Turtle Creek, Dallas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the creek, see Turtle Creek (Dallas County, Texas). For the road, see Turtle Creek Boulevard.

Turtle Creek is a neighborhood running along Turtle Creek and adjacent Turtle Creek Boulevard in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas, Texas (USA).

Turtle Creek has also become an adopted nickname for the Oak Lawn neighborhood, though never an official one. The nickname also sometimes applies to a spillover of the Uptown area, which has become the official monicker for the area between downtown Dallas and Oak Lawn beginning in the 1980s.

The name Turtle Creek also graces a number of business and real estate properties in the area, many of which have addresses away from Turtle Creek Boulevard. There is even a Turtle Creek News which is published twice weekly and circulated in Uptown, Oak Lawn and Highland Park.

But throughout much of the 20th Century, the mention of "the Turtle Creek area" has brought visions of majestic oaks and lush greenery, manmade waterfalls along the creek (built for drainage), ripples over the white rock, mother ducks with their young following behind, a sense of escape from the Texas summer, the luxury high-rises along the boulevard, and, yes, even sightings of the turtles for which the creek was named. It was at one time, the home of the exclusive Dallas Athletic Club before it moved eastward to Mesquite. To this day, the downhill drive on any street that crosses Turtle Creek imparts a brief sense of ease and relaxation.

In more recent decades, the neighborhood became the favorite of the gay community, seeking a refuge, or ghetto, in the "buckle of the Bible Belt". In truth, it was Oak Lawn and Uptown more broadly for which this was true, but the inclusion of Turtle Creek and its bend along Lee Park and Arlington Hall provided some romance for the renaissance the gay and lesbian community would bring to a neighborhood that had become blighted by the 1960s and 1970s.

[edit] External links

• The Turtle Creek Association
• High-Rise Condos of Turtle Creek

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