A five-story red-brick Gothic Revival building that once housed nuns and schoolgirls on Fort Worth’s Southside has reopened as Maren Grove, a 90-unit affordable housing complex at 801 W. Shaw St. that also includes a free, bilingual pre-K program for up to 40 children. The building spent more than a century as a Catholic academy, a short-lived small college, and an artist live/work community before its latest transformation.
Our Lady of Victory Academy was built in 1909 as an all-female Catholic boarding school, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Sisters of St. Mary of Namur, the Belgian order that ran the school, lived in a convent on the academy grounds. The order first arrived in Texas from Belgium in 1873 and went on to build seven major boarding and day academies across the state between 1893 and 1912, per the Texas State Historical Association.
From Convent School to Artist Lofts to Housing
Ground for the original academy broke in March 1909, designed by the prominent Fort Worth firm Sanguinet & Staats at an initial cost of $200,000; the school opened on September 12, 1910, with 31 boarders and 41 day pupils, according to Wikipedia’s history of the building. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 20, 2004, a designation that later helped make the building eligible for historic tax credits used in its redevelopment.
That same year, the vacant academy was renovated into the Victory Arts Center, an artist live/work community with 46 apartments and event space, per an O-SDA Industries handout cited by the Star-Telegram. Financing for that earlier renovation came together in December 2001, when the Fort Worth Housing Finance Corporation approved a $7.2 million bridge loan. The building later briefly served as the home of a small Catholic college in the mid-2010s before closing in 2021, per the Star-Telegram.
90 Units Serving a Range of Incomes
Maren Grove pairs the restored historic building with a newly constructed one, together offering studio apartments up to units with three bedrooms. The complex serves families earning between 30% and 80% of area median income, the Star-Telegram reports. For context, HUD set the median family income for the Fort Worth-Arlington metro area at $101,900 for FY 2024, placing the 60% AMI limit for a four-person household at $61,140…