Trinity Uptown Drawing National Interest

Still busy in House Remodelingland – today’s a big day, as my carpenters are cutting holes in two of the walls of the little Fairmount house I’m working on to install new windows. No new construction photos of various projects, alas – I expect things to become a bit more normal next week in terms of site updates. In the mean time, this Star-Telegram article by Sandra Baker caught my eye, talking about interest from national developers in the TRV’s Trinity Uptown in the wake of the cancellation of the Tarrant County College project. Here are some quotes:

J.D. Granger, executive director of the Trinity River Vision Authority, which is overseeing construction of Trinity Uptown, said in an interview that his office has received at least four serious inquiries in recent weeks, the Star-Telegram’s Sandra Baker reports.

Granger declined to name the developers, but said they are “people who do big water projects” and developers who would bring to Fort Worth the “type of money we haven’t seen here.”

Likewise, the Tarrant County College District, which controls about 47 acres in the project area, is getting calls from local and national developers interested in the land.

Toal told trustees that in the next couple of weeks, he will redraw the Trinity Uptown plans to remove the college campus. In its place, he said, he will add access roads to the riverfront and several pedestrian bridges, including near where TCC had planned to build a bridge to connect the south and north sides of the campus. The access roads would come from Northeast Fourth Street, north of the river.

The Town Lake will also likely be moved slightly and made smaller, not only to accommodate the loss of the campus but also the shifting of the bypass channel north of Fourth Street, he said. The bypass channel and the lake are part of the project’s flood-control measures.

I am looking forward to what will become of the land on the north side of the river that TCC owned. A large swath of it was going to be nothing more than surface parking anyway, so new developers will likely find better uses for it. And James Toal’s statement about including several pedestrian bridges over the river on the former TCC land is great as well, since with TCC’s implosion the planned bridge there was cancelled.

The big new developers who are getting interested in the TRV are intriguing – I would love to know what “big water projects” are being referenced. There is a lot of potential for a very cool urban waterfront environment thanks to the TRV, knitted together with quality infill on the interior land of the project.

My only concern at this point is what will become of the old TXU power plant on the north side of the river. TCC owns it, but I’m guessing they’ll probably unload it shortly. Problem is, it has no historic protection (like too many of our great buildings). The old power plant already saw the unfortunate loss of its smoke stacks, and it would be a great loss to lose the main building as well.