CTroyMathis
13 August 2003, 07:22 PM
Downtown success(or)
Devero ready to step aside for Andy Taft
BY MIKE PRICE
Fort Worth Business Press (http://www.fwbusinesspress.com/)
As an unprecedented changing of the guard nears for Fort Worth’s powerful and influential downtown-improvement agency, crucial distinctions emerge between the Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., that Ken Devero brought into focus during the early 1980s and the DFW, Inc., of which Andrew M. Taft will take charge this Fall.
The big difference? In 1981, nobody particularly wanted to venture downtown, unless one was looking for trouble and/or cheap thrills.
Today, that challenge has been met and conquered, only to have morphed into prospects comparably daunting: How to accommodate all the people who want to spend their after-hours leisure time and weekends downtown?
How to channel that traffic into patronage for the merchants who have committed their resources to downtown storefronts?
How to reconcile a burgeoning traffic in tourism and conventions with the comforts of a local audience – downtown apartment-dwellers in particular -- yet encourage more downtown residential development beyond the pump-priming stage?
And how to nurture re-development in the comparatively neglected south-by-southeastern stretches of the area as the Central Business District sprawls northwest toward the Trinity River?
Kenneth R. Devero still is concerned with such issues – and forging toward solutions centering upon such prospects as a convention center hotel and the Lancaster Corridor development – despite his imminent departure.
Devero is the first – and until now, the only – president that Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., has known, and at 65, he speaks of anything but retirement as he calculates his prospects beyond DFW, Inc. He has played it cagey since last Spring as to what he expects to be doing next, but it is what he’ll be doing immediately that has the greater bearing upon the downtown organization.
“Plans? None at all just now, outside of sticking around for a month to help Andy Taft get settled in,” Devero said. Taft will arrive from Louisiana just before Labor Day and will devote September to managing a relay hand-off from the Devero regime.
“I’m coming in with an open mind,” Taft, 40, said from Shreveport, where he has spent six years as chief of three comparable organizations. “An open mind, and a good many questions. Ken Devero is one of the few real innovators in a field that is still developing, and I’m just grateful to find our paths merging here for a month.”
DFW, Inc., long since has proved itself far more than some bureaucracy of boosterism. Under Devero, the office has created and managed the first public-improvement district in Texas. The breakthrough has inspired emulation by other cities and channeled tens of millions of dollars’ worth of re-development via the Downtown PID and the City of Fort Worth Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 3 – known more familiarly as the TIF.
But the TIF was not meant to function as some perpetual pathway toward prosperity. Its goal of practical re-development was finite and demonstrable, and the capping-off of the $50-then-$70-plus million fund earlier this year seems to have signaled an exodus by the more visible leaders of DFW, Inc.
Months before Devero’s announcement of his exit, the agency had shut down its once-crucial, outdoor events division, triggering the exit of division chief Stephen King. King had spent the 1990s developing three annual events – the holiday season’s Parade of Lights, April’s MAIN ST. Fort Worth Arts Festival, and July’s riverside Fort Worth Fourth spectacle – into significant traffic-drivers, with attendance in the tens of thousands.
(The management of MAIN ST. has been farmed out to a Cincinnati-based production company, Source One Communications. The Parade of Lights remains business-as-usual for DFW, Inc., but the Independence Day fireworks extravaganza was sidelined this year in deference to RadioShack’s new-headquarters project along the Trinity River. The jury remains out as to whether such events drive traffic to specific merchant-tenants, which intend to serve as traffic-drivers in their own right, or primarily to the area in general.)
The direct management of such events by DFW, Inc., was meant primarily to set a variety of mass-audience events in motion during a time when “there wasn’t all that much going on downtown,” as Devero explained it.
More directly tied to the capping of the TIF was the departure of David Pettit, who had spent four years as director of development. Though still affiliated with Downtown Fort Worth as a consultant-collaborator, Pettit joined the architectural firm of Gideon Toal, Inc. Pettit has explained that his move stemmed directly from the topping-off and spending of the TIF, which he had developed from downtown tax money as fuel for large improvements.
Today, Pettit is concentrating upon the Trinity River Vision project and related ventures. Much of his newer work descends from teamwork developed by Devero and Pettit at DFW, Inc.
The rambunctious legacy of Hell’s Half Acre – a mid-town stronghold of the 19th and early 20th centuries, known for its outlaw spirit and alluring (in glamorized hindsight) air of adventure – had been largely forgotten until re-development kicked in. Today, the picaresque image of that era figures in the very branding of downtown’s Sundance Square, which takes its name from one of the more prominent outlaws who sojourned in early-day Fort Worth.
Polite civilization had marginalized Hell’s Half Acre by the Jazz Age and Depression years of the last century, re-defining Fort Worth’s downtown area as a thriving retail-and-office district that, during the 1970s, dwindled as a consequence of the centrifugal force of surburban commercial development.
Downtown’s once-thriving theaters, in better days, had seen Hollywood premieres and a constant procession of first-run, major-studio movies. By the ’70s, such places were lurching toward extinction with such also-ran attractions as kung-fu epics and low-budget horror movies – pictures better suited to some back-road, drive-in theater.
By then, the drab, besotted ghosts of Hell’s Half Acre had returned to haunt the street level of downtown Fort Worth. The landscape was one of 9 a.m.-’til-whenever beer bars, greasy-spoon dining establishments, salvage outlets and clothing emporiums catering to an exclusive clientele of (no way to put it politely) pimps and hustlers. A hope of a fresh start seemed to lie with a shopping mall at Tandy Center, but that finer influence neither spread nor, ultimately, thrived.
Just try finding any such raggedy place today. The central-downtown development known as Sundance Square, which started out with the 1978-81 refurbishment of two blocks by the prominent Bass family, made a point of acquiring surrounding properties whose improvements would stretch the perimeter of Sundance Square by tenfold in less than a generation. The organization of Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., as a private-sector, not-for-profit organization, coincided with the first palpable manifestation of the sector’s re-birth, the construction of the Worthington (now Renaissance Worthington) Hotel. Devero came aboard as president of DFW, Inc., in May of 1982.
The result of this concentrated attention has been a sweeping, progressive restoration of downtown activity, to a state very much like that of the thriving downtown area of the first half-and-change of the last century. The revival seems all but complete, barring the conspicuous absence of big-retail department stores, a lapsed hallmark of the original downtown Fort Worth, and a perpetual challenge to develop adequate parking apace with the renewed traffic. Even the movie-theater industry (which by-and-large had abandoned downtown areas nationwide) came back with first-run establishments – along with dining, and nightclubbing, and apartment living with a high-angle view of the regenerated bustle of street-life.
Such is the core of the downtown area whose provinces Andrew Taft inherits in follow-through to Ken Devero’s track record. Taft surfaced early on within a field “of numerous candidates,” as DFW, Inc.’s board chairman, Allan Howeth, put it. Rumored successors to Devero had included former Mayor Ken Barr.
Taft, originally from Florida, began his career with Grubb & Ellis of Florida, Inc., and in 1993 joined the Tampa Downtown Partnership as director of marketing and business development.
Taft has presided since 1997 over Shreveport’s inter-related Downtown Development Authority, Downtown Shreveport Unlimited and Downtown Shreveport Development Corp. He has been responsible there for such developments as ShrevePark Parking Services and a Downtown Parking Enterprise Fund. He served as treasurer of a successful $85 million convention center bond campaign, and he played a key role in the relocation of Shreveport’s City Hall to the downtown area after a 40-year absence.
“Downtown Fort Worth has a remarkable national reputation,” Taft said. “The Downtown Strategic Action Plan, which is nearing completion, demonstrates that Fort Worth has enormous potential for continued growth and the makings of a world-class city.”
Taft, whose family has chosen a home site near downtown in a historic Near South neighborhood, comes to Fort Worth with a practical understanding of the city’s dynamics, and of the relationship of the downtown area to such districts as the Stockyards and the Cultural District. He has the thought fixed in mind that urban growth as a class “trends toward the water,” as he put it – speaking of the Trinity River, not of the southern-downtown Water Gardens area. And already, Taft perceives that southward development, “more along the railroad tracks, away from the water,” will require “more focus, more effort, more community commitment.”
The formally designated downtown area ranges from Interstate 35 on the east, to the rail lines on the south, to the river on the north and west.
Devero, meanwhile, will go so far as to declare his commitment to “staying in Fort Worth, involved in Fort Worth” while adding: “I’ve been in this business for 38 years… sometimes you have to reinvent yourself.” He admitted to being “amazed that we continue to draw as many people to the [downtown] area as we’ve done” – referring to a recent outdoor concert that packed some 25,000 people into a few blocks’ space – even as he ascribes such accomplishments to a branding and public-awareness strategy that he had helped to introduce as early as the 1980s.
“When I came in, we had a $60,000 start-up budget and just the beginnings of a re-development plan. We’ve wound up with a $5 million budget, and the results of the growth are all around us. The 1993 downtown plan had called for 1,000 [residential] units by the year 2000, and we surpassed that goal. The idea of some 2,000 apartment households in the immediate area might have seemed like a fantasy 20 years ago, but our efforts have helped to make it real.
“I think the people have made it plain that they want to be downtown, whether as a destination or as home,” Devero said. “Now, all we have to do is to come up with the right ways to keep them accommodated.”
Devero ready to step aside for Andy Taft
BY MIKE PRICE
Fort Worth Business Press (http://www.fwbusinesspress.com/)
As an unprecedented changing of the guard nears for Fort Worth’s powerful and influential downtown-improvement agency, crucial distinctions emerge between the Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., that Ken Devero brought into focus during the early 1980s and the DFW, Inc., of which Andrew M. Taft will take charge this Fall.
The big difference? In 1981, nobody particularly wanted to venture downtown, unless one was looking for trouble and/or cheap thrills.
Today, that challenge has been met and conquered, only to have morphed into prospects comparably daunting: How to accommodate all the people who want to spend their after-hours leisure time and weekends downtown?
How to channel that traffic into patronage for the merchants who have committed their resources to downtown storefronts?
How to reconcile a burgeoning traffic in tourism and conventions with the comforts of a local audience – downtown apartment-dwellers in particular -- yet encourage more downtown residential development beyond the pump-priming stage?
And how to nurture re-development in the comparatively neglected south-by-southeastern stretches of the area as the Central Business District sprawls northwest toward the Trinity River?
Kenneth R. Devero still is concerned with such issues – and forging toward solutions centering upon such prospects as a convention center hotel and the Lancaster Corridor development – despite his imminent departure.
Devero is the first – and until now, the only – president that Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., has known, and at 65, he speaks of anything but retirement as he calculates his prospects beyond DFW, Inc. He has played it cagey since last Spring as to what he expects to be doing next, but it is what he’ll be doing immediately that has the greater bearing upon the downtown organization.
“Plans? None at all just now, outside of sticking around for a month to help Andy Taft get settled in,” Devero said. Taft will arrive from Louisiana just before Labor Day and will devote September to managing a relay hand-off from the Devero regime.
“I’m coming in with an open mind,” Taft, 40, said from Shreveport, where he has spent six years as chief of three comparable organizations. “An open mind, and a good many questions. Ken Devero is one of the few real innovators in a field that is still developing, and I’m just grateful to find our paths merging here for a month.”
DFW, Inc., long since has proved itself far more than some bureaucracy of boosterism. Under Devero, the office has created and managed the first public-improvement district in Texas. The breakthrough has inspired emulation by other cities and channeled tens of millions of dollars’ worth of re-development via the Downtown PID and the City of Fort Worth Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 3 – known more familiarly as the TIF.
But the TIF was not meant to function as some perpetual pathway toward prosperity. Its goal of practical re-development was finite and demonstrable, and the capping-off of the $50-then-$70-plus million fund earlier this year seems to have signaled an exodus by the more visible leaders of DFW, Inc.
Months before Devero’s announcement of his exit, the agency had shut down its once-crucial, outdoor events division, triggering the exit of division chief Stephen King. King had spent the 1990s developing three annual events – the holiday season’s Parade of Lights, April’s MAIN ST. Fort Worth Arts Festival, and July’s riverside Fort Worth Fourth spectacle – into significant traffic-drivers, with attendance in the tens of thousands.
(The management of MAIN ST. has been farmed out to a Cincinnati-based production company, Source One Communications. The Parade of Lights remains business-as-usual for DFW, Inc., but the Independence Day fireworks extravaganza was sidelined this year in deference to RadioShack’s new-headquarters project along the Trinity River. The jury remains out as to whether such events drive traffic to specific merchant-tenants, which intend to serve as traffic-drivers in their own right, or primarily to the area in general.)
The direct management of such events by DFW, Inc., was meant primarily to set a variety of mass-audience events in motion during a time when “there wasn’t all that much going on downtown,” as Devero explained it.
More directly tied to the capping of the TIF was the departure of David Pettit, who had spent four years as director of development. Though still affiliated with Downtown Fort Worth as a consultant-collaborator, Pettit joined the architectural firm of Gideon Toal, Inc. Pettit has explained that his move stemmed directly from the topping-off and spending of the TIF, which he had developed from downtown tax money as fuel for large improvements.
Today, Pettit is concentrating upon the Trinity River Vision project and related ventures. Much of his newer work descends from teamwork developed by Devero and Pettit at DFW, Inc.
The rambunctious legacy of Hell’s Half Acre – a mid-town stronghold of the 19th and early 20th centuries, known for its outlaw spirit and alluring (in glamorized hindsight) air of adventure – had been largely forgotten until re-development kicked in. Today, the picaresque image of that era figures in the very branding of downtown’s Sundance Square, which takes its name from one of the more prominent outlaws who sojourned in early-day Fort Worth.
Polite civilization had marginalized Hell’s Half Acre by the Jazz Age and Depression years of the last century, re-defining Fort Worth’s downtown area as a thriving retail-and-office district that, during the 1970s, dwindled as a consequence of the centrifugal force of surburban commercial development.
Downtown’s once-thriving theaters, in better days, had seen Hollywood premieres and a constant procession of first-run, major-studio movies. By the ’70s, such places were lurching toward extinction with such also-ran attractions as kung-fu epics and low-budget horror movies – pictures better suited to some back-road, drive-in theater.
By then, the drab, besotted ghosts of Hell’s Half Acre had returned to haunt the street level of downtown Fort Worth. The landscape was one of 9 a.m.-’til-whenever beer bars, greasy-spoon dining establishments, salvage outlets and clothing emporiums catering to an exclusive clientele of (no way to put it politely) pimps and hustlers. A hope of a fresh start seemed to lie with a shopping mall at Tandy Center, but that finer influence neither spread nor, ultimately, thrived.
Just try finding any such raggedy place today. The central-downtown development known as Sundance Square, which started out with the 1978-81 refurbishment of two blocks by the prominent Bass family, made a point of acquiring surrounding properties whose improvements would stretch the perimeter of Sundance Square by tenfold in less than a generation. The organization of Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., as a private-sector, not-for-profit organization, coincided with the first palpable manifestation of the sector’s re-birth, the construction of the Worthington (now Renaissance Worthington) Hotel. Devero came aboard as president of DFW, Inc., in May of 1982.
The result of this concentrated attention has been a sweeping, progressive restoration of downtown activity, to a state very much like that of the thriving downtown area of the first half-and-change of the last century. The revival seems all but complete, barring the conspicuous absence of big-retail department stores, a lapsed hallmark of the original downtown Fort Worth, and a perpetual challenge to develop adequate parking apace with the renewed traffic. Even the movie-theater industry (which by-and-large had abandoned downtown areas nationwide) came back with first-run establishments – along with dining, and nightclubbing, and apartment living with a high-angle view of the regenerated bustle of street-life.
Such is the core of the downtown area whose provinces Andrew Taft inherits in follow-through to Ken Devero’s track record. Taft surfaced early on within a field “of numerous candidates,” as DFW, Inc.’s board chairman, Allan Howeth, put it. Rumored successors to Devero had included former Mayor Ken Barr.
Taft, originally from Florida, began his career with Grubb & Ellis of Florida, Inc., and in 1993 joined the Tampa Downtown Partnership as director of marketing and business development.
Taft has presided since 1997 over Shreveport’s inter-related Downtown Development Authority, Downtown Shreveport Unlimited and Downtown Shreveport Development Corp. He has been responsible there for such developments as ShrevePark Parking Services and a Downtown Parking Enterprise Fund. He served as treasurer of a successful $85 million convention center bond campaign, and he played a key role in the relocation of Shreveport’s City Hall to the downtown area after a 40-year absence.
“Downtown Fort Worth has a remarkable national reputation,” Taft said. “The Downtown Strategic Action Plan, which is nearing completion, demonstrates that Fort Worth has enormous potential for continued growth and the makings of a world-class city.”
Taft, whose family has chosen a home site near downtown in a historic Near South neighborhood, comes to Fort Worth with a practical understanding of the city’s dynamics, and of the relationship of the downtown area to such districts as the Stockyards and the Cultural District. He has the thought fixed in mind that urban growth as a class “trends toward the water,” as he put it – speaking of the Trinity River, not of the southern-downtown Water Gardens area. And already, Taft perceives that southward development, “more along the railroad tracks, away from the water,” will require “more focus, more effort, more community commitment.”
The formally designated downtown area ranges from Interstate 35 on the east, to the rail lines on the south, to the river on the north and west.
Devero, meanwhile, will go so far as to declare his commitment to “staying in Fort Worth, involved in Fort Worth” while adding: “I’ve been in this business for 38 years… sometimes you have to reinvent yourself.” He admitted to being “amazed that we continue to draw as many people to the [downtown] area as we’ve done” – referring to a recent outdoor concert that packed some 25,000 people into a few blocks’ space – even as he ascribes such accomplishments to a branding and public-awareness strategy that he had helped to introduce as early as the 1980s.
“When I came in, we had a $60,000 start-up budget and just the beginnings of a re-development plan. We’ve wound up with a $5 million budget, and the results of the growth are all around us. The 1993 downtown plan had called for 1,000 [residential] units by the year 2000, and we surpassed that goal. The idea of some 2,000 apartment households in the immediate area might have seemed like a fantasy 20 years ago, but our efforts have helped to make it real.
“I think the people have made it plain that they want to be downtown, whether as a destination or as home,” Devero said. “Now, all we have to do is to come up with the right ways to keep them accommodated.”