I got tired of the Cowboy theme as the mainstay of "official" FW marketing efforts years ago, but that said, the roots of the city lay in that era, trail drives to oil boom. Luckily some of the physical relics from those times remain, including architecture, and not just individual buildings but whole districts in the case of the Stockyards. There is still a lot of restoration work to do there, but it would likely all be gone by now if creative minds had not found a way to make it a destination and not just a junky old part of town. So, KUDOS to those historical preservation folks and to the events, etc. that keep it alive and kickin'. BUT... there are already a lot of things outside the cowboys and cowtown box happening in Fort Worth. I would venture a guess that if you mentioned the city in the company of intellectuals around the world the first association would be the Cliburn Competition, or perhaps the public art collections in our magnificent museums. The horsie shows are sort of elitist but they bring people to FW who might just as easily go to Vegas, OKC, or several other prominent show-and working horse -friendly cities, and they bring a LOT of money with them. FW is and has been an aviation center, although it is just beginning to celebrate that heritage with the slowly improving (and probably severely underfunded) aviation museum at Meacham Airport, the Helium plant featured on another thread was a spectacular centerpiece of technology once upon a time between the wars, and was a center for the oil drilling business in the 20's and now the gas boom of the 2000's. There is a tremendous musical legacy here that is not fully celebrated, encompassing many and varied forms that travelled from here to the cultural centers of the country and the world, from T-Bone Walker, Pappy O'Daniel, Cornell DuPree, Ray Sharpe, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, Delbert, Cliburn, Roger Miller, John Denver, The other T-Bone (Burnett), Betty Buckley, Townes Van Zandt, Kirk Franklin, Pat Green, Kelly Clarkson, and Big Lurch, among many others. Willie even states he first toked up in Fort Worth, so there is an undercurrent of hip that has been going on for some time. So, I hope the culture thing is covered, and that said... Can Fort Worth improve? Absolutely. Does Fort Worth need to bask in the past? Absolutely not. If a city is not moving forward it is sliding backward, there is no standing still. Some of the points raised in this thread (even if it has strayed A LOT from the original) are poignant and need answers. There SHOULD be a district where art and music and culture for the now and the future should be allowed to incubate, and it will need to be very inclusive of any and all people who want to live and work there. To attempt to bring things back around to topic; My immediate guess is once that area is delineated the the Dream Vision HQ will most likely not be located there, but that is OK, Fort Worth is a big city no matter what any PR guy downtown may want you to think, and there is room for all kinds of diversity, as long as your kind of diversity doesn't try to stamp out my kind of diversity. So my take is that Fort Worth can be modern, is being modern, and HAS TO BE MODERN. Times change, and the days of the radio preachers dictating public policy for the city at large from the pulpit has to be gone, along with racial prejudice, age discrimination, glass ceilings, and official art. How to be modern, though is a slippery slope that is open to interpretation and can get you a bloody nose in the wrong crowd, even today. If we are going to be welcoming to a gay-friendly district in the Southside we need to be welcoming to a "family-friendly" film studio and amusement park wherever they choose to settle in.