"Fort Worth: A City in 3 Parts " a Fort Worth Travel Page by pedersdottir

We came to visit colleges. Thanks to information gleaned on the VT Travel Guides to Dallas-Fort Worth we recently spent a wonderful 4-day weekend here with Fort Worth as our Home Base.

And what an interesting town it is! Unique in its three-part layout. The new glass and steel downtown acts as a foil to the historic red granite Tarrant County Courthouse, perched high above the banks of the Trinity River. Some 2 miles downhill the Fort Worth Stockyards evoke every old dusty cowboy movie ever made, with its twice-a-day cattledrive along Exchange Street, Alamo-architecture and collection of western wagons. A mile or so due west of downtown lies the Cultural District, a modern island of outstanding museums and lawn sculpture side-by-side with exhibition grounds for livestock. We expected to see more western adobe in these parts, and were suprised to see so much pale blond brick! Art Deco style. Just south of this point Trinity Park undulates along the Botanic Gardens, over the river again and through Forest Park, like a green ribbon leading to the campus of Texas Christian University.

While in the area we took a rainy afternoon drive over to Dallas, and admired the New England Georgian style of SMU. Big city. Lots of stunning new downtown office buildings and probably the world's largest indoor stadium. But tangled big-city traffic snarl, too. We were glad to return to cozy Fort Worth at day's end.

Urbane architecture awaits you on arrival at sprawling DFW. The spacious terminals could host a cattle drive - and they do! Life-size sculptures decorate the mezzanine area with scenes straight out of the Old West.

Convenient shuttles continuously run the 6 mile length of the airport grounds. Welcome to Texas - where everything is
supersized. And where else in the world could you hope to see a white superstretch limo Pick Up Truck?

If this place is a tourist trap they can lock me inside! Window shop for Western gear to your heart's content. Order a handmade pair of technicolor lizard and ostrich cowboy boots from $1200 +. The Stockyards are a stretch of living history with a Chicago connection: this is where the packing houses of Swift and Armour had outposts. The 'hog butcher to the world' bought its livestock here, then loaded it from the holding pens into the railcars at Stockyard Station. Today cattle auctions are held bimonthly in the Live Stock Exchange. The Superior Livestock Auction company operates a groundfloor studio with live auctioneer, video equipment and realtime TV, which permits cattlemen around the country to trade their herds without having to leave the ranch.