Fort Worth Weekley
June 23, 2004
By: Jeff Prince and Jamie Jorgensen

Rebuilding the Bluff
Fort Worth’s oldest neighborhood gets a total body makeover

A woman in her 40s driving a late-model car approached as Tom Struhs cruised along Samuels Avenue in his Chevy SUV. The woman stopped in the middle of the street, rolled down her window, waved Struhs to a stop, and asked if any jobs would be available once he has revamped the neighborhood. Struhs gave her a couple of leads, shared a bit of small talk, said goodbye, and drove away. “I have no idea who that was,” he said.

The admission was unexpected. Struhs knows just about everyone in the neighborhood, and they know him. Even more surprising is that they like him. After all, he’s a big-time developer who bought a huge chunk of the city’s oldest residential neighborhood, a place just northeast of downtown where early settlers lived, farmed, bartered, drank, gambled, held public hangings, and sought company with sporting ladies. Now he is razing most of the structures to build upscale apartments, condominiums, and retail buildings along the Trinity River’s majestic bluff just northeast of downtown.

Plans such as those often spark venomous response.

“I didn’t trust him too much,” said one of the neighborhood’s oldest residents, Micaela Villegas, 86. “I was worried he would make me move.”

She wasn’t the only nervous one.

“It was contentious at first,” said city councilwoman Wendy Davis. “No one knew Tom, and they didn’t know if they could trust him.”

Trust soon grew. Struhs has a graceful way of putting people at ease, and he backs his demeanor with decent and fair actions. “There aren’t too many Tom Struhs types of developers in the world,” Davis said. “He is an open book. People feel they can trust him to be straightforward.”

Four years after setting out to take over the aging residential area and springboard it into the 21st century, he’s earned a growing list of supporters. Angela Castloo, vice president of the Rock Island/Samuels Avenue Neighborhood Association, recalled how the early anger toward Struhs evolved into hope and optimism. “He’s trying to work with us and everybody has begun to accept the fact that it’s going to be good,” she said.

Much of the neighborhood will be unrecognizable when he’s done, yet even historians are among those casting hosannas. “I’ll tell you one thing I do appreciate: Several years ago, somebody from his company called and asked how tall the courthouse is,” said Tarrant County Historical Commission Director Dee Barker. “He didn’t want to build anything taller than the courthouse. The man really needs credit for that.”

For much of the late 20th century, the area was blighted and overlooked, a place where century-old houses fell into disrepair, empty lots became illegal dumping grounds, and vagrants looked for shady spots to sleep off midday drunks. Now the neighborhood’s promising future is rivaled only by its storied past.

A lilting Georgia — Joe-Ja — accent exposes her Atlanta raising, but Dee Barker has lived in Fort Worth long enough to consider herself a genuine Texan. She and her husband arrived in 1966; a decade later she began volunteering with the Tarrant County Historical Commission. She is now archives chairwoman — and one of the most exacting researchers ever to barrel down the pike.
The history of the Samuels Avenue neighborhood owes much to her resilience and willingness to pore over deed records, bills of sale, newspaper clippings, old letters, titles, wills, military reports, maps, petitions, or just about any other document she can find to help her reconstruct the past without being swayed by gossip or legend. “So much of Fort Worth history has been one writer copying from another,” she said. “The ones who are wrong get copied, and it stays wrong. It needs to be right. I started from scratch with records.”

Like most Fort Worth residents, she was barely aware of the neighborhood hidden behind the trees at the top of the bluff near the county courthouse, where the Trinity River turns northward and then back south, creating a peninsula. Her research was prompted in 1990 by the Texas Department of Transportation’s discussion about creating a new exchange for Texas 121 that would cross Samuels Avenue. TxDOT later changed its plans, but by then Barker was on a mission. For the next year she examined every document she could find to trace the neighborhood’s past and spent another month writing up her findings. Her lengthy report, the source for the historical passages in this story, tells a fascinating story.

Even shade-tree historians know that Fort Worth was established as part of a line of military outposts in the mid-1800s to keep Indian tribes in check and provide security so that settlers could be enticed to make a new start in the rough and untamed Texas. Major Ripley Arnold led a group of men to scout a site for the fort near the Trinity River’s west fork. Upon their arrival, they camped near a cold spring, where they shot a deer for supper. The next morning they found an ideal spot for the fort about a mile from where they had camped. It sat atop the bluff in the spot where the Tarrant County Courthouse now stands, providing sentries with an easy view and offering soldiers cool breezes. On some nights, the glow from countless Indian campfires dotted the landscape like reflections of starry skies.

The cold spring was a popular spot, as Indians, soldiers, and the first few settlers in the area made treks to fill water barrels and pouches. Soldiers set up temporary quarters in a grove of live oaks on the peninsula while they cut trees, prepared logs, and constructed stables, sleeping quarters, and other buildings for the bluff’s fort. Once the fort was completed in 1849 and the soldiers settled inside, the peninsula became the favored spot for early settlers and home to the area’s first general store, opened in 1850 by Henry Daggett, who traded with Indians and settlers alike. Tarrant County was established, and a variety of early official business took place in Daggett’s simple store. The county’s population at the time numbered fewer than 600, and only a fraction of those lived near the fort.

A nearby parcel, believed to have been used as an Indian burial ground, became the city’s earliest cemetery. Major Arnold’s youngest son is believed to have been the first white person buried there. Now called Pioneers Rest Cemetery, the burial ground in the 600 block of Samuels Avenue holds the graves of about 75 Civil War era soldiers, along with Arnold, General Edward Tarrant (the county’s namesake), and other pioneers.

Daggett moved his store to the fort after the soldiers vacated in 1853. Nathaniel and Elizabeth Terry took his place among the live oaks, arriving from Alabama with a string of horses and 36 slaves, intending to farm. They built a large house of white limestone facing south near the spring. Even though the spring was on private property, it remained a popular watering hole and a place for political debates and barbecues, with diners feasting on watermelon cooled by the spring waters. Hangings were held on a platform built on a dirt trail referred to as Cold Springs Road.
The Terrys sold their land to David Snow in 1863, who in turn sold it a few years later to Baldwin Samuel.

The few buildings that had popped up around the fort and become part of the town square were mostly made of adobe or wood, with wooden sidewalks. Streets were unpaved and became mud pits after rains. Farming began to give way to cattle raising during this time, and the herds and cowboys coming from the south took respite in Fort Worth before continuing their journey to northern markets. The first railroad would come along in 1876, making the young city a sought-after terminus for cattle drives that until then had to push the herds much further north on foot.

Samuel, meanwhile, was living in the old Terry home and farming the surrounding land. The path leading from his house to town was dubbed Samuels Road by townsfolk. After the land was platted, the road was renamed Samuels Avenue. Samuel would later divide his land into lots and sell to new residents who built homes. He sold an acre near the bluff, which became home to a brewery, the neighborhood’s first business since Daggett had vacated his store 20 years earlier. Samuel also donated several acres to increase the size of the burial ground. A neighborhood grew, and the peninsula became home to a diverse collection of residents, including lawyers, merchants, laborers, a banker, a well digger, a dairyman, and a carpenter. Elaborate houses were interspersed with smaller frame units and shotgun shacks. The town’s population topped 6,000 in the mid 1870s.

The 1880s brought a booming population and increasing modernization, including a new water plant, electric and gas companies, and a street railway system. To promote the burgeoning city, a driving park and racetrack for horses was built just east of Samuels Avenue. The Park Saloon quickly followed. Then came the Pavilion, a large wooden building with open sides that served as a meeting place and dance hall. These places for years were the city’s center of social activity. Fort Worth called itself “The Queen City of the Prairie.” On nearby Cold Springs Road, M.L. Beaumont, also known as Frankie Brown, built a two-story brick house considered to be Fort Worth’s premier whorehouse. By 1890, the house had been transformed into the city’s first orphanage, the Fort Worth Benevolent Home.

The Samuels Avenue neighborhood was a thriving, integral part of Fort Worth’s dawning history, but its relevance would soon wane. In 1901, the city’s business community attracted two major meatpackers to the area, Swift and Armour. Their plants north of downtown put Fort Worth among the nation’s top livestock markets. But the slaughterhouse stench that began drifting across the river and down Samuels Avenue marked a distinct downturn for that neighborhood. People making riches in cattle, real estate, and oil began looking at newer and better neighborhoods, such as the Pennsylvania Avenue area, where the Thistle Hill mansion was built in 1903.

The driving park and racetrack closed, and another opened west of downtown. The Pavilion saw a drop-off in business and closed as well. The orphans’ home shut its doors in 1908, and the county sold the property in 1914. The city paved and curbed Samuels Avenue, and the area evolved into a quiet, pleasant neighborhood, but one with a less vital role in the city’s commercial and social fabric. The street of stately homes with beautiful views settled into a quiet middle age, little regarded by the energetic downtown area that pulsed and grew a few blocks away.

Jazz Café owner Nicholas Kithas was born 59 years ago in the 1000 block of Samuels Avenue, just a few blocks north of Struhs’ impending development. Kithas and his siblings attended Nash Elementary, and he still lives in the family house. He recalls his growing up there as a magical time. “It was a great neighborhood,” he said. “There were two or three little mom-and-pop stores. That’s where we stopped on the way to school.”

The years between the 1920s and the 1960s were good to the neighborhood. People knew and looked out for one another. Modest and middle-sized houses built on smaller streets joined the big houses on the bluff. Christmases brought residents from across the city to view the elaborate decorations.

The neighborhood was past its prime but still handsome, not yet giving in to the passage of time, flights to the suburbs, and the deterioration and abandonment of homes. Some houses stayed in families for generations. Others were sold and resold, and more than a few became rental properties. Some homeowners took care of their properties; others allowed their homes and yards to become disheveled.

“It was wonderful when I was growing up, but it decayed,” Kithas said. “People get old and can’t take care of their stuff. ... I’ve been watching it come down for a long time.”

Casey Elsasser began working as a butcher at the Courthouse Market in 1967 and knew many of the Samuels Avenue residents who shopped at his store, not only for beef, chicken, and pork, but also for “possums, coons, armadillos, squirrels — I sold all of that,” he said. He saw the decline in both the neighborhood and the store over the years before he retired in 1989. “People would move away, and no one would move in to replace them,” he said.

Kithas is a strong supporter of Struhs. “Tom has a good fresh head on his shoulders, and I like his ideas,” he said. “It’s not a neighborhood anymore, but they’re planning to make it back into a neighborhood.”

In the early 1990s, fledgling Dallas developer Eric Nichol saw the potential amid the history on Samuels Avenue and took a stab at trying to collect properties and build condominiums. Construction never took place. After a few years he sold most of his properties to Struhs. In 1997 he sold one of the street’s most magnificent houses to Bruce Morris. The house at 731 Samuels was built in 1863, and it took a ton of effort to bring back its earlier splendor. “It’s been under renovation for the past five years,” Morris said. “At the turn of the century this was an affluent area, and then it kind of went downhill.”

Renovation of the house has been completed. The property that Morris paid $85,000 for in ’97 is now appraised at five times that amount. He plans to stay for the long haul and expects the Trinity Bluff project to improve property values and solidify a sense of community.

Struhs seems to be the perfect person to lead the neighborhood into the future, Morris said. “Tom is doing on a bigger scale what Eric started to do seven or eight years ago,” he said. “All it took is somebody that knew anything about development and have the foresight to see it was a huge diamond in the rough. It was important that whoever was going to do this did not put up ultra-modern buildings and destroy the ambience that was there. Tom has taken into account the human element. He realizes its not just the location, it’s the whole aura of what that street has represented to the history of Fort Worth. Tom wants to rejuvenate what is already there.”

After a difficult century, the neighborhood is akin to a phoenix, according to Morris. “It’s being brought back from the ashes,” he said.

One of the neighborhood’s only commercial properties in recent years has been Mi Metate, a tiny authentic Mexican food restaurant just south of the cemetery. Onesimo Alvarado serves tasty and inexpensive burritos and tacos to take-out diners. There are no tables inside the restaurant, although Struhs hauled a wooden picnic table to the site and placed it under some shade trees for customers. The location has been good for Alvarado, and he expects business only to improve once the Trinity Bluff project is completed. “We’re excited; it will be a good opportunity for us,” he said.
The Mi Metate property is owned by Struhs. Alvarado expects to stay there for about two more years and then will abandon the building to make way for demolition. Struhs, a frequent customer, has promised to find a place in one of the Trinity Bluff retail pods for the taqueria to relocate. “They’re good people and worth the effort,” he said.

The blanket of trees along the sloping bluff above the Trinity provides a critter condominium for squirrels, birds, and various varmints. The bluff top affords a panoramic view of north Fort Worth, the river, the old TXU power plant, the new RadioShack headquarters, the county courthouse, and other downtown buildings, and yet little development has occurred there in the past century. Houses perched on the south end of the bluff have slowly given way to bulldozers or been moved to other parts of the city to clear the way for the Trinity Bluff project envisioned by Struhs and partner Rudy Renda, who keeps a low profile and refers all questions to Struhs.

Most of the construction will occur along the neighborhood’s south end, the portion closest to downtown. Retail is planned for the riverside, with residential on top of the bluff. The neighborhood’s most historic sections lie farther north out of harm’s way, for now. Success breeds followers, and if Trinity Bluff is a hit, piggyback developers will no doubt come along to try their own luck at buying lots and houses and clearing them for new houses and businesses.

“There is no historic protection there,” Davis said.

And there appears to be none on the way. Barker considered applying for a National Registry historic designation as she researched the area in 1990, until she realized that only a few historic houses remained.

“You don’t save something just because it’s old,” Barker said. “You save something because it has great significance.”

The only thing left of great significance is the area’s history. So the city’s oldest neighborhood is ripe for the plucking should anyone want to emulate what Struhs is doing. The bluff’s south end offers the best views, but the northern section, where the land slopes back down toward Northside Drive, will surely become more desirable to investors once Struhs’ Trinity Bluff vision is completed. Like much of the North Side, the neighborhood will be affected, if not transformed, in the long term if plans go forward for a “town lake” on the Trinity just below the bluff.

Trinity Bluff will cost an estimated $242 million and offer anywhere from 950 to 1,350 apartments, and 150 to 300 town homes and condos, along with retail pods and hike-and-bike trails near the river. “We’re going to have Fort Worth’s version of the Gold Coast,” Struhs said, referring to Australia’s famous tourist area.

Almost everything in the 30-acre area that Struhs purchased will be razed, even his own two-story concrete office building on Bluff Street. At least one building, however, will be spared — Nash Elementary School, 401 Samuels Ave., built in 1927 with a Spanish Colonial design. Currently about 180 students attend the school.

“People were willing to sell their houses, but they wanted to know Nash would stay,” Struhs said. “A lot of them were grandmothers who went to Nash. They wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything to their school.”
One of those grandmothers was Micaela Villegas, who was born in 1918, grew up in the area, attended Nash shortly after it was built, and later married and moved to nearby Grant Street and raised seven children. When Struhs came knocking on her door to discuss buying her house, the 5-foot-tall Villegas was skeptical. She didn’t want to leave the house where she had lived for 50 years, even though the roof leaked and the front porch was falling down. But Struhs made an offer she couldn’t refuse — he would buy her house and allow her to live there until she died. In the meantime, he fixed her roof and her porch.

Struhs smiled when asked what would happen if the Trinity Bluff project is completely built out over the coming years and Villegas remained in her cluttered little frame house surrounded by condos. “She’ll be a reminder of the past, and everyone can look down at the house and it will be like a garden in the community,” he said, giving the impression he would enjoy seeing her stay forever. He designed and built a house in North Richland Hills for another elderly resident to move to.

Struhs comes across as a neighborhood institution, but only a few years have passed since he stumbled upon Samuels Avenue by chance. In 2000, he built the Cassidy Corner townhouses at First and Pecan streets on downtown’s east side and moved there with wife, Elizabeth Falconer. They fell in love with downtown living, “the convenience, the extra dimension to our lives, having something do if we wanted to or just stay at home if we wanted to — and no yard work,” he said.
In 2002 he built the Pecan Place condominiums across the street. Both properties are recognizable by their red brick facades and blue steel roofs.

The Trinity Bluff concept took root as Struhs was developing architectural plans for Cassidy Corner and Pecan Place. Struhs has been a developer in and around Fort Worth for more than 20 years, and he was shopping around for Pecan Place investors, but most people were only interested if he could put together more land for development.

Looking for property one day, Struhs ran across G.P. Allread, an old cowboy businessman who owned a lot on Weatherford Street and a lumberyard on Belknap Street.

“If you’re going to buy my lot on Weatherford, why don’t you buy my old lumber yard too?” Allread said.
“I don’t know if I can get the financing,” Struhs said.

The now-deceased Allread, who was about 90 at the time, gave Struhs a 10-year loan to purchase the lumberyard. Having closed on those two properties, Struhs and his wife took their first drive through the adjoining Samuels Avenue neighborhood. They spotted a rotted plywood sign the size of a picnic table with a hard-to-read, hand-painted message on it: “This whole block for sale.” A phone number was painted underneath it. Struhs called and was greeted by Marion Burda, a Samuels Avenue resident who was looking to sell, sell, sell. The two men quickly made a deal, sealed with a handshake — a “good honest one,” as Struhs called it — that would allow him to purchase all 26 of Burda’s properties for $2.4 million. A year later, Texas Bank gave Struhs a large enough credit line to buy those properties and more.

“We discovered there were a couple of places for sale,” he said. “And one thing led to another and it got kind of out of hand. We had no idea we could pull off the whole assemblage at once.”

He bought a lot here and a lot there, but sprinkled among his holdings were properties owned by others. Struhs became a bit worried. He needed it all to make his project work. According to residents, he got what he needed with persistence, patience, and a willingness to meet with locals, pay fair prices, and compromise when needed. Eventually he accumulated just under 30 acres, roughly bordered by Grove Street and the Trinity River on the west, Belknap Street on the south, the Burlington Northern Railroad on the east, and Pioneers Rest Cemetery on the north. “It was like digging up an old box and looking inside and seeing old Fort Worth,” he said. “Basically, the city grew out from here.”

Trinity Bluff is expected to increase the pedestrian traffic downtown and link the neighborhood to the river-level developments expected to arrive with the lake project. Struhs plans to build at both the top and bottom of the bluff, and connect the two parts with walkways or perhaps a winding road. Add in other downtown retail and residential projects, and the coming years indicate a population boost in downtown, something city leaders have been trying to stimulate for years. The Tower in the old Bank One building is expected to include about 300 condos and an array of retail shops. A similar project is slated for the Tandy Towers once RadioShack moves into its new headquarters next year. Several other projects are under way or being considered, but nothing matching the size and scope of Trinity Bluff.

Downtown retail has suffered from a lack of nearby residents. Projects such as Trinity Bluff could supply the people to support downtown and strengthen the city’s tax base, Davis said. “Over the long term it’s clearly going to enhance the amount of money we are receiving in our general fund,” she said.

There is much work to be done. Along with the daunting task of creating a new high-end neighborhood, Struhs is dealing with infrastructure challenges and city regulations. “The sewers and water mains in Samuels Avenue are outdated and undersized for the kind of development we anticipate for the neighborhood,” City Planning Director Fernando Costa said.

Before Struhs appeared, the neighborhood was a hodgepodge of zoning classifications, and few people would have been able to undertake any project without re-zoning, Costa said. The area was re-zoned for high-intensity mixed development, allowing the land to be used for residential and commercial.

Another roadblock was the composition of the bluff’s edge itself. Just as time has taken its toll on the neighborhood, people have taken a toll on the bluff. In the distant past, residents used the bluff for dumping. For a long time, the Trinity was polluted from all the waste that slid down the slope into the river. What remained on the slope has become part of the landscape, but it’s shaky ground for building on. Still, engineering designs will solve any stability challenges, Struhs and Costa said.

The plans have undergone some facelifts along the way. Tarrant County College approached Struhs with an offer in mid-February. TCC was looking for a new place to call home in downtown Fort Worth, and the bluff, at the time, seemed like a good possibility. So the college put down earnest money and was given 90 days to assess the area and make the decision about possibly building a downtown campus on the bluff.

“A lot of people were really excited about it as a residential community, and they were disappointed we might be taking that away and making a college campus out of it,” Struhs said. “...When the college decided not to do it on our property, again we got tremendous support, and they [the residents] are so glad that we are going to do our original vision.”

TCC is currently considering other locations, with some downtown insiders claiming that the school has made a deal with the Bass family to buy about five acres of land on the bluff as part of a future campus. Pamela Smith, coordinator of public information at TCC, said that the college has not decided where to build, and she did not know of anyone who could answer questions about why TCC decided not to set up shop at Trinity Bluff.

Struhs originally planned to purchase the five acres of Bass-owned land that lie adjacent to his property and include them in his project. The Bass land is bluffside property and closer to the courthouse and Main Street. But after talks and a contract, no deal was finalized. The numbers didn’t crunch right to suit Struhs. “I had it under contract, but because of anticipated rents and construction, we just couldn’t make it work,” he said. “We had an agreement but just decided not to do it.”
Without the Bass parcel, Struhs had to reduce the scope of the first phase of development, but he is convinced that Trinity Bluff will add to downtown’s allure and make Samuels Avenue a “river destination.”

Architectural styles will be reminiscent of the neighborhood’s glory days — the Arts and Crafts style circa 1880s to 1920s — but with a modern bent. “We don’t want to repeat history but want it to be compatible,” Struhs said. “We want it to be Fort Worth.”