Just in time for Arts Goggle, Fort Worth South, Inc. has launched the all-new Near Southside web site at fortworthsouth.org. It is a big improvement over the old site, and it’s the work of local talent - none other than local marketing firm Starr Tincup created the site. Take some time to head on over and peruse the new site!
More good news for supporters of the TRV (like yours truly): the Army Corps of Engineers has given the project the go-ahead, and they can now start construction. Max Baker in the S-T has the story:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officially opened the funding floodgates for Trinity Uptown on Friday by signing a formal agreement that allows the federal agency to actually begin building the $576-million flood control and economic development project.
John Woodley, assistant secretary of the U.S. Army, flew in from Washington to sign the agreement and to praise Trinity Uptown as a project that successfully balances the Army Corps of Engineers’ mission of flood control with the community’s vision of rebuilding the inner-city.
Great news. It’s going to be fascinating watching the TRV come to fruition now that things are in motion (first the demolitions begin, and now this).
The full program for tonight’s Near Southside Arts Goggle is now online. This time promises to be the best yet - there are an outstanding fifty-four venues all around the Near Southside full of art and music. This time around, Fort Worth South, Inc. will be providing a circulator bus and pedicabs, so you can enjoy Arts Goggle car-free!
I’ll be at Spiral Diner, exhibiting some of my urban Fort Worth photography. See you there!
Here’s something of a question/poll for the readers out there.
If you’re looking for an affordable urban residence in a central Fort Worth neighborhood (and by “affordable” I’m talking around $150k or below), what sort of thing would you be looking for? This is assuming that whatever you wanted within that price target could materialize before you. Something with an open loft-like floorplan? Separate rooms? Would one bedroom do it for you? Two? How about baths - one, one and a half, two (and with a shower only, or do you want a tub as well)? One floor? Two? Given the idea of living more compactly and greenly, what sort of priorities like these come to mind?
Couple of quick things:
1) Don’t forget - Arts Goggle in the Near Southside is this Friday from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Fort Worth South, Inc.’s web site has the list of venues - a full program is supposed to be online by the end of the day tomorrow. Yours truly will be exhibiting photography at Spiral Diner! Stop by and say hello.
2) To those of you visiting Fort Worthology from our mention in this month’s Fort Worth South, Inc. newsletter - welcome! The post of Near Southside HDR photography mentioned in the newsletter can be found here.
UPDATE 2: Reader jefffwd writes that the domain name “thecassidy.com” was registered on August 1st by the Enilon Group, a local web design and marketing company. One of Enilon’s clients is none other than Sundance Square Management.
The plot thickens. More info as it becomes available.
UPDATE: There is some word that the “The Cassidy” plaque is simply a reference to the name of the parking lot used internally by Sundance Square and that it does not have anything to do with the long-planned tower. I guess we’ll see. I’d still like some more confirmation of that.
I reported yesterday that talk was running around of a sign of some sort reading “The Cassidy” being installed in Sundance Square, and sure enough, the talk was correct. This metal plaque has been installed between the two benches at the southeast corner of 3rd & Throckmorton, in front of a quarter block that has been a parking lot for quite some time.
If this doesn’t mean anything to you, let me fill you in. “The Cassidy” is the name of a building that has been planned by Sundance Square for quite some time (and I mean it - there is a reference to the project on the New York Times web site from 1996). There is very little information about the building - there have been a few details tossed around here and there. It’s supposed to be 22 stories tall, have 78 units, have ground-floor retail, and has been designed by David M. Schwarz. It has been hidden away for a long time, but speculation is that with the sales at Villa De Leon in Uptown and the Omni Hotel condos in the southern part of downtown, the Basses are finally about to start the project up.
One of the interesting things about the project that almost nobody out there knows is that some work on the building has already been done. That 1/4 block parking lot which currently occupies the site sits atop part of a two-story underground structure that runs from the historic Sanger building on 4th Street to the Sundance West apartment tower on Throckmorton. That underground parking garage currently serves the Sundance West apartments and the Sanger Lofts. There are a couple of things of note about it, though. First off, the garage has quite a few more spaces than there are units in the two buildings. Secondly, the section under the 1/4 block parking lot was built ready for the Cassidy - it already has the foundation of the long-planned tower.
Here’s a Google Street View of the Cassidy site as it sits today. I’m trying to find out if there’s some stirring on the project - as soon as I find something out, I’ll share it.
I’m hearing that crews have installed a logo for the Cassidy, the long-rumored 22-story condo tower planned for the southeast corner of the intersection of 3rd & Throckmorton downtown. Could we be at long last nearing the start of the project?
Not much is known about the Cassidy, except that it’s a Bass family project, will be (at last word) 22 stories tall, and is likely to be designed by David M. Schwarz. If I hear more, I’ll let everybody know.
Fort Worthology reader Mark Rybczyk sends in this photo of the new Sovereign Bank being built on 7th Street as part of the West 7th development by Cypress Equities. The new Sovereign Bank has been designed by local firm Schwarz-Hanson (no relation to David M. Schwarz of Bass Hall/etc. fame), who also designed two other bank buildings on 7th Street: the Citizen National near Montgomery Plaza, and the Whitley Penn building at 7th & Summit.
Both of those buildings had serious urban design flaws. Their sidewalks are too small in both cases. The building near Montgomery Plaza is oriented to face its side parking lot, not the sidewalk. The building at 7th & Summit similarly faces the parking lot rather than the street, and has the other problem of being set back from the 7th & Summit intersection for more parking. Unfortunate suburban touches.
(The firm also recently did an office building on 8th Avenue near Allen that is horribly suburban, with a huge parking lot out front. It is completely inappropriate to the site, and it’s a shame it got approved before the new Near Southside zoning and design guidelines took effect.)
This building, while it looks to be nothing really remarkable, at least does appear to feature a corner entrance facing the sidewalks, rather than an entrance stuck out back. If that’s the case, it will be an improvement over previous works. If S-H intends to continue designing in urban Fort Worth, I do hope they learn more about proper urban design and improve their output from that standpoint.
I attended the Fort Worth South, Inc. presentation yesterday evening on the proposed re-striping of Magnolia Avenue to feature fewer traffic lanes and create dedicated bike lanes. As I expected, there were both supporters and opponents in attendance. What I was pleasantly surprised at was the very strong showing of supporters at the meeting - there were noticeably a good deal more people there to voice their support of the proposal than there were people against it. Continue reading →
So…it’s a bit irritating to be signed up for Google Alerts on “So7,” keeping an eye out for news about the Fort Worth urban development, when there’s also an apparently somewhat popular Indonesian band out there called “Sheila on 7,” whose fans all seem to like referring to the band as “So7.”
And so, in the interest of being the only site on the entire Internet to link Fort Worth urban infill with Indonesian pop, I give you the video for “Pejantan Tangguh” by Sheila on 7.
Found on Youtube.
At last night’s Fairmount neighborhood association meeting, District 9 councilman Joel Burns announced that plans were underway to introduce a bit of urban agriculture to the Fairmount neighborhood in the Near Southside. The vacant lots shown above on Google Maps at 5th Avenue and Maddox, across from Fairmount Park, are currently owned by the city and used as a staging area for the Department of Transportation and Public Works. They no longer need them, however, and now Joel and Fort Worth South, Inc. are working together to turn the lots into a community garden for the neighborhood.
It was only about a month ago that I wrote about efforts of agricultural urbanism, and community gardens are a great example of the sort of things we can do to boost local food growing. I’m really looking forward to progress on the community garden plan, especially as a soon-to-be resident of Fairmount.
Just a reminder: tomorrow evening at 5:30 PM in the Community Room at the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders on Magnolia is a meeting being presented by Fort Worth South, Inc. on the “Complete Streets” proposal for Magnolia Avenue. The proposal would see Magnolia re-striped as shown in the crude drawing I made above. At the top is Magnolia’s current configuration: four car traffic lanes, two in each direction. On the bottom is the proposal: a center turn lane, two traffic lanes (one in each direction), and bike lanes on the outside.
As you’d expect, I personally support the proposal. It would be a great step for the Near Southside to see one of its signature streets be reworked to accommodate bike traffic with dedicated lanes, and the reduction of vehicular lanes would also have the effect of reducing traffic speeds (but with the center turn lane, there should be no congestion problems). Reduced traffic speeds make the street safer for all users - pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist.
I’ve taken you through the Pecan Place townhomes before, but with construction wrapping on a new phase of the project, I decided to take another look. This new phase is notably different from the previous parts of the development, both inside and out. Continue reading →
Working on my HDR again, and got these three from the Kimbell.
On a side note, posting has been irregular here the last few days and will likely be so again for a while. There’s a project I’m starting that will likely consume a lot of my after-work and weekend time for a month or so - a construction project. I’ll write some more about it in the next week or two. A few of you out there already know about it. In the mean time, enjoy the photos.
Fort Worth Forum member (and Fort Worthology reader) Dustin posted the following paragraph over at the Fort Worth Forum, and it eloquently summarizes the benefits of the Trinity River Vision better than I think I’ve ever been able to do myself. Here’s the quote:
The thing about the TRV is that most people in the city recognize the value it will bring to the city. It won’t just benefit the few developers that build around the TRV, it will be an incentive to bring in new businesses. It will add to the attractiveness of our city to tourists, who spend money here. It will encourage companies to relocate here. It will create new shopping destinations in an area that was blighted and economically stagnant. It will generate more tax revenue for the city. It will encourage density in a metropolitan area plagued by sprawl. It will encourage walkable neighborhoods which can improve our air quality. The list goes on and on and the effects range from direct to distant correlations. Yes, a few developers will make a few bucks. Yes it is unfortunate that a few land owners were in the path of progress. But in this cost/benefit scenario, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
I know, I know. Why am I showing you photos of vacant lots? Well, these two vacant lots are the next phases of Trinity Bluff that are now getting underway. The photo above shows the bluffside location where Lincoln Property Company is building a series of townhome-style apartments. This 2.4 acre plot will see a combination of 70 townhouse-style luxury apartments and one- and two-bedroom apartments. These units will feature balconies facing the river and downtown, 20 foot ceilings, attached one- and two-car garages, hardwood floors, and granite countertops. Square footages will be 805 to 1,115 square feet for one-bedrooms and 1,100 to 1,500 square feet for two bedrooms. Rents for one-bedrooms will start at around $1,300, with two-bedroom rents starting at around $1,900.
The lot above, across the street from the townhome site at Samuels & Gounah, is another large apartment project by Lincoln. This phase will be a 298-unit four-story midrise that will feature two large courtyards and contemporary interior finishes. Units will be available in one, two, and three-bedroom layouts, with square footages of 650 to nearly 1,000 square feet for one-bedrooms, 1,100 to 1,400 square feet for two-bedrooms, and starting at 1,400 square feet for three bedrooms. Rents will start at around $1,000 for a one-bedroom, $1,400 for a two-bedroom, and $1,770 for a three-bedroom.
The Overhead Wire has a nicely thought-provoking piece over something that’s bugged me for a long time - why building rail transit is a “waste” and a “gift to developers,” while building roads that enable more sprawl gets a pass. From The Overhead Wire:
I often wonder why there is a double standard. Many critics of the Portland Streetcar point to its success as a function of subsidies for developers. There are some projects in the Pearl that have gotten tax breaks, but let’s remember that Homer Williams didn’t have to upzone his property from 15 units per acre to over 100. 30% affordable housing and parks were also provided. So while there were breaks, there have also been benefits.
But on the other side, there are roads that are built into no-where because of expected future demand. There are very few cars traveling there at the time, but its expected to grow. So why the double standard? Why say that building a rail line to support future density is worthless while turning your head when a road is built to support future sprawl. One is enabling infrastructure waste and the other efficient development. Especially at a time with increasing energy costs and a need for alternatives.
Great points. There have already been stories about planned (and almost all sprawl-tastic) developments being planned by developers buying up land around the proposed (and pointless) Southwest Parkway, for example, yet nobody seems to mind. I expect to hear things like the above about the Fort Worth streetcar as we move forward on it, similar to the things said about Portland’s. It’s a small part of the numerous double standards in comparisons between roads and transit.
It doesn’t extend just to transit, though - I’ve had people tell me the same thing about urban infill development. A NIMBY-ish resident of the Monticello area once angrily declared to me that the mixed-use zoning for the 7th Street developments was just a “gift” to the greedy developers with no real benefit. I had to point out to them that MU zoning is not a gift - it is a return of something we used to do as part of normal development. It is the norm returning after displacing the exception, really. The benefits are real - things I’ve written about on here many times before. (I didn’t want to point out the subtle humor of a resident of one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods lecturing about the “evils” of the big rich developers.)
Over the weekend, I took my photographic equipment to the Near Southside and spent some time wandering around taking HDR photos of things. For the uninitiated, HDR photography involves taking multiple photos of a subject at different exposures, then blending the exposures together on a computer to create an image with a much higher dynamic range than is possible with a single image. All of these images were created from three exposures.
A lot of HDR images you’ll see have an intentional “otherworldly” quality to them - exaggerated in many regards. I tried here for a somewhat more realistic approach.
Click the images for a bigger view. Enjoy!
Here’s a real urban pioneer - this industrial building from 1926 on the long-beleaguered East Lancaster near downtown has been converted to residential loft apartments and is now leasing. The Lancaster Lofts have units ranging from 767 square feet to 1,000 square feet, with rents ranging between $700 and $900 per month. The ground floor is home to an art gallery. For more information, check out the project’s web site.
There has been some confusion out there about the Omni Hotel’s recent topping out ceremony at 447 feet. The height of the building had been widely reported at 547 feet - this had always been my understanding. So what happened to the other 100 feet?
Omni didn’t actually drop 100 feet. The building was built exactly as it had always been planned from what I have been told. The extra 100 feet was a misinterpretation - as has been explained to me by some architect friends of mine, architects often set the elevation of a building’s first floor to 100 feet, so that they can easily measure above ground and below ground floors without having negative numbers duplicating positive numbers and causing confusion. The 547 foot number that was reported was apparently going off this 100 foot ground floor elevation, not the actual height of the building.
I’m a bit surprised that Omni never made that clear in any of their press relations. Still, 447 ain’t half bad (of course, I’ve never been one who’s particularly cared about making the skyline taller).
This link will take you to an outstanding piece by Roger Scruton in the City Journal talking about designing livable cities and towns and famed European antimodernist Leon Krier’s soluitons. Krier’s thinking is along much the same lines as mine. Here’s an excerpt:
Krier’s solution is to replace the “downtown plus suburbs” system with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centers, with their own public spaces, public buildings, and places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is “ours” rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s. The towns will create a collection of somewheres instead of an ever-expanding nowhere. This solution has a precedent: the city of London grew next to the city of Westminster in friendly competition, and the residential areas of Chelsea, Kensington, Bloomsbury, and Whitechapel arose as autonomous villages rather than as spillovers from the existing centers.
I think it’s about time we did another urban Fort Worth walking tour. I had a great time hosting the last one, and had meant to make it a regular thing. Due to a variety of scheduling factors, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m thinking September, after we’ve passed August heat.
The question is - where/what do you want to cover this time? Last time we did a general walking tour of downtown. Is there interest in doing so again? Would you all rather see something more specialized, say an Art Deco related downtown tour? Or would you rather go to the Cultural District or the Near Southside (probably the Magnolia/Fairmount area more specifically)?
I’m open to ideas and thoughts. Let me hear them in the comments.
The new Shamblee Library has opened at the Evans & Rosedale urban village, and I went by to get a few photos. The new library is nifty - the entrance almost has a hint of Mid-Century Modern going on there. All parking is either on-street or in back, so it comes right up to the sidewalk like a good urban building should. Not entirely sure about that middle face there (in the photo below), but on the whole it’s pretty interesting.
As part of the new library, the historic little Tommy Tucker Building on the site was restored and integrated into the library.
Freakonomics has posted an article with thoughts from various pundits on the future of suburbs and development in America. Naturally, one of the contributors was James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City In Mind, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand. Agree with him or disagree, Kunstler is always an entertaining and thought-provoking read (I personally agree with him more often than not, though I’m not necessarily in lock-step with his beliefs of what lay ahead). Here’s Kunstler’s contribution:
There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.
Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.
This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial.
Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.
In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else. We don’t get it. The Happy Motoring era is over. No combination of “alt” fuels — solar, wind, nuclear, tar sands, oil-shale, offshore drilling, used French-fry oil — will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Marts, and Walt Disney World.
The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not. Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.
The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end. Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways. This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.
We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future. I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.
One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest” mode of human habitation. On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply. The process of urban contraction is likely to be complicated by ethnic tensions and social disorder.
As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale. This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.
These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it. Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.