We have a winner in this past Monday’s Mystery Building post – user dredgemortle correctly guessed that the image above was a portion of the historic Fort Worth Club building in downtown. Congrats!

It’s official, folks – the historic Knights of Pythias Hall in eastern downtown in the Hillside neighborhood has been saved from the wrecking ball! The building now has a contract on it by the TownSite Company, who are also behind the Depot Lofts just down the street. I’ll let Mr. Phillip Poole of TownSite tell the tale:

The Townsite Company presented a contract today to the building owners of the Knights of Pythias Building for renovation.

Our firm had done a structural analysis on the building in 1998 for the former owners. When we revisited the building this week although the interior wood structure had continued to fail the load bearing masonry walls and foundation had not advanced in deterioration.

There appears to be no current city code violations on the building and we will move immediately upon acceptance of our contract to apply to the City of Fort Worth for an historic designation.

That process will take about 120 days. We feel confident that we can reuse this building in a similar manner as we were successful in doing on the Historic Cotton Depot up the street.

We look forward to a successful use of this important historic asset.

Please, join me in giving a round of applause to Mr. Poole and TownSite for stepping up to save this bit of Fort Worth’s past. This is a great victory for the city of Fort Worth, its people, and its heritage.

We eagerly look forward to TownSite’s plans for the building, and will follow the project closely to keep the city appraised of the building’s new life.

The Fort Worth chapter of the American Institute of Architects has released a list of their 25 favorite buildings in Fort Worth. On the whole, it’s a great list, and I’d love to hear the community’s comments. The buildings are:

• The Kimbell Art Museum
• Marty Leonard Chapel
• Tarrant County Courthouse
• Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
• Texas & Pacific Railway Terminal
• Will Rogers Auditorium, Coliseum, and Pioneer Tower
• United States Post Office
• Flatiron Building
• Fort Worth Water Gardens
• Thistle Hill
• Fort Worth Live Stock Exchange
• Sinclair Building
• First United Methodist Church
• Ball-Eddleman-McFarland House
• Casa Manana
• Knights of Pythias Castle Hall
• Radio Shack Riverfront Campus
• Anne Bass Residence
• Amon Carter Museum
• Masonic Temple
• Pier 1 Place
• Fort Worth Public Market Building
• Beth-El Congregation
• Burk Burnett Building
• Central Fire Station
• Lasater Residence
• Montgomery Ward Retail Store & Warehouse
• Greenwood Mausoleum

To us, the oddest choices are the Radio Shack Campus and the Beth-El Congregation. Radio Shack is cool, but we’re not sure it’s in the top 25. Beth-El, meanwhile, seems a bit out of left field – it’s a bit too “suburban high school” for our tastes. Our immediate thought is that we’d have pulled Radio Shack and Beth-El and replaced them with:

• W. T. Waggoner Building
• Bass Performance Hall

Otherwise, this seems to be a good list. What’s yours? Post in the comments!

Exciting news on the Knights of Pythias building on the east side of downtown! The historic structure, built as the home of an African-American Knights of Pythias lodge in the ’20s and in a state of severe neglect, was to be demolished at some point in the not-too-distant future. However, after efforts by concerned citizens and the City Council, the Fort Worth Code Compliance department has opened a case on the building. The owners now have until July 5th to fix the building up to code!

Hopefully, after stabilizing the structure it will be either redeveloped or sold to an interested party for redevelopment. This is a great turn of events for the Hillside neighborhood and urban Fort Worth in general, and we’ll keep you posted on the building’s status!

The Scat Jazz Lounge, which was originally supposed to open in the basement of the Burk Burnett Building, will now be opening in the basement of the Woolworth Building next door. This will put the jazz lounge under the Joseph A. Bank store and the Milan Gallery. Lounge singer Ricki Derek has said the club is on track for an October opening.

This promises to be a great addition to downtown, and we’ll be watching its progress!

Time for another Mystery Building! We’re quizzing you, the readers, on your knowledge of Fort Worth’s built environment by showing a small detail shot of a particular building in urban Fort Worth, and asking you all out there to try and figure out its identity. Winners receive a good dose of positive self worth (we may try and figure out some sort of prize or something eventually, but for now this is just for learnin’ and grins).

Here’s today’s Mystery Building – use the comments to guess:

XTO Energy continues its amazing track record of historic building preservation. The company, which began by restoring the W. T. Waggoner building for its corporate headquarters and continued with amazing restorations of the Simpson Building next door and the Swift & Co. building in the Stockyards has now turned its attention to the Petroleum Building, the 1929 Wyatt C. Hedrick building near the Waggoner building. XTO has already restored the building’s base, removing a ’60s remodeling job that left the building with concrete panels and plate glass windows on its base and replacing it with the correct marble and old-fashioned windows.

Now, they’re working their way up the building, replacing all the modern plate glass windows with replicas of the building’s original 1929 operable windows. This will make a big difference in the appearance of the building. It is likely that they will finish by installing replicas of the building’s original rooftop spires, missing for many years. Click the images below for a bigger view of the progress:

An update on the Knights of Pythias Hall on the east side of downtown that was marked for demolition. From Janna at the Hillside Apartments:

I hear from a very reliable source that the Knights of Phythias WILL NOT BE TORN DOWN after all. I’ll keep you posted!!!

This is fantastic news, and we really hope it proves to be true. There has been a very vocal grassroots effort to save the building, mostly using this thread at Fort Worth Architecture’s forum. We will, of course, keep you posted on the status of this historic structure.

Two City Place, the Class-A office space redevelopment of one of the old Tandy Center towers, is coming along very well, and above you can find a shot of the tower’s new look. There doesn’t appear to be much work left to do on the exterior of the tower – basically completing the new night lighting system and installing the Two City Place logo. The redesign gave the tower new glass, new window frames, a new paintjob, the removal of the old Tandy Center lighting systems and the installation of a new channel lighting system.

Work should begin soon on One City Place, which will be going condo and have a completely different look, and The Shops at City Place, which will tear down the old Outlet Mall and replace it with extensive new retail shops under a parking structure.

Work proceeds on the new landmark Tarrant County College campus in downtown. Above, you can see a view into the large pit dug into the Trinity Bluffs for the downtown side of the campus. Parts of the structure are at last starting to rise from the pit. The college extends back into downtown from here, with a plaza alongside the courthouse, and will also stretch across the Trinity to the north bank, where the rest of the campus will be connected to downtown via a pedestrian bridge.

This image shows the work proceeding for the sunken plaza that will mark the beginning of the campus on the downtown side. The plaza will be directly adjacent to both the Tarrant County Courthouse, and the Tarrant County Family Law Center (the red building to the right).

This shot shows the work being done on Belknap for the campus. The black roadway on the right is a new bypass. Traffic will soon be routed through this bypass so that the construction crews can excavate under Belknap itself for the pedestrian pathway that will run from the plaza under the street to the main campus.

A completed rendering of the campus can be found below.