This street was supposed to be ‘Fort Worth’s Champs-Elysees.’ What happened to it?

On a cloudy mid-August morning in 2001, Fort Worth’s powerful and prominent crowded into the Texas & Pacific train terminal on West Lancaster Avenue with jubilant optimism about the future.

In a few hours time, two jackhammers would chip away a piece of the Interstate 30 overpass that had loomed over Lancaster since 1960. Imminent thunderstorms derailed a scheduled F-16 flyover commemorating the ceremonial first step in the overhead’s destruction.

“This is a relic of an age when concrete was king and people didn’t play in the equation,” a triumphant Robert Bass told the crowd, the mayor and state transportation leaders among them.

The Fort Worth billionaire was a flag-bearer in the decade-long struggle to excise I-30 from downtown. Proposals unveiled in 1979 to roughly double the width of the overpass triggered a visceral public outcry.

Expansion advocates stressed the need to accommodate swells in traffic and warned against the costs of a wholesale redesign. Critics argued the new lanes would further spoil a historic part of Fort Worth already scarred by the city’s car-centric infrastructure.

Years of lawsuits and tense debates surrounding the freeway’s future consumed the city until 1989, when the Texas Department of Transportation approved a plan to level “Lancaster Elevated” and move the highway about 1,000 feet south, just beyond the city center.

Fort Worth buzzed with excitement. The highway’s relocation heralded a “new look of Fort Worth — post-overhead-freeway, pre-boom, rail-ready, roundabout-lovin’ Fort Worth,” one Star-Telegram columnist gushed the day its demolition began.

City leaders expected (or hoped) Lancaster, unleashed from the highway’s gloom, would transform into a “grand boulevard,” akin to “Champs-Elysees in Paris or State Street in Chicago.” They envisioned tree-lined promenades humming with people and commerce and culture.

Twenty years on, much of that dream has yet to materialize. The city spent millions reconfiguring Lancaster, replacing pillars and barricades with medians and sidewalks. Developers built up a couple of midrises on vacated lots.

But pedestrians remain a rare sight; there are few storefronts to attract them. Thousands of square feet of land sits unused; the T&P Warehouse, a Fort Worth architectural gem intended to help anchor the street’s rejuvenation, is wilting .

Why has Lancaster so far struggled to live up to its ambitious expectations? Will it ever do so? When, if ever, can the wounds caused by a freeway be healed?

‘Should an atomic bomb hit Fort Worth …’

Rail, not roads, formed the strongest links between Fort Worth and the world beyond for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Texas and Pacific Railway Company finished hammering down the nascent city’s first lines of track in 1876; it opened its first depot on the southern edge of Lancaster.

The avenue became Fort Worth’s de facto gateway over the ensuing decades. Most railbound visitors took their first and last steps in Cowtown along the street.

Lancaster quickly developed a gravity of its own. Businesses catering to the rail industry and the passengers they ferried burgeoned on the properties surrounding the station. T&P completed a new terminal and warehouse in 1931; the buildings, praised as architectural marvels, became their own attractions. The U.S. Postal Service squeezed its own block-wide, eye-catching headquarters between the two structures a couple of years later.

Lancaster grew, for a time, in parallel with the ascendancy of the automobile. By the 1930s and ‘40s, the swell in vehicle use — coupled with rapid suburbanization — required swift and substantial road expansions. The “West Lancaster Avenue bottleneck,” as one 1945 Star-Telegram article described it, had garnered its own notoriety.

Soon, highways became synonymous with security and prosperity in the minds of planners and policymakers nationwide, their construction treated as an inevitability.

Local leaders and Texas transportation authorities had begun drawing up plans for an east-west freeway slicing through downtown in 1944. Early blueprints for the road, later designated Interstate 30, suggested digging the expressway’s lanes into a ditch through West Lancaster, bridging the carved up street with several short overpasses.

The proposal prompted quick and fierce pushback. Critics lambasted the plan as destructive and shortsighted, little more than “an experiment of doubtful civic value.” The road, they feared, would decimate businesses, erase taxable property, and blight one of the city’s most important corridors at the cost of tens of millions of dollars; its benefits, in turn, would be minimal.

In November 1945, three months after U.S. atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anti-highway advocates bought a full-page ad in the Star-Telegram warning that the freeway could wreak potentially nuclear devastation.

Routing the freeway around the outskirts of the city instead, they forecasted, would streamline the flow of traffic while minimizing its more damaging effects.

The Lancaster debate stalled until the early ‘50s, when TxDOT approached Fort Worth leaders with a revised proposal: an elevated expressway instead of an entrenched one. Vocal contingents of the public remained obstinately opposed, but the City Council, finding the reworked plan amenable and the timelines for construction pressing, pushed it forward.

Care and chaos

Commuters began zipping down the four-lane overpass — dubbed “Lancaster Elevated” — in March 1960. The strip shot up from the surface between Summit Avenue and Cherry Street, gliding east for about a mile before descending again and tangling with I-35.

The road’s limitations didn’t take long to reveal themselves. The bottlenecks it had been designed to alleviate soon became routine. TxDOT had begun devising an expansion of the overhead in 1977. The agency revealed initial plans to double the number of lanes and reconfigure the mixmaster two years later.

The proposal rekindled long-simmering frustrations about the freeway — and mobilized a grassroots movement to undo what many viewed as a catastrophic decision to build the overhead over Lancaster in the first place.

By 1983, debates surrounding Lancaster’s future dominated the public discourse.

Overhead opponents coalesced around “Interstate 30 Citizen Advocates for Responsible Expansion” (I-CARE for short). The group, led by Robert Bass, argued that widening the overpass would further smother economic growth in Fort Worth’s urban core already stifled by the highway. And what little could still be enjoyed of Lancaster’s architectural wonders would only be more obscured by extra lanes. Enlarging the road would only enlarge the rot.

The overhead’s defenders, rallied by Bass’ fellow tycoon and one-time Rangers owner H.E. “Eddie” Chiles, countered that simply expanding the structure was the quickest and most economical way of easing the city’s traffic pressures. Removing the overpass altogether would “cause chaos on our city streets.” And for what? The freeway, they contended, would “blend into the existing urban fabric.” Investors would pour money into the city regardless of where or how wide the freeway stretched.

The fight dragged on for years. I-CARE sued the state to stall the process. Workarounds and potential breakthroughs surfaced and died.

The city hired a conflict mediation firm to broker a compromise. In 1987, they reached one.

City leaders agreed to relocate the overhead about 550 feet south, to the southern edge of the railroad bordering Vickery Boulevard. The “Vickery Alternative” also entailed reworking post-highway Lancaster into “a boulevard with a park-like green strip down the middle.”

The plan received TxDOT’s blessing two years later, after the state’s historical commission gave the go-ahead to demolish three historic railway bridges and a storied bakery that stood in its way.

Engineers reckoned rebuilding the expanded overhead two blocks south would cost $35 million more than simply adding lanes to the existing one. Yet the prospect of rejuvenating Lancaster, free of freeway accommodations, was too enticing.

How to start a renaissance

Roger Jefferies, 62, harbors few fond memories of the Lancaster of his youth.

“This was a wasteland,” he recalled, pointing intermittently over his shoulder toward the road, visible from the window behind him. “It was pretty dead.”

The overpass still lingered over the street when Jefferies left Fort Worth after high school in the 1970s, and had long since been decimated by the time he returned close to two years ago.

He and his partner settled in the T&P Lofts, the condo complex retrofitted into the grand terminal building over the course of the early 2000s. (Jefferies lives in the attached midrise built right next door to the old station.)

Earlier plans to repurpose the building into a hotel stumbled, but city leaders still welcomed the residential revamp as a positive step toward Lancaster’s revival — and a good omen for what was to come.

Expectations for the avenue’s post-overhead existence were difficult to overstate.

A team of urban planning consultants hired by the city in 1999 to study the street’s potential deemed Lancaster to be “on the verge of an economic revival.” It had all the hallmarks of a “broad, grand avenue and monumental civic space that opens new vistas to the east and west.”

They envisioned wide, tree-lined sidewalks flanked by cafes, shops and apartments — a “vibrant mix of activity” anchored and enhanced by the street’s iconic structures.

“Over the next five to seven years, 1,500 residences should be developed, including traditional amenities,” the consultant’s report predicted (or urged). “The collection of historic buildings offers the potential for loft living, restaurants, shops, galleries, boutiques, and vibrant street life.”

The street, freeway-free, would also grow symbiotically with other parts of downtown and better connect the city center to the Near Southside. The changes would, in due time, enable Lancaster to reclaim its status as a “great gateway” for the city and become a destination of its own, one that invoked “the ambiance of Paris’ Champs-Elysees,” as one July 2001 Star-Telegram report described it.

The overpass came down that winter. More than twenty years on, much of the development expected to follow in its wake has yet to come to fruition.

“That’s what I would say is the frustrating part about living in this neighborhood,” Jefferies said. “You hear all these great ideas and great plans, and it’s just like, OK, when is it going to happen?”

The next Lancaster apartment complex to follow T&P Lofts, Pinnacle Bank Plaza, arrived in 2017 . The city’s economic development director, Robert Sturns, expected the project “to spur a lot of the activity we have been expecting in that area near the Water Gardens.” The few stores on its ground level — home to a cafe, a dental practice, and a few hair salons — remain the only stores to crop up on the section of Lancaster once shaded by the overpass.

Another rental development, Burnett Lofts, sprouted up in the 2020s a few blocks west. Still, spotting more than five people walking the street at any given time is a rarity typically reserved for convention days. Jefferies doesn’t tend to see any other pedestrians during his Sunday morning strolls to and from a coffee shop farther uptown.

Meanwhile, the T&P Warehouse, meant to be a foundation of Lancaster’s rejuvenation, is rotting away, having become the subject of a yearslong dispute between city officials and the property’s owner.

Fernando Costa, a Fort Worth planning veteran and long-time advocate for Lancaster’s redevelopment, acknowledges that progress has been slower than he and his colleagues had hoped.

“In general, I think that our local real estate market has been the principal factor influencing development in the Lancaster corridor,” he said.

High interest rates, expensive land, and the “absence of a major economic anchor” along the street have, he said, tempered developers’ appetites.

The looming, if more distant, presence of the freeway may still be casting its shadow.

“They just moved it. They didn’t remove it,” said Peter Park, a freeway planning expert and professor at the University of Colorado Denver. “One thing that happened is that the darkness of the underside of the freeway was moved 1,000 feet to the south, but it didn’t get higher connectivity and higher access.”

Relocating the overpass, he noted, certainly helped Lancaster; getting rid of them almost always does , according to his research. But I-30 still severs the street from the rest of the city and casts clouds of fumes and noise.

Costa still holds out hope.

“The new Texas A&M campus , the Convention Center expansion , and other major public investments have already begun to generate greater private interest in the south end of downtown,” he said. “Not everyone wants to live or work near a freeway or a rail line, of course, but many are more than willing to do so in exchange for the benefits of urban living.”

Andy Taft, the president of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., think it’s only a matter of time before the high aspirations of the early 2000s are realized.

“I’m impressed with how much has been done,” he said. “This is very challenging, very nuanced development, so it takes time.”

Taft pointed to the three residential developments as clear hallmarks of progress. And he framed the freeway’s continued proximity as a positive.

“The Interstate is just as much a barrier as the Trinity River is,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s a major arterial into downtown and, to a certain extent, it contains the energy of downtown and limits the geography such that we are able to build a more compact, walkable center city.”

Jefferies, though more skeptical, is optimistic too.

“I think it will happen. Things will happen,” he said, beginning to grin. “Hopefully. I’m not a young man.”