Fort Worth’s longtime rivalry with Dallas isn’t as contentious as it was in the old days, but the feud still percolates now and again.
On Monday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram blog site, Crime Time, posted an article under the headline “Two Dallas neighborhoods make web site’s list of most dangerous.” The article pinpointed the areas near the intersection of Route 352 and Scyene Road, and around 2nd Avenue and Hatcher Street as two of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods with the highest predicted rates of violent crime in America, according to a WalletPop.com survey.
On Tuesday, however, the D Magazine blog site, FrontBurner, was encouraging readers to avoid Fort Worth, not Big D.
Under the headline “Everything Outside of Dallas Going Crazy,” the post described how a man and woman carjacked a Good Samaritan after he stopped to help them along a road on the South Side of Fort Worth.
Coinky-dink? Methinks not.
Of course, the news media has perpetuated the Fort Worth-Dallas feud from the beginning. Most folks probably couldn’t care less.
The bad blood dates back to the late 1800s, when a Dallas newspaper printed a remark about Fort Worth being such a backward, lethargic town that a panther was seen sleeping on Main Street at noon. Fort Worth took the insult in stride and immediately adopted the nickname Panther City.
The feud escalated in the 1920s and 1930s as Star-Telegram owner Amon G. Carter made it a point to lob verbal grenades in Dallas’ direction at every opportunity. He allegedly carried a sack lunch with him whenever he visited Dallas – he didn’t want to spend so much as a penny at any restaurant inside the Dallas city limits.
Can’t we all just get along?
Well, we could if those hoity-toity Dallas people weren’t such pretentious snobs.
