What was 1980's Dallas like compared to today?

[KathrynAragon]

For anyone who enjoys a good walk down Memory Lane, check out the old Dallas show - I've been enjoying looking at the clothes, buildings, decor, hair, EYEBROWS, etc. Oh and the cars. And LACK OF TRAFFIC!!!!!!

[turf3]

I think very little of that show was filmed in Dallas.

[f4shionablecha0s]

Originally Posted by turf3

I think very little of that show was filmed in Dallas.

Basically all the exterior shots were. Can’t fake standing outside One Main Place…

[Nuclear Bear]

Originally Posted by jsnww81

We moved from Florida to Carrollton in 1983. My memories are mostly oriented to the northwest corner of the Dallas area:

Carrollton was the Little Elm of the 1980s - nice new homes and good schools, adjacent to tonier areas like Plano and Coppell, but affordable. My parents found a house they loved in Coppell, but it was just a little too far outside their budget, so their realtor steered them to Carrollton, the same way that folks who can't quite afford Frisco will choose Little Elm or Prosper today.

Carrollton petered out as soon as you crossed Rosemeade Parkway. The shopping centers along Josey Lane and along Frankford Road were all shiny and new and fully leased. The southern part of town, along Belt Line Road, was starting to get a little shabby looking, but was still decent - I can remember grocery shopping at the Tom Thumb store at Josey/Fyke, and the Safeway at Josey/Belt Line, both now LONG gone. Farmers Branch was similar - beginning to age, but still generally well looked-after. The school system was lily white well into the early 1990s.

Going to adjacent suburbs - Plano, Lewisville, The Colony, Coppell - felt like going to a far-off, separate place. You drove out of Carrollton and through cotton fields on two-lane blacktop roads. There wasn't the continuous development you see today.

To the east, Plano didn't really start until you went east of Preston - there were some houses being built in the first phase of Willow Bend, but they felt VERY remote and you wondered what such a nice neighborhood was doing way out in the country like that.

To the south, Addison was starting to build up, with a lot of midrise office towers going up along Belt Line. It was very nicely landscaped and felt very new and corporate and master-planned.

The Tollway ended at LBJ and was a two-lane road called "Dallas Parkway" from there north to Trinity Mills, where it stopped. Prestonwood Mall and the Galleria were brand new and Valley View Center (then only about ten years old) was right around the corner. You went to Valley View to do your everyday shopping, Galleria for the fancy stuff, and Prestonwood if you wanted to have a little more fun (ice skating, looking at the giant clock or playing on the kids' playground in the atrium.) Prestonwood had Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor so it felt more upscale, although not quite at the level of the Galleria. We also went to the rather dumpy Northtown Mall at Webb Chapel and Forest Lane - it had the only Burlington Coat Factory in town (and a very exciting waterslide on the roof for a couple of years!)

To the west, Coppell was still VERY small, with a little old country-sized high school in the middle of fields down by the airport (the current Coppell High didn't open until around 1990) and a few scattered subdivisions, but it didn't really take off until the early 1990s. They put a Minyard store at Sandy Lake and Denton Tap in the late 1980s and it was very big deal for them. LBJ had just been extended to the airport and went through a lot of empty land - Valley Ranch was just starting to go in, but they were having a hard time getting homebuilders interested and there were a lot of vacant parcels there well into the 1990s.

To the north there was just blackland prairie for miles until you crossed 121 and hit The Colony, which was a very remote outpost of Fox & Jacobs "starter homes" marooned out in the countryside. You could buy liquor there, so I remember taking the bumpy, flood-prone Crider Road - now wiped off the map entirely - up there with my dad on weekends my parents were entertaining.

Going into Dallas was something you did by exception, to go to the fair or the zoo or to a Mavericks game at Reunion Arena. My dad worked downtown and drove down there every day - by the 1980s the retail was moving underground into the tunnel system, and I remember the streets above looking very forlorn. The Turtle Creek area was considered nice, but Uptown wasn't really a thing. There were some apartment buildings here and there, but nothing like the urban heart that's there now.

By the late 1980s, South Dallas, West Dallas and East Oak Cliff were in REALLY bad shape and violent crime was really spiking there. All three areas honestly look far better today, even the parts that aren't gentrified. We used to deliver Meals On Wheels in the West Dallas housing projects (now thankfully demolished) and they were extremely run-down and poor. From what I've seen, Dallas doesn't have an area with that type of visible poverty anymore.

Beyond those areas I didn't see as much. We went to Garland a few times (there was a White Water / Wet N Wild there that was easier to get to than the one in Arlington) and my memory is of a vast, featureless suburban expanse that seemed nice enough. Mesquite was all white in those days and was known for being a bit more working-class and redneck-y than the other suburbs. From what I've read, Pleasant Grove had been the same way in the 60s and 70s - it was sliding downhill in the 1980s and many of the white folks there were moving to Mesquite and Balch Springs to get out of DISD.

Sorry for the rambling reply... in short, 1980s Dallas felt like a big city, but it was still very centered on downtown the first ring of suburbs. It wasn't as poly-centric as it is today.

Great post and good recap.

I do remember the Northtown mall having the water park and a movie theatre. That place hasn't been a mall in a very long time.

[jsnww81]

Originally Posted by Nuclear Bear

Great post and good recap.

I do remember the Northtown mall having the water park and a movie theatre. That place hasn't been a mall in a very long time.

Oh yes, Northtown was "un-malled" back in the late 1990s, if I'm not mistaken. Even in the mid-1980s, when the mallway was still open, it was pretty sad in there. The two anchors were Burlington Coat Factory (which started life as a Woolco) and Montgomery Ward, and even Ward's had a nicer store just down the road at Prestonwood mall. Even to a kid it was obvious Northtown wasn't in good shape, although I did think the waterslide on the roof - which then came down through the ceiling to a splash pool inside a mall storefront - was awesome.

[jsnww81]

Originally Posted by NTXPerson

My mom was in high school in the early 70’s. She talked about cruising down Forest Lane as well! What happened to the two Carrollton girls that put a stop the Forest Lane cruising?

They were both students at Newman Smith High School and disappeared into thin air in March 1988. They had gone to Prestonwood mall, come back home for their curfew, and then it's believed they snuck back out again after midnight. Their car was found in the parking lot of a shopping center at Forest and Webb Chapel, so it's believed they went to Forest Lane. No bodies ever found and the case has gone completely cold.

Their disappearance didn't end cruising on Forest but is generally thought of as the final nail in the coffin. Forest had been mostly innocent fun in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s there were signs of gang members mixing with the cruising teens and police were beginning to respond more frequently to reports of shots being fired. The neighborhoods along Forest (and many of the merchants in the shopping centers) were lobbying for a heavier police presence, banning of u-turns, and enforcement of curfews.

When the Carrollton girls disappeared, the street acquired a dangerous reputation among suburban kids, and many of them stopped going. The police stepped in and cracked down, and by 1991 or 1992, Forest was more or less dead as a teen hangout. I started high school in 1994 and it wasn't a place anyone went anymore, despite the addition of the big new Cinemark 17 on Webb Chapel and the prevalence of fast-food restaurants.

There's a good article on the heyday of Forest Lane in this 1982 issue of Texas Monthly.
https://books.google.com/books?id=vS...page&q&f=false