The Star-Telegram is reporting that the Fort Worth Club has bought the properties they had for sale (several parking lots and the Star-Telegram Classifieds Building shown above), and the organization plans to use them all for parking:
FORT WORTH — The Fort Worth Club is under contract to buy the Star-Telegram’s four-story annex building, an adjacent parking lot, and two other nearby parking lots.
“We’re buying it for parking,” said Walter Littlejohn, general manager of the Fort Worth Club.
The deal is scheduled to close by the end of September, after the Fort Worth Club completes a due-diligence review of the property, said Chet Wakefield, the newspaper’s senior vice president of operations.
Littlejohn said officials have not yet decided whether to tear down the building, which opened in 1960 for the Tarrant Savings Association. The newspaper has owned it since 1978.
Allow me to speak up once again in support of not demolishing the S-T Classifieds Building. It is a wonderful and neglected example of late ’50s/early ’60s International Style/Jet-Age Googie architecture and is virtually the only example of that style in downtown Fort Worth. Demolishing it would be an outright tragedy. The style isn’t very often thought of as being “historic,” and thus finds little supporters. Well, here I am, for one.
What’s particularly irritating is that the article specifically mentions that the lot doesn’t have enough space for all the parking they need, which brings these thoughts to mind:
1) Don’t you guys have a parking garage in your ’70s tower?
2) Wouldn’t it make more sense, then, to build a parking garage on the lot to get enough spaces rather than wiping out a notable building and blighting downtown with even more surface parking when that wouldn’t even give you enough spaces?
Downtown Fort Worth doesn’t need one iota of more surface parking. We’ve got too much as it is. If you’re really in that much of a parking crunch, why not spend the coin to build a small garage and solve the problem longer term?
Sigh. Even as the surrounding neighborhoods densify, downtown regresses (first the Landmark Tower block, now this).
I got your back on this one Kevin.
That particular building is one of my favorites downtown. Besides needing a good cleaning, the building is one of a kind and would be terribly sad to see it go.
Hopefully the suits over at FWC recognize this and build a garage on one of the surface lots that now exist.
What is the latest status on the Omni? From what I can see it looks as though it has peaked and looks like it is going to fall way short of the 547 feet mark. What are you hearing from the inside?
Dave
I really enjoy the website and most of your old school photos, but some of the new photos look over photoshopped. That’s just my opinion.
Cannon,
That’s actually a very old photo. Several years old, in fact. It’s the only convenient one I had access to. Haven’t taken a better photo of the building recently.
Update - I replaced the old photo with Google Street View. I need to get a more recent photo of the Classifieds building.