Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas) (Mar 21, 09:50 AM) Mar. 20--FORT WORTH -- On most days, Paul Williams sits on a bar stool on his porch, a Shiner beer at hand, waving at the passing cars as the western sun glints off the water.
Shoes are optional, but fishing is not. He knows when the catfish are biting.
"Life on the lake is good," he said, a smile turning up his thick handlebar mustache.
Williams, a handyman-for-hire around Lake Worth, lives in 720 square feet on a tiny lot that sits 30 paces from the water's edge. If he's not fixing plumbing or fishing, he's using a metal detector at the swimming beaches.
He is one of the reasons Lake Worth has never been confused with the more upscale Eagle Mountain Lake, even though both stretch up the northwestern side of Tarrant County. Folks at Lake Worth are proud of the distinction.
But the colorful characters, bizarre mythologies and quirky history -- a goat man, a boardwalk, a castle -- that define the lake may eventually yield to the same suburbanization and gentrification that have transformed other areas of Tarrant County.
The reason, simply put, is the land.
After almost a century, the city is loosening its grip on the land and selling it to the homeowners, and at generous prices.
It's what the homeowners have wanted. After years of leasing their lakefront land, they suddenly own valuable property on the water just 15 minutes from downtown.
But that newfound value may force a good number of them off the lake.
Joe Waller, 59, who has lived on the lake for more than 20 years, said the houses there are all distinctive -- not remotely alike. The same could be said for the people.
"The area on the lake is improving fast," he said. "Property values have escalated extraordinarily quickly. Houses and land are selling for higher prices.
"But I like Lake Worth because it is eclectic. I like the different kinds of people who live there. We're losing a lot of the real characters. They're getting priced out by the taxes on the property."
Few places around Tarrant County have as lively a history as Lake Worth.
The lake, which the city began filling in 1914, is one of the state's oldest man-made reservoirs and still provides a third of the water supply for Fort Worth.
At least a dozen city parks line the shore, from the expansive Nature Center and Refuge to tiny Camp Joy.
An 80-year-old castle stands watch over a portion of the shoreline. But another lake icon has passed into history, a fella named Catfish Charlie, who once ruled the roost at a dive called Nova's Shady Grove.
The lake was also the site of a gruesome murder spree in 1982, when Larry Keith Robison killed his housemate and four people next door. Five years later, an F-4 Phantom coming in for a landing at what was then Carswell Air Force Base crashed in the lake, killing the pilot and the weapons officer.
"Lake Worth became so much a part of the identity of the city," said Quentin McGown, a Fort Worth lawyer and historian. "The Sunday drive around the lake was a regular part of early life. Later, it became the ultimate site for urban legends.
"I don't know how many cities have their own goat man, but not very many."
Not long after the lake was filled, people started to build on its shores. Most used the simplest brick or clapboard construction.
The city formalized the building boom by signing long-term leases with people, thus retaining ownership of the land. It was an arrangement unique in Tarrant County.
It stayed that way until the early 1990s, with the city eventually hoping to buy people out and make the entire lake parkland.
"I just realized that it wasn't going to work," said Bill Meadows, who was then the city councilman for the area. "It was a nice idea, but it was going to cost us tens of millions of dollars to buy all these improvements around the lake.
"The other dynamic," Meadows said, "was that they were leaning on their City Council person, saying 'We want to own.' "
For more than a decade, the process of transferring the property has crept along in frustrating fits and starts.
But in recent years, the change has sped up. More than a third of the 600 lakefront properties are now in private hands. And the majority of the other homeowners have an agreement with the city to buy.
Property values, meanwhile, have shot skyward. The total value of residential lots around the lake soared 76 percent from 2002 to 2003, as the Tarrant Appraisal District began making large-scale adjustments.
Owning the property has, in most people's views, improved things for the residents, even if it leaves them to wonder what the place will look like in another generation.
"If you own your property, you take more pride in it," said Waller, who was among the first at the lake to purchase his property. "Once people have a chance to buy their own property, they have more security. They invest more in it."
Oh, the days when people flocked to Casino Beach. Thousands came, tens of thousands really, in the 1920s and '30s.
Some came for the Thriller, a state-of-the-art roller coaster that climbed all the way to 72 feet. Some came to stroll the boardwalk, just like in Atlantic City, N.J.
Some put on their tuxedos and ball gowns to dance in the 31,000-square-foot ballroom, where Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington played to huge crowds, as Jacksboro Highway flourished as a gambling destination.
Many more came just to play on a beach with real sand during hot summers without air conditioning.
By the 1940s, Casino Beach was fading as a destination. In 1973, with the boardwalk and amusement park long gone, a wrecking ball finished off the ballroom.
One more Lake Worth memory, gone.
For 14 years, Jerry Swanson leased 7.5 acres from the city and ran the Lake Worth Marina along with a restaurant and some docks.
About two years ago, Swanson, 69, decided he wanted to retire, so he tried to sell everything but the 1.2 acres on which he lived.
"Nobody wanted to buy a marina on leased land," he said.
Eventually, the city bought it from him, as the lease required, and demolished the buildings. Swanson bought the property his house sat on for $29,000. A year later, that land was valued at $128,000.
"They sell you the land for cheap," he said. "As soon as you buy it, TAD slam-dunks you with a big tax bill. We're on a fixed income. We're having a terrible time trying to keep up with the taxes."
Fortunately for the residents, the appraisal district ruled that the land did not constitute new improvements, and the annual taxable increase was capped at 10 percent.
Shelly Harper, who has lived at the lake for 15 years and is president of the East Lake Worth Neighborhood Association, watched her property value shoot from zero to $96,000 the year she bought her land on Cahoba Drive for $20,000.
That kind of sticker shock happened throughout the neighborhood.
"I went and protested, but it did absolutely no good," she said.
The Tarrant Appraisal District said the waterfront lots are worth at least $80,000, some much more, depending on their view and access.
That's what people get when they sell the lots privately, said Randy Armstrong, director of residential appraisal.
"It's all based on sales, every bit of it," Armstrong said. "The appraisal district does not make them up. The market determines property values."
That much Armstrong and Harper agree on.
"It has definitely enhanced the opportunities for people around here to sell," Harper said.
In the 1920s, Samuel E. and Elizabeth Whiting turned an 1860s stone farmhouse into one of the most out-of-place residences ever built in Fort Worth.
A castle. A turret. A tower. Thick walls and rich woodwork. Stained-glass windows. Built on the lake's southern shore, the castle bore the legendary name of Inverness, a famous castle in Scotland and the home of Macbeth in Shakespeare's play.
Most people, though, called it the Whiting Castle.
When the couple moved out in the 1950s, actor James Stewart briefly moved in for the filming of Strategic Air Command. But the house never found owners like the Whitings.
By the 1990s, it had been stripped of many of its valuables, graffiti left in their place. The city sold the property in 2000.
The ominous-looking structure is now protected by razor wire and signs warning that the police are watching.
Just down the road, at a place called Admiral's Point, were cozy cottages used as guest houses by the castle's owners. They were bulldozed when the castle was sold by the city; three big new houses were built in their place.
John Miles and his wife live in one of them.
"We had been looking for lake property," he said. "Eagle Mountain is more expensive than we wanted to pay. Arlington is too far. Here, so many of the houses are run-down and so old, we had to give it a lot of thought."
The view from his back yard is gorgeous, and it's certainly no hassle to drive to work at nearby Lockheed Martin. But the telephone service is awful, he said, and they can't get DSL service.
"There was a lot of stuff we should have checked into before," he said.
Miles is optimistic that the area will continue to improve, that the current owners will upgrade their properties or that new owners will move in.
"There's a good tax base out there if we can get some nicer houses in the area," he said.
But development tops many residents' list of concerns.
They have watched the explosive commercial growth along Jacksboro Highway. They have voiced their worries about traffic from the new Brewer High School planned for Silver Creek Road, a two-lane thoroughfare that feeds into Loop 820.
As new homes begin to spring up near the lake, residents are pushing the city to require large lots to avoid crowded neighborhoods.
Part of the concern, they say, is based on traffic congestion, but some is environmentally based. The city's comprehensive plan calls for low-density development and less concrete around watersheds such as Lake Worth.
"We're not trying to stop development around the lake," Waller said. "That will happen regardless. We're trying to control the shape and look of development."
For more than 20 years, residents have also pressed their concerns about the depth of the lake. Lake Worth is only a few feet deep in places because of decades of sedimentation.
They watched, rather insulted, as local leaders snagged quick federal approval for $110 million to help build Town Lake downtown, wondering why the city can't find money for a lake it already owns.
"It's a public lake, but because it is so shallow, it is dangerous to go boating or skiing," Waller said. "From a safety and a recreational standpoint, the entire city would benefit from its dredging."
The city is working with the Army Corps of Engineers on a study to "environmentally restore" portions of the lake, particularly where Silver and Lone Oak creeks flow in on the western side, said Paul Bounds, the water department's Lake Worth coordinator.
"That's more limited than dredging the whole lake," Bounds said. "We're not talking about increasing the depth of the entire lake."
Nothing terrified the residents of northwest Fort Worth more during the summer of 1969 than the Lake Worth Monster.
The monster apparently lived on Greer Island, off the shore of the Nature Center, and took to hurling tires and attacking cars and generally provoking panic.
More than 100 people reported seeing him that summer. Star-Telegram stories quoting baffled authorities led to ever-greater numbers of gun-toting would-be monster killers roaming the lake's shores.
The monster was described as a 7-footer with a heck of a foot. One footprint was reported to be 16 inches long and 8 inches wide.
He was hairy and believed to be half-man, half-goat.
But he apparently disappeared as quickly as he came. He hasn't been seen since.
Williams, the handyman, pays $55 a month for his lease, an admittedly sweet deal for the luxury of walking barefoot to his boat dock to throw a line in the water.
He's lived at the lake since 1983 and knows many of the other long-timers and their quirky houses. He's now on a stretch of Watercress Road that the city plans on keeping because the houses sit too close to the road, creating problems with rights of way, officials said.
Not that it matters much to Williams anyway. Even if he could come up with the money to buy the land, the taxes would eat him up.
"It makes more sense financially for me to stay with the lease," he said. "I'll stay here as long as I can."
Gracey Tune, the sister of famed Broadway dancer Tommy Tune, has much the same feeling.
She's lived on the lake since 1979. She chose Lake Worth because of its people.
"We looked at two-thirds of the houses on Lake Worth when I first moved out here," said Tune, who runs a neighborhood art and dance studio in Fort Worth. "A lot of those people are gone. I've seen more of the change in the last few years.
"Now I look across the lake and say, 'When did that house go up?' "
After renting all those years, Tune bought a 1940s-era house on Mosque Point in December. She doesn't own the land because she missed the chance to pay the affordable price from the city. The market price, her only option now, is at least $100,000.
But, like Williams on the other side of the water, she will stay as long she can.
"We had these neighborhood bars that you walked to, and people would bring their food in and we would tell stories," Tune said. "I met a man who made his own wild grape wine out of the vines out there. The memories are so rich for me.
"There aren't any places like that anymore."
Staff writer Jeff Claassen and news researcher Marcia Melton contributed to this report.
MOST LAND ALONG LAKE WILL BE SOLD TO RESIDENTS
Almost all the residents living along the shore of Lake Worth have signed an agreement with the city that gives them the right to purchase their leased land at 2001 appraised values.
When the proper infrastructure -- including sewer service -- is on each tract, the city puts the land up for sale, said Doug Rademaker, who oversees real property management for the city.
The city has taken in $3.4 million from the sale of 238 properties. An additional 320 properties remain to be sold, Rademaker said.
About 40 of the leases won't change hands because running water and sewer to the areas is too expensive or because there are access issues, he said.
"We'll continue to honor the leases, but we won't be able to sell," Rademaker said.
The money from the sales is deposited into the Lake Worth Infrastructure Fund.
Only one area -- around Love Circle -- has not received water or sewer services, according to Paul Bounds, the water department's Lake Worth coordinator.
The city hired an appraiser in 2001 to set values on the property, but the prices remain far below the market. That's not a problem, Rademaker said.
"Since the city had a long-term relationship with the residents, we thought it was in our best interest to convey the property to them," he said.
--Chris Vaughn
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