How Peter Brodsky is working to restore Red Bird Mall

“Once a glamorous place to browse Titche’s and Dillard’s, to have lunch with friends at El Chico or Wyatt’s Cafeteria, a mall became a cavernous haunt of T-shirt airbrush shops, disposable-fashion stores and empty spaces.”

This is a line pulled from a 2019 Oak Cliff Advocate story titled “RedBird Redux.”

Today, it remains largely true.

Once a symbol of Southwest Dallas’ vibrancy, RedBird Mall had long fallen into decline — its iconic retailers replaced by empty storefronts and short-term shops.

A developer has been working to return the mall to its former glory as a community center and economic engine for Southwest Dallas.

RedBird Mall had fallen on hard times, losing its ties with the community with a name change to Southwest Center Mall and bankruptcy in 1997. For a time, it looked like it was going the way of other dying malls.

But the community pulled together, with resident and activist Edna Pemberton once going so far as to intervene when power to the mall was about to be cut off. City council member Tennell Atkins and former Mayor Mike Rawlings worked to keep the mall afloat and connected investor Peter Brodsky with the former owners of the main mall building to broker a deal on Sept. 18, 2015.

There have been a couple of previous efforts to revitalize the mall. What’s different this time is that Brodsky owns 78 acres, more of the mall than any previous owner.

The way malls were financed in the ’70s, a developer would build out the mall’s interior, but anchor tenants like J.C. Penney and Sears constructed and owned their buildings and adjacent parking lots.

It took 10 transactions to compile the acreage, including the entire mall except for Burlington Coat Factory and Sears. Brodsky also owns several adjacent retail pad sites.

Brodsky arrived in Dallas in 1995. His first 15 years were spent in North Dallas, and he didn’t know much about the Oak Cliff area.

“I started spending more time in southern Dallas. … I just discovered that it was so much more than what I’d been led to believe it was,” Brodsky says. “I thought it was sort of a uniformly poor neighborhood that was to be avoided. And what I found instead was a huge area, very diverse — racially, socio-economically — very physically beautiful, better topography and broad swaths of middle class communities, but when you drove around the commercial areas of those middle class areas, you did not see the amenities that one would expect to see.”

He had the investment idea to buy the mall and provide those attractive amenities.

“I was excited to do that, because I thought it would be a way to make a lucrative investment, but also do something that was positive and uplifting for the community,” Brodsky says. “RedBird was the perfect place.”

The Starbucks opened in 2019 and was a major milestone for the mall. It’s the first of what Brodsky called “early adopters” who were buying into the neighborhood.

“I’m happy to say, six years later, it is doing extremely well. I was just in there, and there was barely anywhere to sit,” Brodsky says.

Brodsky says COVID really changed the retail environment, and even before that, Amazon had changed it as well. He began to convert the anchor buildings into professional uses.

They signed a deal with UT Southwestern at the end of 2019 to occupy the former Sears building. They opened in February 2022 with a 150,000-square-foot clinic focusing on cancer and nutritional medicine, mammography and a women’s health clinic and a cardiology clinic.

At the same time, Parkland Health opened a primary care in the former Dillard’s building, and a 20,000-square-foot Dallas Entrepreneur Center was developed, which is an incubator space for hundreds of businesses. Brodsky has also developed a lot of the parcels along Camp Wisdom Road.

In addition to Starbucks, they’ve also brought in Chick-fil-A, Jamba Juice, an AT&T Store, a Breakfast Brothers and a couple of banks.

“We’re really proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Brodsky says.

Something they are still working on, though, is bringing in a grocery store. RedBird was very close to a deal with Tom Thumb, but the grocery store backed out.

The 50,000-square-foot Tom Thumb grocery store was set to be located at the southeast corner of Camp Wisdom and Westmoreland roads and expected to create at least 90 jobs.

Albertsons Companies, which owns the Tom Thumb chain, told the city Dec. 5 that it “decided to terminate its economic development incentive agreement with the City” and would no longer develop the Tom Thumb grocery store within the Shops at RedBird, according to a City of Dallas memo sent to the mayor and council members.

“That was a disappointment,” Brodsky says. “It was theirdecision, but I think it’s safe to say that they didn’t feel that their store was going to be a success there, and they decided not to pursue it. For us, it was incredibly disappointing because we have a lot of confidence that that store would have done extremely well. But we’ll just have to prove that with another grocer.”

Brodsky says they are also looking to bring in a hotel and have residential plans such as bringing in town homes. Additionally, they are looking to bring in more restaurants.

“There aren’t a lot of really high-quality mixed-use developments in Oak Cliff, and the people of Oak Cliff want the same things that the people of Preston Hollow and Far North Dallas, and all the neighborhoods in North Dallas, everybody wants the same sorts of things,” Brodsky says. “There’s no financial reason why this area can’t support those sorts of amenities. I think it’s really important for the community to be paid that respect of being provided those amenities, but also it’s really important for the economic development of the city.”