Bass Plan To Increase Fort Worth Global Influence With Granger Grifter Gang Soap Opera

What you see here showed up on the November 10, 2019 front page of the online version of the Sunday Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Apparently Fort Worth's Bass's are forming some sort of team with some sort of fellowship program and this is going to lead to an increase in Fort Worth's already totally formidable global influence.

Soon we can expect even more national and international corporations to join Radio Shack and Pier One Imports in locating their headquarters in downtown Fort Worth, what with that coming increase to Fort Worth's global influence.

Is the Fort Worth Bass family related to the famous Sam Bass gang of stage coach robbers? I've never been able to get a clear answer to that question. I do know the exquisite good taste of the Bass family has left an indelible mark on Fort Worth, architecturally and otherwise.

And now Fort Worth is going to be able to thank the Bass family for an upcoming increase to Fort Worth's global influence.

I don't know if another rumor I have heard about Fort Worth is reality based, or Trump type fake news. That being that Lorimar Productions is looking to once again have success with a prime time soap opera of the sort which brought Dallas world wide recognition in the last century.

It is easy to imagine a prime time soap opera based in Fort Worth, with the opening credits zooming in towards the Fort Worth skyline, making that skyline known world-wide, like the opening credits of Dallas did for Dallas, zooming in over I-30 from the west, heading toward Reunion Tower and the impressive Dallas skyline.

The below is an artist's rendering of what that zooming in on the Fort Worth skyline scene of the opening credits will look like for the new prime time Fort Worth soap opera.

Unlike the Dallas opening credits zooming over I-30, it looks like the Fort Worth opening credits will be zooming over the West 7th Street Bridge.

Soon this view will be known worldwide, should Fort Worth become a hit, greatly amping up Fort Worth's global influence.

The Dallas soap opera was all about oil and the Ewing family. Will the Fort Worth soap opera be about fracking and the Bass family?

Or will the Fort Worth soap opera be more of a Falcon Crest type soap with a domineering mother ruling the roost?

Instead of Miss Ellie (or Angela Channing) will the Fort Worth soap opera matriarch be based on Fort Worth's Kay Granger? Will the Granger Grifter Gang be the plot inspiration for Fort Worth, the soap opera? Instead of Miss Ellie and J.R., will we have Miss Kay and J.D.?

Will the plot of the Fort Worth soap opera be the ongoing tale of one family's Fort Worth shenanigans, wreaking havoc with their trailer park aesthetics in their ongoing nefarious plots to make a buck off Fort Worth's yokels?

Will there be a plot line about a bizarre imaginary flood control project with J.D. in charge of building bridges over dry land, while having thousands of bucks funneled to his bank account, whilst season after season after season nothing much gets done and the ongoing debacle of J.D. trying to build bridges over dry land becomes the Fort Worth TV show's ongoing joke, til the show gets cancelled after running for a decade or two?

Well, I know I'll be watching. I already feel like I have been watching the Fort Worth soap opera for a couple decades...

On The Dried Out Tandy Hills Looking At The Upgraded Tarrant County Courthouse & Bass Family Damage To Downtown Fort Worth

Close Up Look At Beautiful Downtown Fort Worth

I decided to go with my sunny optimistic nature and go to the Tandy Hills today assuming that sufficient time had passed since Sunday's deluge to dry the trails sufficiently to allow mud-free hiking.

My sunny optimistic nature was not disappointed.

But, I would have been happy to have Mother Nature dial back on the humidity a bit.

In the picture I zoomed in, as best I could, on the Tarrant County Courthouse. That is the pointy structure to the right of that short skyscraper that looks like it is not completed yet.

Downtown Fort Worth does not have any, for want of a better way to say it, interestingly designed skyscrapers. I assume there has never been enough money in the downtown Fort Worth skyscraper budget to build a memorable one.

The twin towers to the south of the courthouse, the eastern one of which you see in the picture, are particularly odd. It's like some C-Student architect thought it clever to have cut-outs and indents that give the appearance that the building gave up being completed. And no one thought to tell the C-Student architect that that particular design looks tacky. And so it was built.

I am not sure, but I think these particular twin skyscrapers are buildings that the Bass Family helped bring about. The Bass Family really is responsible for a lot of what ain't right about downtown Fort Worth.

Or so it seems to me.

I know there are those in Fort Worth who are beholden to the wonders that the Bass Family allegedly has brought downtown Fort Worth, but methinks Fort Worth would be a lot better off if the town put on its big boy pants and did not rely on one family's demonstrably bad taste to dictate how the town looks.

Anyway, after a multi-million dollar remodel the Tarrant County Courthouse's clock tower lost the scaffolding that has covered it for a long time. I believe there is still work to be done.

How is the plan to take down the Tarrant County Courthouse Annex coming, you know, that building with the fake covering that looks like yet one more bad downtown Fort Worth building designed by a C-Student architect?

At least that particular eyesore is not called the Bass Tarrant County Courthouse Annex, unlike way too many other eyesores in the downtown Fort Worth zone, that have the Bass name, in various iterations, attached to them.

An Early Texas Saturday Waiting For The Rapture While Wondering How A City Gives A Right Arm & Other Moncrief Nonsense

I am up early this Saturday morning of May 21, looking through the bars of my patio prison cell at what looks like a cauldron.

So far I have heard no news of the Rolling Rapture of 2011. No earthquakes. No reports of Christians flying skyward.

But I did learn in the Seattle P-I this morning that Rapture 2011 has sparked a lot of End of Earth parties.

When May 22 arrives on schedule tomorrow, what do all those people who spent their life savings buying all those billboards do after their erroneous beliefs are shattered?

Speaking of erroneous beliefs.

This morning's Fort Worth Star-Telegram had another article about the plan to finally put a square in Sundance Square.

According to the article, "For years, downtown leaders have wanted to create a plaza, or square, to host events and gatherings."

So? What has stopped those downtown leaders from turning some of those downtown parking lots into a square for all these years?

And then, in a paragraph which has the words "Mayor Moncrief said" without making clear, with quotation marks, what he actually said, the article said this...

"That need became even more evident when ESPN set up its broadcast center during Super Bowl XLV in February on the very lots that Sundance Square wants to transform, Mayor Mike Moncrief said. Those events drew thousands of people downtown."

I added the quotation marks you see at the start and end of the above paragraph.

So, the need for a plaza became apparent after the ESPN debacle where ESPN set up a broadcast center on one of the parking lots, and then retreated when it got really cold and snow arrived. It has only been a few months since this occurred. And yet the Star-Telegram is re-writing history to suit its propaganda. The ESPN "events" only drew people to downtown Fort Worth on the Saturday before the Super Bowl. Because it was too COLD on the previous days.

In reference to the downtown Fort Worth parking lots and the dream to turn them into a real square, the Star-Telegram quoted Fort Worth's goofy mayor, again, and this time put what he said in quotation marks.

"A lot of cities would give their right arm to have what we have and will have," Moncrief said.

A lot of cities would give their right arm to have what Fort Worth has? And will have? Give up their right arm to have surface parking lots at the heart of their downtown that will become a square/plaza?

I think it'd be more accurate to say a lot of cities, with a population over 500,000, would be embarrassed that their downtown is so undeveloped that is has acres of surface parking lots at the heart of its downtown.

This downtown square propaganda is reminding me way too much of the downtown Fort Worth and Fort Worth Star-Telegram propaganda about the pathetic Santa Fe Rail Market boondoggle. Sold as the first public market in Texas, modeled after public markets in Europe and Seattle's Pike Place Market, the reality turned out to be lamer than a small town mall's food court.

This morning's article about the downtown plaza, that other cities would lose an arm to have, also said, "Fort Worth's Bass family developed Sundance Square."

How does one family develop a town's downtown? That is sort of bizarre.

Then again, in this week's Fort Worth Weekly, I read about the Bass Machine's secretive project to replace the elderly Will Rogers Coliseum. Apparently an attempt was made to get a bill passed that would have raised the tax rate on downtown Fort Worth hotels. Somehow this was to finance the construction of the new arena.

But, somehow the shady Bass Machine operation came to light and the bill was pulled. There is talk of having an actual bond election where the citizens of Fort Worth would actually be allowed to vote on this project. But so far, The Bass Machine is providing no details of their latest development.

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.