Little Rock's first streetcar system once extended into Hillcrest, with its entry into the neighborhood being at the current intersection of Markham Street and Kavanaugh Boulevard in the Stifft Station area of Arkansas's capital; the streetcar line then followed Kavanaugh Boulevard through Pulaski Heights up to the line's ending at Forest Park. The streetcars, over time, aided in the growth of Pulaski Heights and made possible its linking to Little Rock. Uniting the two municipal entities increasingly seemed to make sense and was finally achieved when the citizens of Pulaski Heights voted to merge into the City of Little Rock on January 4, 1916, in part to obtain better fire protection. Although no longer a separately incorporated municipality, residents of Pulaski Heights, including both The Heights and Hillcrest, have retained a strong sense of separate identity. In an era in which so much of new urban housing consists of sterile suburban tract developments filled with soulless, cookie-cutter residential structures, Pulaski Heights remains in the present what it was in the past, a green and leafy island in the midst of a city, truly an island of serenity, a cherished community that retains still the feel of a close-knit and supportive small town.