Shoppers once streamed through the F.W. Woolworth Building entrance you face, here in the Sundance Square section of downtown Fort Worth, Texas. This is a historic department store building that served as a retail location for the F. W. Woolworth Company from 1926 to 1990. Designed by Wiley G. Clarkson and James T. Taylor to be ten stories tall, the limestone and concrete structure was only built as a three-story building.
Its Classical Revival style is expressed in the building’s proportions and an elaborate frieze that wraps the façade. After its long life as a Woolworth store the building found new uses and now houses other tenants, including a JoS. A. Bank Clothiers store.
The community recognized the building’s architectural and historic significance when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Stand here and imagine the steady stream of shoppers that passed this entrance across much of the twentieth century, and the careful restraint of its stone and concrete shell that hints at an ambitious ten-story plan never realized. Across the street, the limestone façade and the elaborate frieze rise above you.