On The Fort Worth Trail (February 1990 | Volume: 41, Issue: 1)

On The Fort Worth Trail

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February 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 1

On an outer wall of a small building in Fort Worth’s downtown, and adjacent to a parking lot, a heroic mural called The Chisholm Trail depicts a stream of longhorns. Hooves flying, heads down, the steers fairly burst their frame, ready to pound along a main street of the city that has always been proud to call itself Cowtown. In fact, the Chisholm Trail didn’t stretch this far but lay farther north, in the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where several feeder trails from Texas merged. One of these, the Eastern Trail, did head right up Fort Worth’s Commerce Street. Still, it’s the Chisholm that has become imprinted in the city’s memory.

My visit to Fort Worth last June coincided with the annual Chisholm Trail Round-up, which was held in the old stockyards district. The streets were crowded with country-and-western musicians and barbecue vendors, and once in a while a mock gunfight between desperadoes was staged. Taking place at the same time in another part of town was the internationally known Van Cliburn piano competition.

Fort Worth’s first piano arrived in 1850, only a year after the 2d U.S. Dragoons garrisoned an outpost on the Trinity River, where the wife of the commanding officer, Maj. Ripley Arnold, charmed visitors with her music. In 1853 the base was deactivated when the territorial line of defense moved a hundred miles west. Before long, civilian settlers had moved into the abandoned military buildings.

The story of the city’s growth from a crossroads so sleepy that a scornful Dallas journalist claimed he saw a panther dozing on Main Street (hence the second nickname, Panther City) to a metropolis rich first from cattle and then from oil is expertly told at the compact Museum of Science and History. Housed in the city’s first fire station, this is a satellite of the main museum of the same name located a couple miles west of downtown. It is a place worth visiting more than once—which is easy, since it’s in the heart of town. Admission is free, gained through the doors of the huge, glasssheathed City Center building, a Paul Rudolph design, against which the 1907 brick firehouse shelters, a hardy plant in a skyscraper forest.

 

There is a similar discrepancy of scale in the vicinity of Second and Third streets and along Main and Commerce, where virtually all that remains of the early business district can be found and where many new office buildings rise. Examples of the first lowlying commercial structures have been restored, some reconstructed and some designed from scratch to make up a six-square-block streetscape called Sundance Square. Here the trompe-l’oeil painting Fort Worth loves has been lavishly employed to fill in lost architectural details. At first glance the decorative elements really do fool the eye; then you come to realize that the arched parapet, the fanciful cornice, and the curlicued shop sign are actually two-dimensional.

Only one of Sundance Square’s buildings—the Knights of