Fort Worth gets competing visions for the future of the community arts center
Two developers are competing for the opportunity to redevelop Fort Worth’s community arts center.
The nearly 70-year-old building was the one of the city’s first public art museums, but after years of deferred maintenance and inadequate funding for repairs, a city task force recommended redeveloping the building at 1300 Gendy St. into a “world class cultural hub.”
Representatives from Dallas-based Garfield Public Private and Nebraska-based Goldenrod Companies presented their visions to around 100 residents gathered at the arts center Wednesday night.
Garfield designed the Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences in Lubbock and the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio.
Goldenrod is developing two mixed office, retail and apartment buildings in the West 7th district. The city is considering a $31 million grant to help those projects.
Garfield’s conceptual design focused on keeping much of the building’s footprint while expanding sections to have a larger lobby, concert hall and restaurant.
The team also proposed having the Cliburn and the Fort Worth African American Museum and Cultural Center as anchor tenants.
Goldenrod’s design would preserve the W.E. Scott Theater building and surround it with a hotel to the north, an apartment complex to the west, an arts incubator to the south, and an outdoor plaza to the east.
The idea behind the concept is to create a place for people to live and be with the arts, said Ross Conway, with the Dallas architecture firm Gensler, which is partnering with Goldenrod in the project.
Both teams stressed these conceptual designs were nowhere near a final product. After the city selects a preferred developer, the chosen firm will be required to do public outreach to get a sense of what the arts community and the Fort Worth community would like to see in a new development.
But that did little to calm fears from some members of the arts community about how the redevelopment would affect the center’s open and accessible culture.
Garfield’s team clearly demonstrated it was open to listening and working with the community, but the design suggested the firm doesn’t understand what makes the building special, said Wesley Kirk, a Fort Worth-based photographer and organizer with the group Support Fort Worth Art.
Kirk credited Goldenrod for preserving the Scott Theater and surrounding galleries, but felt the presentation suggested the firm was more interested in profiting off the building’s location.
The benefit of having a for-profit element is that it will help pay for the maintenance of the arts center, said John Zogg, president of Goldenrod’s southwest region.
“I’m not an artist, but what I am good at is listening” Zogg said, promising to work with the city and the arts community to build a center that meets their needs.
Several attendees questioned Garfield’s use of anchor tenants, like the Cliburn, because they worry it would make the building less financially accessible to the nonprofits that currently use the building.
Having anchor tenants is a good way to stabilize the new arts center, but that’s in no way meant to exclude the arts organizations that use the building currently, said Matt Edwards, a project executive with Garfield.
He promised his firm would work diligently to understand the community’s needs.
The city has a dedicated page on its website with both proposals, and is taking comments from the public until 4 p.m. Oct. 16.
City staff will make a final decision on which team to go with by early November, and the City Council is expected to vote on a contract by February 2024.
