"I am very proud of the fact that we were able to preserve and enhance the Baccus Cemetery," developer Fehmi Karahan said, describing a decision that shaped one of the busiest shopping corridors in North Texas. He was not talking about Legacy West, the glass-and-steel district where Toyota, JPMorgan Chase, and Boeing keep their regional offices. He was talking about the other Legacy, the one just across the Dallas North Tollway that most people mean when they say the same word.
Ask a longtime Plano resident where they're meeting friends tonight and they'll say "Legacy." They rarely specify which one. That's the quiet trick of this corridor: two separate developments, built roughly a decade and a half apart, under different ownership, with different anchor tenants, have folded into one word in everyday conversation. The confusion isn't a planning failure. It's the residue of two different eras of Plano's growth landing on opposite sides of the same tollway, and the clearest way to see where one era ends and the other begins is to stand inside a 179-year-old family cemetery that a shopping center built around instead of over.
Two Districts, Fourteen Years Apart
The Shops at Legacy came first. The Angelika Film Center, still the anchor most locals associate with that side of the tollway, opened there in 2003 as the first arthouse cinema to open inside a U.S. suburb. Legacy West didn't open to the public until June 2, 2017, when Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos and Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere cut the ribbon on a $2 billion project built on land JCPenney had held vacant since 1987.
Fourteen years separate those two openings. That gap matters more than the shared name suggests, because it means the two developments were built to serve different versions of Plano. The Shops at Legacy was designed around Ross Perot's original 1985 Legacy Business Park vision, an office-park-adjacent retail strip meant to give corporate employees somewhere to eat lunch. Legacy West was built for a Plano that had already become a corporate relocation magnet, with more than 20,000 employees working inside its own boundaries and a 303-room Renaissance hotel built to house their visiting clients.
Here's what actually separates them on the ground today:
| Legacy West | The Shops at Legacy / Legacy North | |
|---|---|---|
| Public opening | June 2, 2017 | Angelika Film Center anchor opened 2003 |
| Footprint | 415,000 sq. ft. of retail, restaurant, and office space plus a 55,000 sq. ft. food hall | Roughly 400,000 sq. ft. lifestyle center |
| Corporate anchors | Toyota North America, FedEx Office, Boeing Global Services, JPMorgan Chase (regional), Liberty Mutual (regional) | Hilti North America |
| Current ownership | Karahan Companies partnership with JCPenney, KDC, and Columbus Realty Partners | Sold to Florida-based CTO Realty Growth in 2021 for $72.5 million |
That last row is the detail most locals never think to check, and it's the one that explains why the two sides have started to feel different even to people who visit both every week. Legacy West is still run by the same development team that built it. The Shops at Legacy changed hands in 2021, and a real estate investment trust based in Florida now decides what goes into its vacancies. Two shopping districts sharing a name and a tollway crossing are, since 2021, answering to two entirely different owners with two entirely different reasons to invest.
The Family Buried in the Middle of a Parking Garage
Turn north off Legacy Drive onto Bishop Road and you land inside the older half of the corridor, where a wrought-iron fence surrounds a small hilltop cemetery that predates the town of Plano itself. Henry Cook, a War of 1812 veteran who arrived by wagon train from Illinois, settled this land in 1845 and buried his sixteen-year-old son Daniel here in 1847, twenty-six years before the surrounding settlement was renamed Plano in 1873. His daughter Rachel Cook Baccus later deeded the land for a church and cemetery in 1878, and the site carries her married name today.
The cemetery is still active for descendants, and it's still surrounded by a barbed-wire-turned-iron fence, but the "nothingness" that once surrounded it, in the words of descendant Lucy Driggers, is now a parking garage, a fountain, and Mexican Sugar's dining patio. Driggers has spoken publicly about her family's decades of maintaining the graves, including her mother's habit of pulling up surveyor's stakes in the 1980s when development crews first approached the property. Her family eventually connected with Robbie Robinson, who managed the original Legacy Town Center project for Ross Perot's team, and the resulting compromise is why the streets around the cemetery carry the names of the people buried inside it. Bishop is Driggers's great-grandfather's surname. Libby is her sister's name. Robbie Road, named for the man who negotiated the preservation, intersects Bishop Road at the cemetery gate.
That's not a detail you'll find on a shopping center's directory. It's the difference between knowing a place has history and knowing whose history it is.
What's Actually Changing Right Now
The two halves of the corridor aren't standing still, and the pace of change on each side tells the same ownership story the ledger above does.
On the Legacy West side, Fox Restaurant Concepts is building out a roughly 13,000-square-foot location of The Henry inside the space that used to house Frontgate on Windrose Avenue, with an opening targeted for late 2026. It will be the brand's second North Texas location and its thirteenth nationwide, joining a restaurant lineup that already includes Uchiko, Mesero, and Taverna. A few doors down, the Los Angeles furniture brand 7th Avenue opened an appointment-first showroom at 5901 Winthrop Street on September 4, 2026, its fifth Texas location and third in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Adidas Originals also moved into Legacy West this summer with a store built around World Cup activations, timed to the tournament's arrival in North Texas.
On The Shops at Legacy side, the changes read more like a comeback than an expansion. Several longtime tenants, including Jasper's and Nicola's Ristorante, closed or relocated as Legacy West pulled attention across the tollway. The clearest recent signal of new investment is Mic Drop Comedy, which took over the former Plano House of Comedy space with a renovation completed in January 2025. It's a smaller, scrappier kind of announcement than a Toyota headquarters, and that's the point. One side of the corridor is adding corporate flagships. The other is filling vacancies one lease at a time.
Why the Confusion Isn't Going Away
The City of Plano has its own reason to keep blurring the line between the two districts. In 2018, the city and the nonprofit Legacy Association, the organization Perot founded in 1987 to govern the area, proposed a Legacy Cultural District designation that would formally cover both Legacy West and The Shops at Legacy under one boundary, citing the Angelika Film Center, the Baccus Cemetery, and the bronze Trails in Legacy longhorn sculpture as shared cultural assets. If that designation moves forward, the two properties will be legally distinct, separately owned, and still officially branded as one cultural district. The blur is policy, not just habit.
It's also about to repeat itself seven miles north. Karahan has described his new Frisco project, Fields West, as Legacy West's "younger sister," a bigger version of the same formula now under vertical construction with retailers like Crate & Barrel, North Italia, and Kendra Scott already signed. Sequenced openings are expected to begin in late 2027. In a few years, Frisco residents may find themselves having the exact same "which Legacy do you mean" conversation Plano residents have been having for the better part of a decade.
Giving Directions Like You Know the Difference
For anyone who wants to sound like they actually live here the next time someone asks for directions:
- If someone says "meet at Legacy Hall," they mean Legacy West, north of the tollway, near the Renaissance hotel.
- If someone says "meet at the Angelika" or "by the cemetery," they mean The Shops at Legacy, south and east of the tollway.
- If someone says "Legacy North," they're using the newer name for the same Shops at Legacy property, post-2021 sale.
- If someone just says "Legacy" and shrugs, they probably mean whichever one has better parking that day.
That last one is a joke, but only barely. The corridor keeps growing on both sides of the tollway, and the cemetery at its center isn't going anywhere either. Understanding which half you're standing in, and who has been reshaping it since 2021, is the kind of local knowledge that turns a shopping trip into a slightly better story.
For more on how this corner of Plano keeps changing, Katie Chu Group covers the neighborhoods, developments, and everyday details that make this market worth paying attention to, whether or not a move is anywhere on your horizon.
