A decade after LaGrave Field hosted its last Fort Worth Cats game, Tarrant Regional Water District board members will vote on whether to demolish the baseball park as part of the agency’s plans for Panther Island.
Water district board members said Tuesday that they will hold a June 18 vote and give community members a chance to weigh in on the demolition proposal. The water district owns LaGrave Field, a historic former minor league baseball stadium north of downtown Fort Worth that has fallen into disrepair since closing in 2014.
The five-member board of directors also instructed water district staff to begin searching for a consultant to help the agency figure out its long-term strategy for LaGrave’s future. Any discussions with individual property owners or developers would be delayed until after the water district and its consultant create that framework, said board member James Hill.
How to speak at Tarrant Regional Water District meetings
Residents who want to address the board in person must complete and submit a speaker card prior to the beginning of the meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. June 18. Speaker cards are available at the front desk at the Tarrant Regional Water District headquarters at 800 East Northside Dr. Doors open at 8:30 a.m.
Residents have a maximum of three minutes to speak. Questions can be sent to the water district’s Chad Lorance at chad.lorance@trwd.com.
The water district’s announcement comes two months after a consulting firm delivered recommendations on economic development for what will become Panther Island.
Upon its expected completion in 2032, the $1.16 billion Central City flood control project will build a 1.5-mile bypass channel to reroute part of the Trinity River. The new channel will create hundreds of acres in riverwalk development connecting downtown to the Stockyards and Northside neighborhood.
HR&A Advisors, the consultant tapped by the city of Fort Worth, water district and other partners to develop a new strategy for the island, recommended the demolition and sale of LaGrave Field.
“We want to make sure that what we do with property that’s TRWD controlled is consistent with the overall plan,” Hill told the Report. “There’s nothing about the current building that’s historic, it’s new. But again, I know that baseball’s been played there for a long time, and the HR&A report did talk about whatever we do to the island long term, there needs to be some honor to baseball and the history on the island.”
The original 12,000-seat field opened in 1926 off North Main Street, where it hosted decades of minor league baseball games as the home of the Fort Worth Cats. After fire and floods damaged the stadium, it was reconstructed in 1950 before the Cats shut down and the field was demolished in 1967.
Businessman Carl Bell brought the Cats back in 2001 and reconstructed LaGrave, which served as the franchise’s home from 2002 until the Cats’ lease was terminated in November 2014. Developers’ plans to revitalize the stadium and bring a team back to Fort Worth fell apart in 2020.
Larry O’Neal, who runs the 129,000-member Fort Worth Memories Facebook group dedicated to the city’s history, has been a vocal proponent of preserving LaGrave and finding an investor interested in using the property for semiprofessional and high school baseball.
After seeing the HR&A report, O’Neal and other concerned residents suspected that the water district would propose demolition of the vacant stadium, which has become a target of vandalism and security issues. The water district anticipates spending $195,000 on maintenance and security at LaGrave in 2024 after having spent $20,000 the year before.
“They’ve let the thing get run down. You know, it got so many fires and all of that crap,” O’Neal said. “It’s typical of what we do here in all these municipalities. We just let something go to hell so that it’s an eyesore and then that way they get people to say, ‘yeah, let’s go ahead and bulldoze it.’ That’s what’s happened to a lot of our historical buildings.”
O’Neal worries that current board members — two of whom were elected last year — are not as passionate about preserving LaGrave’s history as Marty Leonard, who retired from her position in 2023, and Jim Lane, who died in 2022. Lane was a vocal champion of bringing baseball back to the rundown stadium.
The board wants to hear from the community about their ideas for LaGrave, Hill said.
“We’re giving more time for more people to make input and to be as transparent as possible,” he said.
O’Neal, who regularly livestreams and conducts interviews about Fort Worth politics and history, plans to get members of his Facebook group “fired up” about alternative options for LaGrave, including new investors.
“They’re not going to be able to sneak this one by, because I’m going to raise hell about it,” he said. “I’m going to tell everybody, and I got a bigger audience than they do.”
Haley Samsel is the environmental reporter for the Fort Worth Report. You can reach them at haley.samsel@fortworthreport.org.
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