National Register Listing

South Center Street Historic District

500-600 blks of S. Center St., Arlington, TX

The South Center Street Historic District represents one of Arlington's best extant examples of an early 20thcentury, bungalow-dominated residential neighborhood. By the turn of the century, Arlington had grown from a small rural village with a population of 275 to a town of 1,079 (Texas Almanac: 133). As the population steadily increased, several residential additions or neighborhoods were developed along the northern and southern fringes of the central business district, expanding the community beyond its original townsite boundaries. The vast majority of houses constructed within these early residential additions reflected architectural plans and styles locally and nationally popular amongst the growing middle and upper-middle classes. One such middle-class residential addition was the bungalow-dominated William H. Rose Addition (1916), which lies at the heart of the South Center Street Historic District. The district encompasses the best remaining grouping of early 20th-century bungalows within Arlington. As such, it is significant under NRHP Criterion C, at a local level, in the area of Architecture. The district is significant under Criterion A, in the area of Community Planning and Development, because it represents one of the community's few remaining architecturally intact residential additions of the pre-World War II era. The South Center Street Historic District presents a high degree of coherence and integrity and, in a broad sense, stands as a rare local example of a neighborhood that has managed to maintain its identity, despite intense redevelopment of adjacent neighborhoods.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2003.