The Bookstore Got the Headlines. The Beauty Store Got There First.

Walk south from Monticello Park toward West 7th on any weekday evening and you will pass the same stretch of Montgomery Plaza that's been under some form of construction tape since spring. Ask a neighbor what's happening there and most will say the same thing: Barnes & Noble is coming back. That's the story that made the local news circuit, the one with the headline about the city's first new bookstore in decades. It's also, as of this month, the slowest of the four things actually happening at that shopping center.

The Ulta Beauty two doors down opened without a single press release. The Chick-fil-A is mid-remodel and nobody's covered it. And the food hall meant to replace Pei Wei, which closed back in December, has gone quiet on a timeline that was supposed to wrap months ago. If you've been waiting for the bookstore to reopen before you start treating Montgomery Plaza as changed, you've had it backwards. The plaza has already changed. The part everyone's watching is the part taking the longest.

Four Permits, Four Speeds

Montgomery Plaza's retail reset isn't one project. It's four separate build-outs filed at different times, moving at different speeds, inside the same shopping center at 2600 West 7th Street.

Lay them side by side and the pattern that emerges isn't the one the coverage implied. The highest-profile arrival is the one still behind scaffolding. The one nobody wrote a headline about already has a cash register running.

The One That Opened Quietly

Ulta's build-out was never the story anyone chased. The filing came through in December 2025, construction ran through the first half of the year, and the $812,000 renovation converted an empty shell into an 8,548-square-foot beauty store. As late as mid-July, the most recent press coverage of Montgomery Plaza still described the store as merely "planned," with nothing new to report since that December filing. Check Ulta's own store locator and grand-opening promotions today, though, and the Montgomery Plaza location shows up as a live, operating store with posted hours. Somewhere between that last press check-in and now, the doors opened without anyone writing it up.

That's worth sitting with for a Monticello resident. The retail change you can actually use today isn't the one that made the rounds on social media. It's the one that finished its permit and opened while the press was still calling it "planned."

The Bookstore Fort Worth Keeps Talking About

Barnes & Noble's return is a real milestone, just not the fast one. Fort Worth currently has a single Barnes & Noble location, on South Hulen Street, after two earlier stores in the city closed over the past decade, including the two-story Sundance Square location that opened back in 1996. The Montgomery Plaza store, going into the old Office Depot box, will be the chain's first new Fort Worth location in years, part of a national push to open roughly 60 stores in 2026.

Construction on the 20,000-square-foot space with a café started July 6 and is budgeted at roughly $508,000. The target completion is late October, which would put a possible opening somewhere in the holiday shopping window if the schedule holds. As of today, no opening date has been announced. A Fort Worth Report update from late May noted the same thing: work was set to be complete by October, but no date had been set for the doors to open.

That gap between "construction finishes" and "store opens" matters if you're planning around it. Interior build-out wrapping in October doesn't mean books on shelves in October. It means the countdown to an actual opening starts then, not now.

The Food Hall That Went Quiet

The state filing for the space is straightforward: the former Pei Wei, which closed in December 2025, will become a Wonder location, a takeout and delivery concept offering more than 20 restaurant options under one roof, similar in format to the Fort Worth Food Works ghost kitchen model already operating elsewhere in the city. The original construction window pointed to a wrap by June 2026.

June came and went. Reporting from mid-July that revisited the plaza's pending projects didn't offer a revised completion date or opening timeline for the space. That silence is its own data point. Of the four projects at the plaza, Wonder is the one where the public record has gone quietest, which usually means the project is either delayed past its original window or waiting on a filing that hasn't surfaced yet.

The Remodel Nobody's Watching

The Chick-fil-A at Montgomery Plaza is in the middle of a renovation aimed at easing the drive-through backups that have been a fixture of that corner of the parking lot for years, along with a refresh of the building's interior. The work is targeted to wrap by November 2026. It's the least newsworthy of the four projects and also the one most likely to hit its date, since fast-food remodels of this scale tend to move faster than big-box retail conversions or restaurant group build-outs.

What This Actually Means for a Monticello Weekend

Here's the sequence, as the permits and public reporting currently support it. Ulta is open now. The Chick-fil-A remodel should be finished and running smoothly by November. Barnes & Noble's construction should wrap by late October, with an actual opening landing somewhere in the weeks after, if the holiday timing holds. Wonder is the wild card. Its last confirmed public update is months old, and until a new filing or announcement surfaces, there's no reliable date to plan around.

If you're the kind of Monticello resident who already treats Montgomery Plaza as your extension of the neighborhood, the practical takeaway is simple: stop waiting for the bookstore to declare the plaza "changed." It already has. The beauty aisle is stocked. The Chick-fil-A line should be shorter by Thanksgiving. The bookstore and the food hall are still finding their footing, on two very different timelines, and only one of them has a date attached to it.

This is the same corridor covered in our look at Monticello's July restaurant openings, which reshuffled the neighborhood's dining map around Morton Street, Artisan Circle, and the White Settlement corridor. Montgomery Plaza is the retail half of that same walking radius, moving on its own separate and uneven clock.

If you're curious about how these changes fit into the bigger picture of what makes Monticello work as a place to live, our Monticello neighborhood guide goes deeper into what defines the area day to day. And if you're weighing a move into this stretch of Fort Worth, or wondering how a changing retail corridor factors into timing a sale, John Zimmerman and the team know this neighborhood block by block. Work With Us.