Tomorrow morning, somewhere around 200 cyclists will pedal through Glen Oaks as part of the annual Bike to Beat Cancer ride, using the Moser Farm Pavilion as a rest stop before continuing their route. The GlenOaks HOA has been posting reminders for weeks: watch for riders, drive carefully, expect signage at the entrances starting today. It is the kind of neighborhood event that barely registers outside the immediate blocks it passes through, and that is exactly why it is worth paying attention to this year. The route runs close enough to Wynnewood Village that anyone standing at the pavilion will be looking at a shopping center that has spent almost a decade rebuilding itself in pieces, and is still not finished.
If your image of Wynnewood Village is "the place that got a Target," you are thinking of news from March. That story is already old. What is actually happening at the corner of Illinois and Zang this fall is a different chapter in a project that started under a different presidential administration.
The Version Everyone Already Knows
Target opened its doors at 655 W. Illinois Avenue on Sunday, March 15, a roughly 110,000-square-foot store that became the 160th Target in Texas and the 51st in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington market. It came with a CVS Pharmacy and a Starbucks Café built in, and it employed more than 160 people at launch. Burlington has also thrown open its doors, joining Kroger and El Rancho Supermercado as anchors on the property.
If that is the last update you heard about Wynnewood Village, you are current on six-month-old news. Here is what else is already standing, whether or not it made a headline: Ross Dress for Less and Five Below have been open for a while, LA Fitness has been running since 2019, and a Capital One Café sits in the corner space next to the historic Wynnewood tower sign, one of only two Capital One Cafés in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth region.
Here is what is either brand new or still arriving:
- HomeGoods and Petco, moving into a former grocery box that Brixmor Property Group repositioned rather than demolished
- James Avery Jewelry and Bath & Body Works, added to the same stretch of new facades where Burlington now sits
- A second restaurant building at 505 W. Illinois Avenue, permitted through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation as a two-tenant core-and-shell structure, with a completion date on file for this past May
Eight Years, Four Phases, and Counting
The part most drive-by coverage skips is the timeline. Brixmor Property Group, which has owned the 65-acre center for roughly a decade, started planning this renovation back in 2017 and broke ground on the first phase in June 2018. By the time Target was under construction in 2024, the company told the Dallas Morning News it had committed more than $72 million across four separate phases. Brixmor's own current leasing materials, updated within the past few weeks, describe a $52 million piece of that work as "underway" with completion "scheduled for 2026." Two different dollar figures, two different scopes, both true at once, because this was never one project with one finish line. It was a sequence.
"We're projecting to have a stable center when all this is done."
That is Brett Milke, Brixmor's vice president of redevelopment, talking to the Dallas Morning News back when Target was still a rendering. The quote is notable mostly for what it does not say. Nobody at Brixmor has ever promised a single reopening day. They have described a center that gets rebuilt zone by zone, tenant by tenant, while the rest of it stays open and functioning around the construction fencing.
That is worth sitting with if you drive Wynnewood Village regularly. The version of the center you remember from three years ago, the version from last spring, and the version open right now are three different shopping centers occupying the same 65 acres. The theater that used to anchor part of the property was scrapped as a concept during the pandemic and never rebuilt. The Target that opened this spring sits where a parking lot used to be, next to an LA Fitness that predates it by five years.
The Piece Landing This Fall
The current wave centers on that repurposed grocery box. HomeGoods is taking roughly 24,000 square feet of it and Petco is taking about 12,500 square feet, both fitting into a shell that used to hold a full grocery store. That is a different kind of project than building Target from an empty lot. It means the center is now old enough, and has cycled through enough retail turnover, that some of this "new" construction is actually reuse.
The restaurant pad building at 505 W. Illinois Avenue tells a similar story in miniature. It is a small filing, a $750,000 project for a two-tenant building under 5,000 square feet, the kind of permit that never makes a headline on its own. But its completion date landed this past spring, which means somewhere in the last several months a small piece of Wynnewood Village finished construction with no ribbon cutting and no press release. Multiply that by four phases and eight years and you get a shopping center whose residents have absorbed dozens of small changes without ever experiencing a single "grand reopening" moment.
What Saturday Actually Tests
None of this shows up in a typical drive past the center. It shows up on a day like tomorrow, when 200 people funnel through Glen Oaks on bikes, some of them likely pausing near the pavilion before continuing past a shopping center that has spent years absorbing new facades, new parking, new signage, and new circulation patterns in stages. The HOA's own event notices this week are the kind of granular, block-by-block detail that only exists because someone local is tracking it: signage up today, removed by the end of the ride day, riders expected between roughly 8:30 and 10:30 in the morning.
That is the texture of actually living here. It is not a press release about a Target opening. It is a neighborhood association timing bike route signage around a shopping center's ongoing construction schedule, because both things are happening in the same few blocks at the same time.
Where That Leaves Wynnewood Hills and Glen Oaks
The honest read on Wynnewood Village is that it stopped being a single redevelopment story a while ago and became an ongoing condition of the neighborhood. Something is always mid-phase. HomeGoods and Petco are the version arriving now. The next filing, whatever it turns out to be, will arrive on its own schedule, largely unannounced, the way the restaurant pad building did.
If you are riding tomorrow, or just watching the route from your porch, that is worth knowing before you pass the center. You are not looking at a finished project. You are looking at phase five, or six, depending on how you count, of a shopping center that has been quietly remaking itself since before some of its own new tenants existed.
For neighbors who want the kind of granular, block-level read that goes beyond what shows up in a drive-by, Hewitt+Saucedo tracks Kessler Park, North Oak Cliff, and the surrounding neighborhoods the same way the GlenOaks HOA tracks a bike route: closely, and with the details that actually matter to the people living there. Reach out anytime you want a neighborhood conversation instead of a headline.
