The Blackstone: Fort Worth's Art Deco Crown

The Blackstone Hotel opened on October tenth, nineteen twenty-nine, at the corner of Main and Fifth Streets in downtown Fort Worth. It was Fort Worth's first Art Deco skyscraper, twenty-three stories of terracotta ornamentation and stepped setbacks, designed by the Saint Louis firm of Mauran, Russell, and Crowell for cattleman Gus O'Keefe, who named it after the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. Two weeks after the grand opening, the stock market began to crash and the country entered the Great Depression.

The Blackstone survived. It attracted five presidents over the following decades: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The city's first radio station, WBAP, broadcast from the twenty-second floor.

The building later passed through the Hilton chain in the nineteen fifties before falling into dormancy and eventually being restored in the late nineteen nineties. It still stands as the tallest building in that block of downtown Fort Worth.