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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
"NICE BUILDING, HUH?"
I was so busy craning my neck at the new performance hall going up in downtown Fort Worth, I hadn't noticed the guy on the bike until he'd sidled right up next to me. He was a nice fellow, and we chatted for a few minutes while I stared at the two 48-foot-high sculptures of angels rising on the building's facade, partially obscured by scaffolding. Then he bid adieu, offering some friendly advice as he pedaled away.
"You might want to get on the sidewalk across the street if you want to look some more. You're standing in the roadway here."
The young man on the bike was my introduction to the Basstapo, the teasing nickname for the 115-man security force that patrols the City Center office towers and the adjacent Sundance Square retail and entertainment district on bicycles, horseback, and skates. The force, headed by a former Secret Service agent, augments other security provided by the city police and Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. (DFWI), the nonprofit corporation dedicated to improving the central business district.
The angels and the Basstapo are evidence of a peculiar phenomenon: Downtown Fort Worth has become Texas' liveliest urban environment. The redbrick streets are lined with restaurants, nightclubs, and shops, most of them new. There are twenty movie screens, three live-theater venues, and eight museums and art galleries.
The best, however, is the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, as the building with the angels is formally known. Already being billed as the last great concert hall of the twentieth century and designed to endure well into the twenty-second, the hall--which opened May 1, 1998--is the crowning achievement in the renaissance of a city center that had been left for dead 25 years ago. Fort Worth, the place you used to pass through on the way to somewhere else--Where the West Begins--is now a destination unto itself.
Watching your downtown dry up and blow away has been a fact of life for anyone growing up in Texas during the past fifty years. Larry McMurtry wrote about it famously in The Last Picture Show. Whether it's the old frontier mentality of using up the land until it's useless and then moving on or the passing of an era, downtowns long ago lost their place as the heart of a town or city.
So it was with Fort Worth, my hometown. By the time I graduated from high school in 1969, the Palace, the Worth, and the Hollywood--the three grand movie houses on Seventh Street,...
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