Irving Music Factory Hurts
I don’t know much about Irving, except that it lies somewhere between here and Big D and that other than maybe having a place to sleep and park your car, why would anyone want to go there?
Now there’s an infinite number of reasons, starting on Sep 1 with comedian Dave Chappelle and continuing the next night with Brad Paisley, followed by The Goo Goo Dolls (Sep 6), Young the Giant with Cold War Kids and Joywave (Sep 29), Matchbox Twenty and Counting Crows (Oct 1), Scorpions and Megadeth (Oct 12), and comedian Trevor Noah (Nov 11).
These acts are just some of the mid-to-major names slated to play Irving’s new Pavilion. A 250,000-square-foot venue that’s part of The Music Factory, a 17-acre $173 million mixed use development, the Pavilion will not only be “stealing” hard-earned American dollars from Fort Worthians (and presumably Dallasites and other out-of-towners) but also stealing (actually) Fort Worth’s thunder.
For decades, we’ve been told that a mid-sized venue would never work in Fort Worth. “Big bands will always choose Dallas over us!” “If a band plays here, then they can’t play Dallas because of radius clauses, and no band is going to do that!” “There’s no room to build a mid-sized venue!” You’ve probably heard the excuses, too. You also probably want to ask every person who’s used them, “Where the heck did this Irving Music Factory and Pavilion come from then?!”
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Even Irvingians – “Irvingers”? “Irvingites”? – can agree that when it comes to big-city living, they’ve got nothing on us. Any world-class museums, Irving? We have three. How about a Division I football program? A symphony orchestra? A ballet company? An opera company? No? That’s too bad. We’ve got all four, and they’re all yoooge. And don’t even get started on music. As Fort Worth’s scene is equal to or beyond Dallas’ or even Houston’s, I can’t recall ever seeing a non-nu-metal, non-metalcore band list Irving as its hometown. Cliché lovers joke that Fort Worth is just a big suburb of Big D. But for Irvingians/Irvingers, it’s not funny. They actually live in Dallas County. They are a living, breathing suburb of a bigger city.
Read more: https://www.fwweekly.com/2017/03/29/irving-music-factory-hurts/
[font color=330099]Hello Fort Worth Weekly, Irving does have a symphony orchestra! I went to concerts there. Sour grapes that Fort Worth did not have the vision to get a project of this nature past the negativity phase.[/font]
