Are We Having A Showdown At The Fort Worth Stockyards Cattle Pen?

Big Ed emailed me asking why I'd not opined about this.

With the this to which Big Ed referred being the info contained in the article you see part of here, screen capped, titled Showdown: History and the future face off in Fort Worth Stockyards.

Recently something called the National Trust for Historic Preservation put out its annual list of what they considered to be America's Most Endangered Historic Places, with the Fort Worth Stockyards on this year's list.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation apparently thinks a $175 million project planned by Fort Worth's Hickman family, partnered with a California developer called Majestic Realty, is an "insensitive development" which threatens the historically significant Fort Worth Stockyards.

I don't know where in the Stockyards this proposed development is to take place, but one paragraph in the article tilted me to being against this development....

“It certainly ought to be a wake-up call to [Majestic owner Ed] Roski and the mayor that trading those cattle pens for modern-day restaurants and retail is foolish,” Murrin said. “Our national and international reputation is what tourism in the Stockyards is based on. It’s not just preservation for preservation’s sake. It’s good business.”

This project wants to take down the part of the Stockyards which is a stockyard? That being the cattle pens and the walkway that takes you above the cattle pens? That walkway is what the cowboy is standing on in the above photo.

And the cattle pens are where the Fort Worth Herd lives when the Longhorns are not in Trail Drive mode.

I was hoping this proposed development was an improvement, not something destructive, because the Fort Worth Stockyards could use some work.

Much has improved since I first visited the Stockyard, but many boarded up eyesores remain, such as the New Isis Theater.

Why does the city not do something about the New Isis eyesore is a question I have been asking since late in the last century.

The sidewalks in the Stockyards could use some work.

After dark the lighting in the Stockyards is terrible.

It has long seemed to me that Fort Worth sort of turns its back on its one and only actual tourist attraction that people in other parts of the planet actually know about. Visit the Stockyards on any summer Saturday and you will run into a European or two or three. Often Germans.