Business View Magazine | March 2020

306 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 tell you who that is, but when you come over the Fred Hartman Bridge, you’re going to look at it and say, ‘How the heck did Baytown get this?’ It is a five-star hotel and it’s going to be gorgeous. We anticipate opening this by Christmas of 2021, and we are very excited about it. “Plus, the City of Baytown, in cooperation with a citizen committee called ‘Bring the Battleship to Baytown,’ is responding to the RFP to bring the USS Texas to port in permanent docking at the same site as the hotel/convention center on Bayland Island. The Battleship Texas is the only ship in existence now to have actively participated in both World War I and World War II. And in fact, it was present at D-Day.” At this point, the city has not yet been selected to receive the battleship, which would also have to undergo repairs in dry dock for a couple of years, before it winds up anywhere. “Delivery would not be until the fall of ’21, if we were selected,” Davis notes. “But prognosticators out there, both in the media and otherwise, have their money on Baytown. And we’d still have plenty of hurdles to scale; first of all, we’d have to show that we would have the visitorship necessary to maintain the battleship and, secondarily, we have to figure out how the dredging would be paid for in order to even get the USS Texas into our rather shallow marina.” Downtown Baytown has also been reinvigorated over the past few years. An example of revitalization in the city’s older, southern section is Baytown’s Arts, Culture, and Entertainment (ACE) District, where the city has already invested $3.5 million in a Main Street project: building a town square in the old community of Goose Creek, one of the city’s original neighborhoods. It also recently completed the reconstruction of the Brunson Theater, a former 1949 movie house, which has now become the new Baytown Welcome Center, hosting the city’s Tourism Department, as well as an entrepreneur center. “The movie theater on Texas Avenue is done and