City takes a step to save historic warehouse on edge of downtown Fort Worth
September 29,2023
See full Fort Worth Star-Telegram article by Harrison Mantas here.
It’s a multi-million dollar fix, but it’s not too late to restore the historic Texas & Pacific Warehouse, a city of Fort Worth commission said Friday.
The city’s Historic and Cultural Landmarks Commission unanimously affirmed the 92-year-old warehouse can be rehabilitated, and instructed city staff to come up with a plan to fix it.
The warehouse, at 401 West Lancaster Ave., opened in 1931 to store freight from the nearby Texas and Pacific Railroad. It closed in the 1980s after the last company using the building moved out and its owners at the time struggled with maintenance.
However, city staff told the commission Friday it still serves as an architecturally important connection to the city’s history as a railroad hub, and it is worth saving.
A June report from engineering firm Frank W. Neal and Associates recommended more than $2 million in structural repairs after several code violations and decades of neglect.
Most of the structural damage is due to water leaking into the building which has worn down concrete and exposed rebar on several floors, according to the report.
The building is entirely open to the elements, and this is why there’s so much damage, city preservation manager Justin Newhart told the commission at a work session ahead of a meeting Wednesday.
The building is owned by Dallas-based Cleopatra Investments, which has tried unsuccessfully to restore the structure since it took ownership in 1997.
The ownership group put forth a plans in 2011 that would have transformed the building into a retail and living space with a second building creating a buffer between the warehouse and the train tracks.
However, progress on that redevelopment stalled with ownership pointing to construction conflicts with the Hemphill-Lamar underpass in 2014. It also ran into road blocks getting state funding for a portion of the project set aside for affordable housing, according to documents submitted as part of the commission docket.
Downtown Fort Worth Inc., the nonprofit planning organization, has long pushed for the building’s redevelopment with the organization’s president Andy Taft arguing in a 2019 Star-Telegram op-ed the city should take a more active role in the redevelopment.
The nonprofit reaffirmed that stance in July when it passed a resolution urging its redevelopment. There’s roughly $2.5 billion worth of development in the pipeline in downtown Fort Worth with the new Texas A&M Fort Worth campus, and the expansions of the convention center and Omni Hotels.
The land more than quadrupled in value in 2023, according to data from the Tarrant Appraisal District.
The city will now work with the building owners to come up with a plan to fix the building, preservation manager Newhart said.
Some of the fixes will need to happen within the next three months while others will be required within the next three years, according to the engineering report.
Any fix will need to address the source of the problem, which is that the building is open to the elements, and the insides are suffering from water damage, Newhart said.