Before moving to Prosper in 2011 I lived for 25 years in Orange County, CA. I remembered with fondness the Marine Corp Air Base with it's massive 12 story old Blimp Hangars in Tustin where all manner of Rotary Wing aircraft would come and go daily flying right over my house sometimes. I remember with regret as the base was abandoned and converted into shopping and apartments and one of the great hangars was destroyed to make way for progress. The buildings were so massive they could have their own weather inside including clouds and rain. As you could imagine, they were very expensive to maintain.
Other-times I'd get the Blue Angels from the airshow at El Toro flying in formation over my head as they circled in a lazy U-turn to begin another approach for 100,000's of people gathered to watch the excitement at the base. Now El Toro is long since abandoned and is slowly being converted into housing, retail and office space. Here's an arial pic during it's heyday.
And how it looks now
When I moved to Orange County in the mid 80's Irvine was a small town and John Wayne Airport was a small single building with a great restaurant on the top floor with signed autographs from some of the most famous pilots in history, along with tickets and check in on floor two, and the bottom floor wasn't really a floor at all. Part of the bottom floor was open to the elements and only surrounded by a chain link fence. In the middle of floor one were several luggage roundtables that everyone is used to seeing and at the front of the building where the chain link fence parted was a nice old man checking baggage claim stubs.
Now John Wayne Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world despite only have a single runway for commercial flights and it's new massive building was made famous in Jerry Maguire. If you pay attention, when they show him running through an airport over and over again, it's always different angles of the then new John Wayne terminal.
But the homeyness of the old airport was now long gone.
For those of us who live in Prosper, the disappearance of it's rural past is fast approaching. I've lived here for only 10 years but I've seen the city grow by 600% since 2011. Preston Rd used to be slimly traveled and was only 2 lanes compared to the now 6 lane divided road that has replaced it and the 50,000 cars a day. The grain silo's are, were, the thing that tied us to our cotton farming past and it wasn't long ago that Prosper still had significant parcels of land dedicated to that crop. Even though they were grain silo's for local chicken farms and had nothing to do with Cotton production, they meant something to us living here. They tied us to our quickly disappearing rural past.
Jerry Jones owns much of the land between Coleman and DNT and these are being demolished to make way for future development. Fortunately, some and at least one of the large silo's will remain and Prosper has stated that it is dedicated to the protection of these for our future generations. I thank the city for their consideration on this matter and their desire to protect some of our heritage though of course I wish they all could remain.