Short Cuts: Episode I 
Wowtown!
Fort Worth’s city center was dead until the Basses started rebuilding it. Twenty years later, thanks to their vision—and money—Cowtown has the hottest downtown in Texas.
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The two angels, carved out of Texas limestone by Hungarian sculptor Marton Varo and weighing 250,000 pounds each, may be the hall’s signature, but three domes inside define its interior elegance. The center dome above the seating area is three quarters the size of the state capitol dome in Austin, and two smaller domes distinguish the east and west entrances to the hall. All three, elaborately painted by Fort Worth artists Stuart and Scott Gentling, depict the Texas sky, the center dome ringed by a circle of feathers in keeping with the celestial theme of angels.
Ed Bass relates how the feathers are analogous to the laurel wreath that the ancient Greeks crowned their champions and heroes with. “There’s a long history of symbolism in which feathers connect earthly things and the gods.” David Schwarz has a more practical explanation for the angels: “They hide the circulation ducts.” He says the Ballpark in Arlington provided as much inspiration as the Greeks. “Performance halls and ballparks have a great deal in common—they both have seats, they have players, a stage, a staff, an audience, and guests. Both have very complicated circulation problems and complicated acoustics.”
One clear advantage the privately funded hall has over similar facilities in Texas is not having to deal with governmental bodies regarding maintenance or booking policy. Sid Bass cites the experience of many cities to explain why no effort was made to secure public moneys for the hall’s construction. “The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,” he says, “would bring in an exhibition with frontal nudity or a Mapplethorpe, and a handful of people would go down to the city council and complain, and one or two councilmen would threaten to withhold funding for upkeep or maintenance. It just wasn’t worth it. Because the hall was built with private funds, we can bring in Hair if we want.”
THE BASS PERFORMANCE HALL—WHICH HAS ALREADY booked an average of 23 dates per month for the next year and a half—has clearly accelerated the downtown’s momentum. “When we started building this building, we didn’t anticipate how busy and, at times, congested downtown would be,” Ed says. “Since we started this, activity downtown has increased by another fifty percent. This is going to drive additional things in other directions because the core is fully occupied, which is great. That’s what we had in mind.” The block directly across from the front of the hall is another Bass venture that includes the vaguely deco AMC Palace 9 Theatres movie complex, the retro-futuro Barnes and Noble superstore, the adjacent USA Cafe with Bob Wade’s Mount Rushmore—inspired sculpture at the entrance, and the understated Euro-elegant Angeluna restaurant, with its front-porch vantage point of the angels. The conglomeration of styles suggests the block might have evolved over the course of half a century or so, instead of rising from the asphalt of a parking lot three years ago.
Beyond the bounds of “Bassville” (the Basses now control about forty downtown blocks), the Blackstone Hotel is finally being gutted for a Courtyard by Marriott. Residential construction is going full tilt, with hundreds of new apartment units being built, many in historic downtown buildings. A station is under construction near the convention center for the Trinity Railway Express, a commuter-rail project that will link up with downtown Dallas in 2001.
The Basses have other plans too. “We want to do a condominium tower and a three- and four-story medium-density residential project on the fringe of downtown,” Ed says. “We want to do a lot more retail, but since all the existing spaces are full, we need to create more spaces.”
Other Texas cities have been avidly watching Fort Worth’s transformation. Ed says, “We happen to have a very fortunate area in terms of size and scale. Downtown Dallas is so big that, to get a critical mass and turn the corner, you have to do so much. Downtown Fort Worth is fairly defined and compact, with a river on two sides and the railroad on two sides. It’s big enough that you can make a real downtown, but we’re small enough that it’s manageable. The investment of the early eighties with all the oil money, and the building of four major office towers and doing a small amount of renovation in Sundance Square, gave it a big boost. It was enough energy and overdevelopment to get things started. Yet each time we added a small element such as a restaurant, it made a difference.”
Ironically, Fort Worth got some of its new look from . . . Dallas. In 1986 the Basses recruited Bill Boecker, another west Fort Worth homeboy, to run Sundance Square. Boecker had worked for the Rouse Company, which developed North Star Mall in San Antonio and Highland Mall in Austin. The company also developed the “festival marketplace” concept for Boston’s Faneuil Hall and New York’s Fulton Fish Market. He and Ed found inspiration in Dallas’ West End District, a collection of moribund warehouse buildings on the edge of downtown that had been transformed into an entertainment destination and a tourist attraction. “People in Dallas have a hard time believing that we started on the successful path from copying Dallas,” Ed says. There was one major difference. Ed subscribed to the mantra articulated by urban theorists Jane Jacobs and William H. White. “They said, ‘You can’t have just a business district; you can’t have just an entertainment district; you can’t have just a residential district.’ To make a true downtown urban experience, you have to have them all.”
And planners didn’t forget the little things that make a big difference in a downtown. Bass-owned parking lots and garages are free after six o’clock and on weekends. The street-level lots are bordered by wooden fences and decorated with flowers and trees. Twinkly lights are everywhere. So are patrolmen.
THE BASSES DIDN’T DO IT ALL ON THEIR OWN. Two city-sponsored master plans were drawn up in 1983 and 1993 to direct downtown growth. DFWI, which was established in 1981 and operates on membership dues from downtown-property owners, has built public spaces; it also stages the annual Main Street Arts Festival. In 1986 DFWI created the Public Improvement District, which levies a tax on property owners in the district to provide additional maintenance, security, transportation, parking, and marketing support for downtown. Capital Improvement Program bonds provided money to help renovate the downtown library and design and landscape entryways to the central business district. A Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district was formed in 1995 to make improvements in the downtown’s northern sector. Three hundred million public dollars have been invested in downtown Fort Worth over the past twenty years.
During the same period, $800 million in private money has been invested, with more to come. “As much development that’s here now, there’s twice as much on the boards,” says Boecker. “Obviously, it’s a tremendous advantage to have the owners we do. But the money has to come with a vision. Is there some kind of equation for making a downtown turn the corner? In my mind, there is. You’ve got to have the desire, and the desire has to be strong enough to have a vision, and the vision clear enough to have a plan. Then you’ve got an equation. Downtowns across the country have that opportunity.”
“Downtown matters,” Sid Bass says. “And I’m standing in my office between Main and Commerce as I say this. This is where I work, where I live. I’m amazed it took so long to catch on, and I’m amazed it caught on at all. If you’re going to be operating in a city, there are plenty of reasons to invest in it. You’re going to be bringing in people and trying to retain people. If you don’t have the right environment to work in, to live in, those people are not going to stay.”
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Actor Robert Redford publicly demanded that AMC remove the Sundance name from its cinema. Joe Peters, of Peters Brothers Hatters, which has been putting hats on celebrities and presidents for more than 85 years, grumbles that the tree planted in front of his store on Houston Street covers up his sign. The Supreme Court, Jr., facade that David Schwarz applied to the public library renovation is underwhelming at best, ugly at worst. Architect Jim Gahl faces a daunting challenge in reinventing and rehabbing the old Continental National Bank building, once Fort Worth’s tallest skyscraper, whose topside revolving clock has been idle for many years.
Then there’s the theme-park aura. The Bass-controlled part of downtown is clean and safe and wholesome, just like Walt Disney World and Disneyland—creations of the same company the Basses financially rescued in the mid-eighties. Some critics charge that Bassville is a bland, middle-of-the-road version of a real downtown; that the stylistic jumble of various periods reflected in architect Schwarz’s creations suggest the instant history of an amusement park; that there are too many out-of-town clones like the 8.0, Mi Cocina, Cabo, and Pizzeria Uno, and not enough scrappy hometown joints. Maybe it’s inevitable that the Caravan of Dreams, which once showcased cutting-edge performing arts—emphasizing hard jazz and experimental theater—now books mostly mainstream touring acts.
Given my druthers, I’ll take the Disney version of Cowtown, as long as it includes buskers—the street singers and performers working the sidewalk crowds in the tradition of the blind couple who used to sell pencils and sing gospel music outside Leonard’s. Shoot, if the Basses need more of an edge, they can always pull that crusty old beatnik Pat Kirkwood out of retirement to reopen The Cellar, his legendary nightclub.
I was gazing upon the Bass Performance Hall again the other evening, this time from a table inside Angeluna. For a building, the hall seems downright warm and friendly, fitting in snugly with the neighborhood without overwhelming the neighbors. As I dined, I watched rubberneckers stopping to stare and marvel at the angels, as I had done. You don’t have to like symphonies to love the building. The whole scene was such a convincing urban setting, I thought I smelled the stockyards in the north wind, though they closed almost thirty years ago. My downtown was alive again, more alive than it has ever been. You don’t have to like the Basses to love Fort Worth. But I tell you what: These days, it’s sure hard not to.
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