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Originally Posted by llamaorama
I haven't lived in Fort Worth long enough to have picked up the history of the place, but I can make some guesses based on observations and stuff I've read:
Fort Worth originally put all it's rich people on the west and south side and all it's poor or not-white people on the north and east side. Hell's Half Acre and Niles City (neither place exists now) were incredibly rough places. In contrast the streets off Camp Bowie around Arlington Heights and Westover Hills are old pre-WW2 neighborhoods with big fancy houses.
So there was definitely a west-east divide.
However, I also think later as greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex took shape with DFW Airport creating new business districts to the north and east starting in the 1970s, this changed a lot.
Suburban sprawl leapfrogged the Northside and Haltom City working class neighborhoods and then affluent, white, conservative suburbs like Keller, Colleyville, Southlake, etc blew up and then that gradually spilled west towards I-35 in the 2000s.
Meanwhile there's a visible discontinuity of sorts on the west side and towards Benbrook. Old postwar suburbs that had been on the desirable side of town didn't age well. I wonder if Carswell AFB closing did this. Like the now dead Ridgmar Mall is very large and extravagant and surrounded by vacant big box centers suggesting it was a destination back in the 1980s, and there are a number of early 1980s office towers next to the freeway through there so that must have been an attractive business destination too. But then all the new development seems to have paused for 40 years. Las Vegas Trail and Camp Bowie West is a not so good neighborhood. At 820 the growth just sort of stopped and there's a bunch of empty prairie to the west.
Now however as of maybe 5 years something must have changed because there are a ton of master planned communities that leapfrogged west towards Aledo and jumped over old Benbrook out along 377.
It's interesting. Basically there is no apparent favored quarter district or pattern in Fort Worth. There is new sprawl and old areas on all sides.
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Favored Quarter for city of Fort Worth was and remains the old west side and the southwest side of town. This has intensified in recent years as new areas west of existing central southwest neighborhoods like Tanglewood, and Overton Park have built out. The most prestigious private schools like Country Day and Trinity Valley are located in this part of town as well. The highest in-town property values are almost all located in the west/southwest quadrant including older neighborhoods like Parkhill, Mistletoe, Berkeley Addition, and the gentrified Fairmount neighborhood. On the central West Side, Rivercrest, Westover Hills, Ridglea Hills, and most of Arlington Heights remain well off and highly desirable The wealthy and mostly exurban enclaves west and northwest of DFW airport are really something apart from the traditional well off neighborhoods that still thrive in Fort Worth, and most residents of these newer areas up north don't really identify with Fort Worth..