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 Ft. 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 Ft. 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 buy his property.
In the 1920s and ’30s, tens of thousands of people flocked to Casino Beach. Some came to stroll the boardwalk. Some put on their tuxedos and ball gowns to dance in the 31,000-square-foot ballroom, where Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington played.
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.
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.
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, [the Tarrant Appraisal District] 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.
