Then and now: Look at how North Texas has changed since 2007, via Google Street View

DALLAS — Not-so-breaking news: North Texas has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Heck, even the last five years has brought more growth and development than most metro areas see in 50.

So, it’s not exactly surprising to see then-and-now photos from across Dallas-Fort Worth, and the changes that have ensued since the mid-2000s. New highways and apartments. New sports stadiums and skyscrapers. Old arenas and buildings torn down.

North Texas’ ever-changing façade, it turns out, plays well into the latest nostalgia-inducing trend on social media: Diving into the flashbacks buried in Google Maps.

Google’s Street View feature has become a favorite on TikTok, where users are posting pictures from Google’s trove of historical images. Most of these are pure nostalgia, and sometimes a bit teary-eyed; for example, seeing a loved one on Street View picture from 2008, before they passed away. Or seeing your childhood home before you moved away for college. 

Others are just simply fascinating, and that’s what we dove into for North Texas.

Here’s a look:

Before Klyde Warren Park made Woodall Rodgers Freeway a tunnel, the highway was sunken, but uncovered, similar to U.S. 75 in Dallas. The lack of a deck park in the old photos, and the surrounding development (the soon-to-be-constructed AT&T Performing Arts Center, for example) are what stand out here.

One of the busier stretches of bars and apartments in Dallas now, Henderson Avenue at Belmont was just starting to be developed in 2007.

Before the Cowboys moved to the glitzy confines of AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the club played their home games at Texas Stadium, a semi-dome with a window in the roof and a sea of parking lots surrounding it, all wedged between several freeways in Irving. Texas Stadium was demolished (blown up) in 2010. The land where the stadium sat remains empty.

Speaking of Cowboys’ stadiums, their new digs in Arlington, which opened in 2009, transformed the city’s stadium district. Before Jerry Jones came to town, it was just the Rangers’ Ballpark in Arlington (and their old stadium before that). Now there’s the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, the Rangers’ new Globe Life Field, and the Rangers’ old baseball stadium, still standing across the street.

“There used to be a field there” is what every dad in North Texas has probably said at one point. This was the ultimate field-turned-development in the last decade. The Dallas Cowboys’ Star development sprung up on the plains of Frisco and became the team’s new headquarters.

The West 7th Street development was one of the biggest Fort Worth developments in the last 20 years, a sprawl of apartments, shops, restaurants and bars. In 2007, there was hardly any of that.

The Dallas Mavericks and Stars left Reunion Arena for American Airlines Center around the turn of the century, but their old home remained standing for a few more years. Reunion Arena sat just south of Reunion Tower, an area that remains a largely undeveloped field.

The first of Dallas’ twin bridges (not identical but both designed by Santiago Calatrava) was erected in 2012, changing the western view of downtown Dallas.