Fort Worth’s timeworn T&P Warehouse stands as symbol of frustration

Railroad legend John Lancaster stood in front of business tycoons at the Fort Worth Club, sharing his vision for the city and T&P’s part in it. He touted his recently opened eight-story warehouse.

That was November 1931. Today, the long-abandoned Texas & Pacific Warehouse’s future is uncertain, but when it opened, Lancaster saw it as a symbol of Fort Worth’s promising and expected growth. 

As president of T&P Railway, Lancaster oversaw his company’s investment of $13 million — about $276 million today — into the city of about 163,000 residents, according to Fort Worth Star-Telegram archives.

Spanning the length of three football fields, the warehouse stood as the most prominent piece of his investment. Almost a century later, the T&P Warehouse remains an iconic landmark on the southern edge of downtown. 

The 580,000-square-foot pale brick Zigzag Moderne building, soot-stained and studded with boarded windows, casts its shadow over the street bearing Lancaster’s name. Sunlight dances from dusty orange and blue Art Deco embellishments, reflecting off the highway traffic.

“It is hard to watch something like the T&P Warehouse never have fruition on any proposal that comes,” said Jerre Tracy, executive director at Historic Fort Worth Inc. “It’s very hard to watch that, and I’ve been watching it for a long time.”

Today, after almost 50 years of near-total vacancy, the building is a symbol of Fort Worth’s growing pains, its vacancy a reflection of a standoff between the city and private owners, according to developers and former city officials interviewed by the Report.

The once-innovative architecture looks more and more out of place as modern skyscrapers span the city’s skyline and Fort Worth’s southside develops, said Jungus Jordan, who sat on City Council 2005 to 2021.

Jordan and downtown stakeholders trace the warehouse’s stagnation to its owner, who they describe as so personally connected to the property that she’s unwilling to relinquish the control necessary for large-scale redevelopment.

The property’s owner, Ola Assem, head of Dallas-based Cleopatra Investments, argues that redevelopment efforts have been continuously delayed due to construction projects around the building. She said she has put too much work into achieving her vision for the warehouse to hand it off fully to a developer.

“My hopes for the building are, with the city and community support, to take the development to the finish line, as I always intended to,” Assem said in an email to the Report. 

The owner

Assem’s $6.4 million purchase of the building in 1998 generated little media attention at the time. Over the previous two decades, the warehouse had traded hands between investors and visionaries, none of whom saw their promise to renovate the building come to fruition.

Fort Worth residents at the time knew the warehouse as the ever-aging rental home of Cutting Edge Haunted House and paintball.

Assem, whose company owns multiple, smaller properties across the metroplex, envisioned renovating the T&P Warehouse into apartments and retail shops, offering modern amenities with a historic charm, she said.

“I loved the building from the moment I saw it,” she said. “I appreciated its history. I envisioned its potential and decided to acquire it to redevelop it into a unique urban mixed-use project while preserving its historic aspects.”

Her dream started taking shape in the 2000s, as city officials made strides to redevelop the Lancaster corridor. Until 2001, Interstate 30 was elevated over Lancaster Avenue, stifling its development. Rerouting the interstate around the T&P Warehouse followed decades of city stakeholders lamenting the highway’s dominance over the south end of downtown.

In 2003, Fort Worth council members created the Lancaster Tax Investment Finance District, or TIF, which would stream a special tax fund into revitalization projects around the corridor.

The TIF board promised Assem $7.2 million in 2007, a figure that would later grow to $11.6 million with interest, according to city documents. The developer’s agreement dollars were to go directly to the T&P Warehouse’s remodel, which in the early 2000s was estimated to cost around $40 million.

Assem agreed to meet several project deadlines to earn the funds, including outlining plans for the warehouse and securing a large portion of the project’s funding.

Meeting a deadline in 2009, Assem presented blueprints for the renovation that received approval from the city as well as the U.S. National Park Service, which was necessary to preserve the warehouse’s historic designation. The plans detailed penthouses, 343 apartments, first-floor shops and restaurants and a rooftop pool. 

The blueprints also addressed some of the practical challenges in redeveloping the warehouse, including how to renovate the windowless half, which was built with low ceilings to accommodate refrigerated storage.

However, Assem didn’t produce documents showing she had funding. After five extensions to her deadline, the TIF board terminated its agreement and withdrew the promised funding in 2016. 

“We had a lot of promises that there was going to be starts to redevelop, which never materialized, and there were four or five false starts before we withdrew the money,” said Jordan, who was chair of the TIF for nearly his entire 16-year tenure on council. 

Watching from the outside, Historic Fort Worth’s Tracy felt the city’s withdrawal of Assem’s TIF money was appropriate, as Assem didn’t “play by the rules” of the TIF, she said. Tracy added that she’s met Assem and feels she’s a “wonderful human being.”

Losing the TIF money took steam out of Assem’s plans, but she has stayed in communication with city officials and council members, email records obtained by the Report show.

Assem said her current plans and concept for the building remain substantially the same, subject to some possible modifications to accommodate market fluctuations and elevated costs and interest rates.

“The concept aims to create a vibrant, walkable community that reduces the need for long commutes, especially being adjacent to a commuter train station,” Assem said, adding the project aims to “create a vibrant, walkable community that reduces the need for long commutes, especially being adjacent to a commuter train station.”

In 2017, the city nearly condemned the T&P Warehouse for fear of its structural integrity, forcing Assem to stabilize the building, board up windows and address basement flooding and a crumbling roof.

In 2023, the city hired an engineering group to study the warehouse’s structural integrity. In an 80-page report, they deemed the building needed $2 million in repairs but could be saved.

However, given a few more years of neglect, the report noted, that might change.

Assem said “experts in historic properties” have surveyed the building and said its condition is “very good and solid.” The property has an appraised value of $2.8 million, according to 2025 Tarrant Appraisal District values. Its owner paid nearly $60,000 in property taxes in 2024.

Assem continued introducing herself to new council members, laying out reasons why renovations were continuously delayed, and proposing new ideas for the warehouse. Council member Elizabeth Beck, whose district covers the T&P Warehouse, declined requests for comment.

In August 2023, Assem proposed via email to city staff and council that the warehouse be renovated to house the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, which was on the path to closing. Her proposal did not move forward.

City officials in the economic development department declined to comment.

Jordan said Assem is persistent in maintaining ownership and turning down offers from developers wanting to buy the building.

“I know that there were a lot of suitors approaching the current owner, making offers, and the current owner just wanted to keep it,” he said. “It appears to be either a passion or a strong emotion to keep it.”

Assem told the Report that Cleopatra completed nearly all preconstruction work — including hiring consultants, drawing plans, obtaining local and federal incentives and conducting market studies — before looking to hire a developer.

Cleopatra then sought a “fee co-developer” to manage the planned development, but not invest in the project or become an equity partner. 

In 2015, Cleopatra had an agreement to carry out its plans with Wisconsin-based developer Alexander Company. For nearly a year, Dave Vos, the development project manager, was in close talks with Assem and the city.

The project was ready to start phase one, which had a budget of $115 million and would create parking and apartments on the upper floors, but Alexander Co. withdrew from the agreement after the city took away the TIF funding, Vos said.

The TIF board “wanted to see the developer have control over the building and its redevelopment,” Vos said. “That’s really where it came down to.”

He said the TIF board wanted Assem to allow the developer to take control over the redevelopment — a hurdle they could not get past.

Project developers, in this case Alexander Co., typically assume control of the property and call the day-to-day construction shots, Vos said. This allows them to guarantee the project will finish. He said 16 years after completing the project, Cleopatra would have reassumed full control.

Vos said Alexander Co. exited the project because they knew the city wouldn’t reinstate the TIF if the developer didn’t have control.

Assem told the Report she wanted major decisions on the project to be “collaborative,” as she bears the project’s liability and risk.

“Giving complete control would be like giving a stranger a power-of-attorney to manage your assets as he sees fit, in his sole discretion, with no recourse, and being paid fees while the owner pays the price,” Assem wrote in an email.

The visions

Since the T&P Warehouse fell out of industrial use in the 1970s, developers and investors have floated many potential uses: a jail, retirement home, transit center, tunnel and parking garage, according to newspaper records reviewed by the Report. 

But from the beginning, the most promising vision has been renovating it into a multiuse apartment and hotel building with ground-floor retail, Jordan said. 

That was the dream of John O’Hara, a prominent land investor who bought the warehouse in 1978 from the railroad, said Revis Plemmons, an artist who was commissioned to work on advertising graphics for O’Hara’s vision.

Jordan said the T&P Warehouse’s redevelopment was expected to be a catalyst for Lancaster Avenue’s transformation into a tree-lined, walkable downtown attraction. 

“Can you imagine?” Jordan, 76, said. “The vision was always that it would have sidewalk cafes and shops, that you could walk up and down Lancaster and the people that lived in the multifamily complexes would have grocery shopping and restaurants.”

Some of that vision for Lancaster came to fruition for the warehouse’s neighbors. The nearby T&P Lofts, formerly a T&P terminal, is now a condominium complex with a gym, offices and access to the Trinity Railway Express commuter train. The adjacent historic post office is still in use.

Stakeholders like Tracy and Downtown Fort Worth Inc. hope to see a similar revamping of the T&P Warehouse.

“The number of occupants the building can accommodate, their buying power and presence is important to the success of the street and the south end of downtown,” said Andy Taft, CEO of Downtown Fort Worth Inc. in an email.

The challenges, delays

As often as owners have proposed renovations, they’ve met challenges and reasons to delay.

In the ’70s and ’80s, O’Hara faced pushback from the Bass family, who didn’t want another downtown cultural hub competing with their newly opened Sundance Square, the graphic artist Plemmons recalled. 

The T&P Warehouse’s location also made remodeling difficult.

I-30 hovered over Lancaster directly outside its front door. All the while, city officials discussed a new road connecting downtown with Near Southside, even considering building a tunnel through the warehouse.

“What do I do in terms of developing that property, not knowing whether they are or are not going to run a street through the building?” Star-Telegram archives quote O’Hara asking.

Thirty years later, similar barriers to remodeling were quoted by Assem. 

Like O’Hara, Assem has blamed her remodeling woes on I-30, which was deconstructed and rerouted in 2001, and the city’s nearly 20-year-long Lamar-Hemphill connector project, which connected downtown to the Near Southside in 2020.

The Lamar-Hemphill connector project encroached on the warehouse’s backyard, with the city eventually needing to pay Assem for the ability to use a portion of it. According to emails sent to city officials by Assem, this is the primary reason redevelopment into a multiuse residential and retail space was continuously stalled. She also noted in the messages that the Lancaster TIF’s establishment and street improvements postponed projects early on.

“Each delay caused by the public projects and other interferences resulted in financial burdens to the T&P,” she said in a 2023 email to city officials. In several emails, she lamented the rising cost of renovating the aging building as economic conditions worsen.

In her emails, Assem said her company’s “non-stop, relentless effort to redevelop the property, while facing the obvious challenges of the size, condition and age, were compounded by the above-listed challenges.”

Vos, the Alexander Co. developer, said the warehouse renovations were to be conducted alongside the Lamar-Hemphill connector project, which he didn’t see as a major hurdle.

“The T&P Warehouse is not a small site,” he said.

Taft, of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., shrugged off the idea that external factors have kept the building from being renovated. In an email, he described Assem as “well-meaning and passionate.”

When asked how she has impacted the T&P Warehouse’s current, stagnant situation, he responded: “singularly responsible.”

In 2023, the downtown nonprofit issued a letter to the city, urging officials to “use ‘every’ power to revitalize the T&P Warehouse.”

The possibilities 

The building’s historic designation makes 45% of the renovation cost eligible for tax credits, which would cover about a third of the remodel’s price tag. That combines preservation and reuse benefits from the state historic preservation office and the National Park Service, said Josh Lavrinc, CEO of Grow Community Development Capital. 

“Developers we work with want to respect the historic architecture and use, then try to revitalize these buildings working within those constraints, and as a result, benefit financially through the tax credit that supports preservation,” said Lavrinc, whose company helps developers renovate historic buildings for modern use while preserving them.

Vos said the warehouse could still be renovated into a project similar to one Alexander Co. recently completed in Virginia, which saw an older and similarly sized textile mill transformed into apartments.

Fernando Costa, a former longtime assistant city manager in Fort Worth, has hope for the T&P Warehouse. But ultimately, the building is owned by private parties who decide its future.

“(The city) can offer incentives, it can enforce codes and require compliance, but the city can’t unilaterally decide what happens to it,” Costa said. 

His sentiment was echoed by Ann Zadeh, who sat on Fort Worth City Council from 2014 to 2021, representing the T&P Warehouse’s district.

In general, Texas and Fort Worth policies avoid regulating what people can do with their property, making any sort of vacancy tax or moves to take over the property via eminent domain unlikely, Zadeh said. Whenever the city threatened to seize the warehouse because of neglect, Assem was quick to make the necessary repairs, she added.

For many, the T&P Warehouse will always be a Fort Worth landmark. 

Jordan, who grew up on the southside during the 1940s and 50s, recalled seeing the building from his front yard as a child, planted in the downtown skyline.

“I expected it to be there,” he said.

He watched the city grow and apartments and businesses crowd Lancaster, I-30, South Main and Rosedale. All the while, the T&P Warehouse sat vacant.

Jordan said Fort Worth got through the pioneer days as a “logistical hub,” conveniently located along the Chisolm Trail — an old cattle driving route — and the Trinity River. Then came major railways and the U.S. Highway system.

“Transportation has been of major importance, integral to our development,” he said. “For that reason, T&P Warehouse, to me, has been an important part of our history.” 

Those assets were what John Lancaster recognized in Fort Worth in the early 1900s, and they’re the reason the T&P Warehouse — and Fort Worth’s status as a major city — exist, Jordan said.

At that 1931 banquet, Lancaster challenged attendees:

“See to it that Fort Worth does become a city of 1 million people.” 

At the time, the T&P Warehouse represented Fort Worth’s promised growth. Almost a century later, with Lancaster’s population goal surpassed, Assem and city leaders are hopeful it will once again. 

Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601. 

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