Resilience, ingenuity, community spirit leads Fort Worth’s South Main Street
Visit South Main Street in Fort Worth, and you’ll be treated to a sensory feast and feel the sense of community that defines Near Southside, a bustling 1,400 acre district south of downtown.
You might hear laughter float down from the rooftop bar at Tinies, or smell pizza cooking at Southside Cellar. If it’s a Sunday morning, you might grab an iced coffee as you stroll through the Fort Worth Community Market.
Over the past decade, 1,655 residential units have been built in South Main Village, with an additional 700 planned.
Many of the village’s most iconic spots, including Tinies and Southside Cellar, opened shortly before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Years later, those businesses have paved the way for a new cohort of creatives and entrepreneurs that have opened their doors along South Main Street over the past year. Some business owners have arrived in the village for the first time — and some are moving into bigger spaces.
Indie bookstore brings curated selection
Recluse Books, an independent bookstore owned by Josie Smith-Webster and her husband James Webster, opened at 465 South Main St. in April 2025. The cozy space is tucked into a commercial building.
The couple wanted to bring a carefully curated selection of independent books to a neighborhood they loved after moving to Near Southside in 2023.
Webster wanted to bring unique, unexpected books to the neighborhood, foregoing many popular titles and focusing instead on emerging writers and small press companies.
“We pay a lot of attention to things happening on the edges of literary culture,” Smith-Webster said. “You’ll find almost nothing in the store that has more than four copies. We heavily focus on variety and small runs. Things that our audience is really loving or that we really loved, we’ll continue to bring in, but otherwise, we prioritize cycling through new titles.”
Smith-Webster said the community in Near Southside drew her back after spending her early career in other parts of the country.
“It’s part of why we had our eye on this area … it was a prayer and a hope,” Smith-Webster said, adding that she knew the neighborhood was special — but deciding to bring Recluse Books in made her realize the true camaraderie of business owners in the village. “Even among these kinds of communities, the Near Southside is different.”
A new hotel experience takes inspiration from South Main culture
Across the street, a hotel just opened its doors right off of South Main Street.
Hotel Soma takes its very name from its surrounding neighborhood.
Owned, developed, and operated by Will Moncrief of Fort Worth and his company Sidecar Hospitality Partners, the hotel consists of 31 tiny home casitas and four custom Airstream campers.
The units all share a courtyard with games, comfy chairs, and shady trees in walking distance of South Main’s bars and restaurants.
“We’re a very small business, and everybody around here is a small business, and they’ve created this community-like feel,” Moncrief said. “We wanted to create a unique offering … being able to stay in these casita villas and Airstreams is unlike anything else that you would see here. And we really wanted to lean into the landscaping and the art and the culture that they’ve kind of created in South Main Village.”
Art pieces from local artists sourced by the William Campbell Gallery are rotated regularly inside each of the casitas and are available for purchase.
“The goal is to create something where you’re able to walk out and experience a vibrant, fun city, and then you’re able to retreat back when you want to, into a fully privatized experience that that feels like you’re not in Fort Worth,” Moncrief said.
The casita units are available to rent, Moncrief said, and the Airstream units will be available in June. The hotel will also open a bar and a merchandise store in June.
North Texas’ first single malt whiskey distillery
Half a mile from Hotel Soma, in the space formerly occupied by Rahr & Sons at 701 Galveston Ave., is the first North Texas distillery focused on American single malt whiskey, according to its owner.
Blue Flag Distillery is named for the blue flag that founder and president Will Rucker would hang above his family’s Fort Worth home to give a signal to the neighborhood: come on in.
“Our porch kind of became a kind of monthly meeting place for people to come by,” Rucker said as he showed Blue Flag’s distillery and event space, called The Vault. “The blue flag always let them know that the porch was open.”
The distillery’s single malt whiskey takes three years to age, but in the interim, Blue Flag will also produce gin and beer, said Nate Swan, Blue Flag’s head of operations.
Rucker said that he wants Blue Flag’s location to attract more businesses to the southern part of South Main Street.
“We’re second generation, we’re trying to help move the neighborhood,” Rucker said. “We’re trying to help move South Main farther south.”
Blue Flag’s event space had a soft opening in April, but the future tasting room is under construction. There is no set opening date, Rucker said, but they are aiming for later this summer.
A new space for a beloved favorite
Up the street, in the back room of South Barbershop’s new space at 121 South Main St. in unit 3 — previously occupied by Panther City Tattoo — owner Laleh Rezaie took in a new chapter and a new hustle.
Rezaie opened South Barbershop in 2019 after leaving a job at another barbershop. While commiserating her unemployment, she had a chance meeting with Macy Moore, the co-founder of HopFusion Ale Works, another beloved Near Southside business.
“I had been crying in my beer about it, and Macy walked up and said, ‘Well, we can’t be crying out here,’” Rezaie said.
Rezaie set up a pop-up barbershop at HopFusion and operated there, cutting hair and building relationships with other business owners in Near Southside, before moving into another space on Daggett Avenue before the new space on South Main opened.
“As of February, we joined the Main Street thoroughfare front and center,” Rezaie said. “It’s been quite the adventure.”
The move, Rezaie said, represents the strength of the community that South Main businesses have created.
“It’s a group of people that were my friends that I just had never met before,” Rezaie said. “We just get along so well. I think that’s what’s attractive to this neighborhood.”
Before the new cohort, there were South Main’s icons
Although there are plenty of new kids on the block, South Main’s emerging business owners are quick to pay homage to the mainstays that came to the neighborhood shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Shawn Howell opened Southside Cellar on South Main Street in January 2020, he had what he called “10 gorgeous weeks” operating the business as the craft beer and boutique wine store with a small tasting room that he intended for it to be.
In March 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic brought the excitement to a grinding halt.
“It was horrific, you know? It was every nightmare I think a startup business would endure,” Howell told the Star-Telegram from a plush chair at Southside Cellar on a sunny morning in April. “People are fantastic when they come to me and they say, ‘oh, but you made it.’ We did, and I’m super happy about it, but it was a struggle that no business should be able to survive.”
That spirit of resilience, said Near Southside Inc. president Megan Henderson, is woven into the fabric of the neighborhood.
“After the pandemic, where you would have these empty storefronts of the bygone businesses that the pandemic had killed, in our scenario, we had very different results,” Henderson said. “We lost only a handful of those, and that’s plausibly what we would lose in any given year — the numbers were not extreme in comparison to the average year of just small retailers not surviving, it was almost a typical year on that side. It took a long time for these businesses to recoup losses, but they were able to survive it. And that is the uniqueness of the Near Southside.”
Fort Worth restaurant veteran Adrian Burciaga, who stepped in to oversee Tinies earlier this year as it underwent a revamp, said that the close relationships between business owners and the positive relationship with Near Southside Inc. has fostered strong developments since 2020.
Tinies, along with other South Main staples The Bearded Lady and Tarantula Tiki Lounge, adapted their service models at the beginning of the pandemic to continue offering service.
“I think the pandemic hit this part of town probably more than any other part, to be honest, and I’ve seen the revamp,” Burciaga said. “Near Southside got hit really bad. But the revamp you can see now, all the activity that’s happening in the next, five, six blocks from here, it’s been great.”
Promise and progress in Near Southside’s future
Looking forward, Henderson said, she wants businesses to continue coming to Near Southside and the vibrant communities surrounding it.
“I really encourage the development community to look at the great potential drawing upon Magnolia and drawing upon South Main Street,” Henderson said. “I really believe Jennings and Hemphill will be the next streets that have this huge kind of catalyst environment where suddenly every property owner is looking toward the urban model at the same time.”
