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.
Our Arlington logo carries the Texas longhorn and a lone star above "Texas Republic — Est. 1845," the shared retro emblem of our Texas towns, drawn in worn black-and-white like an old woodcut crate label. The 1845 date marks Texas statehood, and the longhorn is the through-line that links Arlington to every other Texas town we make. The detail that makes this one Arlington is the American Dream City itself — the railway market town, the old mineral well, the Vegas-before-Vegas hill, and the entertainment capital it grew into between Dallas and Fort Worth.
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.
