There’s plenty of things to do for the Dallas young professional. However, if they are looking for food, shopping or entertainment, they have to leave the downtown area to find it.
Dallas communities like uptown, Victory Park and the arts district offer food, shopping and entertainment after a long week at the office. But you won’t find any of these within walking distance.
Drive thirty minutes west on interstate 30 and you will find a downtown that Dallas is forced to admire from a distance. It’s the hot spot known as downtown Fort Worth.
Sundance Square makes up 35 square blocks here in downtown Fort Worth. Parking is free after 5 and on weekends and it’s just a walk across the street for your food, shopping and entertainment.
In the late 1970s, Sid and Ed Bass, two brothers born and raised in fort worth watched people abandon their hometown’s downtown and drive to the suburbs for one-stop shopping.
Downtown became a place for business, not pleasure. The bass brothers authored a plan to bring people back to the heart of the city. They began buying up downtown property block by block and renamed the area Sundance Square.
“They wanted it not to only to be a business intersection but a place to go and have dinner, go shopping and enjoy entertainment of all kinds.,” said director of marketing for Sundance Square, Tracy Gilmour.
Sundance Square management is able to make this happen because it operates as a single entity that insists its tenants follow a high standard of quality.
City streets, a nightclub whose 10 year lease was up for renewal. Was given the choice of doing a complete renovation, or moving out, the owners agreed to completely revamp the venue.
“That bar was banged up; tore up, it was old outdated, it needed a facelift,” said Hobie Welsch, director of marketing and promotions for Lone Star in Sundance Square
City streets reopens in December, with a new look and a new name–lone star in Sundance Square. They’re doing it the way the Sundance developers told them to do it– building 4 separate venues and 6 individual bars at one location.
“It’s now more reflective of fort worth and who the people who live in Fort Worth are,” said Welsch. “It’s a reflection of a positive cosmopolitan, sophisticated city.”
Lone star is just one example of the tenant-landlord cooperative relationship established by Sundance Square management. It’s what makes this place work.
Dallas has struggled to make this happen, a variety of downtown Dallas property owners have individual ideas about how to run their businesses. But, the city of Dallas is taking steps to bring dallasites back to downtown.
“Downtown has actually, all the elevators at this point of becoming successful, we have the slight disadvantage of being in a down economy so we have to be patient,” said Peer Chacko, assistant Director of strategic planning for Dallas.
150,000 people are coming to North Texas for the February superbowl. If they visit Fort Worth’s downtown, the bass brothers will show them a walkable concentrated good time. If they want to find that in Dallas, for now…they better bring a car and be prepared to drive from place to place.
