Fairmount & the Near Southside

South of downtown, the Near Southside is where Fort Worth's railroad boom spilled over the city's edge and built a whole neighborhood of bungalows, foursquares, and grand boulevards. The Fairmount-Southside Historic District — stitched together from more than twenty separate early-1900s additions — is the largest historic district in Texas, roughly a hundred square blocks of cottages laid out for the middle-income workers who poured into Cowtown for jobs. Streetcars once ran down its main streets, and around its edges the city's congregations raised their sanctuaries: a Swedish Lutheran church, a Reform Jewish temple, Presbyterian and Catholic and Church of Christ landmarks, each one a piece of the South Side's mixed immigrant story. This walk threads through the district's residential heart and the ring of churches that grew up with it, tracing how a streetcar suburb became a neighborhood Texans now work hard to preserve.