Cowtown's Crown Jewel

Okay. I admit I am in dire need of getting a life and that it is obvious I have too much time on my hands. Why else, with all there is to be troubled by in this world, do I seem to focus an inordinate amount of attention on things I read in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that strike me as very goofy? Or things in Fort Worth that strike me as goofy.

So, on the front page of the Sunday paper there was this headline at the top, "Cowtown's crown jewel marks 10 years of sound and spectacle." Underneath the headline was the following.:

"It's been 10 years since the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall opened to great fanfare in downtown Fort Worth. In May 1998, the arts-rich city that is home to the Cliburn competition---and a healthy menu of symphony, opera and ballet---finally got a distinguished performance space equal to its world class art museums and worthy of local performing-arts groups' quality. We reflect on the hall's impressive first decade and its impact on the cultural scene."

Okay, I'm pretty sure it's the weird inflated self-congratulatory tone that bugs me. Using phrases like "world class." I'm almost 100% any place that actually does have world class attractions has the class not to describe them as such. It just seems sort of gauche and vulgar to me.

Speaking of gauche and vulgar, regarding that long name for this building, "Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall." The Bass family are Fort Worth billionaires. They bought Fort Worth the performance hall. And, I guess, gave themselves naming rights. The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame is in Nancy Lee Bass Hall. It just seems tacky to me to name a building after yourself that you're giving as a gift.

Up in Seattle, Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen has built and remodeled many buildings. But somehow he had the good taste not to name his restored-to-its-retro-glory theater the Paul Allen Cinerama. When he built a Frank Gehry designed music museum he did not call it the Paul Allen Music Experience Project. Paul Allen has been buying up property in downtown Seattle for years and making come true his vision of creating a sort of mixed use Central Park type area connecting the downtown core to Lake Union to the north.

Meanwhile in Fort Worth the Bass family bought up some downtown real estate and turned it into parking lots named Sundance Square. Which they police with their own police force which locals call The Bastapo.

Paul Allen used an actual world class architect to design his music museum. I don't know what architect designed Bass Hall, but the Bass's have a reputation for having bad taste in building design. And to my eyes Bass Hall is not an impressive building. It's the type of bad architecture that Howard Roark would blow up. I think it would be the garish horn tooting angels stuck on the side that would have set off Howard Roark. If you don't know who Howard Roark is, Google it and add Ayn Rand to the search string.

In recent times one of the Bass's, I think it was Ed, tried to thwart the clever design of a sunken plaza at a college being built in downtown Fort Worth. The Bass family does not like modern looking structures. My dear ol' mom has equally bad ideas. I remember her suggesting I add gingerbread trim to an awning I built over my deck. I bet the Bass's love gingerbread trim.

I'm sure the Bass Family has greatly helped Fort Worth. One can't help but wonder what downtown would be like without them. But, Fort Worth has a population that is nearing 700,000. Isn't Fort Worth big enough to pay for things the way other world class cities do? As in if it is for the public good, put it to a public vote asking the citizens to approve taxing themselves in order to build something. What a concept. Then you could name it the Fort Worth Performance Hall. Wouldn't that be a nice name?

Instead, Fort Worth is run like a company town with the people mostly cut out of the loop. I know Oklahoma City voted a $1 billion bond when they built their hugely successful Bricktown development. The Fort Worth powers that be, copying a similar plan in Dallas, that was voted on by the people of Dallas, announced that the Trinity River north of downtown Fort Worth would be diverted into a town lake with canals and a diversion channel. If this goes forward it will involve yet more eminent domain abuse here in Texas. I don't know if you can use eminent domain for such a thing without a public vote. With over 80 businesses being given their eviction notices, I'm thinking a good lawyer is going to tie the project up. That and when the predictable, expensive to clean up polluted ground is found in that industrial wasteland the project will screech to a halt.

But, maybe I'm wrong and Fort Worth will end up with its own special version of Oklahoma City's Bricktown and San Antonio's Riverwalk.

I just thought of another amusing thing. When this Fort Worth copycat boondoggle was first announced, with plans by a Vancouver, B.C. designer, the Star-Telegram actually said this project would make Fort Worth into the Vancouver of the South! They went from claiming Fort Worth's lame Sante Fe Rail Market was modeled after Seattle's Pike Place to claiming a little lake and some canals was going to turn Fort Worth into Vancouver. I sent a letter to the editor asking "Have any of you people actually been to Vancouver? If not you need to send a reporter pronto so he/she can report back to you how dumb your Vancouver of the South claim is." I don't remember if that letter got printed. I do remember the "Vancouver of the South" lie did not last as long as the "modeled after Pike Place Market" lie. That one got repeated for months.

I need to switch to the Dallas paper.