Fort Worth's Coyote Drive-In Was Never Going to Outlast Panther Island, and Everyone There Knew It

On a recent Thursday night, cars started lining up at Coyote Drive-In two hours before showtime, regulars racing for the same parking spots they've claimed for years. Inside the concession stand, assistant manager Brian Smith kept the popcorn machine running while admitting his heart was already breaking. Across the lot, general manager Chris Fortune pulled up old photos on his phone of his own kids growing up at the theater, five and six years old in the earliest shots, teenagers in the most recent ones.

The scene reads like every other drive-in eulogy published this month, and most of the coverage has treated it that way: a beloved Fort Worth landmark, gone after over a decade, another casualty of changing habits and shrinking land for big open-air lots. That framing misses the actual story. Coyote Drive-In isn't closing because attendance dropped or the business struggled. It's closing because a clause written into its lease back when it opened in 2013 has finally been triggered, on schedule, exactly as planned.

The Clause Nobody Needed to Explain

Coyote's landlord has always been the Tarrant Regional Water District, and the original lease came with a built-in expiration date tied not to a calendar but to a construction milestone. Once TRWD broke ground on two new canals and a three-acre park on the property, the lease would end. That milestone is arriving this fall as part of the Panther Island flood control project, and TRWD has now exercised its right to close it out.

Fortune put it plainly when asked how the staff was processing the news: the drive-in never operated under any illusion that it was permanent. It knew its own end date the whole time. That's a different story than "beloved business succumbs to hard times." This is a business that ran a good, profitable stretch on land it always knew it was borrowing, and the borrowing period is now over.

This Property Has Already Done This Once

If you want proof that this parcel has a pattern of shedding uses as Panther Island's plans firm up, look at what happened to the ice rink. For nine winters, while Coyote went dark for the off-season, the same lot hosted Panther Island Ice, an outdoor skating rink produced and sponsored directly by TRWD, not by Coyote's operators. That rink ran its last season in 2022, when the water district cited the growth of private-sector ice rink options elsewhere in the region as its reason for shutting down the machines.

The ice rink closure wasn't about Panther Island construction. It was a business decision. But it established the pattern this land has followed for the past several years: uses arrive, run their course, and get retired one at a time as the site gets prepped for something bigger. The drive-in's closure isn't an isolated event. It's the second piece of this specific 18-acre parcel to come off the board, and the first one tied directly to actual dirt moving.

What's Actually Moving In

The construction that ends Coyote's lease is the first half of a 1.5-mile bypass channel, part of a flood control project valued at roughly $1.16 billion that will eventually reroute the Trinity River around downtown Fort Worth. The canals and park slated for this specific site are the leading edge of that work, expected to break ground this fall.

Zoom out from this one parcel and the rest of Panther Island is moving on a similar clock. The city and TRWD spent this summer finalizing updated development codes for the island, increasing the share of the island set aside as open space from 9 percent to 15 percent and simplifying what had been a tangle of development zones into two. A few blocks from the drive-in, Austin-based Seco Ventures has proposed a $100 million, 12-story apartment tower with ground-floor retail, the kind of project city officials have called the "proof of market" the island has needed for two decades. None of it is finished. All of it is now further along than a rendering.

The Last Nights

If you've been meaning to get one more visit in, the window is short. Here's what's confirmed:

• Final night of operation: Monday, September 7, 2026, which is also Labor Day.
• Address: 223 NE 4th St., just across the North Main Street bridge from downtown, the same skyline view that's shown up in nearly every visitor photo of the place for over a decade.
• The last scheduled film is "Coyote v. Acme," a title nobody at the theater could have planned better if they'd tried.
• Once Coyote closes, the two nearest remaining drive-ins in the region are Galaxy Drive-In in Ennis and Brazos Drive-In in Granbury. Coyote's own Lewisville location, opened as a second North Texas venue, closed back in 2018.

Glenn Solomon, the managing partner who helped open the theater, summed up the mood without dressing it up: it's bittersweet, he said. They'd had a good run, longer than they expected.

What Doesn't Disappear

Here's the detail most of the closure coverage has buried: not everything on this site goes away. The pavilion structure that's hosted birthday parties, corporate events, and the drive-in's outdoor seating area is staying put as part of the new park. It won't be showing movies, but it will still be standing, still walkable, still part of the public space along the river once the canals go in.

That matters if you live near Panther Island and have spent the last several years hearing about the project mostly through renderings and council meetings. The drive-in's closure is the first change most residents will actually see, feel, and be able to walk past. A fence will go up near the North Main Street bridge this fall. A screen that's lit up the riverfront since 2013 will go dark. And a piece of the old site, the pavilion, will still be there when the new park opens, a small physical thread between what this land was and what it's about to become.

For anyone who's watched Panther Island get talked about for twenty years without much to point to on the ground, this is what "it's finally happening" looks like up close: not a groundbreaking ceremony, but a going-away party for a drive-in, with a construction fence right behind it.

If you're curious what Panther Island's next phase could mean for property near North Main Street or anywhere else along the Trinity River corridor, message Harman Cheema on WhatsApp. He tracks these changes street by street across Fort Worth and the rest of DFW, and he's happy to talk through what it means for your specific block.