When she saw the news, Tanya Ragan had a gut feeling that turned out to be true.
The Dallas developer, who got her start as a buyer at Neiman Marcus, read that Saks Global would purchase the Dallas-based department store, and she guessed that the decision foretold the end of its store downtown.
Sure enough, Saks Global announced that the store, located at 1618 Main Street for more than 100 years, would close at the end of March. Publications spilled ink on think pieces about the meaning of the flagship to the city, most of which mentioned its iconic restaurant, the Zodiac Room, its chicken consommé and its famous popovers with strawberry butter.
To be sure, Dallas has been losing Neiman Marcus for years. The era of family management by the Marcuses ended nearly 40 years ago, and an unfortunate 2013 buyout left the company saddled with debt. Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy a few months into the pandemic, and it was finally purchased by rival Saks last year.
Yet the actual closure comes at a terrible time for downtown Dallas, just as the city and some of the city’s most prominent developers are laying the groundwork for multiple billion-dollar projects aimed at renewing the long overlooked central business district. They’d like to keep the beloved store as a placemaker, even if it doesn’t sell clothes, shoes or consommé.
And so, in the days after the Feb. 18 shutdown announcement, a coalition known as the Dallas Consortium, which includes City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert, Todd Interests’ Shawn Todd, Downtown Dallas Inc.’s Jennifer Scripps and the Dallas Economic Development Corporation’s Linda McMahon, rallied to save the store.
Initially, Saks blamed the decision on a complicated ground lease situation. But the company stuck to its guns even after the landlord agreed to donate the ground to the city. Saks eventually relented and said that the store would remain open through the 2025 holiday season.
The dispute highlights the tension at the root of the situation: The flagship is first and foremost a business, but it’s also become one of Dallas’ only landmarks — and the last tangible thing tying the brand to the Big D.
In a city with a slippery sense of history, those betting on its future don’t want Neiman Marcus to disappear — especially at a moment when downtown Dallas is poised for a multibillion-dollar renewal.
Downtown drab
To understand the experience of visiting the flagship Neiman Marcus, it’s instructive to go back in time about 25 years. Imagine: The dot-com bubble is bursting, Vladimir Putin is the new president of Russia and mogul twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have released the desktop computer game Magical Mystery Mall.
The game takes place in a mall with grayed-out stores and floors. The purpose of the game is to collect gems and reanimate the drab retail center, whose stores and shoppers are frozen in time.
That’s kind of what it’s like to walk around the flagship Neiman Marcus.
On a rainy weekday afternoon, the only people there are a few “ladies who lunch” eating salads and drinking white wine at the sixth-floor restaurant. The floors have stocks of modern merchandise, but there’s nothing new about the walls, shelves or lighting. The effect is more sad Sears than Southern luxury, although sometimes the undeniable mid-century charm peeks through.
“Billions of dollars have been invested in Dallas’ remarkable transformation over the last 10 years in downtown Dallas, much of which has been the focus of people wanting to live here, dine here, establish their businesses here because of Neiman Marcus.”
Stanley Marcus, whose father, Herbert Marcus, and aunt Carrie Marcus Neiman founded the company, wrote the handbook on luxury customer service. He obsessed about whether the store was a good place to sell but displayed little nostalgia for the space itself. In a 1992 profile of Marcus in Texas Monthly, which referred to rumors that the Dallas-born brand would leave downtown, he acknowledged that moving from a historical location is a “tough” question for management, but he reiterated that “customers are the most important part of the equation.”
“They’ve got to do what is prudent for business management,” Marcus said at the time.
Ragan might be channeling Marcus when she notes that it’s important to keep in mind the original function of the location. The nine-story building served as the longtime home for the company’s offices. Even after the corporate office was shipped out to Cityplace in 2023, functions such as accounting stayed downtown.
She described the flagship store as “a headquarters that operated a showroom.” With this set-up, holiday visits and nostalgia were enough to keep the store afloat, since sales weren’t the location’s primary purpose.
But when Saks bought Neiman Marcus, even the headquarters became defunct. Without company offices, “it can’t stand alone,” Ragan said.
She’s still wistful. Her time at Neiman’s was one of the top three influences in her life, along with her father and her longtime mentor and attorney.
Central business district renewal
The empty storefronts and budget hotels surrounding the flagship store make it easy to use the closure as evidence of a final decline.
Ragan, who’s been a longtime champion of downtown since working on the revival of the Farmers Market starting in 2007, thinks that’s a mistake. The closure of the store is “solely a casualty of the acquisition,” she said.
The CBD of the Big D, an area that’s long been overlooked in favor of such trendier neighborhoods as Uptown and Deep Ellum, is on the precipice of revitalization, Ragan and the Dallas Consortium would argue.
Just a mile west of the store, Hunt Realty has plans to revamp downtown’s Reunion project, the mixed-use development built in the 1970s that includes the iconic Reunion Tower — 561 feet tall, topped with a massive globe lit by 259 LEDs — and the Hyatt Regency Dallas.
Hunt’s $5 billion plans include up to 3,000 multifamily units, a 600- to 1,000-key hotel, 150,000 square feet of retail and up to 2 million square feet of office around a 3- or 4- acre park.
The city of Dallas is spending $3.7 billion to replace the nearby Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, which first opened as the Dallas Memorial Auditorium in 1957. The project will more than double the convention center’s meeting space, from 160,000 to 430,000 square feet. It’s supposed to be completed by 2029.
The big plans haven’t diminished an outsized hope that Neiman will somehow stay.
“As the downtown landscape continues to evolve, we know that it’s important we continue to focus on this flagship store,” Tolbert said in February.
Neiman 2.0
The Dallas Consortium spent the month of March on the offensive.
The group hosted multiple press conferences on the sidewalk in front of the flagship store. Just weeks after Tolbert was officially hired to be Dallas’ city manager, she shared her love for downtown, the neighborhood she calls home, and identified the store as a favorite place “to sneak away to after a long day at City Hall.”
Shawn Todd, the developer behind the successful downtown renovation projects One Dallas Center and the National, waxed poetic about the centrality of Neiman Marcus to downtown Dallas.
“Billions of dollars have been invested in Dallas’ remarkable transformation over the last 10 years in downtown Dallas, much of which has been the focus of people wanting to live here, dine here, establish their businesses here because of Neiman Marcus,” he said on March 4.
Inspired by the impassioned outcry from Dallasites desperate to block the store’s closure, Saks Global agreed to keep the store open through the holiday season while it figures out what’s next. The company is also making a $100 million investment in its nearby NorthPark location.
As of June, the downtown Dallas Neiman Marcus flagship store has only seven months left to “reimagine” its future.
Ideas on the table include a museum or a fashion incubator.
Ragan would like to see the place transformed into a Neiman Marcus-branded hotel, where maybe the Zodiac Room could stay open. A gift shop would sell the famous Neiman Marcus cookies.
“‘Let’s go stay at the historic Neiman Marcus,’” she tried, liking the sound of it. “Isn’t that a great story? ‘Let’s go grab a drink at the historic Neiman Marcus bar.’”
