If your not from Denton please read anyway. This WILL happen to your town if it hasn't already. This is the new trend. Since the economy has to keep growing more more places will be pilaged, raped, beaten, and left to die.

Being a Dentonite for 6 1/2 years I've heard people bemoan the death of this town since I got here. During this time I've watched a cool artsy town strongly based around a local economy become and more coporatized and gentrified into another Frisco/Plano/Lewisville surban hell. Are we there yet? No, but we are certainly on the fast track. When I first got here the only thing on the loop once you got away for I-35 was Mal-Wart and Lowes, then trees that reached to the sky. Now, its a bustling area that looks like it was surgically cut out of Plano and grafted onto the Denton landscape. Over the last few the City Council has been drooling like vampires in a blood bank over this new plan. They want more bourgois mcmansion owning types and less alternative lifestyle artsy types, all the while claiming Denton as an arts town. They've been chipping away at the soul of this town for a while but sent an A-bomb recently. Fry St. will exsist no more as we have come to know and love it. Kiss is goodbye. No more sitting on the roof of Cool Beans listening to a great band. No more drinking at TJs and finishing the night with some great wings, a good band, and pool. Forget rifling through for burried riches at Treasure Isles, singing Bohemian Rhapsody with strangers at the Tomato, or a romantic night of pasta, wine, and hookahs at Bagheri's. This is all ancient history. Or at least that's the way the city council would have it. A large Californian company has bought the property where all these establishments are located. They are planning on bulldozing it and putting up an 8 story apartment complex with businesses on the bottom that open up to the street. I'm sure the rent for these buisness will be out of the range of most local entrepeneurs. I have to wonder if anyone gives a flying fuck? I've heard some grumblings but not the outrage such a tragedy deserves. Have we really grown this complacent? When will you care? When the Kharma is bought out and bulldozed for a StarFucks? When Zebrahead is replaced? When they use eminant domain laws to take the Delta Lodge? Maybe when Voertman's becomes a Barnes & igNoble college book store and the Inferno becomes a Coyote Ugly? Or will you wait until they decide to change the laws the yard Nazis enforce, and that siding or wood on your home is no longer up to "community standards," and you have to get bricks or tear it down? Maybe when carports aren't good enough and are considered "trashy". Ironic, considering most stuff designed/created by Frank Loyd Wright is out of this world expensive but carports equal white trash. Maybe when there are no clubs left for your band to play at so you'll have to drive to Dallas or Ft. Worth but can't afford the gas so your bands dies from carbon monixide because you can't get out of your garage. It seems like the University might care, but it's sitting on its obsese ass dining off the corpses of the overworked students populus. When college towns lose what makes them unique people stop coming. Denton is on the verge of losing just that. IF UNT wants to change its image from a communiter school they better give students more of an inncentive to live here. That incentive doesn't come from huge corporations. Those are available where they live now. Why move to a place that's just like your hometown but your going to have to pay lodging? UNT, as an alumnus you disgust me. You are a sick bloated whore that needs to have your abssess drained. You do not listen to your student body only to your accountants. Students cry more parking and you give them more dorms. Housing is plentiful in this town. You do not need an eight story apartment complex. You're not that large of a school and never will be if you assist in sucking the individuality out of this town. Many people come here when looking at schools and like the fact its a smaller Austin. You can recognize most of the regulars in the area, but it is made up of a diverse range of backgrounds. Those people will leave when you take away (or at least cut it in half) a cultural haven like Fry St. Thus you will lose students who come here for that reason. The mayor and city council can kiss my ass in Hell. You claim you want an arts town; you want to build an arts walk, you care about the arts in this community. Then why don't you back your words with actions? What you define as art has no underlying substance but it matches that new couch and rug well. This town has more artists (painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, filmmakers) per capita than any town than I can think of. The only problem is they don't make "art" that is pretty and to your liking. Instead of helping bands you hurt them and the clubs (local businesses) by passing ordincences that make it more difficult for them to draw crowds. You don't want Art, you want arts & crafts. Just be honest about it and don't hide behind these facades.
Denton is dying and if you don't think so your either in denial, unobservant, or maybe you just enjoy the suburban nightmare. There is still time left to save her but it is running short. Are you going to strum your guitar while it burns or are you going to crank that amp to 10 and tell the fuckers whose town this really is?