By Eleanor Forfang-Brockman
My husband, David, and I enjoy living in the friendly neighborhood gathered along our West Meadowbrook cul-de-sac. This is a quiet place; the fact that we do not live on a through street encourages foot traffic and dog walking.
The residential area is an architect’s delight. Every street is different. Nearly every house is different. In some areas, older Craftsman houses predominate. In others, they are interspersed with houses from a variety of decades. The small A-frame house that was the original real estate office for the West Meadowbrook area still sits on Oakland Boulevard. It is now a charming small-home residence.
Front yards are also interesting. Amid blocks of manicured lawns, one finds occasional yards with winding walks and gardens, or yards given over to native plants, or a few punctuated with art in iron, stone or wood — and perhaps areas where one can sit out under the ample shade.
The old neighborhood fire station sits on a triangular plot of land at the corner of Oakland and Meadowbrook. It is now a working pottery shop, offering handmade ceramic products as well as lessons. Sharing the grounds is Coffee Folk, a neighborhood favorite. People gather there four mornings a week, or stop by on the way to work or school. Dogs and yoga practitioners are welcome. The large pecan trees on this little plot of land bear the marks of grafting, evidence that they were once part of a larger pecan grove before the land was carved up and sold for residential building.
Before the laying out of its own cul-de-sac, the street we live on used to be a farm. Traces of it remain, if you know where to look. The original farmhouse still exists at the top of the hill, though largely modified. At the bottom of the hill, one can find the rectangular stone well. At the end of the street, a solitary pear tree is the ancient remnant of an orchard. Beyond that, the large depression in the yard of Meadowbrook Elementary School remembers the lake associated with the farm.
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Our neighborhood is a good place for recreation and to get in touch with nature. Gateway Park is just to the northwest across Interstate 30. And along the south side of I-30 is the Tandy Hills Natural Area. Our neighborhood has easy access to Oakland Lake Park, and patches of brush and woods make our neighborhood attractive to a large variety of bird species, wildlife and pollinators — particularly butterflies.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, David and I started to learn about local bird life and have been astonished at how species-rich this area is. In addition to the ubiquitous crow, cardinal, tufted titmouse and varieties of sparrow, we regularly see white-winged doves, Carolina chickadees, downy woodpeckers, two species of wren, eastern bluebirds, Cooper’s hawks, screech owls, and sometimes mourning doves. More occasionally, visitors include whistling ducks and night herons, and other visitors from the park lake include great white egrets and blue herons.
The mature trees shade the neighborhood, especially species native to this Cross Timbers region of North Texas: cedar elm, pecan and post oak. Of course, all these are aging now, leaving gaps as they fall. Because they are not popular landscaping species, these trees are difficult to replace. What is more, while they readily reseed, many of them do not do well with transplantation. Nevertheless, my hope is that we do not simply replace them with whatever is trendy at the moment. Our native trees are valuable not only because of their longevity and beauty, but because they are adapted to our particular weather and soils.
West Meadowbrook is truly a gem hidden in East Fort Worth.
Eleanor Forfang-Brockman is a retired adult English as a second language teacher at Tarrant County College, artist and aspiring naturalist. Her family moved to this West Meadowbrook neighborhood when she was 14, and she returned with her writer and professor husband, David, in 2000.
Meadowbrook
Total population: 4,690
Male: 50% | Female: 50%
Age
0-9: 16%
10-19: 16%
20-29: 14%
30-39: 16%
40-49: 13%
50-59:12%
60-69: 8%
70-79: 4%
80 and older: 2%
Education
No degree: 29%
High school: 30%
Some college: 19%
Bachelor’s degree: 11%
Post-graduate: 11%
Race
White: 21% | Black: 16% | Hispanic: 59% | Asian: 0% | Two or more: 4%
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