Suburban DFW's Forgotten New Deal Colony, Part 1
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...