Pedestrians ‘all over the place.’ How car-dominant Arlington is transforming downtown
About a year ago, Jennifer Kemp relocated her vintage furniture business to a one-story storefront on the corner of East Division and North East Streets in downtown Arlington.
The site, on its face, didn’t seem a natural setting for a showroom of handcrafted wooden credenzas and swung vases. A used car lot and shuttered body shop clog the vista from the store’s north facing windows. A perusing customer looking west would spot the remnants of Galaxy Auto Sales, its slim, towering area lights the only remaining decoration.
“I’m pleased with this area,” Kemp said. “I feel good about it because I know it’s up and coming.”
Fort Worth developer Street Realty began snatching up worn and vacant lots along Division and East Front Streets in the mid-2010s. It debuted the Urban Union development in 2016. The area’s turnaround has been stark and swift.
Kemp, one of around a dozen Urban Union tenants betting on the area’s rejuvenation, shares walls with a coffee shop and comic book store. Well-regarded North Texas pizza chain Cane Rosso set up shop in an old garage down the road.
At least eleven incoming businesses signed leases in newly constructed mixed-use buildings along Front Street in late October. Rodeo Goat, a popular Fort Worth burger joint, plans to open its second location in the deserted repair shop across the street from Kemp.
Arlington leaders have long promised to transform the blighted thoroughfares of its urban core into a “walkable, vibrant, and economically strong” downtown befitting of the city’s size and rising status. They tout Urban Union and its recent bustle as clear signs of its progress.
Can a stretched city borne from the dominance of the automobile nurture a dynamic city center — more or less from scratch?
Something from (almost) nothing
Arlington sprawls around 100 square miles across the heart of the Metroplex. The city — supposedly named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s mansion Arlington House — sprouted from a modest Texas & Pacific railstop constructed in the late 1870s.
For much of its early life, Arlington puttered in the shadows of its neighbors to the east and west, where the region’s wealth, power and prestige coalesced.
Arlington was little more than a stopover, boasting few attractions. The Interurban trolley line, and the Bankhead Highway that later supplanted it, sliced through the city, helping sustain a community that, by 1950, amounted to no more than 7,700 people.
By 1960, Arlington’s population had multiplied almost sixfold. Millions nationwide had begun to ditch the country’s crowded metropolises for the quietude of suburban life.
Arlington attracted tens of thousands of urbanites fleeing Dallas and Fort Worth. Interstate 30, finalized in 1957, facilitated easy migration to its burgeoning subdivisions — and afforded emigres easy access to offices in the cities.
Arlington gradually developed a gravity of its own. General Motors began churning out vehicles from its Arlington assembly plant in 1954. Dallas real estate mogul Angus Wynne built the nation’s first Six Flags just two miles north in 1961.
Early the following decade, Arlington mayor Tom Vandergriff enticed Washington’s flailing major league baseball franchise to relocate to the city and rebrand as the Texas Rangers. The Dallas Cowboys began playing their home games less than a mile west in 2009.
The University of Texas at Arlington, once an appendage of the Texas A&M system, is now the state’s fifth largest higher education institution by enrollment — and, in the words of city manager Trey Yelverton, “by far our number one economic development entity in the city.”
The timing and style of Arlington’s growth — dispersed and auto-oriented — didn’t lend itself to the organic emergence of a downtown.
“Arlington never really had a traditional downtown, the way Fort Worth and Dallas did, because we were just a small agricultural farming town for so long before we really grew in this century,” said Maggie Campbell, the president of Downtown Arlington Management Company, the neighborhood’s nonprofit business development group. “We kind of came to the party late.”
Sustained efforts to cultivate one surfaced in the 1990s. Planners and politicians at the time felt the city needed a “civic heart” that theme parks and stadiums couldn’t provide. Tens of thousands of UTA students and faculty craved accessible leisure outside campus grounds; so too did Arlington locals (who, by 2000, numbered 333,000) and the kinds of educated young workers the city hoped to attract.
“It does help provide that sense of overall identity and space that maybe some had argued that Arlington is kind of missing,” said Alan Klein, the director of UTA’s Institute of Urban Studies. “Walkability is a part of that, particularly for younger professionals.”
Consultants and staffers drew up lengthy redevelopment strategies in 1995. The City Council created a tax increment financing zone three years later to bankroll public improvements in the area.
The city debuted its first “master plan” for the district in 2004. Its aspirations for a “vital business and civic center, bustling with activity and investment” began taking form over the ensuing decade.
Levitt Pavilion, an open air concert venue on the corner of Abram and South Center Street, showcased its first performances in 2008. The city opened a sleek, three-story public library across the street in 2018.
A midrise on the opposite side of South Center welcomed its first tenants the same year. Developers built another along Abram a few hundred feet away in 2020. The new apartments coincided with a small burst of new storefronts and sidewalk improvements along the street.
“If you looked five to 10 years ago at downtown, in comparison to what it is today, it is night and day different,” said Klein, who moved to Arlington in 1995.
Yelverton, in the late 2000s, remarked with fascination to his boss at the time that he had seen a pedestrian during his lunch break at one of Abram’s once rare restaurants.
“You see pedestrians, really, all over the place now,” he said.
The Star-Telegram spotted at least a dozen milling around Abram and Front Street on a cloudy Thursday afternoon in early November — several families drifting in and out of restaurants, a few individuals ambling about.
Roughly 400 people lived within the boundaries of downtown in 2014; the district’s population has since swelled to around 4,200 by 2024, according to estimates collected by Downtown Arlington Management Corporation. Property values, the group says, have more than doubled in that time frame.
“Our downtown sits right here, anchored between the entertainment district and the University of Texas at Arlington. We’re basically a 15-minute drive to one of the world’s best airports,” Campbell, the corporation’s president, said. “We’ve made it an attractive place to live and invest and work.”
Growing pains
“There wasn’t much of a reason for me to come here,” said Hyacinth Szabo, standing at the doorstep of Kemp’s furniture store. “But I have been here more recently, several times either for Walkable Arlington events, or with friends. One of my friends really loves Cidercade.”
Szabo, a civil engineering major wrapping up their final year of studies at UTA, runs a student-driven group dedicated to the daunting task of making Arlington more pedestrian friendly.
The promises of downtown piqued the aspiring planner’s optimism and scrutiny.
“There are pretty good connections from UTA campus to a good chunk of downtown, but that’s only really up to the railroad,” which severs Urban Union from the rest of the district, Szabo said. “Unfortunately, connections across the railroad right here are not really as robust, not really as comfortable, and this little corner of downtown especially is a little difficult to access on foot from any direction.”
Szabo paced west along East Front Street, past Hurtado’s Barbecue, and glanced north toward Division.
“The pedestrian infrastructure on Division Street is …” Szabo paused and grinned, “not confidence inspiring.”
The 2004 downtown master plan noted that “With just 13 percent of downtown used for housing and one-third of all the physical land in the study area used as parking lots, the area has fallen out of balance, requiring that people travel within the downtown primarily by car.”
The strategy’s 2018 revamp offered a similar assessment, finding that: “The Downtown Core remains auto-dominated and has significant gaps in the urban fabric that detract from its walkability and desirability.”
The Downtown Arlington Management Corporation commissioned Klein’s institute to assess the district’s pedestrian infrastructure two years later.
The research team concluded that more than three quarters of downtown’s streets had fewer than two street lights; almost half lacked any. Around 13% of its blocks possessed no “indications of even basic required intersection/crosswalk conditions.” Forty percent were in poor or mediocre condition — discontinuous, uneven, unprotected. Only 5% — a few stitched to the library and one of the new midrises — scored perfectly.
“They’re actively working on all of that, and there has been improvement,” Klein said. “And I think some of the recommendations that were made as part of that study have been taken to heart and have been worked on.”
Yelverton reiterated that commitment.
“We’ve got to do more investment in sidewalks, more investment in streets infrastructure, more pedestrian safety things, particularly as the railroad comes through and cuts through the downtown area,” he said.
The railroad, in Klein’s view, poses the biggest hurdle to connectivity. Its freight traffic is frequent and loud; the track slices the district in two and offers few comfortable crossing points.
“It does interrupt transportation flow, whether you’re walking or driving or biking,” he said.
Parking is another snag.
“If we have relatively little parking, then we can create an area that feels very tight knit. It’s convenient to get from one business to another, or from one residence to a business, or from your parking spot to wherever you’re trying to go,” Szabo explained.
Building a new structure over the neglected lot of an old dealership is simple enough. But the businesses taking their place often rely on ample spots to store the cars of their customers, who have few other reliable ways to access downtown from other towns or neighborhoods besides driving. Too much parking space risks sapping a neighborhood of its charm — and limiting its prospects for expansion.
“Even a sprawling, low density city like Arlington has these cores where people want to go, and a lot of people want to live,” Szabo said. “The city is not going to reach its full potential in the long term unless it provides those alternatives and it creates a transportation system that requires less space and pushes people apart less.”
Arlington is the most populous American city without a mass transit system. City hall bankrolled one bus route between 2013 and 2017 but elected to discontinue it, pointing to low ridership. Creating a more substantive network to sew together the city’s disparate districts would involve a fiscal and political haul that few seem prepared to undertake in the short term.
“Transit is a tricky issue in Arlington,” Klein said. “It has not been, over time, well received necessarily, by voters, and right now there really isn’t the funding available on the city side to be able to make that investment.”
Yelverton said Arlington’s existing network of bike paths and Via rideshare routes more than suffices for the moment, but he didn’t write off the possibility of change down the line.
“The density that’s required to support bus and rail doesn’t necessarily exist in the way that it needs to be economically viable,” he said. “So I won’t say it’s not part of the longer term future, but today, I think what we have going is working well for us.”
Szabo still holds out some hope.
“In terms of urban development, in terms of land use, I think that Arlington seems to be going in a reasonably good direction.”
Whether other parts of Arlington will take cues from downtown’s apparent success and follow its template for growth is uncertain. The neighborhood is less than one percent of Arlington’s total land mass. The city’s 2015 comprehensive plan pledges to “limit higher density development” to downtown, pockets surrounding UTA, and slivers of the Entertainment District, Lamar Boulevard, and Collins Street.
But demographic pressures may undermine those plans.
“Arlington is largely built out. There’s not a lot of greenfield, open space left,” Klein said. “If you’re going to increase your population and you have no more land to spread out on, you have to increase your density.”
Regardless of the pattern, Klein finds it hard to feel anything less than optimism about downtown’s future.
“I’ve seen such massive changes in the past five to ten years that it makes me very hopeful that it will continue, that there’s a momentum that’s built,” he said. “That may not happen as fast as some people want, or probably happen faster than other people want, but I think that the changes are going to keep going.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
