Fort Worth: Dickies Arena

Dickies Arena rises on the Will Rogers Memorial Center campus in Fort Worth’s Cultural District, and for a city whose entertainment identity had leaned on decades-old buildings, it was something new: a fully modern, 14,000-seat arena built from scratch and designed to look like it belonged next to its Western-heritage neighbors.

Built for the Stock Show, Built for Everyone Else

The arena opened with a public ribbon-cutting on October 26, 2019, and hosted its first ticketed concert less than two weeks later when Twenty One Pilots played to a sold-out crowd on November 8. Architect David M. Schwarz gave the building a limestone-and-brick exterior that echoes the historic Cowtown Coliseum a few hundred yards away, even though the inside is pure 21st-century arena engineering. Fort Worth’s own Stock Show & Rodeo moved in as the arena’s anchor tenant starting in 2020, and Dickies Arena has hosted the rodeo’s bull riding and barrel racing every January since, alongside NCAA basketball and gymnastics regionals, WWE pay-per-views, and the PBR World Finals.

A Concert Room With a 360-Degree Screen

For touring artists, the draw is a bowl that reconfigures for basketball (13,550), hockey (12,200), or full concert capacity (14,000), anchored by a center-hung video screen roughly 105 feet wide and 26 feet tall — one of the largest continuous 360-degree screens of its kind in North America, built from nearly 1.2 million LEDs. The arena is owned by the City of Fort Worth and run by the nonprofit Trail Drive Management Corporation, which also hosts touring comedy, family shows, and the occasional boxing or mixed martial arts card between concert dates.

Dickies Arena sits a short drive from the Fort Worth Stockyards, where Billy Bob’s Texas has anchored the city’s live-music scene since long before the new arena broke ground — between the two rooms, Fort Worth can now book everything from an arena tour to a Saturday-night two-step in the same long weekend. Parking is available in surrounding lots at the Will Rogers complex, and doors typically open 90 minutes to two hours before a scheduled concert start time.

I’ve been here ♪