How Now, Cowtown
The Fort Worth Stockyards are a favorite Texas stomping ground. For how long?
The North Side of Fort Worth, home of the venerable Fort Worth Stockyards, has seen through the years cattle drives and slaughterhouses, oil refineries, and even an improbable helium plant for dirigibles. It’s been a hotbed of union activity, the home of a Klu Klux Klan hall, and the scene of performances by such notables as Enrico Caruso, Indian chief Quanah Parker, Theodore Roosevelt, Bob Wills, and Elvis Presley. In 1908 it was the site of a geographically ridiculous 273-man simulation of the Battle of Gettysburg, and between then and now it’s had more than its share of unsimulated shootings.
Now the slaughterhouses are long since gone, and the great Swift and Armour packinghouses are stolid cow culture ruins. The cattle business is more ornamental than functional, and on weekdays the brick streets are likely to be all but deserted, save for mounted cop Leonard Schilling, a few local characters, and assorted Japanese and German tourists scurrying around with their cameras. But this spring you would have thought the Stockyards were the economic center of Fort Worth, judging from the attention the area drew.
First there was a series of furious political maneuverings over historic designation for the city-owned 75-year-old Cowtown Coliseum. The city backed away from any historic designation, saying that it could impede development plans. Preservationists, led by the North Fort Worth Historical Society, fought for historic designation and eventually applied for it-- behind the city’s back-- through the State Antiquities Committee. Given the choice between Austin control and Fort Worth control of the building, the council reluctantly agreed to grant the Coliseum historic status locally, severely limiting the freedom of developers to modify it.
In the middle of that flap came the announcement of major redevelopment proposals in the area that could include a new hotel, quarter horse training facilities, various shops, and a general face lift. And punctuating it all were various solemn pronouncements about the glories of Fort Worth’s Western heritage and the sanctity of the Stockyards and sundry homages to Cowtownism in all its splendorous permutations.
It was a heck of a lot of attention devoted to a section of town that was declared dead almost a decade ago and for years was regarded by people in Fort Worth as little more than a raunchy playground for the city’s losers. But if there’s any stretch of turf in Texas that’s worth worrying about and perhaps fighting over, it’s the Fort Worth Stockyards. There’s so little left to preserve in most Texas cities that preservationists end up fighting some pretty nit-picking battles; the Stockyards, though, is one that really matters. The area, which has slowly been coming back to life over the past eight years, may finally be reaching critical mass, and there are a lot of people in Fort Worth and elsewhere watching to see what develops.
“Let’s be honest, profit has no loyalty,” says Charlie McCafferty, who, along with his wife, Sue, leads the North Fort Worth Historical Society, probably the loudest voice in the pro-Stockyards choir. “We’re not antidevelopment, but the question is, How do you maintain the so-called heritage and develop it without turning it into another phony French Quarter? How do you avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg?” That goose is the tourism that has been steadily picking up in recent years. Even die-hard North Siders like McCafferty think there’s a good chance Fort Worth will end up doing right by the Stockyards, so the next few years should be interesting ones there.
The North Side has gone through many guises, from way station on the Chisholm Trail to packing plant center to run-down slum. When you scrape away the new romanticism, it’s worth remembering that for most of the North Side’s life it was a foul-smelling industrial area owned by out-of-state conglomerates. Rather than a reminder of the nobility of the open range, it was a place that stank of manure and the carcasses of horses, mules, pigs, and cattle; its characteristic sounds were the wailings and bleatings of animals being led to slaughter.
In essence the Stockyards were born in 1893 when Louisville V. Niles of Somerville, Massachusetts, became the manager of the newly formed Fort Worth Stockyards Company. By 1903 he had enticed J. Ogdon Armour of the Armour Packing Company and Gustavus Swift of Swift & Company into opening packinghouses in Fort Worth, instantly creating the town’s dominant industry and beginning six decades of activity that saw a peak processing of four million head of livestock a year. Eventually, the construction of new packing plants elsewhere and the spread of feedlots that decentralized the cattle industry turned the Fort Worth plants into dinosaurs. Armour announced in 1962 that it was closing its Fort Worth plant, and when Swift closed in April 1971, the Stockyards were suddenly an unsightly relic of an outdated industry.
Since then, a combination of brains, PR, and good timing has brought the area back to some semblance of life. In the early seventies Fort Worth tried to dump the “Cowtown” label and replace it with the lame “Now Town,” and right-thinking Fort Worthians wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near the Stockyards. But when Texas found itself a fad in the mid-seventies, people started noticing that Fort Worth had the most atmospheric street scene in the state. Tourists in search of Texana began showing up, and before long the neo-Mission Livestock Exchange Building was renovated and the Coliseum reopened. The White Elephant Saloon also revived, and some of the sleazier bars and flophouse hotels closed. New restaurants like the Star Cafe joined venerable landmarks like the Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, and the various Western wear shops in the area were spruced up a bit. There’s even a renovation of the old Stockyards Hotel under way. When Billy Bob’s Texas opened two years ago, the Stockyards began to draw locals as well as tourists. Now so dramatically have attitudes changed that if there’s one motherhood-and-apple-pie issue in Cowtown, it’s the Stockyards.
“Fort Worth may have wonderful museums or a great symphony, but that’s not what’s going to draw people here initially,” says attorney Jim Lane, whose office in the Livestock Exchange Building is such a riot of Western artifacts that it’s becoming a regular stop for tourists. “It’s the historical significance of Fort Worth that will draw them to those other things, and the Stockyards area is the door that will open Fort Worth to a lot of people.”
The trouble with the Stockyards is that although everyone loves them, no one knows what to do with them. Almost the entire area is owned by the New York firm of Canal-Randolph, which has been very conservative in viewing development proposals. The latest potential breakthrough came in March when Billy Bob Barnett of Billy Bob’s Texas and developer Bill Beuck announced their plan to lease 74 acres of land from Canal-Randolph for future development. Together with the 15 acres that are part of the Billy Bob site, that gives them 89 acres of land, which would be redeveloped to attract tourists.
Even North Side chauvinists like McCafferty, who still pines for the days when North Fort Worth was an incorporated city unto itself, seem to think Barnet and Beuck are committed to preserving the ambience of the Stockyards. And logic seem to point in that direction. The geographical isolation that allowed the Stockyards to flourish three miles from downtown also limits their investment appeal. Unlike valuable downtown real estate, the Stockyards are nothing without the ghosts of cowboys past hovering over the old holding pens, brick streets, and turn-of-the-century buildings on Exchange Street and North Main.
Then again, other promising development plans have been proposed for the Stockyards in the past, only to fall apart, and there’s no guarantee the Beuck-Barnett plan will ever get off the ground. Most North Siders agree that the worst thing that could happen to the Stockyards would be for Canal-Randolph to sell the area to foreign investors, who would seem the most likely to try to make a go of Cowboyland, Cowtown Condos, or something similar. Equally disastrous would be the phasing out of what little cattle business remains. Only three thousand head of livestock are sold each week, but that activity still adds a great deal of flavor to the area.
It’s not wise to have too many illusions about the Stockyards. There’s plenty of touristy Texana, bathrooms labeled “Bulls” and “Heifers,” signs announcing, “We have stuffed armadillos,” and that sort of thing. But what Texas city can offer a more authentic turn-of-the-century street scene? What better monuments to cattle culture are there than the glorious red-tile-roofed Livestock Exchange Buildings and the morose acres of livestock pens behind? Other than the Riverwalk in San Antonio, what urban tourist attraction says more about Texas? So far, the Stockyards have steered a moderate course between untended decay and heedless growth. But the skirmishes of the past spring may indicate that the real battles-- whether they’re against neglect or overdevelopment-- are just beginning to be fought.
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