The West End Marketplace, Dallas, 1986 to 2006

The Marketplace started life as the Brown Cracker & Candy Company factory, built in phases between about 1902 and 1911. It later belonged to Sunshine Biscuit, then served as a showroom for the Home Furniture Company. Its brick buildings are part of the warehouse district known as the West End.

In 1986 Market Street Developers spent about $25 million turning it into a festival marketplace, designed by the French firm Ceria & Coupel. It joined three buildings: two four-story wooden-frame buildings full of shops, and a seven-story concrete tower behind them. The old Coca-Cola building next door shared the outdoor plaza and Dallas Alley.

The designers kept the factory bones. The original pine beams, maple floors and sash windows stayed, the red brick was left bare, and a giant wheel from the cracker ovens stayed on the wall of an upper level. They cut an 85-foot atrium through the middle under new skylights, with fountains, tall palms and escalators crossing from floor to floor. On the roof, the tower's three round water tanks were ringed in rainbow neon you could see from Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

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The atrium from the third-floor walkway, with the TILT sign in lights hanging down the middle.

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The tower's water tank and smokestack at dusk, with downtown behind.

LEVEL 1The Fudgery

The first thing most people remember is the smell. The Fudgery sat right by the front door, on the left as you came in, and made its fudge where everyone could watch. The mall's own website called it fudge "made in-house with an entertaining fudge show," and the Dallas Observer remembered it as the place "where you could watch folks making" fudge. A crowd usually gathered to watch.

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The Fudgery's case, looking out at the entrance passage. The layout inside is from memory.

Tilt "took over most of the bottom floor." In the early 1990s it covered about 12,500 square feet, and by 1996 it had more than 100 games. You paid in brass tokens and cashed your tickets in at a prize counter.

The games people remember, and that the Arcade Preservation wiki lists, include Skee-Ball, Frog Bog, Hoop Shot basketball, a pirate shooting gallery, Daytona USA, Hard Drivin', Galaxy Force II and Virtua Racing. There was a giant gorilla, an Old West shooting gallery where you fired a rifle at moving figures, and a high striker "a couple of floors tall." Later a simulator room went in where a downstairs nightclub had been. Tilt closed with the mall in June 2006.

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Tilt in the walkthrough. The cabinets are drawn without real logos.

Dallas Alley ran between the Marketplace tower and the old Coca-Cola building, paved in red brick under a row of lit arches, with a view of InterFirst Plaza (now Bank of America Plaza) outlined in green neon at the end. When it opened in 1986 it was the Marketplace's biggest tenant, nearly a third of the space: six nightclubs and a diner.

The clubs

The Boiler Room was the flagship, 8,000 square feet in the biscuit factory's old boiler room, with two dance floors and three granite bars. Froggy Bottoms had beer, barbecue, and rhythm and blues. In the Coca-Cola building were Take Five (jazz), Alley Cats (a sing-along bar) and Backstage (a piano bar). Bubble's Beach Diner was a 1940s-style diner open 24 hours, and there was the Plaza Bar.

People who were there remember free Monday night concerts in the alley put on by Q102, with acts like Midnight Oil, ZZ Top, Joe Ely and Warrant, and carrying a drink from bar to bar.

Around 2001 the arches glowed warm white and amber, with "Dallas Alley" in red neon script hung inside them. The rainbow-colored arches many people picture came later, from about 2005.

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Most people parked under the Woodall Rodgers overpass and walked in through the alley. The walkthrough can start you there.

On the afternoon of December 4, 1991, Van Halen played a free show at the West End Marketplace, with the street blocked off for the crowd. They played 11 songs. Sammy Hagar had lost his voice at the band's 1988 Monsters of Rock show at the Cotton Bowl and promised Dallas they'd come back and make it up to them; this was that show. Police estimated 25,000 people, promoters said 50,000, and later retellings go as high as 80,000. The set opened with "Poundcake" and closed with "Top of the World." Remastered footage of the show came out in 2024 with a reissue of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, and it was covered again by the Dallas Morning News, Ultimate Classic Rock and Loudwire.

In the footage, the stage seems to sit at the mouth of Dallas Alley, facing out over the courtyard toward Munger Avenue, with a tall brick warehouse on one side. That is how it is placed in the walkthrough's second tape.

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The 1991 tape: the view from behind the band. The players and music in the walkthrough are stand-ins.

Planet Hollywood Dallas was announced in February 1994, with Sylvester Stallone in town for it. Bruce Willis was there in a hard hat that April, and the restaurant opened that fall with a red carpet night. It was on the ground floor in Suite 105, with its door on the courtyard (phone number 214/749-STAR), and it closed in 2001.

Out front stood the thing everyone remembers: a 27-foot dinosaur in a red bandana and spurred cowboy boots, holding up two tall cone lights. It stayed in the courtyard after the restaurant closed. Around November 2012 it moved to the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, where it still stands as "Big Tex Rex."

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The dinosaur, rebuilt from photos taken in the 1990s and 2000s.

LEVEL 4CityGolf and the food court

The top floor was for food and games. CityGolf was an indoor mini golf course, listed with 36 holes around 1992, with the Caddy Shack Sports Bar beside it. The food court had about a dozen counters in the early 1990s. The 2004 directory lists Flying Fruit Fantasy, Hot Diggity Dog and Burgers Express, and people remember a Steak Express and an Italian place.

One visitor remembers the course being laid out to look like Dallas, so the walkthrough builds each hole around a downtown landmark. That detail isn't confirmed yet.

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CityGolf in the walkthrough, with a small downtown skyline for obstacles.

Across Market Street was the Spaghetti Warehouse, described in 1997 as "the West End's first restaurant." Its main dining room was built around streetcar No. 707, a red and yellow Dallas streetcar that ran from East Dallas to downtown until the system shut down in 1956. You could eat inside the car, and for a lot of Dallas families it was where birthdays and school field trips happened.

The lobby had a confessional booth, and one booth was made from Stephen F. Austin's bed and sat eight. After the restaurant closed, its fixtures were auctioned in 2019, and getting the streetcar out meant opening a brick wall.

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The dining room with streetcar 707, rebuilt from the one known color photo and visitors' memories.