THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Developers giving Oak Cliff thoroughfare a new lease on life.
By: Steve Brown, Real Estate Editor
Fort Worth Avenue got its start as a busy highway connecting Dallas with its namesake to the west. But by the 1990s, it was a road going nowhere, with crumbling motels and cluttered car lots.
Even the resurgence of neighborhoods in North Oak Cliff and new business projects along Interstate 30 did little to lift the boulevard’s sagging spirits.
“No one had paid much attention to Fort Worth Avenue since the 1960s,” said Randall White, who helped found an economic development group for the area in 2001. “It had been neglected for decades.”
Now that’s changing.
Boosters in the area say a revival of Fort Worth Avenue is getting a jump-start from a new neighborhood shopping center with national tenants and a mixed-use development – to be called Dilbeck Court – that includes a historic hotel.
The area seeing a resurgence is just two or three miles from downtown Dallas – about the same distance away as parts of booming Oak Lawn.
“We are not saying that this is going to be Oak Lawn or McKinney Avenue,” said real estate broker and developer Monte Anderson. “But it can be a lot more than it is now.”
“Someone has to start somewhere to make that happen.”
Mr. Anderson is doing just that. He’s purchased the former Belmont Hotel, on a hilltop site at Sylvan and Fort Worth avenues.
Starting next month, his Options Real Estate will begin restoring the 58-year-old court-style hotel, which was designed by revered Dallas architect Charles Dilbeck.
“We call Mr. Dilbeck a team member, even though he is deceased,” Mr. Anderson said. “This hotel, when it was built, cost $400,000 for 74 rooms. Today, that would be the same as $8 [million] or $9 million.”
Options Real Estate plans to spend more than that on the project, which includes turning the old inn, with its postcard views of downtown Dallas, into a boutique hotel. For a vacant tract next door, they want to build townhomes and retail and office space.
“We’re going to start immediately,” he said. “This hotel says a lot about the history of Fort Worth Avenue.”
The thoroughfare is one of the oldest routes into Dallas. There’s even evidence that the road started out as an American Indian trail, said architect Jim Barnes, who is doing a study of the area.
“The route of Fort Worth Avenue appears on maps at least as early as 1855,” Mr. Barnes said. “During the last half of the 19th century, it was referred to as the Fort Worth Pike. It was substantially realigned and paved during the 1930s.
Fort Worth Avenue had its first land rush during the 1930s and 1940s, when auto traffic grew. Developers lined the strip with Western-themed motels, restaurants and businesses.
Commuters abandoned the old highway when the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike opened in 1957, putting an end to the avenue’s glory days.
Many of the old motor inns remain, and advocates for the redevelopment of the area want them preserved.
“But businesses in the area need to come up to the times with improvements,” said John Cramer, president of the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group.
Pinnacle’s effect
Mr. Cramer credits construction of the Pinnacle Park industrial, office and retail complex at the west end of Fort Worth Avenue at Westmoreland and Interstate 30 for focusing attention on downtown Dallas’ west side.
Pinnacle Park, created in 1998, has been one of Dallas’ most successful inner-city redevelopments, adding thousands of jobs and bringing in national retailers such as Wal-Mart and Lowe’s.
With construction under way on a Home Depot on Fort Worth Avenue west of Hampton, Mr. Cramer is predicting more big things for the business strip.
If Home Depot hadn’t decided to build there, he said, “I don’t think anyone would have recognized the area, and it would have taken a lot longer to catch on.”
“When someone like Home Depot has an interest in a location, people wake up to the potential.”
“There are other types of services that follow them – restaurants, electronics stores, pharmacies, banks,” Mr. Cramer said.
Walgreens and other merchants are already scouting sites along the avenue.
Weitzman Group, one of the region’s biggest retail real estate brokers, is marketing a shopping center to be built along with Home Depot on the site of the demolished Bronco Bowl. The project is called the Shops of Stevens Park.
“The total buildout will be 200,000 square feet, and it should have an enormous impact on the neighborhood,” said Weitzman Group’s Brian Glaser. “There is tremendous opportunity for retailers to take advantage of an underserved market.”
Mr. Glaser said Fort Worth Avenue can support more retail because it is close to prosperous neighborhoods in North Oak Cliff and rebounding areas of West Dallas.
“We have three big-box retailing positions available that we’re working on,” he said. Neighbors’ needs
Not all the new investment is coming from outside the area.
Businesswoman Maria Gomez, who lives in the neighborhood, will open a full-service community center this summer in the 1000 block of Fort Worth Avenue.
The 12,000- to 18,000-square-foot building will be called Salon las Americas.
“It will be a site for community events like weddings, and we will have a conference room for employee training and meetings,” Ms. Gomez said. “I live in the area, so I had seen the need for a place like this.”
“Anytime there is a wedding or a graduation, you have to go across the river to find a decent place,” she said. “This community has been neglected for a long time.”
The changes are bringing the avenue closer to what residents dreamed of when they started the redevelopment efforts in the late 1990s.
“Here’s this major entryway into the heart of downtown and adjacent to some incredible neighborhoods,” said Mr. White. “And yet we are all getting in our cars to go to Uptown and Oak Lawn for services.”
“That can change,” he said. “We want to attract more business here.”
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