West End Marketplace

Man what happened to this place? you walk around this place and its like a ghost town. dallas ally is shut down and all the little shops and bars too for the most part. the only thing left is a few restaurants and the dallas aquarium. even the horse and buggies are
and my girl walked around for about a hour and left for the stockyards. which is ten times better then this place. What a disappointment. This used to be a happening place.

We went to the West End for the first time in years… hoping that it was still amazing. We were supremely disappointed.
So here’s a snippet of my childhood memories. Planet Hollywood, West End movie theater, mall, fudge shop, Joe’s Crab Shack, a TON of people crowding the streets, and at LEAST a 45 minute wait per restaurant.
Now? …a haunted house (WTF?!?) in the former mall, Spaghetti warehouse, and a few other crappy restaurants… it’s the remains of what used to be. Nearly a ghost town. The band on the corner still plays, the guy peddling roses still hangs around, and the horse/​carriage rides still take off to victory plaza or other popular nearby neighborhoods, but other than that, there’s not much going on here.
So with the West End having ended a 25 year peak in Dallas, I would love to see it restored to it’s former glory. There are other neighborhoods that are taking off in Dallas, and I’d hate to see the West End get left behind, but it seems like it’s going that direction unfortunately.
Man… I’m disappointed. I LOVED this place. I want so badly for it to be what it used to be!

I wonder if the West End area will ever get back to its former glory. There was a time years ago when people used to hang out down there and it was kind of a go to spot, especially for tourists.
My thought is there it will come back but not sure when. It almost can’t not come back, it is becoming surrounded. Victory Park on one side, the new Omni hotel in the other direction and the Arts District in the third direction. All of the other three areas seem to be growing year by year and eventually have to engulf the West End.
The West End isn’t totally dead now or anything but it has seemingly become somewhat of an afterthought. There are some restaurants and some shopping still there. The downtown side of the West End seems to get some of the downtown office building lunch crowd as well as some tourist activity from Dealey Plaza. The Victory Park side seems to have the potential to get some overflow activity from Victory Park and the House of Blues, but I am not sure whether it does or not. My guess would be that the West End will kind of bump along for a few more years until other parts of downtown and Uptown force it to get a face-​lift (in terms of uses not in terms of buildings because its building are old and cool).