The old Dr Pepper plant at Mockingbird and Central Expressway is expected to open as a retail center next summer.
The building’s exterior will be preserved and the interior will undergo approximately $18 million in renovations this fall. The former soft-drink headquarters will turn into a three-story shopping center with space for four anchor stores, each occupying more than 40,000 square feet, says Kirk McJunkin, Dal-Mac’s vice president of business development. Office space will occupy the third floor.
“The end result is going to be a very fine, classy development,” McJunkin says. “Dallas will have one of its landmarks back and has found a use that will keep it alive.”
Dal-Mac is finalizing leases with Barnes & Noble Bookstore and Marshall’s for the project, McJunkin says.
McJunkin says it is too early in lease negotiations to announce who will occupy the other two spaces, but at a recent meeting of the Greenville Avenue Area Business Association, Dal-Mac discussed the possibility of Old Navy Clothing Co. and Cost Plus moving into the building.
Once leases are finalized, Dal-Mac will begin removing asbestos from the building, a process that McJunkin says will cost about $500,000. Construction should start in October, but the schedule is tentative, McJunkin says.
“There will be extensive work,” McJunkin says. “Retailers today look for a structure to be a certain way in order to sell their product. The challenge is how to take something that violates certain design criteria and adapt it.”
Dal-Mac purchased the building May 28, 1993. In the beginning, Dal-Mac was prepared to demolish the existing structure, but negotiations with preservationists and neighborhood residents helped save the building. Renovation is costing Dal-Mac more money than rebuilding would have cost, McJunkin says.
During the negotiations, the building was declared a City landmark by the Dallas Landmark Commission and the City Council in March.
Another factor that helped save the building was retailer interest, McJunkin says. The creativity of Larry Good, the preservationist architect who has redesigned the inside of the Dr Pepper plant, has attracted businesses to the site, McJunkin says.
In addition to saving the building, residents of surrounding neighborhoods were concerned about increased traffic on residential streets once the retail center opens.
Homeowners don’t want shoppers racing down McMillan Avenue to reach the new shopping center, says Bobbi Bilnoski, a Greenland Hills Neighborhood Association member who participated in the negotiations.
Dal-Mac is constructing the retail center to make it impossible to access it from McMillan, McJunkin says. Shoppers will have to use Mockingbird Lane.
“Dal-Mac is not the big, bad developer, although they have that perception,” says Bilnocki, who lives in the “M” streets.
“We (homeowners) have learned to work with a big developer. They are much more sensitive to the neighborhood than we thought.”
“Often neighborhoods and developers get squared off,” says Landmark Commission chairman and neighborhood resident Trudy O’Reilly, who participated in the negotiations.
“This is a situation where everyone came together and reached a solution. Reasonable people can come up with good decisions.”
