With Farrington Field up for sale, what’s next for Fort Worth’s Cultural District?
The sale of Fort Worth’s historic Farrington Field has placed the surrounding Cultural District at a tipping point, and district leaders say it’s time for the diverse interests west of downtown to rethink the locale’s future.
The Fort Worth school district plans to sell most, if not all, of the 32-acre site at the southeast corner of Lancaster Avenue and University Drive. Though a piece of it could be used for the district headquarters, the field itself will be redeveloped, possibly as a business or tech hub. It’s at the edge of the Cultural District, and offers one of the largest chances to develop a contiguous piece of land in the city’s core.
“Everyone wants to see this succeed, but can we define that success?” asked Dustin Van Orne, chairman of the Cultural District Alliance.
Van Orne said it is time to corral the varied entities into a “singular voice” that can not only guide the development of Farrington Field but also shape the Cultural District into the next decade.
That may be easier said than done.
Cultural District
Though it is anchored largely by the three museums and the new Dickies Arena, the Cultural District extends east from Montgomery to the Trinity River, north to White Settlement Road and south the Interstate 30. The quiet Linwood neighborhood sits in the northwest corner and condos, townhouses and apartments provide urban living around the district, including at Montgomery Plaza, So7, and the Left Bank. In the middle is a bustling bar and restaurant district.
It is an area prime for “whopping” density, said Randle Harwood, the city’s director of planning and development.
“There’s a natural fabric that ought to extend across West 7th to the north or across Lancaster,” Harwood said.
That fabric likely won’t include simply more bars and it will definitely have to be pedestrian friendly. It’s unclear what Farrington Field will become, but architect Michael Bennett told the Star-Telegram in December it will be grander than simply more commercial development.
Van Orne speculated that a nonprofit could work with developers and market the district appropriately — similar to the successful Near Southside Inc.
Mike Brennan, president of the Near Southside, hesitated to compare his part of Fort Worth to the Cultural District, but agreed that having a single entity advocating for the area south of downtown was crucial.
The Near Southside is unique, he said. In the mid-1990s when the nonprofit was formed, the area was economically depressed, with boarded up buildings and a perception of being unsafe. The hospitals and residents in the surrounding neighborhoods came together to revamp the area.
“There was this rallying cry around ‘Oh my gosh, we’re going to lose this iconic character’ and if we lost it, then there would be no hope for turning us around,” Brennan said.
That’s not the case in the Cultural District, but Van Orne sees the sale of Farrington Field as the right catalyst.
“My goal for the next year is to start having conversations around the city to help negotiate some sort of shared vision,” he said. “An idea that we can all say ‘This is what we want.’”
Two perceptions about the district may be a deterrent, neither of which are accurate, Van Orne said.
First, that West 7th is just a bar district for TCU students. While fans of the area’s nightlife do populate the many bars, that crowd typically doesn’t arrive until after 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.
The second is that parking is hard to come by.
This simply isn’t true, said Van Orne. The Crockett Row garages have plenty of space that’s free with validation, and the city recently OK’d two-hour free street parking during the day. Lots also exist near Montgomery Plaza and Farrington Field. Trinity Metro’s The Dash carries people to and from downtown.
“There’s a perception that you can’t have business over here, that you can’t open your law office here because there’s a bar or there’s no parking,” he said. “That’s just not the reality of the situation.”
Free market vs zoning
The trouble with development in the Cultural District is that it’s been left up to the market, said Phillip Poole, an architect and co-owner of the real estate adviser TownSite Company. Poole has sat on several city commissions regarding development, including the group that looked at bringing a street car to West 7th.
“What I see missing here is what we call ‘the outdoor room,’” he said. “It’s the space between buildings that belongs to the public.”
Crockett Row, the biggest development in the West 7th area, has cohesive blocks, but there’s no natural connection through the overall district.
This has largely happened because the district lacks “someone who wakes up every morning thinking about how we want to look,” said Poole, who works in the Cultural District and lives nearby in Arlington Heights.
Nowhere in the district is new development more obvious than Linwood.
After surviving two floods and the 2000 tornado, the old neighborhood dominated by small single-family homes began to change. Five dense apartment complexes dot the neighborhood now. While some small cottages remain, many of the lots have been converted into high-end townhouses.
Eva Bonilla, the Linwood president, has been “crying to the city” about establishing development guidelines in her neighborhood for years, she said. She worries the city is more interested in pleasing developers than listening to longtime residents who may be pushed out.
Without tighter regulations she said she worries developers will continue to promote high-end homes and leave out the middle-income housing for the types of residents the Cultural District needs to thrive.
“Cities have to have two policies: one for displacement of current residents and one for affordable housing,” she said. “How can we have a sustainable neighborhood without that?”
Harwood, the city’s planning director, agreed it was time for the city to take a serious look at the Cultural District and build a long term vision. That probably won’t happen any time soon, he said.
His department is in the midst of laying out the citywide 10-year plan which is due in March. That and a bureaucratic staff restructuring will take up much of the department’s energy well into 2020, he said.
“It’s not a simple problem,” he said. “There’s a ton of work to be done.”
This story was originally published December 26, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
