's large retailers, the construction of a massive outdoor mall in Cedar Hill further threatens the survival of Southwest Center Mall, as the owners of the proposed Cedar Hill mall are working very actively to entice Dillards to relocate to the new center. Local activists in Oak Cliff have pressured Dillards to remain in their present location, recognizing that the loss of Dillards will probably spell the end of the mall, and the only sizeable shopping area in southern Oak Cliff. These efforts though seem to have been unsuccessful, as signage at the new mall suggests that Dillards will be an anchor of the new facility when it opens in 2007.

Trivia: In its earlier high-end days, Red Bird Mall was a property of the Debartolo family, the then-owners of the San Francisco 49'ers.