Two Interesting Downtown Design Review Board Items

We were perusing the agenda for today’s meeting of the city’s Downtown Design Review Board, and a couple of items under “New Cases” caught our eye. Here they are, as written on the agenda:

DG09-053
401 West Lancaster Avenue; Texas & Pacific Warehouse
Owner / Applicant: Cleopatra Investments, Ltd./Gromatzky, Dupree & Associates
Requests a Certificate of Appropriateness for rehabilitation of the Texas & Pacific Warehouse building.

DG09-054
1206 Throckmorton Street; St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Owner / Applicant: Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth / OA&ID
Requests a Certificate of Appropriateness for construction of a three-story Parish Hall building and its adjacent plaza and landscaped area; restoration of St. Ignatius Academy building; installation of new sidewalk, new lighting, new sidewalk trees, greenspace and landscaped areas; and installation of new wrought iron fence around certain parts of the campus.

The T&P Warehouse project isn’t entirely surprising, as the project last month went to the Historic & Cultural Landmarks Commission for approval (including the enlarging of the building’s windows), which was granted. Now, they got to DDRB for further approval. We are still rather skeptical, but this is more hope than there has been in a long time that the T&P Warehouse will actually get redeveloped. Stay tuned.

The St. Patrick’s stuff, though, is new. It’s our understanding that the church has plans drawn up to gradually redevelop several of their Downtown land holdings, which are mostly just parking lots at this point. This new Parish Hall looks to go on the parking lot directly across the street from the St. Ignatius building, and is of similar architectural character to St. Patrick’s and St. Ignatius. In addition, the plan we’ve seen shows the current street cut-through, which takes cars on a gentle curve onto Throckmorton, is to be removed and replaced with a plaza. The street intersection there becomes a conventional four-way again.

We did some digging, and found this image taken from a fundraising brochure which shows the Parish Hall proposal and some of the landscaping & street reconfiguraiton:

We always like to see parking lots go away and get replaced with active buildings, and this has a bonus of removing an awkward street design (the current setup encourages cars to barrel through at higher speeds and moves pedestrians to an inadequate little sidewalk) and replacing it with a public space. It will be interesting to see when St. Patrick’s begins work on this expansion.