By my accounting, the Belmont Hotel on Fort Worth Avenue has been closed for about as long as it was open after Jordan Ford bought the hotspot-turned-notspot in 2015.
It shuttered in 2020, because of the pandemic. Then it fell victim to the following year’s deep freeze, which burst pipes all over the place. It’s like one of its neighbors told me a couple of weeks back: “COVID screwed the hotel. But the freeze [expletive] it.”
That short, sharp summary was courtesy Mary McDermott Cook, who spent years building that house on the hill that overlooks the hotel and has a daughter’s-eye view of the Calatrava bridge named for her mother, philanthropist Margaret McDermott.
A couple of weeks ago, I joined Cook and Laurie Weeks, secretary of Villas at Dilbeck Court HOA, for a walk around the Belmont, which is gated up, dinged up and overgrown. Water dripped from a busted pipe into an overflowing trash can in one of the old parking bays. We could peek into a few rooms and see the wood beams where drywall used to cover the ceilings.
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Ford told me a few days later, via email, that “over 50% of the rooms suffer[ed] significant damage from plumbing in the ceilings and walls that froze, thawed, and flooded the buildings.”
A trash can catches water dripping from one of the pipes that broke during the deep freeze of 2021, which ruined more than 50 percent of the rooms in the Belmont Hotel.
Robert Wilonsky
I peeked into Smoke, once my favorite restaurant in town, and saw it gutted to the studs. As we wandered in the late-day heat, Weeks said she has spent the last couple of years chasing off folks doing drugs and/or each other in the weeds. We found a used condom at the base of the stairs leading to the locked-up patio.
“It used to be so much fun,” Cook said as we trundled back to her house on the hill. “Damn it.”
Cook bought the land up here more than a decade ago because she loved the Charles Dilbeck-designed Belmont, built in 1946 and restored and reopened in 2005 by Monte Anderson. There, she used to hold court on the patio bar that once provided a panoramic view of downtown until Sylvan Thirty stuck its middle finger into the line of sight.
Now, Cook and a few of her neighbors on the hill are regulars at the meetings of the Landmark Commission’s Designation Committee, which could benefit from serving strong drinks. Every couple of months, since November, Ford and his attorneys go before the panel of architects to discuss their plans to reopen the gem that somehow managed to lose its luster.
This slide featuring proposed modifications and additions to the Belmont was among the renderings presented to the Historic Designation Committee in March.
Courtesy Droese Raney
Those plans, which are expected to cost around $130 million, include making some additions, shifting the entrance from Fort Worth Avenue to Seale Street around the corner, moving the pool to the new front, adding a patio to the restaurant, building a penthouse to reclaim the view and much, much more. In March, Ford’s architects at Droese Raney — whose Warehouse my colleague Mark Lamster deemed one of the last decade’s best buildings — also unveiled to the designation committee plans to plant a box full of parking spots and 24 apartment units along Fort Worth Avenue, which Ford has said he needs to make the Belmont economically viable.
The latter caught neighbors and Landmark officials off guard, in large part because the big box doesn’t mesh with Charles Dilbeck’s design. Dallas architect Sally Johnson, a member of the original redesign team, once described the Belmont as “a mix of art moderne and bungalow.”
In the spring, architect Daron Tapscott, chair of the designation committee, hailed the renderings of the proposed remake. But he said all of that good was “completely voided” by the drawings of the proposed apartments.
“When I saw that, I felt sick,” said Weeks, whose home overlooks the proposed site which was the parking lot for the long-shuttered restaurant Smoke. “I am looking at the rendering, and I was like, ‘That’s going to come right to the corner of my property.’ My neighbors, all these people, would be screwed.”
Many a magical night was spent on the patio of the Bar Belmont, which has seen better days — and which once had better views.
Robert Wilonsky
For years I’ve been told: Don’t worry, the Belmont will be back. That’s what Ford told me in March 2019, in fact, when the hotel was already turning a pale shade of dismal and he wound up in front of the City Plan Commission after discovering some commissioners were considering making it a historic landmark to save it from ruin. And that’s what he told me, in a lengthy statement provided by his attorneys, at the end of July:
“The historic importance of the Belmont Hotel is top-of-mind for our team, and we are actively working to bring forth a holistic proposal for the entire Belmont property,” it began. “A project of this magnitude requires thoughtful consideration and must address various intervening factors impacting the property.”
There’s certainly no due date for its reopening, as — yet again — the motor hotel works its way through a massive makeover coupled with extensive rezoning and historic landmark designation. It’s a lot of moving parts. Just none of them at the Belmont. Not yet.
The swimming pool, which once has the best view of downtown on that side of the city, will move to the new front of the Belmont Hotel off Seale Street.
Courtesy Droese Raney
The rezoning’s complicated, seeing as how the Belmont sits in a planned development district that requires a specific use permit to operate a hotel. And as Morris explained via email, “Currently, there is not an approved SUP for the hotel use, and obtaining an SUP is a lengthy application and public hearing process, similar to that of a zoning change.”
Morris said the hotel also sits in two other zoning districts and that there are two public deed restrictions “encumbering portions of the Belmont property, one of which expressly prohibits hotel use.”
None of which I understand, since the Belmont has operated as a hotel, on and off, since 1946. But that’s not my problem. Or yours.
It’s Ford’s, son of SMU trustee and stadium namesake Gerald J. Ford. And it has been since he and his partners, now out of the picture, bought the acclaimed hotel on the hill from Anderson, who in 2019 worried its new owners were trying to “[run] it into the ground so they can say, ‘No one wants to come here; let’s tear it down.’”
Cars drive past the former Belmont Hotel along Fort Worth Street, Monday, Aug. 5, 2024, in Dallas.
Elías Valverde II / Staff Photographer
Ford said in his statement that he and his team have “studied the Belmont Hotel in depth, including engaging with several local and national development partners, and these intervening factors have presented an issue at every turn,” which explains the long delay.
The new proposal, he said, “seeks to address these issues in a realistic and sustainable way, as the Belmont Hotel is not just a cluster of buildings to sit as a mausoleum on a hill. Our vision remains focused on revitalizing the Belmont Hotel so that it may reopen and operate in perpetuity, while also creating complementary opportunities for the rest of the Belmont property that are necessary to support the Hotel’s historic needs.”
Which is a long way of saying: That empty hotel on the hill’s going to be empty for a long while. Long enough that its neighbors worry about it falling apart … again. That’s what makes all of this so frustrating. Anderson already saved the Belmont once. Now it has to be done all over again.
“The hotel was still fun when Jordan brought it. Now I am sad. I am disgusted. I am ticked off,” Cook told me as we sat in her magnificent house overlooking the Belmont — and everything else in this city. I asked her why she keeps sitting through boring designation committee meetings, where sometimes the hotel only gets a few minutes’ worth of discussion.
“Unfortunately my name carries a lot of weight in this town,” she said, grinning. “I just hope Jordan understands this little development up here has a lot of intelligent, serious people that don’t want the Belmont to go away.”