Fort Worth Public Spaces: Sundance Square Plaza

March 3, 2009 at 12:15 pm | General | Tags: , ,

In the first of what I intend to make a series of posts on the site, I’m going to be taking a look at the state of public space in urban Fort Worth. As our first case, I thought I’d discuss the long-running question mark of the Sundance Square central plaza.


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From an urbanity perspective, one of the most unfortunate parts of the otherwise wildly successful Sundance Square are these two parking lots, bounded by Houston, 4th, Commerce, and 3rd on either side of Main Street. Here, in the very heart of Sundance Square (and by extension, Downtown itself), nearly two full blocks in the center of Downtown’s most people-centric neighborhood are taken up by surface parking lots. Have you ever walked around Downtown Fort Worth, missing the lack of real effective public plazas & parks in it, and thought that these sites would make a great location for a plaza?

In fact, the Bass family agrees with you.

As seen above in the Sundance Square master plan, designed by architect David M. Schwarz, those two parking lots disappear, replaced by half-block mixed-use buildings fronting Houston and Commerce, and half-block public plazas on each side of Main Street. While the details tend to shift around (I don’t expect that the plan now would call for the demolition of the historic Jett and Land Title Block buildings, and I’ve heard of a slightly different design that shuts off that one-block stretch of Main to car traffic, which I think would make for a more effective space than allowing cars to bisect two plazas), the intent to use those lots for public space has been part of the plan since the ’80s.

So why are they still just parking lots? There are a number of stories out there: that the Bass family feels there aren’t enough parking garages yet to offset the loss of the lots (personally, I don’t agree with that sentiment). That another family owns half of the eastern block and doesn’t want to work with the Basses, preferring to keep their parking lot rather than sell the property. I’m probably forgetting others.

Downtown Fort Worth lacks a real central public space, an “outdoor room” in the heart of the city. There’s Burnett Park, but it’s on the west side of Downtown and is not really all that effective in its current form (its unfortunate ’80s makeover and being dominated by Burnett Plaza’s retail-less design keep it from being truly effective). The Water Gardens are a bit too big, and at the moment are not surrounded by much that people want to go to, a situation that will likely remain until the rest of the Lancaster area redevelops. These central blocks in Sundance Square remain an ideal location for a central plaza.

The setting reminds me a little bit of Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon. Pioneer Courthouse Square is an incredibly effective and popular public space, often called the best public space in America and named fourth best public space in the world by the Project for Public Spaces. It’s a city block (which, like Fort Worth’s, is small), surrounded on all sides by active uses (as the central Sundance Square blocks are), linked by rail transit (which would be the case here as well when the streetcar gets built). Pioneer Courthouse Square is described as “Portland’s Living Room,” and it’s a space like that which is missing in Fort Worth.

Here’s a Streetfilms video about Pioneer Courthouse Square, taken during the “Festival of Flowers” during the summer:

A video from imagiNATIVEamerica:


Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square from imagiNATIVEamerica on Vimeo.

And a photo by “Dog Mom of Five” on Flickr:

Here’s the link to the Project for Public Spaces entry on Pioneer Courthouse Square.