<\/p>\n
Incorporating an indoor ice skating rink inside a mall was considered a big risk when the Galleria opened in 1970.<\/p>\n
Courtesy Hines<\/p>\n
Shoppers at the Galleria mall stop to look at puppies up for adoption as part of The Houston SPCA collaborating with Neiman Marcus for the 35th annual \u201cHomes for the Holidays\u201d pet adoption event in Houston, Friday, Nov. 28, 2025.<\/p>\n
Raquel Natalicchio\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
This story originally appeared in 2016. It has been updated and is being republished as part of the Chronicle’s 125 project.<\/p>\n
The sparkling\u00a0mecca of retail and more attracts more than 30 million visitors a year to its shops and hotels. It reshaped the entire southwest corner of the city into a second downtown and inspired how shopping malls and mixed-use projects were developed in the following decades.<\/p>\n
But before the Galleria was born in the 1960s, the land at Post Oak and Westheimer was mostly open countryside, where Italian farmers had called home for generations. Only 7 miles from downtown, the area nonetheless was considered a suburb. Loop 610 had not yet been built. Westheimer was known as Farm to Market Road 1093.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
But Gerald Hines, a developer in his 30s from Indiana who had developed only a string of warehouses and office buildings up to that point, took a chance and thought the land was perfect for a first-of-its-kind shopping, office and hotel center. He followed a few retail stores into the area, attracted to the wealthy of nearby River Oaks, Memorial and Tanglewood.<\/p>\n
But his project was by far the most ambitious and ultimately transformative.<\/p>\n
“The job of a developer is to come up with ways that create value and then hopefully a successful project. And the Galleria is a successful project,” Hines said in a PBS documentary “Post Oak Boulevard: A Texas Legacy.”<\/p>\n
His idea for a multistory shopping mall that included office and hotel did not always seem like the wisest of investments. The young developer took on a disproportionate amount of equity, meaning he would assume most of the profit and all of the risk. He made generous deals to acquire the land and to attract his first anchor, Neiman Marcus. He created a design that was extremely unusual for the time.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
“He put it all on the line,” Louis Sklar said in 2016. Sklar, a former Hines executive, helped develop the\u00a0Galleria.<\/p>\n
The design, Sklar explained, was meant to keep traffic and visitors going at all times, hence the multiple uses for office, hotel and shopping. The unusual, multistory structure meant visitors had to enter at different floors, ensuring traffic on all the floors, he said. The ice-skating rink, for example, was meant to keep traffic high on the ground floor to keep rents there higher.<\/p>\n
Hines gave generous deals at first to attract the tenants, and it was about 60 percent full when it opened.<\/p>\n
“That was a make-or-break time for me,” Hines said in a 2016 interview with the Chronicle. Hines died in 2020 at age 95.<\/p>\n
The company was also developing the high-rise One Shell Plaza in downtown at the time. His now-international real estate firm later developed Galleria Dallas, and is known for building Pennzoil Place, RepublicBank Center (now Bank of America), First Colony in Sugar Land and Williams Tower.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
The Galleria influenced future mall projects.<\/p>\n
One of his regrets was not trademarking the name Galleria, Hines said. After his project opened, several copies opened throughout the country.<\/p>\n
The enclosed, upscale, multistory mall became the go-to design for shopping malls in the 1970s. Hines was originally inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, Italy. Built in 1867, one of its central components is a dramatic steel and glass atrium. A glass vault dome is one of the\u00a0Galleria’s defining features.<\/p>\n
The first phase of the Galleria, a three-story, 600,000-square-foot development, opened in 1970. It featured the first indoor ice-skating rink in a U.S. mall. Its anchor, Neiman Marcus, had opened in 1969. The Galleria continued to grow, and today it spans 2.4 million square feet with 400-plus stores and restaurants, two high-rise hotels and three office towers where roughly 7,000 employees work for various companies.<\/p>\n
The shopping mall is one of Houston’s top tourist destinations. Of its 30 million visitors, a third are international.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
The property was purchased in 2003 from Hines by then-Simon Property Group. Simon, based in Indianapolis, owns more than 230 malls and shopping properties across the U.S. and in Asia and Europe. Locally, Simon also owns Katy Mills, Houston Premium Outlets in Cypress, and it co-owns Tanger Outlets in Texas City.<\/p>\n
The Galleria is anchored by Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom and Macy’s. (Saks’\u00a0parent company acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion this year, bringing the former rivals under the\u00a0Saks Global entity.) The mall’s luxury retailers include Louis\u00a0Vuitton, Chanel, Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Celine, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Christian Louboutin and Tiffany & Co.<\/p>\n
Simon made a $250 million investment in the west end of the mall with Saks Fifth Avenue, and a standalone building dubbed “the jewel box” with an upscale retail store and restaurant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We just want to keep her looking beautiful,” said Randy Schumacher, Galleria operations director first for Hines, then Simon. “It’s all about making sure it’s the No. 1 mall in the United States.”<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
From the Chronicle archives<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Incorporating an indoor ice skating rink inside a mall was considered a big risk when the Galleria opened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-410780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}