The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 44. Lunch in Lacy Lakeview

Travel Date:  September 12, 2018

Veterans Memorial Park in Northcrest Lacy Lakeview, Texas.

Ever wonder what happened to Northcrest, Texas?  Yeah, me neither.  I wouldn't even know there was a Northcrest, Texas had Marci and I not stopped there to have lunch.  To be honest, I didn't even know there was a Northcrest, Texas once we did stop there.  In fact, I didn't know there was a Northcrest, Texas until just now, looking at Google Earth.  In fact, to be honest, there isn't a Northcrest, Texas.  Not anymore.  There also wasn't one when we showed up for lunch that day.  There once had been, but by the time we arrived, it was gone.  It vanished in 1998--well, sort of--and we didn't arrive until around 2:00 p.m. on September 12, 2018, our twenty-first wedding anniversary.  And so you can see we were far too late to experience Northcrest at all.  Well, sort of.

Besides this being the tale of our anniversary lunch date, this is also the tale of three cities:  Lacy, Lakeview and Northcrest.  It's an incredibly uneventful story, but I like those types of stories best of all.  If I could write a great novel--and I can't, for I never finish what I start--rather than having some climatic plot, I'd develop a plot similar to the topography of a good slice of Texas.  I'd start with as much excitement as a grain field outside Amarillo can conjure up, and then I'd slowly fizzle out the action unit it ended flat as a mosquito-infested salt marsh along the Gulf Coast.  Rather than killing off characters, I'd just have them doze off while reading travel books about places like Lacy, Lakeview and Northquest, and I'd just never wake them up.  They'd spend eternity slumbering on couches or love seats, heads turned sideways, snoring and spitting slobber over delicately embroidered pillows.  There'd be lots of flies buzzing on screen doors.  Perhaps there'd be a plant sitting in a window above an old ceramic sink filled with shucked corn.  There'd most definitely be an old toilet with hard water stains in an add-on bathroom that has a green ceramic-tile and pink and purple daisy-print wallpaper on the walls.  Yet, the greatest action in my great American novel would be Mother turning off the television each night for family prayer and Dad saying "Shit" as he steps in dog crap on the front lawn on his way in from working at the gas station just down the block.  I like my fiction real.  There should be thousands of uneventful hours to read about and only a few pages dedicated to exciting moments such as taking little Andrew to the emergency room after he stepped on a nail and drove it deep into the heal of his right foot.  After reading my book, people would be more than ready to face their own tedious lives with enthusiasm.  Northcrest would be the ideal setting for such a revolutionary novel.  Perhaps the opening scene would not be all that different than our own drive into town:

Under a big blue Texas sky with big blotchy, slightly scattered rain clouds, the Browns exited I-35 to enter what had once been Northcrest, Texas via E. Crest Drive, a four-lane strip of asphalt that quickly narrowed to two.  Our two protagonists, if they could be called that, were relatively hungry.  Steve, the husband, in fact felt famished, but then he usually did after hours on Texas highways, boredom gnawing the inside of his gut like a wild dog cleaning out a cow carcass and climbing out blood-faced to smile at the hot, Texas sun and that one passing farm truck.  Marci, the wife, too was hungry, but determined not to admit it.  Stopping for food would lengthen the hours between WiFi hot spots.  She could wait, she thought, until the motel in Austin.

Outside, on the left, placed at a diagonal, facing both the frontage road and E. Crest Drive, was a gas station with four regular pumps under a blue-gray metal canopy and a separate pump for diesel off to the side.  Behind that was a convenience store with dark tinted glass mirroring the acres of black asphalt out front.  There were a few scattered cars headed to or leaving the pumps and a long-nosed semi-truck with a sleeper and a flat-bed trailer parked off to the right, between the gas station and a corrugated metal Family Dollar next door.  Beyond that was Bush's Chicken, and that was the end of the business district.

The Browns were fine with that.  School teachers, they were used to being poor.  They needed no fine eating establishment.  Vacation, for them, even one celebrating twenty-one years of marriage, was having a good picnic in a park.  In fact, they were looking for a picnic table at that exact moment.  Marci had seen a sign.  It had said, Veterans Memorial Park.  Together, the Browns had deduced there just might be some picnic tables there.

And so the courageous couple ventured forth down this long, straight lane edged with a sidewalk on the right and an irrigation ditch on the left with long, bushy, uncut grass along the edges.  The houses all faced the cross streets, only their boring, windowless brick ends facing E. Crest Drive, the primary route of our pilgrims' progress.  

And so it continued, block after block, until our courageous couple happened upon a time-tormented white stucco garage of sorts with little bits of what once had been red trim clinging to rotted wood for dear life.  The company name was faded beyond recognition, but Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies could clearly be made out.  Oddly enough, there appeared to be a customer, for there was a car out front.  Behind the debilitated ambitious enterprise stood a tall metal tower and Marci announced, "According to my GPS, the park should be somewhere around here."

At this point we'll break with our narrative.  Once again I have failed to follow through with a complete story.  Perhaps a travel book is better suited to the situation at hand anyway.

Behind Something, Something Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies is the ugliest park dedicated to our men in uniform that I have ever seen.  Rather than hiring an architect, the city officials must have done the sensible thing and had the town's kindergarten students draw up site plans and awarded the best one with a contract, I assume paid in full prior to ground-breaking with such and such amount of lollipops as recorded in the town's minutes.

And you know, I loved it.  I truly did.  Rather than trying to unify the grounds with the elements and principles of design, they just made this sort of loop with concrete--somewhat square, somewhat diamond-shaped, a little bit oval, and then squiggled here and there, and then they just plopped things down almost randomly, but not quite.  On the north side of the park are four covered picnic tables, all rigidly perpendicular to the back chain link fence, the only geometry in the park.  Everything else is just tossed upon the green.   Sort of in the center, but not really, is a formal garden with two granite stones set upright like the twin-towers which they memorialize.  Instead of doing something insanely conventional like placing them in the center of an octagonal plaza with walkways converging on it from all sides of the park, you know, like you'd see in Rome or Washington D.C., they placed the main feature in the park in a little alcove in a waist-high wall of hedges along a curvy path that is not reached from the side of the park facing town, but rather from the side facing away from town.  Residents have to walk around the park, and by Something, Something Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies and then along a highway without sidewalks to reach the main gate.  Cows, on the other hand, if they break through the fence of the field across the highway, can walk right in.  It's quite interesting.  Rather than consume volumes of paper trying to describe it, I've supplied a visual below.  The only things the picture doesn't quite capture are the bright blue benches randomly spaced along the walkways.  You'll have to fill that detail in yourself.

Veterans Memorial Park viewed via Google Earth.
Note, the main entrance faces a highway and fields (top)
while the secondary entrance (bottom) faces town.

However, here's the great thing about art:  it's all relative.  Although grandma's painting of Texas bluebonnets, a barn, a dirt road, and what is supposed to be a live-oak tree is complete garbage alongside an Edward Hopper, compared to a Thomas Kinkade, her painting is actually quite nice.  And, to be honest, even a Kinkade jigsaw puzzle is somewhat enjoyable to look at while putting it together Christmas day--although admittedly much funner to destroy after you're finished.  So too with gardens.  Although the now defunct town of Northcrest (or it's replacement town, Lacy Lakeview) did certainly manage to build one of the ugliest monuments possible in remembrance of their veterans' service, it is still a beautiful place in an odd non-artful sort of way, simply because it is, after all, a park, and all parks add some grace.  One cannot go wrong by opening up some green space and providing a few picnic tables.  Although a good architect could render earth-shaking spirituality from such a plot, even having your kindergarten class (or Thomas Kinkade) design your park cannot do too much harm because in the end, all parks are beautiful.

. . . . .

Some of the most joyous moments of writing this book occur not while writing about what I actually experienced, but rather, in the tidbits of information I've gleaned in my limited, lazy-man's Wikipedia research along the way.  For instance, if I'd never started writing this book, I'd never know there was a Twitty, Texas, even though such a fact seems obvious with all the twits there are in Texas.  Likewise, I wouldn't know about the long, uneventful legacy of the three communities, Lacy, Lakeview and Northcrest, which I'll get to in a minute.

First, however, here's a commitment to myself in writing:  if I ever do get this book published, and if I ever sell more than ten copies, I will donate 10% of my royalties to Wikipedia.  Yes, it may not be real research, and yes all historians would scoff at even attaching that word research to whatever it is one does while googling articles on Wikipedia, but that nonprofit organization opens up worlds of information to lazy armchair intellectuals like myself.  And although it may not always be 100% accurate, it's a lot more accurate than if we just sat in our armchairs and made up the facts ourselves.  So, here's a plug for the democratization of knowledge made possible by Wikipedia--the primary source of information in this book other than my own experience.  And even when their editors don't catch all the mistakes, Wikipedia articles are still far more factual than anything on Fox News.  Now to the story of Northcrest Lacy Lakeview, Texas, which if my source is correct, is all true:

If you're picturing a lake viewed through fine, lacy pine bows, or dangling Spanish moss as the source for the town's name, get that image out of you're head, because you're wrong.  The name comes from two separate towns that later merged.  Lacy, which came first, is named for "William David Lacy, who sold lots in the 1800s" (Wikipedia).  According to Wikipedia, Lakeview "named for its location near spring-fed lakes," although I personally witnessed no sign of water, not even in the park drinking fountain.  The article goes on to say that both towns were "stations along the Texas Electric Railway, also known as the Interurban which ran between Dallas and Waco" (Wikipedia).

The article goes on to say that "neither town grew quickly" and that "by the 1940s the combined population of the two communities was barely 120 with four businesses" (Wikipedia).

So, in 1953, in desperation (I added that loaded word to liven up this exposition), the two communities combined.  Although this did ignite growth, the town reaching 2,000 inhabitants by the 1960's, all the growth was residential, as the town became a bedroom community of Waco.

In further desperation (again, my words), the community of Northcrest (where our fabulous park sits) merged with Lacy Lakeview, which allowed the former three communities "to qualify under Texas law for home rule status" (Wikipedia).

Now, if like me, you don't have a clue what "home rule status" is, thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you.  "Home rule" basically means that those ruling over you now consider you significant enough to now rule yourselves.  I'm assuming, in this case, it now meant the new larger Lacy Lakeview was now significant enough to have either a town council or a mayor or both.  And what a blessing!  Without them, who would there have been to approve having the town's kindergarten class design the Veterans Memorial Park?

An uneventful story, but if it never happened, Marci and I would never had a memorable 21st anniversary lunch in a town that no longer exists.  The world may not know where Northcrest, Texas once was, but I, on the other hand will never forget, even though I just learned about the town writing this.  May the residents of this bedroom community continue their sleepy lives blissfully forever.  And if the boredom of the Texas landscape ever eats out your guts on your journey between Dallas and Austin, well drop by for an enjoyable picnic in the nation's ugliest Veterans Memorial Park.  And if you didn't pack a lunch, you can always stop by Bush's Chicken and get a bucket to go.  I'm sure they could use your business. 

Such a lovely, homely park.  Do stop by.

References

Wikipedia. Lacy Lakeview, Texas. 9 September 2019. 30 December 2019.