A new book, out now from Arcadia Publishing, promises to be a fascinating look at the history of the Near Southside’s Fairmount neighborhood.  Fort Worth’s Fairmount District, part of Arcadia’s “Images of America” series, uses incredible archival photographs and the research & writing of its author, Michael S. McDermott, to tell the story of the architecturally significant Fairmount neighborhood.

Fort Worth is called the city “Where the West Begins,” and 100 years ago, the neighborhood known as Fairmount was where the south side ended. Now considered inner city, the Fairmount Southside Historic District is actually numerous smaller subdivisions including the largest, the Fairmount addition, and the smallest, the dubiously named Swastika Place. The neighborhoods were home to early merchants, lawyers, judges, artists, and small-business owners-many of whom went on to local and national fame. Today that legacy continues. Fairmount welcomes new generations of urban pioneers and benefits from a neighborhood renaissance that has brought this historically and architecturally significant gem of the city back from the brink of extinction.

Michael is a 44-year resident of Fort Worth, and has lived in Fairmount for 25 of those years.  A founder of the Fairmount Southside National Historic District in 1990, a former neighborhood historic preservation director, and restorer of his own 102-year-old home, Michael has dug deep into the rich history of Fairmount to create a work that will truly be engrossing to anybody who loves Fort Worth history and looking at the connections from our past to our present.  An absolute ton of research went into Fort Worth’s Fairmount District, from dates to identifying everything in the beautiful historic photos.  From some of the photo’s we’ve seen from the book, this is something not to be missed by Fort Worth history buffs, architecture lovers, Near Southside enthusiasts, and fans of revitalizing our central city neighborhoods.

Fort Worth’s Fairmount District by Michael S. McDermott is available now – online from Arcadia Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, and is also available in local Fort Worth brick & mortar bookstores like Barnes & Noble.

The lovely old Dunn-Haven Apartments building at Adams & Magnolia in the Near Southside is well on its way to a new life.  The building is being extensively restored and redeveloped into the headquarters of a marketing company relocating from Arlington.  The building’s getting a complete makeover, from new windows and exterior restoration work to a new interior, new elevator (being built inside the building rather than as an addition due to the difficulty of matching the unique brick color), and more.

The Dunn-Haven building is one of the older structures in the area, having been built in 1914. It shows elements of various styles, including the Prairie School. It is of a configuration not common in this area, with its three stories and full porches at each level. A similar structure can be found in the nearby Fairmount neighborhood south of Magnolia, the currently also-vacant Bomar Apartments at 1507 Alston, built in 1907.

While we’re disappointed that the Dunn-Haven building will no longer have a residential use (Magnolia desperately needs a lot more residential units than it has now to help add to street activity and multiple uses), we are pleased that it’s going to be serving a creative company instead of YAMO – Yet Another Medical Office.  It’s our understanding that the restoration is going to be extensive and first-rate, complete with new sustainable features included in the project, so it’s going to be good to see one of Magnolia’s prettiest buildings brought back to life.  Click the photos for a larger view.

Progress on yet another small mixed-use infill building in the Near Southside.  The building above (which we’re calling the Chunduri Building after the doctor whose office will take the ground floor) is being built just off Jennings at Grainger & Cannon.  The building is ground-floor office space with second-floor apartments.

Click the photos to embiggen.

Cypress Equities has just told us that later this month, on Thursday the 24th, they’ll be holding a groundbreaking ceremony for Phase II of the West 7th development.  The Phase II groundbreaking will be for the southeast block, the last missing piece of the Crockett & Currie intersection.  The southeast block was once planned for a hotel, but we’ve heard that instead the block will become another mixed-use building with residential lofts over retail space.  The southeast block construction will also wrap around behind Fred’s, as can be seen in the aerial photo above.

The groundbreaking ceremony will be held from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Thursday the 24th in the Movie Tavern, upstairs and across the street from the southeast block.  This should provide a clear view over the site, and Cypress will undoubtedly be talking about the plans for the development’s second phase.

We are looking forward to seeing more buildings rising at West 7th.  The development has thus far been the most successful of all the 7th Street projects at creating a real sense of place and making walkable, livable, and enjoyable spaces, and getting the last corner of Crockett & Currie filled in will make it even better.  We hope to have some renderings and other information on Phase II shortly.

This two-story mixed-use infill project just off the new West Leuda Park in the Near Southside has made a lot of progress since the last time we looked at it – it’s now got facade materials going up, a mixture of brick and stucco.

The new building is apartments over ground-floor medical office.

In the shadow of the Tarrant County Courthouse, another building is rising at the site of the beleaguered Tarrant County College downtown campus, now rechristened something like “Trinity River East Campus” to differentiate the Bing Thom structures from the former Radio Shack campus now occupied by TCC and dubbed the “Trinity River Campus.”  This new, small structure springs from the sunken plaza running under Belknap connecting to the two bluff-side buildings.

We’d write up some more words on how this design is cold, sterile, inhumane, and anti-urban, but we’ve all done that dance before.

Meanwhile, speaking of the two bluff-side buildings, crews are now knocking holes in the blank downtown-facing walls in what looks like the beginning of window installation, what we figure is some valiant but eventually ineffective attempt to make the buildings less dehumanizing and to create some small sense of street interaction.  Given some of the discussion of making the TCC buildings “better” by adding more windows, louvers, vines, and trees to the development, a classic quote from Frank Lloyd Wright comes to mind:

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

If you, the readers, will allow a bit of editorializing…

We would have hoped that the Downtown Design Review Board (DDRB) and other downtown stakeholders would have thrown up some serious objections to this design – everything from the blank walls to the sunken plaza to the utter lack of street interaction and more is diametrically opposed to what the DDRB is supposed to be encouraging in downtown Fort Worth: human-scaled, human-oriented urban design. It seems like the TCC campus would not have been allowed in its present form under an effective design standard.

Of course, given that other anti-urban developments such as the Radio Shack campus, the Pier One/Chesapeake Energy tower, and others get built downtown with no apparent problem (not a judgement of their architectural style – a judgement of the way they interact with the public realm, or rather don’t – Radio Shack and Pier One both have very poor urban design and little-to-no interaction with the public realm), we wonder sometimes if the DDRB and other people of power in downtown aren’t falling into the “any development is good development” trap. It happens across the Metroplex, in both Dallas and Fort Worth (our friends at Walkable D/FW have written about this attitude and how it has allowed some really unfortunate development in Uptown Dallas and elsewhere), and it can allow some really unhealthy stuff to get built and praised as “progress.”

Imagine for a moment if TCC had used its considerable assemblage of downtown blocks to build a more traditional (in form, not necessarily in style) urban campus comprised of sane buildings on standard city blocks, embracing and enhancing the walkable form of downtown Fort Worth instead of creating a blank-walled sunken repellant to walkability. Whatever style of building – modern, traditional, who cares at this point – if TCC’s campus had been built of buildings on normal blocks built right up to the sidewalk with friendly, engaging designs and, say, things like a bookstore, coffee shop, etc. on ground level on the sidewalk, we’d not only have a much more livable, walkable campus, but we’d wager it would have been done by now and for considerably less money (don’t forget that these structures are costing somewhere north of $1,200 per square foot, hugely more expensive than commercial construction in downtown).  Instead, we’ve got a development that will have a deadening effect on the street and walkability and which will (if the old renderings are still somewhat accurate) be surrounded by several blocks of surface parking lots (which aren’t going to be doing anything to help tie the Trinity Bluff developments into downtown proper).

Again, let us stress that this isn’t about style.  We still love new traditional architecture, but we’ve also seen plenty of modern design that is warm and welcoming (there’s just not much of it around the Metroplex).  TCC could have built a campus of traditional urban form with nearly any sort of architectural style and have it turn out more livable and engaging than this debacle, so before you assume we’re just wanting to take a piss over modern design and run home to David Schwarz, hear these words:  this is about urbanism, not architectural style.

One would hope that DDRB and other downtown stakeholders would learn to be more selective in what they approve for construction.  There was a lot of merit to bringing Tarrant County College to downtown Fort Worth, to add a student body to a walkable, livable area that is well-connected to transit and easily bikeable – this, however, wasn’t the way to do it.  As for us, we regret ever voicing support for this thing.  We were wrong then as we look with hindsight, and if we’d seen detailed renderings that accurately showed how the end product would turn out instead of vague models that promised some sort of earthy, warm, Frank Lloyd Wright-style development, we might never have said anything positive in the first place.  Fool us once, starchitects…

Above and below are renderings of Renzo Piano’s fortcoming expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum in the Cultural District.  Piano’s new building will sit across from the Kimbell’s main entrance, on a portion of the current “Great Lawn.”  It will be of similar size and scale to the original Louis Kahn building, and defers to its predecessor in many ways – for example, Piano is attempting to correct the way people enter the complex, by orienting an entrance from a new underground garage to direct people into the space between the two buildings, facing the original Kimbell’s main entrance (most people seem to throw their car in one of the eastern lots and scurry in via the below-grade back door rather than making their entrance through Kahn’s beautiful main entrance on the west side).

About the best article on the new design we’ve found is this one from the New York Times, written by Nicolai Ouroussoff.  Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Piano invested a great deal of creative energy fine-tuning the relationship between his building and the old one, which will face each other across a shallow reflecting pool. Most visitors will arrive through a new parking garage buried underneath this pool and ride an elevator or take one of two broad staircases up to the front of the addition. In a nod of respect to Kahn, Mr. Piano has oriented both the stairs and the elevator to the east, so that as you emerge at ground level, your first view is of the vaulted arcades of the Kimbell’s main entry facade rather than of his own building. From there you turn back into the addition or proceed along a more drawn out and ceremonial route around the reflecting pool and into the original museum.

His respect for Kahn’s masterwork, in which one can feel Mr. Piano reworking Kahn’s ideas over and over in his head, is obvious in the interiors as well. Approaching from the new reflecting pool, visitors will be able to look straight through the glass walls of the addition’s lobby to a strip of garden running behind, and beyond that to the glass-walled, 295-seat auditorium — a visual sequence that offers a richly layered counterpoint to Kahn’s outdoor entry. Inside, the layout of the main galleries on either side of the lobby mirrors Kahn’s plan. And by partly burying the auditorium, library and secondary galleries in back, underneath a mound of grass, Mr. Piano keeps his building from dominating the site. Even the choice of material — ethereal glass as opposed to Kahn’s concrete and travertine — suggests deference, making the addition a ghostly twin of the original.

The scariest challenge of the project, surely, was trying to create a roof structure that could hold up against Kahn’s vaults. Mr. Piano too is celebrated as one of the great masters of light; the curved louvers of the Menil Collection have been studied as attentively by architects as the Kimbell’s roof structure. Here, working with the engineer Guy Nordenson, Mr. Piano creates a system of twinned wood beams supported on concrete pillars. A complex system of fabric scrims, glass panels and metal louvers rests on top of this frame, creating a highly refined light-regulating machine.

This new office building on Hemphill, just south of Magnolia in the Near Southside, has come a long way since we last looked at it.  The building will be the offices of Dr. Jeff Hantes, and it was designed by local architect Ray Boothe.

One thing to note on this building is the north wall, not seen in this photo – it’s solid brick, with no windows or doors.  This was done because the adjacent lot is owned by the same land owner (local investor Peter Lyden), and the building was designed so that a sister building could be built directly adjacent to it.

The Stayton, the new tri-tower retirement condo project in the So7 development in the Cultural District’s 7th Street corridor, is starting to become very noticeable as the first tower clears the Lancaster Avenue bridge.  The three connected towers will eventually rise to 11 stories, containing condos with 46 different floorplans, a top-floor restaurant, medical services, and more.

We took an in-depth look at the Stayton last year.  These panoramas show the development in its current state as it rises alongside So7’s townhomes, ArtHouse condos, and Residence Inn.

Time for the “free beer” part of the first ever Walkable DFW/Fort Worthology join Car-Free Happy Hour tonight at Houston Street Bar & Patio.  The first person to comment with the identity of this city and arrive at the Happy Hour car-free (walking, bicycling, transit, or some combination of the three) gets a free beer.  Everybody else – still have to pay for beer, but we hope you stop by anyway.  It’s from, oh, say, 5:30 until whenever, Houston Street Bar & Patio in Downtown near the Convention Center.

Not getting a lot of hints today on this city.  It’s in Europe (obviously), and is a beautiful example of human-scaled walkable urbanism.  Plus, they love their bikes.  Guess the city!