The modern city is largely the work of one long-serving mayor, Tom Vandergriff, who set out at mid-century to turn a town of a few thousand into something far bigger. The pivotal stroke came in 1961, when the first of the regional theme parks in the United States opened in Arlington — the idea, as the story goes, of dropping a roller coaster in a cotton field and calling it the future. It worked. Major-league baseball followed, then professional football, and the stretch of ground between the old farm town and the highway became a national entertainment district. Arlington had reinvented itself as a place people drove to for a big weekend.
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.
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.
