Fort Worth has been called a great many things by people passing through it. A cowtown, a boomtown, the gateway, the place where the West begins. None of those names have ever fit entirely, and none have ever quite come off either. The city has done what very few American cities of its size have managed: it has grown to nearly a million people without losing the rough seam of its origins. You can still walk from a glass tower on Throckmorton Street to a wooden hitching post on Exchange Avenue in twenty minutes. The walk is short. The distance is something else.
This publication exists because nobody else was going to do it the way we wanted it done. Fort Worth has fine daily reporters and excellent weekly journalists and writers at the national magazines who occasionally turn their attention this way. What we did not have — what we still do not have, in any concerted form — was a long-form quarterly that took the city seriously as a cultural object. Not a guide to the best brunch on Magnolia Avenue. Not a roundup of the weekend's events. Something slower. Something that would still read as a useful document fifty years from now.
"A city that does not write down its own life will find, eventually, that someone else has written it down badly."
So in the autumn of 2015 we printed our first issue and mailed it to roughly three hundred subscribers, most of them friends of the founding writers. We expected to fold within the year. We are now in our forty-fourth issue. The print edition still goes out four times a year. This website carries the same pieces and a small amount of work that does not fit between covers — longer features, photo essays, the occasional letter that does not require a postcard reply.
The four departments — The Stockyards, Music & Memory, Built to Last, West of Fort Worth — were chosen deliberately and have not changed. They are the four subjects we feel are most consistently undercovered in the way they deserve. The Stockyards is a working district, not a theme park, and the families who have made their living there for four generations are not interested in being photographed in front of a longhorn for the tourist board. The music made on West 7th Street and Magnolia Avenue and out at Billy Bob's is the only continuous American art form Fort Worth has produced, and it is treated, mostly, like a calendar listing. The buildings that fill the National Register here — the 1895 Tarrant County Courthouse, the Stockyards Historic District, the brick frontages along Camp Bowie Boulevard — are the work of stonemasons and tinsmiths and roofers and carpenters whose names appear nowhere. And the country that lies west of the city, all the way out to Palo Pinto and Stephens and Young counties, is where most of the food and most of the oil and most of the trouble in our part of Texas actually originate.
We try to write about these things the way the people who live them would recognize. That means we name the streets. It means we name the buildings and the men and women who built them. It means we do not, as a rule, romanticize. The cattle drives were not a Western movie. The 1876 boom that turned a sleepy army post into a railroad town also created Hell's Half Acre, a fourteen-block district of saloons, brothels, and gambling houses that took the city forty years to clean up, and the cleanup itself involved a great deal of quiet cruelty. The brass band on Exchange Avenue at noon is delightful. The wages of the men who muck the pens at five in the morning are not.
"Fort Worth music venues are not nostalgia. They are the rooms in which the next thing is being made, if you bother to walk inside."
Lola's Saloon, the West 7th Street institution whose closing forms the lead of this issue, was a place I went to in my twenties when I was trying to understand whether I had moved to the right city. The answer turned out to be yes, and the answer was given to me, repeatedly, by bands playing for thirty people on a Tuesday night to a room that smelled like spilled Lone Star and floor wax. There is no replacement for what Lola's was. There rarely is, when a Fort Worth music venue goes. The buildings get bought, the neon comes down, the next thing on the corner is almost always less interesting than what was there before. We are writing the obituary now because the obituary is what's owed.
What we are not is a preservation society. We are not against new buildings, new bands, new restaurants, new people moving to Fort Worth from places that are, for reasons that are easy to understand, no longer livable. The city has always been a place people come to from somewhere else. What we are is a publication that believes the past has standing — that it is, in fact, a fellow citizen, and that you do not get to vote it out of the room just because the room is being remodeled.
If you are reading us for the first time, welcome. Start anywhere. The departments are arranged in the order they suggest themselves when you walk the city: the Stockyards first, because that is where Fort Worth began; then the music, because that is what the city sounds like; then the architecture, because that is what the city looks like; and finally the country west of here, because that is what Fort Worth has, for a hundred and fifty years, been a town for.
— M.S., Fort Worth, October 2025