Adjacent to Fort Worth's #1 tourist attraction, that being the Fort Worth Stockyards, there is an area of sprawling ruins, the site of the former Swift-Armor meat packing plant, where cattle driven to the Stockyards met their final fate.The Stockyard's Ruins is such an aesthetically interesting looking thing that one would think that something would be done with them. I don't know, maybe preserve the ruins, but build touristy things among them, like restaurants. Maybe they are just too unsafe and it's best to let them continue their gradual decay.
The only creative use I know of, regarding the Stockyard Ruins, is the Fox TV show Prison Break used it as the set of Sona Prison in Panama during that show's second and third season. Prison Break has now abandoned the Stockyards Ruins.
The reason I've mentioned the Ruins today is yesterday I got Feedback regarding them from someone calling himself CM Waring and claiming to have an answer as to what happened that made the ruins.
Here is what CM had to tell me....
"The Stockyards ruins were victims of arson fires, 2, in 1971 and 1973. The amount of animal fat in the buildings left the fires unable to be extinguished. They just let it burn out. I was long interested in how the ruins got in the state it's been for decades. I had to do plenty of digging to get that info, and I couldn't tell you where I finally found it. It was not easy."
I don't know. You don't really see signs of what looks like a big fire at the Stockyard Ruins. It more looks like a massive earthquake shook it all. But they don't get earthquakes here. Maybe a tornado struck it. Or maybe it was a huge animal fat fire. The mystery continues...
2 comments:
Thanks for this info... I've grown up and live in Fort Worth, those are some great ruins to visit.
They were fires. I was in High School when my dad woke me up around midnight because he had heard on the late news about the first fire in 1971. He and I drove into Fort Worth and watched the Armour plant burn from a hill on 28th Street. The Armour plant burned completely. The Swift plant burned in 1973 and Swift started to tear down the ruins after the fire but then stopped because it was too expensive.
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