The Ghost Town in Downtown Cowtown
Good urban design brings cities to life—but what keeps them alive?
I spent the first week of June at the center of the world—and nobody was there.
The world center in question was the unlikely Fort Worth, Texas—home to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which for three weeks every four years becomes the global focal point for classical music aficionados. We attended the final round with friends, enjoying a dozen concertos performed by talented young pianists over four evenings. When we weren’t at the concerts, we had time to explore Texas’s fourth-largest city.
It wasn’t anything like I’d expected.
The city has gone to great lengths to care for its downtown. Handsome historic buildings, strung with colorful lights, line not-too-wide, tree-shaded streets with brick-paved sidewalks—making for a delightful, inviting pedestrian experience. Frequent bins kept trash off the streets—some of the cleanest I’ve seen in any American city. Charming shops and cafés lined the principal axis of Main Street, from the pink-granite tower of the Tarrant County Courthouse south to the domed “flying saucer” convention center, a multi-block behemoth from the urban renewal era. Between the courthouse and the convention lies Sundance Square, a former parking lot that had been transformed into a pedestrianized square with shade structures, seating, fountains, and a Starbucks. As inviting as the downtown core appeared, none of it seemed to matter: it was all empty. Cowtown felt more like a ghost town.
Where was everybody?
The question was on my mind in part because Fort Worth recently eclipsed Austin in population, gaining more than 23,000 residents last year alone to cross 1 million Cowtowners.
According to advocacy group Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. (DFWI), Downtown is doing remarkably well: office vacancy is at 10%, way better than Downtown Austin’s 21.8%; employee visits increased 7.5% year on year; and hotel stays are up. Homelessness has declined after recent spikes, but unlike Downtown Austin, you wouldn’t know it in Downtown Fort Worth—there weren’t any homeless people there, either. This is all in contrast to Downtown Austin, where sidewalks are often grimy; where some streets are too wide, too congested, and often unshaded; where homelessness is an ever-present problem.
If anything, you’d expect Austinites to avoid their downtown—but retail tells a different story. In Downtown Fort Worth, around 25% of storefronts have no tenants. Downtown Austin, by contrast, boasts a 97% storefront occupancy rate—only 3% vacancy.
The data—and walking the streets—suggests that Cowtowners have turned away from their downtown. Only 11,600 people—barely 1% of Fort Worth’s population—live downtown, versus 15,000 in Austin. But a lot more people work in Downtown Austin: 132,000 jobs are located there, versus only 56,000 in Fort Worth. Despite the higher vacancy, Class A office rents in Downtown Austin are nearly double those in Fort Worth, according to DFWI. Meanwhile, in Austin, most of the hotels and tourist attractions are situated in the capital’s urban core; Fort Worth, by contrast, has situated its principal attractions, like the Cultural District and the Stockyards, beyond theirs. This may explain why forty million people visited Downtown Austin last year, while Fort Worth saw only half that.
Fort Worth was originally built on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River to defend Texans as they advanced across the North Central Plains. As the frontier moved west, pioneers moved in, and they built a settlement on the site of the fort. The railroad, cattle, and oil brought wealth, and with it Cowtowners built a city. But in succeeding in its mission, the fort also cleared the way for urban pioneers to settle beyond the old fort’s former walls. From the vantage point of Heritage Park, on the site of the first settlement, the north and west of the city are separated by an expanse of river and greenways. From a terrace outside the cheap seats at Bass Performance Hall, where the Cliburn competition was held, you can see the snarl of highways that isolates downtown from the city’s eastern and southern neighborhoods—as well as the massive parking garage where most concertgoers returned after the show, before driving back to the parts of the city where people actually live.
Once, Fort Worth’s bluff defended Texas from the wilderness. Today, its highways defend its downtown from civilization.
Where Interstates 30 and 35W intersect—just southeast of the convention center—sits another monument to midcentury urban renewal: architect Philip Johnson’s Water Gardens. Built on what was once Hell’s Half Acre, Johnson hoped the park would “remove visitors from the harshness of the city.” Instead, he seems to have introduced it—and removed the visitors. By the 1960s, when it was built, the area looked less like Sodom on the Trinity and more like Sundance Square today. One wonders how many people and businesses were driven out of downtown, never to return, thanks to urban renewal.
Visiting another struggling downtown, I came across the storefront of a newly renovated historic building in Dallas’s West End. Inside, a giant photo of Jane Jacobs was pasted on the wall, paired with her famous quote in neon lettering: “New ideas need old buildings.”
Jacobs wasn’t arguing that new ideas require charming historic architecture—rather the opposite. Cheaper old buildings create opportunities for new ideas to flourish, serving as literal platforms for lower-cost risk-taking. The mix of old and new allowed for economic dynamism and vibrancy as neighborhoods mature and evolve through active use and adaptive reuse. Of course, so many cities cleared out downtowns full of old buildings during the urban renewal era. Fort Worth’s midcentury experience of bulldozing old buildings and historic blocks for highways and monolithic projects surely influenced the trajectory of its growth. Perhaps people and businesses drifted to the suburbs because there were fewer old buildings downtown—fewer cheap, adaptable spaces where new ideas could emerge. If Sundance Square is a product of top-down redevelopment rather than bottom-up evolution, its retail vacancies may reflect that disconnect: Downtown may be beautiful, but it’s too curated, too costly, and too controlled for new businesses to take root.
On our last night, we saw a different vision of downtown Cowtown.
The final day of the Cliburn competition coincided with the city’s monthly First Saturday festival in Sundance Square. The surrounding blocks were closed to vehicular traffic, food trucks and other vendors rolled in, and a bar was set up in the middle. The Cliburn meanwhile installed a sculpture of their logo and a large screen from which they simulcast the final performances and awards ceremony. As the shadows grew long on a sweltering day, people began to assemble on the square, to visit the vendors, to get drinks from the bar. A Cuban band played Latin music as people salsaed where fountain jets dance during the day. Notably, the band did not include a piano. Still, the mayor proclaimed the Cliburn medalists honorary Fort Worthians and dubbed the city “Pianotown.”
The Van Cliburn competition, which so strongly links Fort Worth to the world of classical music, was merely an excuse to throw a festival in the heart of the city, to get ordinary Cowtowners out of the house and into downtown. While the music on the square wasn’t Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or Bartók, the streets were alive with people and thrummed with the music of life. It was a glimpse of what urban life could be like in a place like Cowtown.
Bringing people together is not a new idea; indeed, it’s the very oldest idea at the root of all cities. Sundance Square is a new place created out of no place, on a parking lot that perhaps long ago hosted old buildings. Still, if the packed square was any indication, Fort Worthians thought it was a good idea—if only for an evening. Good places can draw a crowd for a night, but as the empty streets the next morning proved, they’re not enough to make people stay. Fort Worth’s leaders have created a beautiful stage on which to program content—but occasional orchestration doesn’t, by itself, foster the daily improvisation that fills a city’s streets with the music of life.
As Jane Jacobs also reminded us: downtown is for people. Fort Worth has figured out how to make Downtown a place worth visiting. Now it needs to figure out how to make it worth staying for.
I used to live in Dallas. Its downtown was often equally empty, but new office-to-residential conversions are beginning to change that. Without even looking at a map or analysis, I bet there's capacity for at least 10,000 more residential units in downtown Ft. Worth. Downtown will likely remain a tourist/special event spot until more people live there.
My first professional orchestra audition after the pandemic was for Fort Worth, and had similar thoughts. The downtown is remarkably clean and “nice,” but empty. Notably, there was no downtown grocery store.
After the audition I texted an old teacher that I got close but didn’t get the job, and she responded, “Everything happens for a reason—you didn’t want to live there anyway!” How right she was.