“Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows.” We all remember this chant from our youth and from reciting it with our own children. Well, this post is not a commentary on Robert Louis Stevenson or the Brothers Grimm, but a recent observation on the insatiable growth of Dallas and its major life-giving arteries, the Dallas North Tollway and Preston Road.
A client recently requested some reconnaissance of what’s going on up north, so I got into the Tahoe and hit the road. I was familiar with Frisco and the self-sustaining community it has become, but my assignment was for the far far north. The end of the Tollway at State Highway 380, where it turned into a caliche road just a few years ago, now extends to F.M. 428 as the Dallas North Parkway. Concrete, curb, and guttered all the way, it ends at a T-intersection.
So I headed east toward Celina, home of the Bobcats, with several state football championships, and onto S.H. 289, the familiar Preston Road, for the trek home. Along the way I veered onto a side road or two, exploring potential major east-west intersections where our grandchildren will be developing homes, shopping centers, and office buildings.
It was fun again to ride the caliche trails connecting the main arteries, kicking up dust, patching together the future locations where commercial real estate will turn farm land into fortunes. Places where people will live, work, and play-and continue to grow this region we call Dallas.
As I headed the 30 miles south from F.M. 428 to Northwest Highway and our office in Preston Center (which my mother-in-law still says is “out north”), I could not help but think of the famous Texas cattleman, Jesse Chisholm, as he drove his cattle north for sale in Kansas, on what is now Preston Road/S.H. 289, but was then called the Chisholm Trail.
Reflecting upon that, as development “goes round and round,” maybe it will not stop after all.
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