Where are the ‘Mid-Cities’? Texas has an answer: at the H-E-B store | Opinion
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- H-E-B opened in the Glade Parks shopping center and signs read “H-E-B Mid-Cities.
- H-E-B said the store straddles Bedford and Euless, so it was named H-E-B Mid-Cities.
- In the early 1950s, the original Mid-Cities were Hurst, Euless and Arlington.
H-E-B Grocery has achieved the impossible.
With one brush of a sign, it has revived the old “Mid-Cities” nickname that had been falling out of use for 50 years.
For about that long, a local joke has been about what would happen if H-E-B — a south Texas supermarket chain — ever opened a store in the suburbs of Hurst, Euless and Bedford near DFW Airport, also nicknamed H-E-B.
The punch line came true last month when H-E-B opened in the Glade Parks shopping center on Texas 121.
But it would have been too cute to name it “H-E-B/H-E-B.”
Instead, H-E-B polished up the region’s much older nickname, created in the early 1950s to label the cities growing between Fort Worth and Dallas.
Now, giant signs welcome shoppers to “H-E-B Mid-Cities.”
The nickname is already catching on all over again.
British soccer fans were told to meet up at the “Londoner Mid-Cities” pub on the east edge of Colleyville. Radio hosts on KTCK “The Ticket” tell stories about growing up in the Mid-Cities. Social media posts on the new H-E-B are tagged #midcities.
There’s a simple reason H-E-B revived the nickname instead of calling the store “H-E-B Euless.”
It’s not totally in Euless.
“Our stores are named ‘Frisco 1,’ ‘Frisco 2,’ ‘Plano,’ etc.,” Mabrie Jackson of H-E-B explained in an email.
“This stores straddles two cities, Bedford and Euless. So we are calling it ‘H-E-B Mid-Cities.’ “
At the store’s grand opening, she said the challenge was to “not confuse our IT systems.”
“So we have to come up with Mid-Cities,” she said. “But make no mistake about it. This is the H-E-B in H-E-B.”
Today, the Mid-Cities are well-defined. They’re the three cities along Airport Freeway between Fort Worth and DFW Airport: Hurst, Euless and Bedford.
But in the early 1950s, Bedford was still an outlying town. The original Mid-Cities were Hurst, Euless and — yes — Arlington, which was just down Farm Road 157 or Texas 360 toward the old Fort Worth city airport, Amon Carter Field, and toward jobs at General Motors.
Arlington quickly graduated from the class. Bedford was promoted.
Until 1982, the Star-Telegram still covered all of eastern Tarrant County from a “Mid-Cities Bureau” in Arlington.
The 1960s also brought a civic power struggle of sorts over whether the Mid-Cities label included Haltom City. Richland Hills and North Richland Hills, or whether the Haltom-Richland area would stand on its own.
By then, “Mid-Cities” seemed to be shorthand for “not Arlington, Irving or Grand Prairie.” The Mid-Cities News-Texan newspaper was based in “Euless-Hurst.”
A 1994 Star-Telegram story posed the existential crisis.
“Where are the ‘Mid-Cities’?” the story asked in a Star-Telegram edition which itself was labeled “Northeast Tarrant.”
“Are they a state of mind or a state of being?”
The story quoted owners of Mid-Cities Manufacturing and Mid-Cities Fabrication.
The two businesses were in Arlington and Dallas (?!).
The owner of Mid-Cities Manufacturing, Tom Farrow, said he “was in a hurry for a name, and that’s what it is. When I see ‘Mid-Cities,’ I think of the area between Dallas and Fort Worth, and that’s what this is.”
So basically, the Mid-Cities is a state of mind.
With an H-E-B.