Fort Worth - Where the West Begins

"Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,
Out where the smile dwells a little longer,
That’s where the West begins"
Arthur Chapman

Fort Worth did indeed begin its existence as a fort in 1849. Named for General William Worth it was built to protect the early settlers from Indian attacks. Fort Worth earned its nickname "Cowtown" as a stop on the Chisholm Trail, the route that took Texas beef north. From its past of saloons and dance halls, Fort Worth has grown into a center of culture in Western Texas.

We had two days to visit Fort Worth, however the second day was much shorter since the freezing rain had come and we didn’t leave our house in Irving until the roads had begun to thaw out. On our first day we parked; right behind the Amon Carter Museum. The Amon Carter Museum opens one hour before the Kimbell Museum so we decided to make it our first stop. We spent about two hours there, and then headed down the street to the Kimbell Museum of Art.

After having lunch at the Museum we began our visit. Allow at least an hour. If there is a special exhibit, which there wasn’t when we arrived, then allow more time. We planned to visit the Cowgirl Museum that afternoon but when we were told it would cost us to park there, I balked. It was just as well because the weather was starting to turn bad and we were anxious to get back to Irving before the rush hour traffic made travel anymore hazardous than it already was. This was Friday January 12th.

Quick Tips:

On Saturday and Sunday we went to Dallas. On Monday we were ready to attempted a second foray into Fort Worth. We headed downtown to Sundance Square to visit the Sid Richardson Museum which as it turned out was closed. We then headed over to the Cowgirl Museum and I just payed the to park. The Cowgirl Museum was a real treat to visit and not at all what I thought it would be. We met a couple from Illinois who gave us tickets to the Mexican Rodeo at the Stock yard Show for 2pm on Monday afternoon. We rushed through the rest of our visit and walked over to the stockyard. It was a hefty walk in the bitter cold and with the ice, I fell once, but I refused to pay another to change our parking lot.

The Rodeo lasted a little over two hours, it is not exactly like a regular rodeo, though it does have some of the same events. We watch bronco and bull riding but there was also a lot of pagentry. We saw dispalys of great talent with a loasso and also bareback riding. There was also entertainment, a young Mexican singer walked to the center of the arena and belted out a few numbers that we didn't recognize but did appreciate.After the show we walked leisurely back to the car. We could have visited the cattle exhibits but by this time we were ready to go find somewhere to eat dinner. We stopped back in at the Cowgirl Museum looking for suggestion for a steakhouse and were told to go to Hoffbrau, which we did.

For discount coupons www.fortworth.com/coupons

You can get off of the national Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

www.fortworth.com  

Is a good general site with lots of information for visitors. It is the official site of the Forth Worth Convention and Visitor Bureau.

www.visitdallas-fortworth.com

Dallas Fort Worth Area Tourism. There are pages of coupons along with lots of useful information on this site. You can order a guide or download one whichever you prefer.

Best Way To Get Around:

Fort Worth has air service from the DFW International Airport located between Fort Worth and Dallas. Fort Worth is connected to Dallas by the Trinity Railway Express which connects DART to the T (Fort Worth Transit Authority).
TRE site www.trinityrailwayexpress.org. TRE runs Monday through Saturday with no scheduled service on Sunday. For the tourist this is a bummer.

Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer has a daily run between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Texas Eagle that runs between Chicago and San Antonio with a stop in Fort Worth. Fort Worth has bus service know as "The T". Their website www.the-t.com will help you plan your travel in Fort Worth.

Driving into Fort Worth was never a problem other than the weather. The highways can be a little tricky but we never had any serious problems. Driving into downtown was easy and though it was a holiday (Martin Luther King Day) when we went in traffic was light. There is a parking garage so parking would not be an issue. I was disappointed that the Sid Richardson Museum was closed because I was looking forward to poking around down there. The streets were icy however anywhere that the buildings shaded them from the sun and we decided to just drive out to the Museum District.

Up to this point we had not eaten at a steak restaurant and so in the Rachael Ray tradition we asked a local where we should go for steak. Hoffbrau was their suggestion. Now in all honesty, we didn’t know anything about it and if we had know it was part of a small chain we would probably have asked for another suggestion but we didn’t.

On the positive side, it was a very easy drive from the Cowgirl Museum and also located close to the highway back to Irving. As we drove up at about 4:30 we noticed that the parking lot was already full. Either they start happy hour early here or this is a good place to eat. We parked along the street to the left of the restaurant and we were joined there by many others by the time we left.

Inside the decor is rustic and looks like a local joint with wooden tables and lots of beer signs glowing on the walls. We were seated quickly and sitting with our menus in hand. It was an interesting menu with lots of favorites potato skins, chili and onions strings and some uniquely Texas things such as saw mill pickles, sweetwater shrimp (4 tender shrimp stuffed into a whole jalapeño, wrapped in bacon, and basted with Dr Pepper BBQ sauce) and what Al chose the steak soup. And very good and chunky soup it was and believe me Al is not a soup kinda guy and he really loved it, chunks of sirloin with rice and beans. We placed our orders and the board with the warm bread and butter arrived along with mine and Joe’s salad. They were basic salads but fresh and tasty.

For our main courses we all ordered beef. Joe got the Texas T-bone, Al got the serious sirloin and I ordered the Hoffbrau fillet. You get to choose one side winder with each of the steaks. Joe got the scalloped potatoes and they were not exactly what he expected, they were covered with cheese and scallions. That should be au gratin potatoes not scalloped but they tasted good anyway. I got the steak fries and Al got the onion strings and we shared them.

Was this the best fillet I have ever had? Probably not, but it was good and wrapped in bacon and cooked medium well, just the way I requested.

Al’s serious sirloin was 20oz of tender and tasty beef and he was one happy camper. Joe also was very pleased with his steak. If you don’t do beef there are things that you can choose, chicken breasts with Dr. Pepper BBQ sauce, fried pork chops, grilled salmon and shrimp and chicken fried steak make with chicken.

Service was good and the drink glasses so huge they never needed to be refilled. It was good solid food in a comfortable atmosphere, and non-smoking is well separated from smoking.

After a morning of touring the Amon Carter Museum we were ready to have lunch. Buffet is the restaurant at the Kimball Museum. They offer a light menu of soup, sandwiches, quiche and salads.

How you order is by the single item, which can be can be any of the above items, or a small plate or a large plate . The day we were there the menu consisted of two soup choices, black bean and carrot ,cabbage and rice. The quiche was sun-dried tomato and pesto, the salads with romaine with jalapeno citrus dressing; seasonal fresh fruit, pasta salad with broccoli and chicken salad. The sandwich was smoked turkey on multi-grain bread with cheddar cheese and Dijon mustard and mayo. With any of the choices a drink of coffee, tea or lemonade is included.

Joe had a bowl of the carrot cabbage and rice soup. He had a glass of lemonade. They had two dessert choices, a raspberry truffle brownie and a mandarin orange cake. He chose the brownie.

Al got the sandwich straight up and had the brownie for dessert. I chose the carrot soup, a piece of quiche and then helped myself to the fruit salad and the pasta and broccoli salad. I took the small combination plate plate which was $8.00. I had a glass of mango iced tea and I also had a roll and the mandarin orange cake.

The soup was very good but I have to admit that when I ordered it I didn’t realize that it was creamy carrot with cabbage and rice. I was expecting a creamy carrot, I though cabbage and rice was another kind of soup. . It was tasty though. The quiche was very good with an excellent dried tomato flavor. The fruit salad was fresh and the pasta salad also was good. I loved the mango iced tea. The mandarin cake with fresh whipped cream however was awful. It was so disgustingly sweet that there was no way to distinguish the flavor of the mandarin oranges. I took two bites and gave up. Not worth wasting the calories on. Frankly, I love dessert so you can imagine how bad it had to be for me not to eat it.

The sandwich was nice and fresh and Al enjoyed it but the brownie had basically the same problem as the cake. It was so overly sweet that it wasn’t enjoyable.

The set up is cafeteria style. You get your soup, sandwich and quiche from the people behind the counter and then you help yourself from the bowls of salad. You also serve yourself your drink at the drinks bar.

We did not plan our trip specifically to be in Fort Worth during the Stock Show. In fact, had I know the dates (this year the Fort Worth Stockyard Show was scheduled for January 13th - February 5th 2007) I would probably have planned our trip to miss the show. When we went to the parking lot for the Amon Carter Museum there was a guard who asked us why we were parking there. When we told him we were visiting the Amon Carter and the Kimbell Museum he said perfect and let us park. At that point I didn’t realize that people probably tried to park there for free while they went to the Stockyard.

As it turned out we thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to attend the Mexican Rodeo. We met a couple while viewing the video at the Cowgirl Museum, they asked if we were going to the Stock show. I said noooo and they asked if we would like to have 2 tickets to the Mexican Rodeo. Sure why not, what the heck is a Mexican Rodeo? We needed to walk over to the arena to find out. This was no mean task since it was freezing cold and icy outside and the entrance was at the opposite end of the venue. After picking myself up off the ground as I slipped on the ice we shivered our way to buy a ticket for Joe.

The entrance fee is $16 for the Mexican Rodeo and this would also allow us to visit any of the exhibits at the Stock Show. Luckily there were still plenty of seats available and we just took three together and hoped that no one would come and ask us to move. (They didn’t.)

Called the Best of Mexico Celebracion and presented by Charro Geraldo (Jerry) Diaz the show includes some rodeo standards such as bull and horse riding and a whole lot of other skills that the charro’s were famous for. The performance begins with the Grand Entry where the charro’s enter riding horses and we then have dancers and mariachi music and a very grand performance.

We watched exceptional artistry with a bull whip, lasso twirling, bareback riding and a young singer from Mexico who entertained us with several songs. Jerry Diaz and his wife and their young son all provide us with a high degree of entertainment, this is a very talented 4 or five year old child.

The celebration ends with another grand performance and then all the performers exit the stadium. It lasted about two hours and though not quite as exciting as a standard rodeo it was twice as colorful and mighty entertaining.

To get ready for next years stockyard show visit their website www.stockshowrodeo.

The Amon Carter Museum was the dream of Fort Worth philanthropist Amon Carter. He didn’t live to see it happen but he donated his collection of American Art to as the base for the permanent collection and made provision for a foundation to be established and managed by his daughter to allow for future acquisitions. The Museum opened in 1961 and the building was designed by Philip Johnson, and again he was in charge of the expansion design. It is a beautiful building with a very open and light feeling.

You will have no doubt that you have entered a museum in the Wild West as soon as you walk into the lobby. Works by Frederic Remington line the walls (paintings) and fill the cases (sculptures). If you aren’t familiar with Frederic Remington, you will get a very good introduction here in Fort Worth. For Al who is an aficionado of all things Western this was pretty much as good as it gets.

Remington’s works are not just flat paintings, they are moments caught in time. You can feel the movement , the pain, the strength of the animals, the soldiers, the drummers, the Mexicans, the cowboys, and Indians all come alive. Especially in his sculpture, you are drawn into the moment he has created. On the first floor you will see the works of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington. We really enjoyed "The Right of the Road", it depicts a bicycle rider and a stage coach meeting on a country road. The horses are started by the newfangled apparatus and it is very much a case of yesterday and today meeting head on. Through the works of Charles Russell the Native American is given a face, in the snow, climbing the rough mountain trail and in the battle. These to artist give us the west as they saw it, gritty, dirty, rough, and crude, but also very much alive.

On the second floor you find some of the more usual 19th century American Artists, Childe Hassam, Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, George Caitlin, and John Singer Sargent. They have a small but very lovely collection of this period. There is a more modern section which I have to admit I didn’t visit. I did find an artist I wasn’t familiar with, Martin Johnson Heade, an oil painting of two hummingbirds hovering above a while orchid. It was beautiful. There is also a small bronze of Diana which is a copy of the original that stood atop the Madison Square Garden and now in on the main staircase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Allow at least an hour, probably more, to visit this museum. They have a very nice gift shop on the lower lever rear. When we were visiting there were two exhibits of photographs, one of portraits and one of Native Americans. For information on the museum visit their website at www.cartermuseum.org.

Now I have to admit that this museum caught me totally by surprise. It was not at all what I expected. AL and I discussed it before we went here and we expected it to be about Annie Oakley with maybe Calamity Jane and Belle Starr thrown in for good measure. We were partially right, there was an exhibit about Annie Oakley but this museum is not about the bad girls of the west. It is about Cowgirls past and present and what a cowgirl is will surprise you.

Be sure to bring your discount coupon with you, it is $2 off. They first thing we did was to watch the movie ‘Spirit of the Cowgirl”. It introduces us to the women who helped found the west. We meet Clara Brown a freed slave who walked west to Colorado and started a laundry for the miners. We hear about Georgia O”Keefe and her attempts to capture the west on canvas. This is where we first get a clue that this isn’t just about the past but also about current cowgirls and we meet the women who were inducted into the cowgirl hall of fame in 2006. A very diverse group to be sure.

A very interesting fact that I took away from all this was that women in the Wyoming Territory had the vote 50 years before the rest of the country thanks to one woman, Esther Hobart Morris. One the lower level you will be greeted by a statue of Sacagawea, not exactly what you would think if when you think of a cowgirl.

We walked upstairs and headed to the Cowgirls in Movies exhibit. The is a horse's head that greeted us and we sat in saddles while we watched a movie about cowgirls called “Reel Cowgirls”. It is really amusing with the horse talking in between takes. Katherine Ross narrates part of the movie and tells a bit about her role as Etta Place in the Movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We also see Barbara Stanwyck as Annie Oakley, Joan Crawford as a strong woman, Dale Evans and Maureen O’Hara as more girly versions of the cowgirl. We also learn that sometimes the horses got higher billing than the woman. This movie is eight minutes.

We headed over to the musical section and there are four mini jukeboxes with songs in them that you can listen to, Patsy Kline, Dale Evans, and even Reba and The Dixie Chicks.

The Cowgirl in the 50's was something we could relate to and they had Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch boxes and other memorabilia in a case. If you would like to be photographed and placed on a cowgirl poster, this is the place to do it. There are some really nice costumes that belonged to Dale Evans.

There is more but go and see for yourself. It is very entertaining. Allow an hour and a half.

This is one of the most fabulous small museums I've ever visited. The Kimbell Museum was mandated by the will of Kay Kimbell. His wife Velma decided that the whole Kimbell estate should be used to make the museum a reality. The Kimbell’s collection of mostly 18th and 19th century European paintings became the core of the collection but the philosophy of the museum was that the collection should be first class and added to as time and money allowed. It has grown into an extraordinary collection covering ancient times through the twentieth century.

The building itself is quite interesting. It was designed by Louis Kahn and has a wonderful open and airy feeling and is seems as if the building and the art become one . Even the gift shop is open and airy with no walls across the front.

We began our visit here by going to the Café and having lunch. It is a wonderful space with a beautiful sculpture in the interior courtyard, food was interesting too.

The first thing that greeted us as we left the restaurant was a beautiful little Fra Angelico painting. Next to it is a new acquisition a terracotta relief of the Madonna by Donatello. I particularly enjoyed a terracotta bust of Isabella D’Este by Romano, it is exquisite. I was disappointed to find out that the Cranach was down for conservation, it wouldn’t be normal for us if at least one painting wasn’t down.

The whole feeling in this museum is light filled, the ceilings are high and the floor are wood and the dividing walls in the center are not all the way to the ceiling. This adds to the airy feeling.

Among the works for us to enjoy were Gerrit Dou’s Dentist by Candlelight which has a great treatment of the effect of light. A stark contrast to Titian’s Madonna and Child with female Saint and St John the Baptist with its vibrant and rich colors. There is a beautiful but dark Rembrandt portrait of a young Jew and an El Greco which is very typically gray.

I spent quite a bit of time enjoying Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps” and Frans Hals “The Rommel Pot Player”. The Frans Hals children are so charming with their rosy cheeks and smiling faces. I wasn’t aware that the Rommel Pot was making a disgusting noise which is why the children are laughing.

Each room was even more fantastic than the previous with de La Tour, Rubens, Poussin, Tintoretto and Watteau filling the walls. As always I was entranced by the Elisabeth Viger LeBrun self-portrait. From Spain there were works by Velazquez and Murillo. It’s not all paintings either, there are sculptures by Bernini.

It doesn’t end there, there are some magnificent Impressionist works by Monet, Sisley, and Cezanne, to just mention a few. Allow about an hour for the European collection, and if your interest includes Asian Art, there is also a very fine collection in the East Gallery.