These looks at these type items have been among our most popular blog postings, for years.
And part of what renders these blog postings amusing is hearing feedback from Fort Worth locals expressing umbrage.
The Fort Worth locals expressing umbrage thing is always amusing. It always seems the same as someone getting all cranky because of what they see in a mirror.
Anyway.
The first article which struck me as something you would not see in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about something regarding Fort Worth is a Seattle Times article which has 10 sketches showing how Seattle has changed over the last decade.
Sketches showing things like the Amazon campus, the new Seattle waterfront with the now gone Alaskan Way Viaduct, the new tunnel under downtown Seattle, the hugely altered city skyline, a new floating bridge, trolley lines, link light rail lines and other stuff.
Meanwhile during the last decade in Fort Worth.
What could the Star-Telegram possibly sketch 10 instances of showing how Fort Worth has changed over the last decade?
Well, the Fort Worth skyline has not changed. Heritage Park remains a boarded up eyesore. The Trinity River Vision is now a nationally known Boondoggle, with three simple little bridges stuck over dry land. I guess sketching the ruins of three unfinished bridges would qualify as something which happened over the previous decade.
Oh, Rockin' the Polluted Trinity River Happy Hour Inner Tube Floats, that is something sketch worthy.
Did the pitiful solo Molly the Trolley public transit vehicle come to be the last decade? I don't remember when that embarrassment started up.
How about those Trinity River Cruises which the Trinity River Vision Boondogglers were hyping earlier in the year. Did that ever come to fruition?
I suppose the Star-Telegram could sketch the remains of the Cowtown Wakepark, what with it being something that came and died the past decade.
I just remembered an actual sketch worthy thing which happened in Fort Worth this decade. In the goofiest bond issue ballot I have ever seen voters passed three goofy ballot measures which somehow approved of the building of a new arena.
Dickies Arena is now open and has received nothing but positive reviews and has already hosted multiple events, and is likely going to be a big hit at the upcoming Stock Show.
If only Fort Worth's ongoing inept urban planning had managed to make an exception to its usual ineptness and had addressed the traffic problems which a town with urban planning would have anticipated with the building of a new venue.
Now, let's move on to the second article in the Seattle Times about something in the Seattle zone which one would never expect to read in the Star-Telegram regarding a similar thing happening in Fort Worth.Seattle has been one of America's boom towns for most of this century, with the booming getting more so this past decade, hence the article saying Seattle's massive surge of new construction is causing a permitting backlog.
Fort Worth has no similar problem. Pretty much anyone wanting to build anything in Fort Worth can get the project approved. Often encouraged with tax breaks and other incentives. Even for an obvious con job, like a sporting goods store finagling to get breaks to build what they conned the locals into thinking would be the biggest tourist attraction in Texas.
The town manifests little evidence of what is known as urban planning.
A visit to where I first lived when I moved to Texas, to the hamlet of Haslet, in far north Fort Worth, is instructive. Back then, miles of open land was between my abode and development. The skyline of downtown Fort Worth was a distant little blip on the horizon.
And now, 20 years later, all that open land has been filled in, mostly with houses. And retail, such as malls, and Costco. With the roads basically the same as they were when I first drove on them. HUGE development allowed without the infrastructure upgraded. Just drive west on North Tarrant Parkway til you get to Highway 287 and you will see all you need to see to understand how ineptly Fort Worth's urban planning is.
Add to that the fact that drainage was not adequately upgraded. Which has greatly exacerbated flooding, causing deadly flash flooding downstream from the badly developed development.
Recently the Fort Worth city council embarrassed itself by disbanding the town's Ethics Commission. On Facebook I saw more than one person sarcastically comment along the line that doing so fits right in with the city's delusion of thinking that it is somehow going to attract multiple corporations to re-locate to Fort Worth in the coming decade.
I often wonder, have most of these Fort Worth locals, who apparently are okay with what is known as the Fort Worth Way, not been to other parts of America? Even other parts of Texas?
Very perplexing. And it is almost not only a happy new year, but a happy new decade, as well...
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