Winds Damage Historic Stagecoach Hotel
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FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Piles of crumbled bricks now lie scattered and the roof and wall of the old Stagecoach Hotel are gone.
"I was about two walls away from it. I could feel the ground move," said Mark Dixon. He was on business next door at the Lonesome Dove Restaurant, when the vacant building collapsed in the midst of high winds. "Heard a lot of rumbling from the storm and then a big crash. Walked outside and concrete blocks were all over the top of my truck, smashed the whole cab," he said.
Virgie Manning arrived minutes later. "I was standing in front of the building and the fire truck was out there. I thought maybe there was a fire over here," said Manning. She found her car, unharmed, but trapped beneath a now potentially unstable building. "All this stuff was on the floor. It was sad," she said.
Police and firefighters evacuated neighboring businesses and closed off part of Main Street. "We just don't want to take the chance of anything falling sideways or the front taken out," said Fort Worth Fire Lieutenant David Childs.
Built in 1930, the old hotel sits in a trust, owned by the family of Stockyards staple, Steve Murrin. "Anytime you see any of the walls come down in the Stockyards, with me, it's a sad time. We're trying to preserve all that we can," he said. Friday, he'll be back, with a structural engineer, to see just how much of this piece of history he can salvage.
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