The Tower, formerly Bank One Tower, is Downtown Fort Worth’s largest residential high-rise.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Watch “Twisted Fury,” looking back at the devastating 2000 tornado that tore through Fort Worth, on demand on the WFAA+ app. Don’t have WFAA+? Here’s how to download and install it.
The Tower is Fort Worth’s fourth-tallest building, though its story stands head-and-shoulders above the rest.
Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper. Some mistakenly believed twisters could not touch down in a city’s center.
But 25 years ago, an F-3 tornado crossed the Trinity River and smashed into Downtown Cowtown. The Tower, known in 2000 as Bank One Tower, took a direct hit.
“Everyone who lived in Fort Worth prior to 2010 knows about it,” filmmaker Rob Smat said. “But Fort Worth is a growing city. There’s a lot of new people here, so you have this entire generation that doesn’t know Fort Worth was hit by a tornado.”
Smat, a Fort Worth native, has spent years interviewing tornado survivors and combing through newspaper archives and television newscasts. Initially, he thought he’d write an anthology on the disaster.
His plans changed when he met his manuscript’s main character, Jim Eagle, a business executive who was dining at Reata inside Bank One Tower during the storm.
Eagle would eventually help rebuild the tower, while also rebuilding his own home.
“Everywhere this tornado touched down, then the aftermath of that – Jim is intricately involved in the whole thing,” Smat said.
Smat is nearly finished with the manuscript, titled “The Birdhouse.” Eventually, he says he’d like to adapt the story for TV.
He envisions a series like Apple TV’s “Five Days at Memorial,” a gut-wrenching drama about Hurricane Katrina. There’s enough material to make a compelling, mostly-true story about The Tower, Smat says.
“The Tower was stuck in limbo, and the windows weren’t even the half of it,” he said.
About 90% of Bank One Tower’s 3,540 windows were shattered. Dangling glass rained onto Downtown’s streets for days.
Residents could not access the area without a city-issued permit. While the area was closed to the public, cleanup crews poked the remaining glass shards from the window frames and onto the ground stories below.
Eventually, plywood boards plugged the gaping holes in Bank One Tower. Fort Worth residents nicknamed the decaying building “Plank One.”
“It turned into what some would call a ‘cluster’ pretty quickly,” Smat said.
Talk of demolition began almost immediately, but a nearby church and some businesses feared their buildings would be damaged by falling debris during the implosion. It would have been the tallest building ever destroyed in such a manner.
When cleanup crews discovered asbestos in the building’s guts, Bank One Tower’s embattled owner cut bait and sold the facility. The new owners, Fort Worth’s billionaire Bass family, planned to implode the skyscraper and use the property for parking.
Workers began deconstructing the high-rise by hand, carefully removing the carcinogen. The Bass family, who developed Fort Worth’s 35-block Sundance Square, feared the dangerous material would rain down on the city’s center.
Crews drilled holes in the moldy plywood planks, which allowed birds to nest in the decaying tower. The avian tenants’ chirping drowned out the traffic below, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“That was Fort Worth’s birdhouse for five years,” Smat said.
Talk of implosion ended after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Insurance companies were hesitant to cover a project involving a high-rise’s destruction.
Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
Finally, in 2003, developers announced plans to convert Bank One Tower into housing. The skyscraper proved too sturdy for a tornado and too stubborn for demolition.
But the plan was risky. The high-rise required complete reconfiguration and investors weren’t certain people would flock to the area.
“Downtown was a place where a lot of people went to work, but it rolled up at 5:30 p.m.,” said Graham Stiles, the realtor who handles condo sales at The Tower. “It’s completely changed in the last 25 years. You’ve got vibrant nightlife and activities down here every night. You’ve got grocery options and local restaurants. So much of that you did not see 25 to 30 years ago.”
Still, The Tower opened in 2005 with 36 floors and 276 units. It is Fort Worth’s largest residential high-rise.
Developers initially planned to list the units above floor 20 for sale and the units below floor 20 for rent, Stiles said. Demand was so high, the building managers sold every space as a condo.
“The day that sales opened for this building, there was a line,” Stiles said. “It was pretty wild.”
That success changed the neighborhood, proving people were willing to live in the area. Other developers followed suit, and downtown became a place to live, work, and enjoy.
“It really was the catalyst for so many other things we saw down here – and not just residential,” Stiles said.
It’s easy to trace the tornado’s path from condo windows on the building’s western side. Relatively new developments line a narrow stretch of land from the West 7th entertainment district to The Tower.
“The tornado was a source of immense damage,” Smat said. “But it also fostered a lot of the resurgence and growth of Fort Worth you see now.”
Smat said there aren’t really villains in The Tower’s story, just an unfortunate few tasked with work no one had attempted. Sometimes, they made mistakes.
Still, that group became downtown Cowtown’s unwitting trailblazers.
