Van Cliburn suggested it; two 48-foot angels guard it. The Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall at 525 Commerce Street opened on 1 May 1998, a 65-million-dollar, privately funded European-style opera house that instantly placed Fort Worth among America's elite performing-arts cities. Architect David M. Schwarz crowned the Founders Concert Theater with an 80-foot dome painted with sky by brothers Scott and Stuart Gentling, and sculptor Marton Varo carved the facade's two trumpet-blowing a.....

Billed as the world's largest honky-tonk, Billy Bob's Texas is a sprawling country-music dance hall and bar in the Fort Worth Stockyards, the city's historic cattle-trading district. Opened in 1981 inside a cavernous building that once housed an open-air cattle barn, it covers a vast floor dotted with bars and has become a Texan institution, drawing visitors from around the world to experience country music and culture on an enormous scale. The venue is defined by its sheer size and its many at.....

The world's largest honky tonk keeps live bulls behind the dance floor. Billy Bob's Texas at 2520 Rodeo Plaza in the Fort Worth Stockyards opened on 1 April 1981 inside a 100,000-square-foot building whose past lives read like Texas itself: a 1910 open-air cattle barn, enclosed in 1936 as a Centennial project with livestock stalls and an auction ring, an aircraft factory during World War II, then a department store so vast the stock boys wore roller skates. Founder Billy Bob Barnett's conversion.....

The world's first indoor rodeo bucked out of the chutes here, and the rodeo has never really stopped. Cowtown Coliseum at 121 East Exchange Avenue, in the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District, was built in a sprint - ground broken in 1907, the 250,000-dollar Mission Revival hall by architect Berkley Brandt finished in just 88 working days, opening officially on 11 May 1908 for the National Feeders and Breeders Show. Financed by the Stock Yards Company with the Swift and .....

Fort Worth voters approved three new taxes by seventy-percent margins to build it, a billionaire led the private donors who covered the rest, and the result is the finest rodeo arena ever constructed. Dickies Arena at 1911 Montgomery Street, beside the Will Rogers Memorial Center in the Cultural District, opened with a public ribbon-cutting on 26 October 2019 and its first event - a Twenty One Pilots concert - on 8 November. The 540-million-dollar building was a public-private partnership capped.....

Four thousand tons of Palo Pinto sandstone, laid by Depression-era relief workers dreaming of Versailles, built the rose garden that started it all. The Fort Worth Botanic Garden at 3220 Botanic Garden Boulevard, in the city's Cultural District, was established in 1934 around that 1933 Rose Garden - making it the oldest major botanic garden in Texas, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 120-acre campus grew from Rock Springs Park, land first acquired in 1912, and today ho.....

Elvis played the flying-saucer arena, Bob Hope worked the ten-day opening festivities, and the whole complex stands on the razed remains of Hell's Half Acre - Fort Worth's notorious red-light district. The Fort Worth Convention Center at 1201 Houston Street opened on 30 September 1968 as the Tarrant County Convention Center, after fourteen blocks of the old vice district were cleared from the southern end of downtown. The 18-million-dollar complex was the county's answer to Dallas's convention .....

The founder could not afford to open a club, so he rented a 600-seat downtown venue show by show until the door money added up - three decades later his room is the longest-running comedy club in Fort Worth. Hyena's Comedy Nightclub, at 425 Commerce Street in Sundance Square, has anchored downtown Fort Worth stand-up since December 1994. Randy Butler learned the trade at Laffs Comedy Caffe in Albuquerque in the 1980s, watching Jerry Seinfeld, Dana Carvey and Ellen DeGeneres sell out rooms on th.....

A 40-acre outdoor event complex on the banks of the Trinity River in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas, Panther Island Pavilion features five permanent stages, a 10,300-square-foot indoor venue called The Shack, and the only waterfront stage in the state. The downtown Fort Worth skyline serves as a dramatic backdrop for concerts, festivals, sporting events, 5K runs, and community gatherings held across three rentable zones. The North Shore Main Stage zone requires a minimum expected attendance of .....

The room doubles as a rodeo training arena three weeks a year - gala floor the rest. The Simmons Bank Pavilion at 1911 Montgomery Street is the 10,000-square-foot multi-use event space within Fort Worth's Dickies Arena complex, sitting directly below the Simmons Bank Plaza on the Will Rogers Memorial Center campus. The parent building set the standard: Dickies Arena, the 540-million-dollar, David M. Schwarz-designed 14,000-seat arena that opened in November 2019 as a public-private partnership .....