A new rodeo arena, new Stockyards shops: Fort Worth seeks the ’21st-century cowboy’
When 1.2 million cowhands, ranchers and visitors come back this week for the Stock Show and Rodeo, they will find a changed Fort Worth.
The rodeo arena is new, a $540 million public events center built for the annual pro rodeo tour stop.
Across town in the Stockyards, a new $45 million shopping center is replacing 120-year-old barns.
In the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Wild West scenes by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell have moved to central galleries amid a growing museum collection.
Even the Dairy Queen across Montgomery Street, a familiar Texas stop for cowboys and cattle ranchers for 51 years, has been closed and demolished for new development.
For guests from across the West who make Fort Worth an annual trip, it’s the city’s most dramatic change in 40 years, since the opening of Billy Bob’s Texas and the Stockyards as a tourist district.
“They’re going to be confused!” said musician and rancher Tom Reynolds, descendant of a “Lonesome Dove”-era Texas cattle ranching family with roots in Fort Worth since 1902.
“But they’re going to like the new arena. Once they get the new lay of the land, they’ll be happy.”
For ranchers and rodeo fans hide-bound to tradition, everything changes this week.
The first ranch rodeo contest in the new Dickies Arena is Friday, with the pro rodeo tournament beginning Jan. 24..
On Saturday, after the All Western Parade downtown, the Stockyards in north Fort Worth will host a “130th anniversary” party to show off the new Mule Alley shops and restaurants across from Cowtown Coliseum.
Sponsors include RFD-TV, the Cowboy Channel and the new Stockyards headquarters of the American Paint Horse Association.. New York-based Shake Shack will serve burgers, although the official opening date has not been announced for a new Shake Shack restaurant location at 122 E. Exchange Ave. facing the coliseum.
Mule Alley is part of a new $175 million shopping center.
It’s a lot of change at once for a city that clutches its Wild West past.
“The old Stockyards everyone loves is still here — Riscky’s, Joe T.’s (Joe T. García’s), the Star Cafe, Cattlemen’s,” said Pam Minick, the 30-year co-owner of Billy Bob’s, still the “world’s biggest honky-tonk.”
“We’re still the same Stockyards. The (Fort Worth Herd) cattle drive is here every day. People go the Stock Show, and then they want to see where the cowboys live. This is where the cowboys live.”
The openings have rekindled an age-old civic debate over whether Fort Worth is losing its cowboy history.
(Or should.)
For tourists, civic leaders promote Fort Worth as the home of Western history, “cowboys and culture.”
But to attract businesses, the city is marketed as an international hub, a diverse city in the modern West.
“The brand and the charm and integrity are what drew people here,” said Brandom Gengelbach, at 43 the new Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce president.
“The biggest concern from business leaders is, how do we show a dynamic, aggressive business community in the middle of being known as a Western cowtown?”
He worked in Nashville, which built on its Opryland/Dolly Parton past to become a Southern business and educational center.
In Fort Worth, Dickies Arena and local brands like TX Whiskey and Saddleback Leather define the “21st-century cowboy,” Gengelbach said.
“You have a modern arena and companies that represent cowboys going forward — we’re looking at the Fort Worth of the next generation,” he said.
Mayor Betsy Price, 70, said visitors will love the new arena and new Stockyards shops.
“People have been terrified for five years — they said the Stockyards was getting too cosmopolitan,” she said.
“Now that people can see it, they say, ‘This is great.’ ”
She distilled the debate over Fort Worth’s image to a single sentence: “ ‘Cowboys and culture’ is what draws people here, but we still want to let people know we’re a big city and what we have to offer.”
Out in west Texas on the 145-year-old Pitchfork Ranch near Paducah, working cowboy Clay Timmons said his fellow ranch hands have no idea what they’ll find when they get to Fort Worth.
“It’ll take a little getting used to,” he said.
“But the younger cowboys are going to like it.”
Those would be the 21st-century cowboys.
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 8:52 AM.
