What's with Vegas Before Vegas? On a hilltop above the old highway between Dallas and Fort Worth, a genteel tea garden once hid one of the South's most notorious illegal casinos. Top O' Hill Terrace ran high-stakes gambling behind a respectable front through the 1920s, '30s, and '40s — with a concealed basement and escape tunnels for when the law came up the hill — and it drew gamblers, oilmen, and celebrities from across Texas long before the Strip existed. They called it "Vegas before Vegas." The Texas Rangers spent years trying to shut it down and finally did; the estate is now Arlington Baptist University, and the tunnels are still there. It is the most Arlington story there is: a little hardscrabble prairie town with an outsized appetite for spectacle.
Then Arlington discovered it had water worth selling. A downtown artesian well drilled in 1892 brought up mineral water, and for nearly sixty years the town marketed itself as a health resort, with a bathhouse and pavilion and visitors who came to "take the waters." The interurban electric railway that linked Dallas and Fort Worth ran right through town, carrying day-trippers to the wells. The well stayed at the center of downtown civic life until it was capped in 1951; a memorial plaza marks the spot today. The health-resort decades gave Arlington its first taste of being a destination rather than a way station.
Why People Visit Arlington
Arlington rewards travelers who want big-event energy with Texas convenience — the stadiums and theme parks of the Entertainment District, set between Dallas and Fort Worth and easy to reach from either. People come for the games, the coasters, and the concerts, and stay for the river-and-lake parks and the offbeat heritage of a prairie town that talked itself into becoming the American Dream City.
