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.