THE LIVING (WEST) END

This month marks the debut of West End Marketplace, a jazzy mix of restaurants, specialty shops, music bars, mimes, and magicians in the burgeoning West End Historical District. Situated in three buildings bordered by Munger Avenue, Record Street, and Woodall Rodgers Freeway, the Marketplace should be Dallas’s profitable answer to New York’s South Street Seaport and New Orleans’s Jackson Brewery.

The Home Furniture Building, the cavernous Sunshine Biscuit Company, and the old Coca-Cola building are the structural anchors of the Marketplace. They surround an outdoor plaza designed with cart vendors and street performers in mind. Dallas Alley, an enormous entertainment complex, will complement a retail smorgasbord. Nightclub King Spencer Taylor, co-founder of Billy Bob’s Texas, was looking for a historically significant area for his new business venture when he heard of plans for a marketplace in Dallas’s West End. The two concepts seemed perfectly suited for each other. Of the six Dallas Alley clubs, the flagship is the Boiler Room, appropriately located in the boiler room of the Sunshine Biscuit Building. Designed by Tonny Foy, the 8,000-square-foot club will boast two dance floors and multilevel seating, as well as three large granite bars.

Another Alley club is Froggy Bottoms, a beer-and-barbecue, rhythm ’n’ blues spot named for the Trinity River bottom area where blues fans once gathered. Take Five is the Alley’s jazz club in the Coca-Cola building and Bubble’s Beach Diner serves traditional breakfasts, lunches, and dinners twenty-four hours a day.

The Marketplace is the darling of developers Robert W. Bagwell, David J. Levine, John W. Martin, Kaare A. Birkeland, and Spencer Taylor’s Step III Entertainment. Designed by the French architectural firm Ceria & Coupel. the Marketplace has a scheduled tenant mix of 60 percent food, beverage, and entertainment operations and 40 percent specialty retailing. With U5,000 downtown office workers and Dallas conventions fully booked for the next three years, the West End Marketplace should be a strong swimmer against the dreary economic current.