In Urban Needs, Part One: Grocery Market, we took a look at what some other cities are doing with urban grocery stores, what sorts of designs work in urban settings, and a (in hindsight, fairly hard) critique of the Montgomery Plaza development here in Fort Worth and its Super Target. As the original article is about to fall off the front page, I wanted to bring the subject up one more time to share a comment left by Downtown Fort Worth, Inc.’s Andy Taft on the original article, as it contains some great insight into the whys and hows of the Montgomery Plaza store:

Posted by: Andy Taft

I enjoy your site and think it will add positively to the evolution of urban thinking in Fort Worth. Great work!

Now, as for the Super Target design…I have trouble criticizing it, especially in comparison to the other more urban examples you give. Downtown Fort Worth’s Super Target is in a decidedly auto-oriented environment. The M. Ward area’s residential density, including FWS, Downtown, Arts District, etc…for years to come…will be miniscule compared to the trade area required for that store. The site is difficult given the historic building, sight lines, street exposure and service requirements.

These aside, while the site is “urban,” Fort Worth’s density (unlike Portland), land prices and in-town retail mix make the Portland model unsupportable. There is just too much low priced land available to expect or require a developer to build the urban forms suggested…especially in that location. Target recognized that the urban core of the city was under-retailed, thus the big box, and bigger parking lot. The better question may have been: “Do we really want a big box?” The answer to that question: “Are you kidding? Get them in here yesterday!” The MW and ST construction played a large role in spurring the other, more urban forms developing on 7th.

The whole foods above appears to be located on the hard corner of a busy street. The Super Target at MW is not. Orienting it to an internal street as suggested also probably would not have worked given the massive sq. footage required by a Super Target. They are not going to go multiple floors, so orienting the massive facade to the back of the site is more appropriate. In a perfect world, the developer might have been able to break up the ST facade with smaller shops, thus making more human scale the wall created by the tradition big box.

For the heart of downtown, FWS and Cultural District, smaller grocers will be more appropriate (if they can survive) and the urban forms therefore more desirable and supportable.

While this is an interesting design exercise, I submit that the presence of a ST…with all of its shortfalls, is a tremendous advance in the return of the Fort Worth urban core. (Measured in miles in any direction.)

With all that said, I predict that the value of the land behind the historic Montgomery Ward building will increase in the future, making the current suburban retail layout something that the owner will reconsider once density improves.

I realize the original article may have come across as a bit hard on the Montgomery Plaza project. My main real disappointment in the site is the sheer amount of parking behind the historic Wards building. I’ve always felt that, even keeping most of the current site plan, if the developer had just added another set of retail buildings lining the central drive that extends back from the MW building, the environment would have wound up being more conducive to walking to the Target.

As Andy points out, the land back there just keeps getting more valuable by the day, so future development on the site is extremely possible as the density of the area increases. In the meantime, the Super Target is without a doubt a fantastic catalyst for the area, and I didn’t mean to downplay that aspect of it so much. The presence of the store, even in its “big box” form, is definitely a very valuable asset to Fort Worth, and I’d rather have the store we do have than not have any store at all. Sometimes, it can be helpful to compromise, and the Montgomery Plaza project has certainly got people (and developers) flocking to the Cultural District.

We’d like to thank Andy Taft of DFWI for sharing his own insight into the project. You can visit Downtown Fort Worth, Inc.’s web site at dfwi.org.