Casa Linda Shopping Center or Casa Linda Plaza, as it is more commonly known, was the brainchild of Carl Martin Brown and his son Howard D. Brown. The East Dallas family farm was to become the premier place to live and shop at the Garland Road and Buckner Blvd Crossroads in East Dallas. Casa Linda Plaza is one of the oldest shopping centers in the Dallas area. It is located in northeast Dallas, near White Rock Lake.
Carl Brown started buying the land in the early 1920s and eventually owned over 1,000 acres of prime residential and commercial property in East Dallas. Building was started before World War II and resumed after Howard Brown returned from his active duty in WWII in February 1946. Due to the war, construction materials had been in short supply and Carl Brown waited until his son was home to help him renew their efforts to finish building the Plaza and additional homes surrounding it.
Design architects Sidney Milam & Jon Roper used the Spanish Revival style, featuring tile roofs and masonry walls. These same architects selected Casa Linda Estates to build their personal homes in. Howard D. Brown loved Spanish names and all the streets in the area have Spanish names like El Patio, Redondo, Tranquilla, and Verano. All streets ended in Drive, no Street or Avenue, as the Brown's felt the word Drive was more suited to the atmosphere they were trying to create.
Many of the homes built had guest cottages at the back of the property that were also used to house live in help. The last building was a Kroger Grocery store, built in 1971 on the Plaza Property. Carl Martin Brown died in August 1971 and his son died in November 1981.
The anchor of the shopping center was the movie theatre, which opened as a single screen theatre. The theatre was converted several times and was eventually a quad-plex. It closed in 1999 and on May 7, 2011, reopened as a Natural Grocers grocery store.
Among the first tenants were Mott's Variety Store, C & S Hardware, Skillern's drug store, Reynolds-Penland, El Fenix, Zenith Televisions, Ashburn's Ice Cream, Wyatt's Cafeteria, and Parisian-Peyton'sColberts, Mr and Mrs Gift Shop, Vavra's Bakery store, Time Jewelers and even a Fix IT Shop.
Hopkins-Shafer purchased the property in the 1980s and painted the buildings bright pink. Since then, the center went through several changes in ownership. In 2008, the shopping center changed hands again, selling to a company called AmREIT, which began renovating the center in March 2008. According to the company website, the firm "desires to restore this great center back to its original grandeur. (AmREIT owns all of the shopping center, with the exception of the theatre.) This premier property has tremendous traffics counts, a highly populated area surrounding it, significant barriers-to-entry and an emerging demographic. It is truly a property worth revitalizing with updated features, new tenants and a sense of place for its east Dallas neighbors."
The Casa Linda Cafeteria unexpectedly closed in 2007 shortly after the property was sold. It reopened as the Highland Park Cafeteria in May 2007.
Famous quotes containing the words shopping center, shopping and/or center:
“The most important fact about our shopping malls, as distinct from the ordinary shopping centers where we go for our groceries, is that we do not need most of what they sell, not even for our pleasure or entertainment, not really even for a sensation of luxury. Little in them is essential to our survival, our work, or our play, and the same is true of the boutiques that multiply on our streets.”
—Henry Fairlie (1924–1990)
“Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women’s lives. You never saw men milling around in men’s departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)