South Main Street Historic District

This stretch of South Main Street on Fort Worth's Southside, a few blocks below downtown, preserves eight commercial buildings from 1909 to 1946 and three tiled curb markers from about 1930. The buildings are one-part and two-part commercial blocks of brick, clay tile or reinforced concrete. The earliest three, the Sawyer, Joyslin and Gorrell buildings, were put up in the months after the Great Southside Fire of April 1909. They have corbelled brick parapets and segmental arched windows, and their upper floors held hotel rooms or apartments over street-level shops. Later additions include a 1920s garage, a 1940-41 Safeway store with Art Deco or Moderne touches, a planing mill and a 1946 building from the early postwar years. The district was recognized for architecture because it shows the commercial block form changing over several decades, and because it holds the most intact block faces on South Main Street. Recent rehabilitations of two buildings have added apartments and renewed activity.