Whiskey, Texas: a different side of Ft Worth

Uniquely Fort Worth

Not many things outside of a good train chase or a bike ride can even motivate me to leave the house, much less travel outside of my neighborhood "comfort zone". But I do like to travel and see different things, and after three and a half years of seeing the same stuff every day, sometimes it's good to just get out and experience a change of scenery. In our neighborhood -- one of those "master planned communities" -- the landscaping and buildings and homes all look clean and sterile and borderline artificial. It's not an unpleasant setting in which to live; it just feels a little too "generic". The strip shopping centers with their Subways and 7-Elevens and donut shops and nail salons could be ANYWHERE in suburban America. To look at them as I drive down the street numerous times each day, I see nothing that helps give the area an identity that sets it apart from, say... suburban Phoenix or suburban St Louis or suburban Atlanta or suburban Cleveland -- nothing that tells people, "this is Texas."

So it was the promise of finding some things uniquely "Fort Worth" -- red brick buildings displaying fading names of long-closed hotels; storefront signs shaped like boots and horses and stetson hats; brick streets; cattle barns; abandoned slaughterhouses; tacky gift shops; mysterious side-street saloons -- that lured me down to the Stockyards last Monday morning.

As you might have concluded from all the photos, I didn't come home disappointed.