Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey Fort Worth Near North Side West Side Westover Hills

In the early twentieth century, developers from Baltimore to Beverly Hills built garden suburbs, a new kind of residential community that incorporated curvilinear roads and landscape design as picturesque elements in a neighborhood. Intended as models for how American cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized, garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city—the mythical “good” city of U.S. city-planning practices of the 1920s. This extensively illustrated book chronicles the development of the two most fully realized garden suburbs in Texas, Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson draws on a wealth of primary sources to trace the planning, design, financing, implementation, and long-term management of these suburbs. She analyzes homes built by such architects as H. B. Thomson, C. D. Hill, Fooshee & Cheek, John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Charles W. Oliver. She also addresses the evolution of the shopping center by looking at Highland Park’s Shopping Village, which was one of the first in the nation. Ferguson sets the story of Highland Park and River Oaks within the larger story of the development of garden suburban communities in Texas and across America to explain why these two communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities today.

Presents black-and-white photos and text profiles of nearly eighty architecturally and historically significant buildings in Fort Worth, Texas, all built before 1945.

"Jan Jones' volume on Fort Worth's theatrical heritage presents for the first time a comprehensive history of the showmen, performers, theaters, and events that shaped the city's histrionic fortunes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET.

On the prairie west of Fort Worth, British-born Humphrey Barker Chamberlin commissioned a model mansion, grand hotel, trolley line, lake, and waterworks in the early 1890s. He launched Chamberlin Arlington Heights as an opulent suburb reminiscent of his Capitol Hill enclave in Denver, then lost his overextended empire in the silver panic of 1893. Although several more well-to-do families established homes near those of the original "Heights pioneers," development progressed slowly. With the coming of World War I, local leaders persuaded the U.S. Army to build Camp Bowie across much of the sparsely settled area, providing infrastructure. A bungalow boom followed, with housing additions for the middle class and annexation by Fort Worth. As the 20th century drew to a close, preservationists sought protection for the legacy of built treasures within the neighborhood.