The research/technology and commerce connections envisioned by the growing Texas A&M presence in downtown Fort Worth now has a name: the Switchyard Innovation District.
During the Downtown Fort Worth Inc. annual meeting on April 9, keynote speaker Bobby Ahdieh, chief operating officer for Texas A&M-Fort Worth, unveiled the name as he spoke to the crowd about what the future might hold for the city in the next five to 10 years.
The name, he said, harkens back to Fort Worth history. The city has its roots as a rail center for cattle and grain in the latter half of the 19th century.
Tower 55, the area just east of the campus, was one of the nation’s busiest and most congested rail intersections.
“A switchyard is also a meeting place, so it was that kind of dynamic we wanted to capture, but also the energy and movement associated with that,” he said after the meeting. “We wanted to capture something that gave the spirit of that movement and energy and intersection of what was going to happen there.”
Andy Taft, president of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., the nonprofit advocacy group for the central business district, said the name was appropriate for the energy he sees emerging in the southeast corner of downtown.
“The idea of switching and being maneuverable and making things come together to make something new, that’s what you’re beginning to see there,” he said.
These plans are taking shape as Texas A&M’s initial $185 million, eight-story Law and Education Building nears completion, with a scheduled opening in the summer. The second of five currently planned A&M buildings is expected to break ground in the summer of 2026.
T0 read the text of Bobby Ahdieh’s Universities & Cities: Engines of Economic Growth speech, go here.
In his speech, Ahdieh, who came to Fort Worth to lead the Texas A&M University School of Law in July 2018, showed an email he had sent to downtown businessman Edward Bass discussing his plans in April 2019.
“I told him, in that letter, my aspirational goal is to build a higher education center that can help to make Fort Worth a gathering point for multidisciplinary, public, private and academic policy conversations around the most crucial questions of local, regional, state and national policy today,” he said.
The goal was to use Fort Worth as a platform for engagement, not just with students, but with the entire business and policy community, he said.
The idea of an innovation campus downtown came at an opportune time for the city. In 2017, Fort Worth received a report critical of its economic development efforts.
The report included one thought that particularly stung: If Fort Worth did not find its footing in economic development, it risked basically becoming a suburb of Dallas.
Ahdieh heard those fears. In February 2020, he went to businessman John Goff, then co-leader of economic development organization Fort Worth Now, to discuss the project. Goff supported it and the end result was the Texas A&M downtown campus, announced in November 2021.
“How, then, does all of this end?” Ahdieh asked the crowd at the Omni Fort Worth Hotel.
Fort Worth will become a big city, Ahdieh said, but that is not enough.
“That, I believe, should not be enough to satisfy any of us,” he added.
Ahdieh believes Fort Worth should become a city that shapes attitudes and shapes vision and defines the direction for the entire country.
“Not simply one of 11 or even 10 of the biggest cities in America, but one of just a handful that are looked to from every corner of the country for direction and even inspiration,” he said.
Bob Francis is business editor at the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.
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