The City Series offers brazenly incomplete and idiosyncratic impressions of places I’ve visited.
In Robert Parker’s book A Catskill Eagle, Hawk, tired of the back and forth traveling, says, “We should have enrolled in one of those frequent flyer programs when this started. Get ourselves a free trip to Dallas or something.” Spenser responds, “Second prize is two free trips to Dallas.”
This sounds mean, but there’s something to it. By that I’m not referring to the Dallas Cowboys football team, which an Eagles and Giants fan like me has a serious problem with and in general deems to be an affront to all things decent. I’m referring to the general vagueness and emptiness of the Dallas experience.
Dallas, located in the northeast area of Texas, is a city of about 1.2 million people living on 386 square miles, the ninth most-populated city in the United States. But when you spend, as I did, the greater part of a week in downtown, defined by the West End Historic District, and the Arts District, and the City Center, the most significant feature of Dallas is that it is empty.
Morning rush hour sees plenty of activity on the streets and sidewalks, with breakfast spots and upscale coffee shops doing great business. People emerge from office at lunchtime to get a sandwich. But if you walk around downtown in mid-morning or early afternoon the only people you’ll see on the street are derelicts, panhandlers, and tourists trying to manage those motorized scooters after a little day drinking. And you wonder, how could that be? Where are all the people?
But then you look around and realize you are surrounded by business buildings and little else. There’s virtually no shopping at all, of any kind. Very few restaurants but for breakfast and lunch joints which are closed by 3:00 p.m. Few high-rise condominiums so single business people can energize (and gentrify) the neighborhood and walk to work. There is virtually nothing in downtown Dallas that would entice you to go to downtown Dallas if you didn’t have to travel there for work.
It is a strange feeling. It is like the best city planning minds of Texas put all their energy in creating a business-friendly environment but completely forgot about what it is actually like to live and work in a city, forgot about what is needed to make a city environment an enjoyable, interesting, exciting place. Dallas feels like a city prototype that people never fully populated.
So when I was done with my meetings Jill and I took the DART light rail and went out of town to the Dallas Zoo. It houses over 400 species and it is a pretty cool operation. We said hello to the gorillas, giraffes, elephants, crocodiles, big cats, little mammals, and had a fun time surrounded by school kids. That was easily the most memorable part of our Dallas experience, and there was nothing about it that was particular to Dallas.