Broadway Square Spent $1.4 Million On Two New Storefronts This Year. Three Others Just Went Dark.

If you live in The Woods and haven't been back to Broadway Square since the headlines in January, you're shopping in a mall that no longer exists. J.Crew Factory has been open since July. The lululemon that used to be a seasonal pop-up now has a permanent, renovated storefront that opened in August. Meanwhile, Talbots is gone, and so are two locally owned shops that never made the news outside of a quiet closure notice.

For most Woods residents, Broadway Square is the default retail run, the place you go for a return, a birthday gift, or an hour of air conditioning between errands. The mall just went through the biggest tenant shuffle it's seen in years, and the story that got told back in the spring, two exciting new brands are coming, was only half true. Here's the fuller picture, with the numbers that never made it into the local news coverage.

The Money Behind The Two New Storefronts

Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filings show exactly what these two projects cost, and the gap between them tells you something the press releases didn't.

J.Crew Factory moved into an existing storefront for $600,000. That's a straightforward buildout. lululemon spent $210,000 more to renovate a space it had already been testing since a pop-up opened there in April 2025, according to Visit Tyler. That's the detail worth sitting with. A retailer doesn't usually spend more money converting a location it already knows into a permanent one unless the pop-up actually worked. The extra investment isn't lululemon taking a chance on Tyler. It's lululemon confirming a bet it made more than a year ago.

Who Left While The Construction Crews Were In

The same season that brought in two national retailers also emptied out three storefronts.

• Talbots closed, with Stephen Richardson, the mall's director of marketing and business development, confirming in January that a new nationally recognized retailer would take the space. A second, still-unnamed national retailer was also teased at the time.
• Weird & Different, a clothing brand owned by Tyler Junior College graduate Romereo Brown, closed its physical storefront on Jan. 31. The brand still sells online.
• Attic Salt, a specialty retail shop, closed around the same time.

Put the two lists side by side and the story changes shape. It isn't simply "the mall added two exciting brands." It's a mall that traded locally owned, single-location retail for larger, capital-heavy national tenants, in the same window, on the same floor plan. That's a pattern worth knowing if you've wondered why the mall directory looks different than it did at the start of the year.

What Broadway Square Actually Looks Like Right Now

As of this fall, both new storefronts have been open long enough to stop being news and start being normal. J.Crew Factory has had a full summer of foot traffic. lululemon has had about a month. If your last mental picture of Broadway Square is the one from the February headlines, "coming soon," it's out of date. The construction is finished. The stores are stocked. The fitting rooms are in use.

The rest of the mall's anchor tenants haven't changed: Dillard's and JCPenney still hold the department store end, Dick's Sporting Goods still covers the athletic gear category that lululemon now shares, and HomeGoods and LongHorn Steakhouse are still there for the errand run that turns into dinner. Sephora and MAC handle the beauty counter side. James Avery, a Kerrville-founded jewelry brand with decades of history in Texas, still holds its spot near the fashion corridor. None of that changed this year. What changed is the specific mix of who's paying rent on the storefronts closest to the food court, and that mix now leans more toward brands with regional or national buying power than it did in January.

Making It A Full Saturday: University Boulevard After The Mall

The Woods sits close enough to the UT Tyler and University Boulevard corridor that a mall trip and a dinner out can happen in the same afternoon without much of a drive. Republic Icehouse, at 3807 University Blvd., is the sports-bar-and-live-music option across from campus, with live music on Friday and Saturday nights and a patio for anyone who wants to eat outside while the weather is still cooperating. Enoch's Tyler sits a few doors down at 3979 University Blvd. if you want something quieter after a day of shopping.

That loop, mall in the early afternoon, dinner on University Boulevard in the evening, isn't new. What's new is that the mall half of that loop now includes two national retailers that weren't there a year ago, and doesn't include two local shops that used to be.

The Part Worth Remembering

The headline in January was simple: two big brands are coming to Broadway Square. That was true, but it left out the cost of getting there, both in dollars and in storefronts. J.Crew Factory and lululemon together represent more than $1.4 million in construction investment, real money that suggests the mall's ownership sees enough demand in Tyler to keep betting on national retail. At the same time, a homegrown brand built by a local college graduate no longer has a physical counter here, and neither does the specialty shop that used to sit near it.

If you haven't walked through Broadway Square since the spring, you're due for a look. The stores that were "coming soon" back in February are simply open now, and the ones that quietly disappeared aren't coming back. That's the actual state of the mall closest to The Woods this fall, not the one from the press release.

Amy Egaña Group keeps an eye on these kinds of changes because they're part of what makes a neighborhood feel current, not because a mall renovation moves home values on its own. If you want more of this kind of on-the-ground reporting about Tyler and the communities around it, from Lake Tyler to the Azalea District, Amy Egaña Group sends it directly. Reach out to receive exclusive listings and the local updates that don't always make it into the headlines.