When Zakery Sanchez steps into an abandoned building, he doesn\u2019t just see broken windows, rotting wood, and graffiti-tagged walls. He sees stories \u2014 etched into crumbling plaster, whispered in echoes, revealed in shafts of light that pierce through collapsed ceilings. For Sanchez, a Fort Worth\u2013based photographer and videographer, urban exploring isn\u2019t about cheap thrills. It\u2019s about finding beauty in ruin and preserving pieces of history that cities are quick to bulldoze away.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been intrigued by buildings, not just abandoned ones but the ones with dark histories that people don\u2019t want to talk about,\u201d he says. \u201cTo me, buildings are like people. The scars talk more about their era in time than a history book.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sanchez\u2019s obsession began with nothing more than curiosity and a camera. He found a partner in exploration in Scott Grace, a fellow adventurer who nudged him past hesitation. \u201cI was too nervous to go by myself,\u201d Sanchez admits. \u201cScott\u2019s a go-getter. He said, \u2018Let\u2019s go,\u2019 and I brought my camera. That first trip, we explored three or four buildings, and I\u2019ve been hooked ever since.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
What Sanchez and Grace discovered in Fort Worth\u2019s back corners is history in its rawest form \u2014 stripped bare, often painful, and nearly always forgotten. Few buildings embody that more than the hulking structure at 1012 N. Main Street, perched on the edge of the Trinity River diversion channel with a red-brick fa\u00e7ade weathered by decades of neglect. Sanchez calls it the Ellis Pecan building, but many locals remember it for a far darker chapter in its history.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the 1920s, it served as the epicenter of division\u00a0in Fort Worth. Klavern No. 1 \u2014 a Ku Klux Klan auditorium \u2014 was erected in 1924 after the group\u2019s original hall was bombed. Built by contractor B.B. Adams and designed by Earl Glasgow, the structure could seat 4,000 and once housed a membership of more than 6,000. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Inside, the vaulted roof and tall arched windows bore witness to rallies where the Klan spread its gospel of fear. The irony of the place is stark: in 1925, just months after construction finished, famed magician Harry Houdini performed on its stage. Weeks later, the hall was bombed again. It survived, scarred, and by 1927, it had passed into a more mundane use as a warehouse for Leonard\u2019s Department Store. Over the decades, it became a boxing arena, a concert hall, and finally a pecan warehouse for Ellis Pecan Co., which occupied the hall for decades before it fell into abandonment and decay.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, the building stands as perhaps the last purpose-built Klan Hall left in the United States. But its story is turning. In 2019, the nonprofit Transform 1012 purchased the property with a vision: to reclaim the space as the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, honoring the memory of Rouse, a Black Fort Worth meatpacking worker lynched in 1921. Contractors are now working to clear debris and stabilize the historic shell, with demolition of non-historical additions set to conclude by mid-October.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Sanchez, walking through the Klan building is less about gawking at decay than it is about confronting ghosts. \u201cIt\u2019s heavy,\u201d he says. \u201cYou feel the aura, the history. Parts people would rather not talk about, but that\u2019s exactly why I love these places. My camera doesn\u2019t just capture what\u2019s in front of it. It captures what lingers in the atmosphere. It\u2019s dark, gritty, ominous \u2014 and beautiful.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
On one trip, he and Grace slipped in from the back of the Ellis Pecan Building and found themselves on the auditorium\u2019s stage \u2014 the very stage where famed magician\u00a0Harry Houdini once performed. \u201cIt\u2019s wild to think of him performing there shortly after the building was bombed,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can feel the history in the walls, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n