For those of you who don’t read both West & Clear and my other little baby, Fort Worthology, here’s a summary of what you missed whilst cruelly stomping on my heart with your steel-toed Ignore Boots. C’mon, baby - Fort Worthology loves you like a kitten, too.

• A link to an old ’70s plan to extend the Leonard’s/Tandy Center subway
• A note that the Museum Place development marches onwards with the closing and imminent demolition of J & J’s Hideaway
• A post about Agricultural Urbanism - techniques for integrating food-growing into a dense, walkable environment
• A video from the CNU showing how walkable neighborhoods help reduce energy use and pollution
• Another one of my laments (collect the whole set) about the closed and decaying Heritage Park downtown
• Some updated site plans for the West 7th development
• A note about the Downtown Design Review Board’s half-approval of new lighting for the Texas & Pacific train station/lofts
• A request for information on vacant lots for sale in Fairmount

It’s been a while since the last time I did one of these big development roundups, so let’s do another one, covering the current hotbed of activity - the 7th Street corridor between downtown and the museums. A lot has changed since the last time I wrote about these developments, so let’s dive right in.

Museum Place is really making significant strides in construction these days. The area around the development is a world of torn-up pavement, orange cones, fences, and cranes as work steadily moves from the big 7th/University/Camp Bowie/Bailey intersection back into the neighborhood.

Above, the big building of the development, One Museum Place, is getting more glass installed as its facade installation continues. This building will be home to ground-level retail, office space, and condos on the upper two floors.

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HDR - High Dynamic Range - Photography involves a bit more work than just aiming and pressing the shutter button. For the uninitiated, HDR photography is the technique of taking multiple photos of a subject with different exposures (allowing different amounts of light onto the camera’s sensor), then blending those separate exposures with a computer to get one photo with a much higher range of definition in light and shadow than is possible with a single photo. A camera can’t see as wide a range of light at once as the human eye - so, if done realistically, these blended exposures can get photography closer to what the eye sees. In effect, you’re making areas of the photo that would otherwise be under or over exposed look correct. You can also go really nuts and make very unreal looking images, but I’ve gone for realism.

It can be a little tricky - significant moving objects tend to fluster the HDR blending software, and a tripod is pretty much essential, since each exposure must be from an identical angle and position for the technique to work.

Here are seven HDR photos I’ve taken in downtown Fort Worth. All were taken with my Canon PowerShot G9, and all are the result of three exposures blended in a piece of software called Photomatix Pro. Click on each for a bigger view.

It’s official - Susan Alanis is your new planning director. From the city’s web site:

City Manager Dale Fisseler has appointed Susan Alanis as director of Fort Worth’s Planning and Development Department, replacing Fernando Costa who recently was tapped as one of the city’s five assistant city managers.

A number of things strike me as curious about this decision; for example, Alanis’ lack of actual urban planning experience:

Most recently serving as acting director of the Planning and Development Department, Alanis joined the city in 1996 as a budget analyst, moving to the Police Department in 1999 to manage administrative services and to become the department’s first civilian assistant director. She was named deputy director of the Development Department in 2006 and was instrumental in merging the Planning and Development departments in 2007.

This concerns me, because under previous Planning & Development Director (and new Assistant City Manager) Fernando Costa, Fort Worth made remarkable strides towards rebuilding its central city and promoting smart urban development. Costa was instrumental in sparking the revitalization of areas like the Near Southside and Six Points, and his work started the city on a path away from continued emphasis on suburban sprawl towards walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods in the central city.

Costa has the background to back up his rep: he worked in city planning in Georgia for 22 years before coming to Fort Worth in 1998. Eleven of those years were spent as planning director of the city of Atlanta, a role which saw him promote and enable the New Urbanism in that city as well.

Alanis, on the other hand, joined the city as a budget analyst. Her major accomplishments in the Planning & Development Department seem to be things like new field computers for inspectors, and an online permitting system. Nothing wrong with that, but still a far cry from Costa’s track record of smart urban development experience. With the city now on the path towards real urban revitalization all around the core and working to counteract the negatives of sprawl, is it wise to appoint a planning director with no apparent planning experience?

There’s more to this tale, though, than just questions of qualification. [Read more]

Another week of posts at West & Clear’s sister site Fort Worthology, and it’s been a busy week in Fort Worth urban development. Here’s some of what’s been going on since last Thursday:

• Another building falls to the Museum Place development - now they’re making way for the Aloft Hotel on Arch Adams between 7th & Camp Bowie.
• So7’s Shops & Lofts are moving ahead at a good clip.
• I took a look at the loft apartments in the Kress Building downtown.
• Finally, I wrote a big roundup on the status of various bits of the Trinity River Vision.

I snapped these photos from my loft last night as the big thunderstorm rolled into downtown and sent Main Street Arts Festival patrons scurrying for the nearest retail space. Even managed to get the last gasp of a lightning bolt in that last photo. Also got a couple of photos showing off the hail that fell during the middle of it all.

Thought the world might like to see them. Click each one for a bigger view.

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