The Rise and Fall of America's Most Overambitious Mall Empire: West Oaks Mall, Texas

In June of 2023, a visitor to West Oaks Mall in west Houston found every interior entrance locked or boarded up. Employees at one of the stores still open said the mall was closed. Around the same time, the mall’s management said it was open. This was a mall that had opened in 1984 with Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord and Taylor as anchors. Six years later both were gone. This video traces the full history of West Oaks Mall, built by JMB Realty at Westheimer Road and Highway 6 for the wealthy families expected to follow Houston’s oil boom to the west side. It covers the Foley’s that opened alone on the site in 1982, the Macy’s that was announced in 1985 and never built, and the oil bust that cancelled the upscale neighborhoods planned around the mall. It follows the 1990 departure of Saks and Lord and Taylor, the arrival of First Colony Mall in 1996, and a string of reinventions: a ranch-style renovation, a dine-in movie theater, a fourteen-screen cinema, and a Toby Keith restaurant that lasted less than a year. It also tells the story of the mall’s price, sold for 102 million dollars in 2005 and bought back four years later, by the same people, for 15 million.