Texas Wesleyan hoping to help revive Fort Worth's east side

"You shouldn't need GPS to get from class to class," reads one of the bright blue highway billboards.

Then there's the multilayered message of "Can you really find yourself on a campus of 40,000?"

Texas Wesleyan University, with its enrollment of 3,200 students (about 1,800 of them undergraduates), has been reaching across Fort Worth-Dallas with its "Smaller. Smarter." ad campaign.

It's a smart strategy to strategically raise the profile of a school that's been a fixture in the Polytechnic Heights area of east Fort Worth for more than a century.

In much the same way that Texas Christian University on the west side of town has accented its physical boundaries with attractive new brick arches and other features, Texas Wesleyan also is planning a distinctive new look, with an East Rosedale Street entryway designed to provide a campus facelift that also spruces up the surrounding neighborhood.

But compared with the more-affluent, thriving commercial and residential areas around TCU, Wesleyan and its neighbors have more of a challenge.

Efforts to revitalize Rosedale have consumed years of planning, but they've been slow to bear fruit. The city of Fort Worth has been working for a decade on revitalizing struggling areas of town and has had an "urban village" master plan for the Polytechnic/Wesleyan corridor since 2007. (See: bit.ly/SSWuDj)

There's evidence of progress, though, and reason for renewed hope.

Texas Wesleyan expects to start construction on its $1.3 million entryway -- featuring a clock tower and horseshoe-shaped parking area -- in the spring, Star-Telegram higher education writer Diane Smith reported Thursday.

That's about the same time work is set to start on renovations to East Rosedale Street, according to a timeline on the city's website. (bit.ly/YK5qBk)

Fort Worth and Tarrant County are putting $15.5 million into rebuilding two miles of the street from U.S. 287 eastward. Plans include sidewalks, decorative lighting and park benches, with a traffic circle at Mitchell Boulevard by the entrance to Texas Wesleyan's Sycamore Park baseball-softball complex and another at Ayers Avenue and Rosedale. (The Texas Department of Transportation is underwriting a $16.1 million second phase of road reconstruction, from Miller Avenue to East Loop 820.)

Storefronts across from the Wesleyan campus, between Nashville Avenue and Collard Street, are to be redone with a $1 million federal grant plus $375,000 from the county.

Right now, the main commercial attractions there are the university bookstore and a Subway sandwich shop that opened more than two years ago.

The goal has long been to attract more retail businesses and restore what once was an active retail thoroughfare. A Buxton Co. market analysis included in the 2007 urban village plan listed 50 strong matches for the area, ranging from Brookshire's supermarket and Dairy Queen to IHOP and Cinemark Theaters.

Wesleyan is planning other projects that could help draw people to the area, including a business incubator center and a 15,000-square-foot conference center that will house the Central Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church.

While no university, especially a small one, can carry a neighborhood's revival on its back, it could be that Texas A&M's pending purchase of Texas Wesleyan's downtown Fort Worth law school becomes a most-beneficial partnership for the Poly campus and its neighbors.

The plan (still in the approval stage) calls for A&M to pay Wesleyan $25 million, which would more than double its endowment. A&M also would pay $2.5 million annually, adjusted for inflation, to lease the law school building and parking.

That's a lot of new money for academic programs and other projects. On top of that, Wesleyan could get Aggie attention and connections it didn't have before to a vast alumni network.

Smaller might be smarter. But to accomplish bold visions, bigger might be better.

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