There’s a thoughtful post today on FortWorthology about the greatest loss to Fort Worth’s history. Their answer is the decimation of Hell’s Half Acre, downtown’s “red light” district until the 1960s.
It’s worth a look for the amazing contrast of two photos of the south end of downtown Fort Worth — one from 1956, the other from Google Earth (a few years ago). You’ll see an unfortunate transformation:
The biggest change you’d see now is the completed Omni Hotel, which is just under construction in this image. This shows the amount of change and destruction brought to the south end: block after block after block of urban, humanly-scaled buildings, replaced by massive superblocks (such as the Convention Center) that impede walkability, overscaled architecture, and seas of storage for cars. The loss of density and walkable fabric is incredible.
You’ll remember that Wick argued for human scale in downtown Dallas.
6 comments
It’s fine to lament losing the old commercial buildings downtown.
But “Hell’s Half Acre” had already been gone 50 years.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/HH/hph1.html
I’ve never seen HistoricAerials.com until now…I am in love with it.
Bud,
“Hell’s Half Acre” was a perfectly acceptable name for the district as a whole. The HHA of yee-haw cowboy fame might have already been gone, but the area was still something of a red-light, “wrong side of the tracks” district. I think the HHA name was still perfectly applicable and stand by its use in the post. It is an easy way to name the area for writing purposes.
Brandon,
Isn’t Historic Aerials fascinating? I’d never heard of it before, either – just stumbled across it while writing the post.
Jason,
Thanks for the link! Glad you enjoyed the post. Happy to have Frontburner readers take a peek at the site!
D Magazine should probably refrain from any criticism of downtown Ft Worth considering how successful theirs is, and how utterly depressing ours is.