If you think that driving through Fort Worth’s “six-point” intersection of Camp Bowie Boulevard, West Seventh Street and University Drive can be confusing or intimidating, just consider what your parents or grandparents had to navigate.
This wonky and infamous intersection in what’s now the Cultural District was described as a “death corner” in a 1938 article in the Star-Telegram. Even back then, the junction was “one of the city’s worst traffic problems” (there were fewer ways to get from west Fort Worth to downtown back in those days). Cars smashed into one another. Pedestrians got run over.
It was ugly, in more ways than one.
In the decades since, the intersection’s design has been perhaps one of the most scrutinized in Fort Worth. Area colleges studied it (“blow it up and start again” was a popularly suggested fix). Proposals for overhauls came and went — from over/underpasses to lane reductions to building a roundabout with a fountain in the center.
By the 1980s, the confluence had earned the derisive nickname “Waiting Room,” because red lights took so long you’d wish for a magazine to read. Drivers approaching the intersection from six directions could go 24 different ways.