r/Dallasdevelopment

Downtown Dallas was so dense that it left no room for parks. It was completely built out by this time with little to no parking lots and no freeways. There was consistent development from Dealey Plaza to Deep Ellum…and beyond.

Skillman-Live Oak Center is a Main Street, but built in that transition period after WW2. This has parking (well before Dallas established parking minimums), but there isn't a ton of it. You'd never see a major department store in Dallas today built with hardly any parking like this.

Here's the same building today

Found this article from 2006 about Volk Brothers at Skillman-Live Oak Center

These tales could change how you think about Lakewood.

Her sons may not have liked it, but Betty Hathcox still remembers how much she appreciated taking them shopping for shoes at one of Dallas’ finest department stores — just blocks from her home off Gaston Avenue.

“It was a very beautiful store, and it was so convenient,” says Hathcox, who has lived in the neighborhood for 55 years. “The store was quite unique back then, something that big in the neighborhood.”

Her destination? The suburban location at Skillman and Live Oak of Volk’s Bros., then one of the city’s leading retailers, comparable to Neiman Marcus.

“You used to be able to get anything there,” says Hathcox, who bought her sons Stride-Rite saddle shoes, something of a rite of passage for boys who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“It was very exclusive — good men’s clothing, a women’s department, even jewelry.”

The four biggest retailers in Dallas after World War II were Neiman’s, Volk’s, Titche’s and Sanger’s. So the fact that our neighborhood had a Volk’s was a big deal. In those days, the leading department stores were all downtown; Neiman’s, for instance, had only one suburban store, at Preston Road and Northwest Highway, well into the 1960s.

And by all accounts, Volk’s was an impressive store — not just because of the quality of its merchandise (it was where neighborhood women bought hats for Easter, and Hathcox still has some jewelry she purchased there), but also because of its design and layout. The main entrance on Skillman, near the middle of the building, was an atrium, and the highlight of the atrium was an indoor-outdoor goldfish pond.

“My mother used to drag my brother and I down there to go shopping,” says Alan Clarke, a life-long Casa Linda resident, “and the only thing that made it worthwhile was the goldfish pond.”

But Volk’s suffered the same problems that plagued so many other local retailers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as malls changed people’s shopping habits, and residents moved to more distant suburbs. Colbert’s, a local women’s clothing chain, bought Volk’s in 1970, and the stores became Colbert-Volk’s. The downtown store closed in 1973, and the Skillman store disappeared by the early 1980s. Colbert’s hung on until the late ’90s (there was a store in Casa Linda almost to the end), and then it, too, went out of business.

Full credit goes to ahx0 on Dallas Metropolis: https://dallasmetropolis.com/dfwu/viewtopic.php?p=59717&sid=0dbdcea29d283fb6c134d8fe6a6153e0

Full credit goes to ahx0 on Dallas Metropolis: https://dallasmetropolis.com/dfwu/viewtopic.php?p=59726&sid=6241e31a176efc195a5f02fecc811cdb

Comparing https://resume.zoevera.com against https://chatgpt.com

And what a purpose-built ATS checker caught that GPT-4 didn’t.

Let me be upfront: I use ChatGPT for everything. Code reviews, draft emails, explaining stack traces at 2am. It’s genuinely useful. So when I needed to tailor my resume for a senior backend role, my first instinct was to open a chat window.

That was three weeks ago. Here’s what I learned.

What ChatGPT actually does well

Ask ChatGPT to “improve my resume” and it will:

• Clean up passive voice (“responsible for” → “led”)
• Suggest stronger action verbs
• Add structure and formatting consistency
• Rewrite vague bullets into something that sounds more impressive

For general writing quality, it’s genuinely good. If your resume reads like it was written by someone who hasn’t slept in 48 hours, ChatGPT will fix that.

What ChatGPT fundamentally cannot do

Here’s the problem: ChatGPT doesn’t know what job you’re applying for.

You can paste the job description into the prompt, sure. But there’s no mechanism for it to:

1. Score your resume against that specific JD — it has no concept of a match percentage
2. Identify which keywords are present vs. missing — it will suggest improvements but won’t systematically audit keyword coverage
3. Know how Applicant Tracking Systems parse text — it will rewrite content without knowing whether an ATS will ever see it

ATS filters work on keyword frequency and placement. A resume that reads beautifully to a human can score 40% on an ATS if the right terms aren’t in the right sections. ChatGPT optimizes for human readers. ATS systems are not human readers.

I ran a test. Same resume, same job description (Backend Engineer, Node.js/AWS stack). I gave ChatGPT the full JD and asked it to optimize my resume for ATS.

The output was well-written. It added “microservices” and “REST APIs” in a few places. But it missed:

• “AWS Lambda” — mentioned 4 times in the JD, absent from my resume after the rewrite
• “CI/CD pipeline” — appeared in the required skills section, never added
• The Projects section — ChatGPT rewrote my experience bullets but left the Projects section untouched, which is where most of my relevant backend work lived

When I ran the same resume through resume.zoevera.com, it flagged all three gaps explicitly, with section-level attribution. The ATS match score went from 54% to 81% after applying the suggested changes.

The core difference: diagnostic vs. generative

ChatGPT is a generative tool. It produces new text. It’s very good at that.

An ATS checker is a diagnostic tool first. It measures the gap between your resume and a specific job description, then tells you exactly what’s missing. The rewrite comes second — and it’s grounded in what was actually identified as absent, not what the model thinks sounds better.

This distinction matters because:

ChatGPT hallucinates improvements. It will add metrics you never achieved (“improved system performance by 35%”), use terminology that
sounds right but wasn’t in the JD, and rewrite bullets that didn’t need rewriting while leaving critical gaps untouched. Every line needsfact-checking.

A purpose-built tool works from the actual gap. The keywords it adds are the ones the JD asked for. The sections it flags are the ones the ATS will score. The output is closer to submission-ready.

A practical workflow

These tools aren’t mutually exclusive. The best result I got came from using both in sequence:

1. ATS checker first: identify the keyword gaps and get a scored rewrite that closes them
2. ChatGPT second: use it to polish tone, tighten sentences, and clean up anything that sounds mechanical

The ATS checker handles precision. ChatGPT handles prose quality. Neither does both well alone.

The cost argument

ChatGPT Plus is $20/month. If you’re actively job searching, that’s a fixed overhead whether you use it or not.

Most people search for jobs in windows — a few weeks of active applications, then nothing for months. A per-session model makes more
sense: pay when you need it, nothing when you don’t. ZoeVera’s pricing works that way — free analysis, one-time payment for the full
rewrite, no subscription.

For a developer audience specifically: if you’re applying to 10–15 roles over two weeks, you’re not optimizing resumes 365 days a year. The math on a monthly subscription doesn’t work.

What I’d actually recommend

• If you just need better writing: ChatGPT is fine and you already have it
• If you’re applying to roles where ATS filtering is real (any company using Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS): use a dedicated ATS checker first, then polish with ChatGPT
• If you’re a developer and haven’t thought about this: your resume probably uses technical jargon that means something to you and nothing to an ATS keyword parser. “Built scalable backend” is not the same as “developed microservices architecture using Node.js and AWS ambda” — even if the underlying work is identical

The ATS doesn’t know what you meant. It only knows what you wrote.

Tested against a real Backend Engineer job description. Tools used: ChatGPT GPT-4o, https://resume.zoevera.com. June 2026.

Looks like the La Michoacana on Fitzhugh Ave & Belmont is leaving. There is a ‘for lease’ sign on the lot. Not totally surprised given all the change happening in the area but I wonder what the plans are going forward..