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.
That reinvention is why Arlington calls itself "The American Dream City." Today it is the third-largest city in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, a city of nearly 400,000 sitting squarely between Dallas and Fort Worth, with a General Motors assembly plant, the University of Texas at Arlington, Lake Arlington, the Trinity River woods of River Legacy Parks, and an entertainment district that draws visitors from across the country. The prairie practicality is still there underneath the bright lights — a hardworking Texas city that also happens to throw a very large party.
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.
