The Pitchfork

[You can find Part 1 here and I fibbed there's a third part coming. Photos of DWG subsistence farmstead in both posts all courtesy of the Library of Congress.] As we left off yesterday Dalworthington Gardens, Texas looked to be on the ropes a bare year into its founding as a New Deal planned farm community. But slowly and stubbornly those 26 remaining families hung on and through their own self-organization and tighter administration from New Deal entities conditions start shifting from god-awful to livable. In 1935 the overstretched administration of the program (it's running similar colonies of varying scales all throughout the country such as this beautifully-documented one outside Dayton, Ohio ) is shifted to the newly-created Resettlement Administration headed by the magnificently-named Rexford G. Tugwell.  The shift in program administration accidentally and narrowly saves both the national program and Dalworthington Gardens as a few months later the Supreme...

The section of Arlington I went to grade school in is a crazy quilt of rapid urban development. The shining new tract of townhomes that we moved into in the late 1970s jostled with looming mysterious pecan orchards, lonely cowfields, straight broad new avenues, and a sprawling (and miraculously still thriving) sprocket factory. Just a quarter mile down the road stands the portmanteau-cursed enclave of Dalworthington Gardens. In that suburb inside a suburb, one could easily think it was a town planned wholly by non-medicated schizophrenics. Old wooden shotgun homes stand on long rectangle plots thick with livestock rub right up against gated McMansions, checkerboarded with scraggly patches of vestigial Cross-Timber woodlands. The only thing tying them together seemingly being the immensity and uniformity of the multi-acre lots and the shits not given to urban planning. Except for those spare few minutes ruminating in the car as I pull out of Mom's driveway, my brain neve...