—Christopher Swope

Why is Arlington doing this survey of postwar neighborhoods?

In the 60s and 70s, and even into 80s, the thing to do was to tear everything down and have urban redevelopment and all that. That's one of big mistakes Arlington made. In the 70s we had an old downtown core that was pre-turn of the century, and we leveled to build a new city hall and new library. Now, the oldest building downtown is 1949--it's all post-World War II. We look at what other cities have done with preservation--what Fort Worth has done with Sundance Square, what Grapevine has done with its little downtown area, where they've become centerpieces for tourists to come to. So we know we missed the boat 30 years ago and we don't want to miss it again.

How did Arlington develop after the war?

The boom for Arlington started with the General Motors assembly plant built here in the early 50s. That created a residential boom, so a lot of the housing on our east side of town near the plant is 1950s working class neighborhoods. You also had as a result of that boom some 1950s style public buildings, because the city also had to keep up and have school buildings, fire stations, and police buildings built then--all the things that come with a vastly growing population, which is what Arlington started experiencing in the 50s.

In 1950, Arlington had around 7,000 citizens. It was just a small town on the railroad between Dallas and Fort Worth. Now it's close to 370,000 people--we're the 49th largest city in the United States. That started in the 50s. It was just a boom all of a sudden, so a lot of what was built then is now of an age that it can be considered historic under the right circumstances.

How should we look at these postwar neighborhoods when considering whether they should be preserved?

Just because something's 50 years old doesn't mean it's historic. But there are samples of 50s architecture you don't see any more--we just don't build that way any more. So we need to preserve some of that for future generations. It's like art deco in the 30s--they just don't do that any more.

Every city should have a good sample of what came before--even if it's ugly. Fifty years from now people will appreciate it. It will still be ugly, but it will be something people will want to see. It's so easy to look back and say, gosh I wish we didn't tear that down. It's harder to say we'll want that 30 years from now. That's especially true with the mundane things.

One of our older residential areas north of downtown was once a very low-income area, and there were a couple of streets that had nothing but shotgun houses. They're all gone now. Wouldn't it be neat if we had at least one little row of shotgun houses still there so people could see how working class people lived at the turn of century? I'm not suggesting that all of these houses built in the 50s should be preserved, but there should be a good sampling.

How will Arlington use the survey?

If you don't know what you've got, then you're taking a shotgun approach to preservation. Every time you see a bulldozer next to a building, you walk over and see if it's historic. That's not the way to go about it. With this in hand, we'll be able to recognize publicly those things that are historic, and we have a good preservation ordinance in hand to help keep what we've got.

For the last 50 years we've been driven by development, but we're landlocked, and we'll be built out in the next 10 or 12 years. So now it'll be redevelopment. And the thing about redevelopment is, you can do it in a more thoughtful and careful way. Because when you're in the middle of a boom then city government has to do everything it can just to keep up with city services. It happens so fast that you don't realize some of the mistakes that are being made. But if we have this inventory in hand, when it comes to redeveloping parts of the city, we can identify for a developer--this is a historic property, this is something special. And that will be very helpful.

© 2006, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.