Skyline Drive neighborhood has history
Bella Vista Heights, the neighborhood around Skyline Drive, has gone through several phases over the decades.
The hillside neighborhood hosted several cottages that were initially part of the Old Bella Vista POA. A Nov. 4, 1980, Weekly
Vista story looked at the neighborhood’s early days as part of the original Bella Vista resort village which the Linebarger brothers built between 1915 and 1930.
The cottages, formerly filling out the neighborhood, were among several hundred built by the Linebargers in this period and they were conveniently placed a stone’s throw from the then-freshly-dammed Lake Bella Vista and the Wonderland Cave, which was opened as a nightclub in 1930.
But, by the time the land was purchased by Cooper Communities in 1963, those cottages were in rough shape. Only a handful of cottages remain, and mobile homes that started to appear in the 1960s remain in the neighborhood today.
These homes vary immensely today, with some occupied by owners, others rented and others sitting uninhabitable because of damage from storms or fires. In the 1970s, a neighborhood group formed among residents to keep the mobile home park clean and safe. But initially
these buildings were placed primarily as guest houses to help Cooper Communities show its new resort village to prospective home buyers.
Gilbert Fite’s From Vision To Reality: a History of
Bella Vista Village details a point in 1966 where home sales sagged and Cooper Communities was feeling pressure related to these slow sales and high expenses while trying to build new streets, water lines and golf course outlays.
According to Fite’s book, part of the challenge was providing a place for prospective home buyers to stay — at the time relying on Bentonville hotels — and the area around Skyline Drive featured several hundred lots.
Relatively inexpensive mobile homes could provide temporary housing as people took up invitations to visit the village, and in 1965 the company took out a line of credit to put 200 homes on the hill.
Workers started placing concrete slabs for the homes in January 1966 and it wasn’t long before something resembling a neighborhood popped up.
Business started to pick up for Cooper, in part because of a public relations effort headed by noted Arkansas journalist Ernie Deane, and over the years several of these homes were purchased by individuals.
Bella Vista Historical Society president Xyta Lucas said she knew a
couple who came to check out Bella Vista in 1974 and ended up purchasing the trailer they stayed in while visiting.
“I remember a number of parties there,” she recalled.
Residents of the stillyoung neighborhood formed a neighborhood group, the Hilltoppers, to keep the neighborhood safe and attractive in 1976, according to an article in the May 19, 1976, Village
Vista.
According to the article, residents were primarily concerned with quality for renters, police protection and the area’s appearance. This group coined the neighborhood’s Bella Vista Heights name at some point, with the earliest reference printed in the June 13, 1978, Weekly Vista.
In 1977 the association renamed the streets and worked to realign them somewhat to ensure better navigation for visitors and emergency workers.
During its time, the Hilltoppers group hosted picnics, golf tournaments and neighborhood cleanup events, met at the Hill ‘N’ Dale restaurant next to Lake Bella Vista — of which only a concrete foundation remains — and released a newsletter called The Hilltopper that contained poems, neighborly advice, games and puzzles, alerts about crime in the neighborhood and other neighborhood and POA-related news.
The Winter 1992 newsletter contained a letter from Glen Stromath, then-president of the neighborhood group, who lamented a decline in meeting turnout — from an average of more than 60 people in the group’s early days to fewer than 40 at the time.
“Maybe we are just getting older and don’t care about what’s going on here on the hill, I hope not,” he wrote.
The group is no longer present.
Today, Bella Vista Heights sits as a small pocket of unincorporated land, meaning it is not in city limits despite being in the POA.