Fort Worth Omni Hotel & Lancaster Avenue Renovation

It has been a long time since I've been to downtown Fort Worth. For months, when I've gone through the I-30/I-35 downtown Fort Worth Mixmaster (mixmaster is Texas-speak for a humongous freeway exchange), I've been wondering what was sticking out from the sides of the under construction Fort Worth Omni Hotel, looking like scaffolding.

Well, today on the way to Zorro's Buffet for my Thanksgiving pigout, I decided I was going to wonder no more. That I would go to downtown Fort Worth to look at that new hotel.

The scaffolding turned out to be huge, scary-looking cantilevered balconies. How in the world did this get past building codes? It gets very windy here. It wouldn't be safe to have much of anything, like a chair, or even a human, out on one of those high up balconies.

The last time I was downtown it was to take pictures of what an awful mess the area south of the Fort Worth Convention Center continued to be, along what is known as Lancaster Avenue. Years before, an elevated section of I-30 blighted the south side of downtown FW. It was removed and relocated, with I-30 moved a bit to the south. Lancaster then became an eyesore of weeds and garbage.

What bothered me the most on that visit was to see that the Haynes Memorial was surrounded by cyclone fence and weeds and litter and was in an even worse state than when the old overhead I-30 separated the memorial from downtown. This is an important memorial to a very significant moment in Fort Worth history. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

The first photo above is the view looking northwest from behind the Haynes Memorial, looking at the Omni Hotel.

I was happy to see that a lot of improvement has come to the formerly blighted section of Lancaster Avenue. It no longer will scare potential convention bookers away from using the seldom used Fort Worth Convention Center. I was very pleased to see that the Haynes Memorial now sits in a park-like setting with grass and benches and trees. The only piece of litter I saw today on Lancaster Avenue maybe was not even litter, it was a single high heel Liz Claiborne shoe. You can see it and the now much nicer looking Lancaster Avenue in the photo on the left.

For some reason there was no water in the Water Gardens today. I found that disturbing. Other than that, downtown Fort Worth was looking good today.