The new episode of the PBS series NOW, Driven to Despair, is a very well-done showcase of the problems and weaknesses of car-dependent planning and far-flung suburbia. The episode introduces us to the Schleighs, a family living in California exurbia in a large four-bedroom house. Mr. Schleigh gets up at 4:00 AM every weekday to begin his 72-mile (that’s 72 miles one way) commute before traffic snarls the freeways. While the kids wonder why daddy’s already gone so early in the day, the family is spending $1,600 a month on transportation. With the adjustable rate mortgage that helped get them their big suburban home about to go up, the family’s feeling pretty desperate.

What follows after that can be fairly described as a 25-minute ode to transit and traditional neighborhood design, showcasing people living in more traditional neighborhood settings and using rail transit regularly to cut time, costs, and stress. One resident of a walkable, bikeable, transit-enabled traditional urbanism community remarks “When gas prices started to skyrocket, we just didn’t really notice. We spend maybe $100 a month on gas.”

It’s a great video, and one of the best examinations of the problems of car dependent planning I’ve seen in a more mainstream media source. Click the link above to watch the whole episode on the PBS web site.

So, what say you? Would you like to have a Fort Worthology discussion forum?

This Streetfilm shows a rarity - a bicycle drive-thru at a bank. This one’s located in Boulder, Colorado. It’d be nice if banks in urban Fort Worth could provide a bike lane, as many banks refuse to do transactions with bike-using customers in drive-thrus.

The rumors were true - the Albertsons at TCU will be coming down to make way for a mixed-use development featuring the first urban-styled grocery store in Fort Worth. The new development, on the northwest corner of University & Devitt and just south of the Bank of America at University & Berry, will be five stories tall and feature a ground floor consisting of a 50,000 square foot urban Kroger store and another 4,300 square foot retail space, a 584 space parking garage in back, 38 new on-street parking spaces, and 164 residences on the upper floors.

Below are a couple of closer looks at the site plans of the first floor and upper floors. Click any of the renderings for a bigger view!

The image above is our first look at the new building being planned by XTO Energy for the block at 7th & Calhoun across from the historic Binyon-O’Keefe Warehouse that XTO’s moving into. The new building features a few floors of office space and then several floors of parking. Local firm Hahnfeld Hoffer Stanford has created a building that compliments the style of the Binyon-O’Keefe Warehouse very nicely. Click for a bigger view.

The site plan above depicts a new mixed-use development planned for the southeast corner of University & Devitt near TCU. The development will feature 7,200 square feet of retail space, 52 residential units, and a 122 space parking garage. Click for a bigger view.

You may remember this small building at 8th Avenue & Magnolia from my recent post about endangered historic buildings. I’m now receiving word that this building may be more endangered than I thought. The word I’ve heard is that the building is to be demolished and replaced with a Comerica Bank building. The plans I’ve seen indicate the new building would occupy the same corner site as the old one, with parking and drive-thrus in back screened from view. If I hear more about this, I’ll try and post what I can.

UPDATE: I have a site plan:

Following up our previous note about the Portland Streetcar having record high ridership, I’d also like to mention (thanks to a post on The Overhead Wire) that the Seattle Streetcar has already exceeded its first year ridership projection three months ahead of schedule. Between the time the Seattle Streetcar opened on December 12, 2007, and October 1st of this year, the streetcar carried 347,000 riders.

Again, I link to these because the Fort Worth system will be inspired by systems such as Portland and Seattle, and it’s instructive to note the success being had with similar systems in other cities.

This Streetfilms video uses animation inspired by the classic game Frogger to show the usage and benefits of raised crosswalks, which help to slow traffic down on streets and provide safer pedestrian access.

This is similar to the planned raised plaza at 7th & Arch Adams in the Cultural District, in the Museum Place development.

The Human Scale

Love Shack Headed To SoSeven?

Streetfilms: Bike Box

The Carnegie Progress

This video comes from Reconnecting America, and is a quick intro video the group did to promote human-scaled development. It’s been making the rounds in the smart growth blog world so I thought I’d share.

Interesting bit of tenant news. Love had been in talks to open a Love Shack in Victory Park in Dallas, but that deal is apparently no more. Looks like Love Shack #2 will keep the Fort Worth love (sorry) going strong.

In various cities with dedicated bike lanes, “bike boxes” are being used to make cyclists more visible and safer around motorists. This Streetfilms video shows how they’re used in Portland, Oregon. With dedicated bike lanes in the planning for Magnolia Avenue in the Near Southside, it would be worthwhile to consider using bike boxes in addition to the lanes. I could definitely see them being of some use in left turns if extended a little further, and in keeping cyclists safe from right-turning cars.

Construction on The Carnegie, the new 16-story Class A office tower in Sundance Square, is just about complete. I saw a tenant moving in recently, most likely EOG Resources. The building’s traditional design is turning out very well indeed, in my opinion. Now, some detail shots.

I love the building’s detailing on the lower floors here. Very grand and engaging.

Details of the stone trim on the lower floors.

Upper floor stone detailing.

Streetwall with the Chase Building & 3rd Street Garage.

All in all, a gorgeous “fabric” building, by which I mean a building that respects context and serves as a part of the urban fabric rather than trying to be a solipsistic, self-indulgent “look at me” type of building. As it should be. Its traditional design and beautiful detailwork should help promote more pedestrian activity in its area as well. A big success as far as I’m concerned.

The Carnegie is the work of David M. Scwharz Architects, who have previously designed the neighboring Fort Worth Central Library, 3rd Street Garage, and Chase Bank Building, as well as the Bass Performance Hall, Sundance West, the Palace Theater/Barnes & Noble block, the Sundance Theater, the Virtuoso Building, the Maddox-Muse Center, the Tarrant County Family Law Center, the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame, and more.

This film from Streetfilms features Greg Raisman of the Portland Office of Transportation giving a tour of bicycle parking facilities in Portland, Oregon. Watch the video and learn the pros and cons of on street bicycle parking (a bicycle corral) vs a sheltered bicycle parking oasis. Fort Worthology is about Fort Worth, but I do like to use examples from other cities of great urbanity, so that’s why I draw on photos and videos from places like Portland.

Would love to hear from Fort Worth urban cyclists about bike parking here in Fort Worth - what’s good, what needs improvement, ideas and opportunities for improvement. I myself am a bike commuter here in the Near Southside (I ride a black Breezer), so I plan on increasing the urban cycling coverage here at Fort Worthology in general.

Expect more Streetfilms to appear on Fort Worthology in the future - they can often showcase fascinating developments in urban design.

In addition, from this post forward Fort Worthology now has a “Bicycling” category, under Transit & Infrastructure, to help you find future bicycling-related posts more easily.

Across Samuels Avenue from the luxurious Villa De Leon condo development, Lincoln Apartments is building a new 300+ unit apartment development. Site prep has been underway for a while now, and at last there is something rising from the site. As seen in the top photo, the development’s parking garage at the rear of the property is now on the rise. The apartments themselves will rise between the garage and Samuels, shielding the parking structure from view. As seen in the second photo, site prep for the actual apartments continues.

Across the street from the new Lincoln apartments, on the other side of the two small homes next to Villa De Leon, site prep is underway as well for some bluffside townhomes being developed by Lincoln as well.

Lincoln’s first Trinity Bluff apartment development, named (appropriately enough) Lincoln Trinity Bluff, was a great success, with the fastest lease-up of any development in the company’s history, so it’s no surprise that the company is continuing to build more developments in the neighborhood. I don’t have a rendering of the new projects just yet, but a facade sample is being constructed across the street from the construction site, so when that’s finished we should have a good idea of what to expect, style-wise. More photos to come as construction progresses.

While I await Councilmember Joel Burns to finish up a wrap-up of the Streetcar Study Committee’s trip to the Pacific Northwest to study the streetcar systems of Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma, I think it’s worthwhile to point out a bit of news (which I found linked to off the excellent transit blog The Overhead Wire) on the success of Portland’s system, which the Fort Worth system will draw a lot of inspiration from. The Portland Streetcar has hit new record ridership highs - weekday ridership is at 12,600 per day (about a 25% increase from the year before), with Saturday ridership at 11,700 and Sunday ridership at 7,300. All are record highs. The 10-month annualized ridership for FY 2008/2009 now stands at 4.3 million passengers.

These charts show the increasing ridership trend on the Portland streetcar. Click for a bigger view.

On Samuels in the Trinity Bluff development, the luxurious Villa De Leon condos next to Charles Nash Elementary continue to steadily progress towards completion. Facade prep is underway and balconies are being installed. The condos start at $786,000.

As can be seen at the top of the building in the photo above, the steel framing of the crown on the Omni Hotel & Condos is now being assembled. The framing will be covered with glass like that used on the condo tower portion of the building below it, giving an angled “swoop” to the top of the tower.

A lot of pavement has been ripped up around the building’s base. What’s happening here is that the existing sidewalks on the site were determined to be too narrow to comfortably accommodate pedestrians, so they’re being expanded.

Next door, the new city parking garage is now getting some facade materials installed. As shown here, tan brick and stone are going up on the structure. The portion in the center where no facade has been installed is where the Houston Street facade’s large black Art Deco-inspired columns will go, rising above the garage’s ground-floor retail space.

Showing support… (note from Kevin: I’m honestly very flattered by your Fort Worthology shirt. Thanks!)

Here, we’re at Vulcan Real Estate, Paul Allen’s development company in South Lake Union, as we’re shown examples of new developments along the streetcar line.

Some of the signage near a streetcar stop.

Here’s an example of one of the many new mixed-use developments that have sprung up along the streetcar line.

And here’s another. This new residential/retail building is nearing completion. There are many new developments along the streetcar’s path.

Dan toured me around his works. One was the Sound Transit Project, which consists of over 200 Overhead Contact System poles in Seattle’s streetcar system with specialty paint and spire-shaped finials. At a maintenance facility, the poles are striped with black and “safety green” paint. The artwork is inspired by a prehistoric plant indigenous to this region – commonly known as the horsetail or Scouring Rush. Elsewhere, slender curved poles along a transit line feature tips that gracefully curve and blend the dark poles into a metalic sky blue and then to a silver tip. All the tips point west towards Puget Sound.

Another installation we looked at was the Rave Wave Cave, a dark underpass transformed with animated pea gravel-covered waves that erupt from a sculpted sea of pea gravel. At night, moving “psychedelic” lighting animates the space.

We also looked at the Antennae Reeds, an installation at the University of Washington featuring tall aluminum poles with resin tips illuminated by sapphire LEDs at night.

I also got a chance to see his studio near the University of Washington. Dan has done works from Seattle to Florida, and is known for his use of simple yet dramatic shapes and vivid nighttime colors. Unfortunately, since my tour was during the daytime, I did not get the full effect of some of the lighting components that are integral to much of his work. Check out corsonart.com for more of Dan’s work.

I am excited to have someone of Dan’s creativity coming to design a landmark project in Fort Worth.

More to come!

Joel Burns

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Building at the corner of 8th Avenue and Magnolia
Year built: Unknown

There’s not really a lot of information about this little building that I could find - I wasn’t even able to locate it on Fort Worth Architecture. It has been vacant for as long as I’ve know about it. I’ll guess it’s likely from the 19teens or 1920s. The building has been boarded up for some time and parts of it (such as the roof over a balcony on 8th Avenue) are collapsing.

The fate of the building is not known at this point.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram Classifieds Building
Year built: Approx. early/mid 1960s

The Star-Telegram Classifieds Building (originally built as the home of Tarrant Savings) has few friends, and that’s a shame. It’s pretty much the only example of Googie-infused International Style architecture in downtown. Unfortunately, it’s been badly neglected over the years - it used to have translucent blue panels between the “fins” that stick out from the upper floors, for one example. Its windows have been covered with ugly mirror tint (always a bad move on an International Style building, in my opinion). It’s filthy. If it were to be restored, I think it would be an extremely cool slice of Jet Age futurism. I can picture some slick mid-century modern style lofts in this building.

The building’s fate is uncertain - it was recently bought by the Fort Worth Club, and there are threats that it’ll be demolished for a parking lot (ick!).

Heritage Park
Year built: 1976

I’ve written about the uncertainty about Heritage Park’s future before, so its inclusion here should be no surprise. Lawrence Halprin’s intimate, meditative park space on the bluff looking over the Trinity needs a lot of TLC, but it also has a lot of potential. It’s one of the few bits of 1970s architecture that I don’t find repulsive. The city has been strangely quiet about the park since its closure.

The park’s fate is uncertain - it is currently fenced off and closed.

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Church & House at Hemphill & Broadway
Year built: Unknown (likely 19teens/1920s)

This little church and the house next door aren’t in great shape, and were recently up for sale. The buildings apparently were purchased, and now a demolition request sign has appeared in front of the house. It would be a shame to lose either building, but let’s hope this demolition request is for just the house and the church will be redeveloped.

The fate of the two buildings is unknown.

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Texas & Pacific Warehouse
Year built: 1931

This massive Art Deco structure has been vacant for a long time - even the occasional haunted houses and paintball games that happened there from time to time have long since moved on. The only building of the monumental Texas & Pacific Station/Post Office/Warehouse development from the ’30s on Lancaster to be vacant, the T&P Warehouse has enormous potential. The city has been pushing the owner, a lady from Dallas, for a long time to redevelop the building as loft apartments over ground-level retail, but nothing yet has come about. Meanwhile, the building sits neglected. Until recently, it apparently even had standing water in the basement, but crews were seen pumping the water out not long after the building was put on Historic Fort Worth’s list of most endangered buildings.

The building’s fate, unfortunately, is unknown. It’s a protected landmark, but the long-awaited redevelopment plans have never come about despite the city’s offers of money and assistance.