It’s official. Contracts are ready to be signed, boxes will be bought tomorrow. I am moving to the DFW area, and I have just realized how clueless I am about it. We’ve gone there for the weekend often over the last 6 years, but beyond the general road pattern, we don’t have much practical knowledge. So, I ask you, good people of that shining point on the Texas star, please help out a couple of confused folks from back east with some questions. For instance, do you all call it ‘The Metroplex’? Or does that mark the speaker as an unsheared pigeon or a demographer?
What are the different areas like? Just generally-what’s trendy, arty, rich, poor, full of offices, etc. I’m not looking for real-estate advice (unless you feel like giving it). If my boss says he lives in Richardson (picked at random from map), does that mean there are suburban homes or livestock across from his house? Would it be any different than, say, Richland Hills (again randomly chosen)?
What parks are nice for walking around, with trees?
Explain the supermarkets. I grew up around Walmart, Target, Food Lion, and Krogers. I understand Whole Foods and Central Market, but what the the rest of these? Fiesta? Tom Thumb? HEB?
Are there any nice movie theaters? Like
the kind with good equipment, beer and adult-only balconies. Also, where are the art films played?
Is there a traffic website with historical data? The Dallas DOT site is real time only. I’m looking for something like Houston’s Transtar page which is absolutely awesome. I can’t figure out where to live without some idea of how long it takes to get to work.
Any unusual local customs or laws that might startle a transplant or result in incarceration? Similarly, how can a transplant fit in better and not give offense.
What’s fun to do, within about 100 miles? Fort Worth has the zoo, botanical gardens. 3 art museums, and the stockyards. Dallas has one museum of art, a small natural history museum, and I’m not sure what else. This is one huge metro area so I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff.
The airports (DFW and Love). How long does it take to get from your car to the jetway? Is there viable alternate transportation to the airports like a shuttle service or train?
Any good local stores (or local chains) that might be overshadowed by the national ones?
What hospitals are good, excellent, or only if bleeding to death?
Any nice bowling alleys? Pool halls?
What’s a good website for finding out what’s going on in live music or the general entertainment? Is the free weekly (can’t remember the name) any good?
Can you recommend a good plumber, electrician, roofer, general contractor, realtor, architect, veterinarian, doctor, dentist, mechanic, or accountant?
I live in Fort Worth. There is considerable rivalry between Dallas and Fort Worth. Sometimes it’s friendly, other times not so friendly. So take that into consideration. Most of my experience is in Fort Worth.
It gets VERY hot here. It’s not a desert, but we can and do have people pass out from the heat on occasion. Air conditioning is not optional. Every year we usually hear of people who develop severe health problems, or even die, because they can’t afford air conditioning, either the machines themselves or the electricity to run it. Also, our food is hot. Many, perhaps most, Texans like food with a LOT of black pepper and pepper sauce. Chain restaurants know this, and will alter their formulas for the food for this market. If you’re not used to a lot of Tabasco pepper sauce, especially, be careful. Also, if you’re sensitive to this hot stuff, it can burn on the way out, as well as on the way down.
Usually we do refer to the whole area as “the Metroplex”, but we refer to the various cities and suburbs by name.
You have GOT to visit Fort Worth’s Botanic Gardens. Some of the Gardens are free, some charge a fee. All are awesome. Bring a camera.
We have Walmart, Target (and superstores of both chains), and Krogers. I don’t know if we have Food Lion any more, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one. Fiesta is a chain of supermarkets that aims for the Hispanic (mostly Mexican) demographic. It carries a lot of mainstream American goods, but it also carries a lot of Mexican groceries, like various soft drinks. Many of the products will be labelled in English and Spanish, or just in Spanish. Soft drinks made in Mexico are usually made with cane sugar, rather than high fructose corn syrup. Tom Thumb is just Safeway’s new name. HEB is a regional chain. Aldi’s has just arrived, as in they opened some stores last week or the week before.
A lot of men wear hats indoors. Some of them are cowboy hats, some are ball caps (sometimes called gimme caps). You don’t need to wear a hat if you don’t want to. However, the sun is pretty fierce in these here parts. Some parts of the area are dry, too, but usually you won’t be thrown in jail for asking for a beer in a dry part of town.
Dallas has an interestingly corrupt city government. I suspect that I wouldn’t be nearly as amused by it if I lived in Dallas, though. As it is, my husband and I point and laugh at the latest scandals in (Dallas) City Hall.
We also have the Log Cabin Village, if you’re into that sort of stuff. Dallas has a zoo, but even Dallasites will admit that the Fort Worth zoo is better. There are various live theaters and live music venues. We have a great selection of little Mom and Pop Mexican and TexMex restaurants. Most of them are quite reasonably priced, too.
Dallas has the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, but I’m not sure how good or bad it is. I don’t think that it goes to Love Field, though. Love Field is a pit, by the way. It was SUPPOSED to have been phased out a couple of decades ago, but due to a great deal of legal wrangling, it’s stayed in business. However, it’s not a very good airport, and I’m not just saying this out of city loyalty. I usually have someone drop me off at DFW, I don’t park my car and then go to the airport itself. However, DFW has some very…creative…roadways, and it’s a pain to figure out just where you’re supposed to go when you drive in there.
I used to live in the DFW area (specifically Carrollton and Plano which are northern suburbs of Dallas) and I left as soon as I could because I could not stand a lot of it. There was some great stuff there but it wasn’t enough to keep me.
Great things that you must experience:
-Chicken Fried Steak. Seriously, get a chicken fried steak the size of your head smothered in gravy with a side of mashed potatoes and you will understand why this is number one on my list. When I took my fiance to TX to meet my family he took one bite, looked at me and said, “Why in God’s name did you move up north?!?”
-The Ft. Worth Zoo. Some really amazing animals here including an albino alligator and a few others you may not have seen anywhere. They have an amazing herpetorium (herpetarium?) that you should check out.
-Addison, TX. This is a suburb of Dallas with more restaurants per capita than New York City and lots of other fun stuff including Pete’s Dueling Pianos and The Addison Improv.
-The Texas State Fair. The birthplace of deep-fried coca-cola should definitely be on your list of stuff to check out.
Horrible things that you should be aware of beforehand:
-The Heat. Oh my god, the heat is horrible! Your car will be 150 degrees inside less than an hour after you walk away from it. You need to have spray-on sunblock with you in your purse or glove box. Do not go outside without a bottle of water and sunglasses. The heat was one of the biggest reasons I moved away from Texas.
-The Driving. With little in the way of public transportation your car needs to be in excellent shape. If your car dies and it will take a week to fix it you need to have a rental because there really isn’t any way to get around the city without it. They do have a bus line and they are slowly installing a train line but they aren’t very effective.
-The Bugs. Have you ever seen 8,000 millipedes in your driveway? How about swarms of cockroaches/water beetles? Clouds of locusts attracted to the lights on a football field? If you haven’t yet you will soon. Even if you manage to avoid the bugs in huge numbers Texas is home to lots of really dangerous bugs you will run into one on one. I’ve killed more black widows, brown recluses, and scorpions than I care to remember. I used to sit in fields as a kid with a shoe box and catch tarantulas to keep as pets. These things will find their way into your home so be ready and don’t ever assume that something isn’t poisonious.
-The Conservatives. This isn’t as horrible as the rest of it but I have to say as a liberal it was really unpleasant to listen to coworkers talk about politics or go on dates with men who thought Rick Perry was a great govenor. I once was forced to switch desks because the woman sitting next to me at work didn’t think I was “Christian enough” to sit near her. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t Christian at all otherwise she might have keeled over right there. Be prepared for plenty of this kind of thing over time while you live there.
In general, the closer you get to central Dallas, the more urban the atmosphere will be. I lived in Oak Lawn and I also liked the adjacent Uptown area. Liberal, urban, and diverse. You start heading out past 635 and you’re in suburbia. The further away from the city you will tend to be more conservative with larger suburban houses. Both Richardson and Richland Hills will be suburban. Richland Hills is in Tarrant county while Richardson is in Dallas county. Suburban tract homes in both.
Kroger and Tom Thumb are the main supermarkets. Kroger is the same as everywhere. Tom Thumb is the Texas name for Safeway.
Texas Freeway is a good site to get you oriented about the freeways. Otherwise, check out the Dallas Morning News every day which has real time traffic information. http://www.dallasnews.com/
The alcohol laws are weird. Some places are dry, some places sell alcohol. No hard liquor is sold on Sundays. Car dealers are also closed on Sunday. Church is probably a bigger deal than you’re used to unless you’re coming from another Southern state.
No Food Lion’s any more. And there aren’t any HEB branded stores in DFW (Central Market is owned by HEB). Central Market is fun to shop at for speciality items and they have great meat and produce, but they’re a bit spendy. And you probably won’t be able to buy all your groceries there; their selection on things like soft drinks is more specialized than, say, Kroger.
That’s the Turnpike, now known as I-30.
It would help to know which part of the DFW area you’re moving to. It’s a really big area, and people in Dallas may casually visit FW (and vice versa) only a few times a year, if at all. Only about … oh, 40% of DFW is actually Dallas or FW proper. The rest is suburbs. It’s a sprawling area.
The part of Arlington I grew up in is not part of the city yet. There is at least one town on that map that is long gone. The last remnants of Greater Southwest airport are long gone. Arlington State College? No I-20? People still called I-30 the turnpike when I was growing up, but you can’t even till what it used to be.
Ahh memories.
Advice about moving there now? Everything I know is hopelessly outdated.
Now you’ve gone and told him? her? and s/he won’t scream and faint when s/he sees that first palmetto bug. Ah well, there’s still the grackles for a good fright for the newbie.
Oh yes. Forgot to mention this, because it’s what I’m used to. In the cities and some of the suburbs, people are pretty diverse in their beliefs, political and religious, but if you assume that someone is a Christian conservative, you’ll be right at least 75% of the time. The more rural a person is, the greater the likelihood of him/her fitting the stereotype of a redneck. A lot of us laugh at the Blue Collar Comedy shows because they’re true. Think of Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck if…” routines. I know a few people who can qualify…and a lot of them are related (by marriage).
Seriously, if you have a coughing fit in public, you will get at least one person tell you very sincerely that she’ll pray for you. She will expect you to be comforted by this idea, and grateful, and she’ll expect that these prayers will actually do you good. The prevailing religion is Southern Baptist, followed closely by Roman Catholicism. And what’s more, if you don’t acknowledge conservative Christianity as being completely correct in all things, you are a godless heathen and need to be Shown The Light. People actually use Chick Tracts around here, and not as an ironic statement, either. While it’s not common to see the tracts, it’s not really that rare, either.
The State Board of Education is either a joke or an embarrassment, depending on whether you’re a Texan or not.
Don’t let all this put you off, though. Texans are, for the most part, extremely friendly people (as long as you don’t push your librul heathen beliefs in their faces), and are usually willing to forgive damyankees for being born Back East. There’s good bits and bad bits about living anywhere, but you can have a lot of fun in DFW.
Thanks everybody. I probably should have pointed out that I’ve lived in Oklahoma City for 6 years now, so the politics and religion in the workplace will, if any different at all, probably be less strident in Dallas.
Also, I used to live in a swamp, on the coast, in the southeast US, so I’m kind of looking forward to the bugs, snakes, and grackles. Except the giant roaches that go ‘crunch’ when you get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, barefoot.
The weather, also, should be an improvement over OK. I know Dallas is a little wetter, which is, to me a huge advantage. The summer heat is more or less the same and, really, the south-central US has nothing on the southeast when it comes to summer misery. I’d rather bake than boil.
I would like to extend a hearty WELCOME to you. I’ve lived in the DFW Metroplex for 26 years now. The Metroplex is generally all of Dallas and Tarrant Counties. Sometimes the adjacent counties (Denton, Johnson, Wise, Parker, etc) are included because quite a few people live in the outlying counties and commute inward to work.
The areas are very diverse. Within each area is a lot of diversity. There are areas where will find little pockets of pasture with people raising cows, surrounded by a developement of zero lot line, half-million dollar McMansions. There are little pockets of semi-urban areas scattered around Dallas and Fort Worth. Several of the suburbs have developed “Town Centers” that are decent attempts to providing an alternative to driving to the downtowns for dining and shopping.
They’re scattered all over the place. For example, there is a “linear park” just a block from my house that exists under a high-tension power line. It’s a great place for an evening walk.
We have Krogers, Tom Thumb, Albertsons, Walmart, Sams, Costco. There are a few Market Streets (my preference). Aldis has just moved in, but they’re only in a few locations. There are two Central Markets in Tarrant County. They are awesome, put a little inconvenient and a little pricey for me. I’ll go there for a treat
I can’t help you much here. My favorite is the Movie Tavern. They have roomy seating and serve drinks and food. There is an art film theatre in Dallas and I think the one in Fort Worth (the Ridglea) is still open.
There is no online information that I know of for this. My advice here is to make temporary living arrangements for six months or so. Then get a feel for the traffic patterns round your work location. A big factor in the quality of life here is how much time you spend on the road. For example, I live 25 miles from my job. But, if I don’t time my commute carefully, it can easily be a 45-60 minute drive each way. There will a major contruction project starting in a year or two that will make it worse and I will have to adjust. That’s an example as to why there’s no easy answer to this question.
The liquor laws mentioned earlier - they’re a bit wierd. Each voting district gets to set its own laws, so the laws are a bit patchwork. That’s changing, though. It getting to the point that you can buy beer and wine almost anywhere. That’s one of the few good side-effects of Walmart. They’ve been able to get most of the suburbs to vote in beer and wine sales by threating to move out if denied the opportunity to sell beer and wine. Liquor sales are a little more restricted. For example, I have to drive about fifteen miles to restock my liquor cabinet.
Oh, goodness. Within a 100 miles, the list is endless. Fort Worth’s art museums are great. Bass Hall has a pretty impressive concert list, both symphony and pops. There are numerous playhouses in Tarrant County. Withing 30 miles of my house is Cedar Hill State Park and Grapevine Lake, both of which have good camping areas.
Love Field is, by law, a regional airport. It is also the home base of Southwest Airlines. So, while it’s hard to get to if you live in Tarrant County, you can get some sweet deals on regional flights. Longer flights, too, if you’re willing to change planes in Houston.
DFW airport is easy to get to. For years, the airport had a near monopoly on parking. How, however, there is some competetion from off-airport parking lots. My favorite is The Parking Spot. There are several others. They provide a shuttle that drops you right at the terminal. We can go from our front door to the airport gate in about an hour.
DFW is also the home base of American Airlines. They have a near-monopoly at DFW. As a result, you will find the ticket prices a little high on routes where they have no direct competition, which is the majority of routes. It can be a bit frustrating when you’re planning a vacation.
If you like Mexican food, you’ll be in heaven. Most neighborhoods have little hole-in-the-wall Mexican places that are good. I live in Northeast Tarrant County and, other than Mexican food, it’s pretty much chain-restaraunt hell.
Half-Priced Books is a local chain of used books stores that has grown a lot in the years I’ve been here. They are not as much fun as they used to be, but the one near us is still a pretty good place to browse.
I can’t help you much here. I know there are hospitals scattered all over the place. Both Dallas and Fort Worth have huge Medical Districts near downtown.
Bowling alleys have fallen on tough times in the last 4-5 years. There is still a big one in Euless on the freeway. There are small pool-halls/bars scattered around in several strip centers around here. They’re not my gig, though, so I don’t know much about them.
I don’t know of a website, but I’m sure it’s not hard to find one. Both Dallas (The Dallas Observer] and Fort Worth (Fort Worth Weekly] have pretty good weeklys. They have good info on the live music scene, buy their restaraunt guides leave a little to be desired. Half-Priced Books and the hole-in-the-wall restaraunts are good places to pick up a copy. I have a couple of favorite restaraunt/bars that feature live music and I will check their websites to see what’s coming up. Plus, I get good tips by word-of-mouth.
Sorry, I’m my own handyman and I do most of those things myself, so I can’t help much. I do know a good vet in Haltom City and a good A/C guy in Watuaga.
In general, this is a great place to live. It’s like most other places: it is what you make of it and you shouldn’t let yourself be defined by a place or its people. It has its own quirky politics, but so does every other place in the world. You can choose to alienate the people with different backgrounds and opinions, and you’ll find yourself alienated, just like everywhere else.
I live in a middle class, older neighborhood. One next-door neighbor is from New York, complete with the accent. The guy across the street is from Puerto Rico and I have more in common with him than with anyone else around here. His family likes to have pool parties with some awesome salsa music. Four doors down is a family from India. They always say Hello when they walk by.
I’m one of those rednecks that people on this board like to make broad generalizations about and poke fun at our behavior. I don’t care to live in the city, but my choice of career requires it. But, I decided years ago to make the best of it and enjoy some of the advantages that this area affords.
I worked at the Movie Tavern in Bedford back when it was a General Cinema.
My parents still live in Hurst, where I grew up, but I moved to California in 1993. I’m still close to several friends in the area, so we still visit fairly regularly; my knowledge is a bit out of date, though, for the purposes of this thread.
“HEB” is a school district to folks in the Metroplex (Hurst-Euless-Bedford). That those initials make people in other parts of the state think of the grocery store was a source of minor amusement during high school.
I have fond memories of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and would move back there without reservation if the right situation arose. As a basis for comparison, I went to college in Houston and hated that town. For the weather, mostly - which as the OP is surely aware is quite different from that in North Texas.
This isn’t as horrible as the rest of it but I have to say as a liberal it was really unpleasant to listen to coworkers talk about politics or go on dates with men who thought Rick Perry was a great govenor. I once was forced to switch desks because the woman sitting next to me at work didn’t think I was “Christian enough” to sit near her. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t Christian at all otherwise she might have keeled over right there. Be prepared for plenty of this kind of thing over time while you live there.
