When Billy Bob’s Texas co-owner Pam Minick stood before the Fort Worth City Council on June 25 to support a new investment in the Stockyards, she recalled the skeptics of a decade ago, when the first project was being considered.
“Some of the business owners were afraid that their business would be affected, and I can say they were right,” she said. “Business has never been better, not only in the Stockyards but throughout our city.”
If there were any skeptics in the room this month when the council passed incentives for the project with $630 million in development costs, they remained silent.
The economic development agreement supported the development of 300,000 square feet of commercial space, 500 rooms at one or more hotels, a 295-unit multifamily property, 1,300 below-grade parking spaces across parking garages to support Cowtown Coliseum, as well as additional support for the Fort Worth Herd. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2032.
Stockyards Heritage Development, the joint venture between Majestic Realty Co. and Hickman Companies, along with development partner M2G Ventures are the businesses developing the expansion.
The council unanimously voted to authorize the purchase of the newly constructed parking garages for about $126 million, reimbursem*nt of up to $15 million for improvements to Cowtown Coliseum and up to $75 million in economic development grants.
While the skeptics have been quieted, Craig Cavileer, managing partner of Stockyards Heritage, feels the weight of responsibility to continue the success.
Cavileer quoted Darrell Royal, the former University of Texas head football coach, who when asked what his game plan was for the National Championship game, said they would “dance with who brung us.” That applies here as well.
“Our challenge is to maintain the integrity, authenticity and preservation of the area and tell the story, better than we do today, of the history of the Stockyards,” he said.
In the expansion, Cavileer said, the developers want to better highlight the animals, the longhorns and the cattle pens that are still standing.
“We’re going to give the Fort Worth Herd a $15 million home that we and they can be proud of and showcase not just the drovers and the herd, but find other ways to activate them and bring stories to life for the equine and other Western lifestyle industry,” he said. “Our biggest challenge is keeping that alive and getting better at it.”
Integrating all these new components into the Stockyards is also a challenge, Cavileer said. Part of the reason the Hotel Drover worked so well was that it had the Spanish architecture but also a Texas ranch look and feel to it, he said.
“The landscaping also made it look like it had been there forever,” he said.
Now, the partners have to construct more new buildings that will have to also integrate with the Stockyards.
“Like the Drover, we’ve got to do a lot of great brick work, good architecture and what we call placemaking,” he said. “That is, I think, our greatest challenge, but also where the opportunity is.”
The partners will spend the rest of this year putting the overall master plan together, complying with the city’s form-based codes for the buildings that are meant to preserve historical elements of the Stockyards.
“We hope to break ground at the end of next year and then it’s about a three-year building process,” he said.
It will take about a year to get the garage going underground and then another 18 to 24 months to complete that, he said.
“It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, but this foundational commitment that we got from the city, and the county, is instrumental in making all of that happen,” Cavileer said. “Without that, we’d be on a completely different path, and probably one that would not be as successful.”
The success has surpassed even their most optimistic expectations, Cavileer said.
“We inherited a well-traveled historic district here with 3 million visitors a year,” he said. “We invested over $200 million into this space, but we didn’t predict having 9 million visitors almost three years in a row.”
Sometimes a new development will see a one- or two-year increase, but the Stockyards visitation rate continues well past the pent-up demand following the pandemic, he said.
“We just continue to have this cycling through of people visiting. We’re still getting a very high visitation rate that began when the Hotel Drover opened,” he said.
About 40% of those visitors are from North Texas, with another 10% or so from the rest of the state. The other 40% are from other states and the remainder are international.
That traffic from North Texas is not all about the Stockyards, Cavileer said.
“I feel like we helped break down the wall between Dallas and Fort Worth with respect to entertainment, but it wasn’t just us. Dickies Arena played a big role in that as well,” he said. “I think we’ve demonstrated that the entertainment business is regional.”
The success of the district has allowed the partners to think a little bit outside of the box when it comes to the expansion. One of the more unusual ideas came from a day Cavileer was standing on a street corner in the middle of Paris.
“I was waiting on an Uber, on a 2,000-year-old street with buildings everywhere, and I saw cars dipping underground,” he said. “I was kind of curious.”
He found that the developers had taken out a pocket park, put a parking garage underneath, then put the park back on top.
When Cavileer returned, he and Kayla Wilkie, director of design and development for lifestyle and hospitality at Majestic, began to ponder using the idea in the Stockyards.
“There’s a certain grittiness to parking out there on our dirt parking lots, which are sort of like going to the county fair or something, and there’s some romance to that, but not when it’s hot and dusty and the wind is blowing,” he said.
The three- or four-level underground garages will provide parking for about 1,300 vehicles. The city will eventually own the garages.
The expansion also calls for a place to better house the Fort Worth Herd, the twice-daily cattle drive that has become iconic for the area.
“This is part of the heritage here, and we want to give it the best platform to demonstrate that,” he said.
Improvements are also planned for the Cowtown Coliseum, which currently has about 250 events a year. Stockyards Heritage Development, the Professional Bull Riders association and ASM Global acquired the coliseum in 2021. They plan to add some more events, including a few musical acts.
“I don’t know if they’ve had music there since Elvis played there in the ’50s, but we think a few signature events would be great for the area,” Cavileer said.
Cavileer said the success of the Stockyards has brought attention from around the world and that will allow the developers to be selective about who they partner with for the expansion.
“We get inquiries from organizations that we would never have considered before,” he said. “Some come in, we just can’t even believe that we have the opportunity to have a dialogue with someone that may not have even been to Fort Worth or thought about it four years ago.
“When you’re a merchant or brand leader, whether you’re Western lifestyle or not, and you see the demographics and the volume of sales, it is definitely on a list of anyone that is progressively expanding their business or their brand.”
There is still work to be done, Cavileer said. His group and the city want to work on making access to the area better, particularly from Interstate 35.
“Hopefully next year we’ll bring some things to bear that will actually be a plan toward implementing real improvements over the next one or two years, not five or 10 years out, for access from I-35,” he said.
Meanwhile, the businesses in the area are seeing the benefits of the influx of visitors from Texas and around the world.
Marisa Wayne, one of the owners of the John Wayne: An American Experience museum in the Stockyards and daughter of the iconic actor from Hollywood’s golden age, said every time she is at the museum, it seems more crowded. The museum recently expanded and will unveil new additions later this month.
“The last time I was there I met a man from Argentina. He came in because he wanted to see the Stockyards,” she said. “The word is getting out around the world that it’s just a fantastic destination.”
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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