Search This Blog

Sunday, January 1, 2006

What's in a name?

Why the name NorthWest Carrollton?

In January 2006, I stood on my front porch and thought how do you start a neighborhood group where everyone is NOT back in their homes and some folks are staying in other cities and only coming into town on weekends. I also looked around and thought what makes a logical boundary for a neighborhood group? Then I asked myself the real deciding question: how far can I walk and flyer every building or, in January 2006, every car that didn't look like it had flooded? I decided that Carrollton, Claiborne, Leonidas & Earhart was about as large an area as I could hope to cover by myself for the first 3 or so months.

I got lucky. The West Carrollton neighborhood boundary almost exactly coincided with my physical limitation boundaries. It seemed silly not to include the commerical area on Earhart and not to set the boundaries at the "big streets".

When I did more research I found the Preservation Research Center showed that almost the same area was a part of the Carrollton Historic Register Neighborhood. When you think you and your neighbors could end up a green dot and the map says you have to "prove your viability", being a part of historic Carrollton seemed like a very good thing indeed.

I'm a 9th Ward girl (my husband moved me uptown in 1988 and we moved to our NorthWest Carrollton home in 1997). So I didn't really have any preconcieved notions about the area. The choice in the name and the boundaries were made on research and the limitations due to having to ensure that, with or without phones, electricity or eMail, everyone in the area could get flyers about neighborhood meetings.