Legacy Town Center opens in Plano, Texas

A new town center offers urban life to sprawling corporate park. The first new urbanist town center within an existing business development is opening in the sprawling corporate park of Legacy in Plano, Texas, 20 miles north of downtown Dallas. Legacy consists of 6.5 million square feet of office space on 2,665 acres of land, owned and operated by Electronic Data Systems (EDS) since 1983. With 36,000 employees, Legacy business park has been one of the Dallas area’s biggest employment centers. In addition to EDS, other major employers based in Legacy include JC Penney, Fina, Legacy Bank, Frito-Lay, and Dr. Pepper/7Up. The 150-acre town center, which straddles Legacy Drive east of the Dallas North Tollway, is an attempt to bring urban amenities to Legacy’s employees in the midst of this expansive suburban environment. The original Legacy plan called for a residential core, albeit in the form of a conventional, automobile-oriented “edge city” project. EDS changed directions in 1997, hiring new urbanist designer Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. The plan includes a modified grid street network, ground-level retail with offices and apartments above, several squares and plazas, six- and eight-story parking structures, a community entertainment district, diverse but complementary architecture, narrow streets and wide sidewalks. Anchoring the retail development is Robb and Stucky, a furniture company based in Florida that opened a 115,000-square-foot store during the summer of 2000. A 400-room Doubletree Hotel is scheduled to open in February of 2001. The primary location for shops is Bishop Street, a thoroughfare that terminates at a central square with the hotel and a civic building. A total of 300,000 square feet of retail is planned, with tenants to include a mixture of local merchants and regional and national chains. The primary competition will be two major malls under construction in the region, but Fehmi Karahan, the developer of the retail portion of the town center, is counting on Legacy’s urban design to give the project an advantage. Many of the approximately 400 apartments built during Phase 1 in the town center by residential developer Post Properties are already occupied, and Lincoln Properties will soon begin construction of two office buildings. Some compromises to the original plan were necessary, according to Legacy Director Marilyn Kasko. An additional access lane — called a “slip road”— was created on each side of Legacy Drive, the major boulevard through the town center. “It’s not New Urbanism, but there were tenants who wouldn’t go in without it,” explains Kasko. The placement of the Robb and Stucky store was also a compromise. The building is not on the grid, but constructed at an angle, with parking on three sides. Robb and Stucky demanded this placement, and other retail tenants were contingent upon Robb and Stucky. However, the store does face a street and is pedestrian-oriented on one side. Kasko explains that while these changes are not ideal, they are on the periphery of the town center, and she considers them transitions from the suburban to urban environments. “The other three sides are well-defined urban edges.” As soon as the 75-acre first phase is completed, the remaining half of the project is scheduled to begin construction.