Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

I’m not exactly DFW’s go-to guy for shopping, but I’ve lived here for almost fifteen years — so I’d have to be completely clueless* not to be aware of where, exactly, the local epicenters of shopping are located. In Dallas, it’s the Galleria out on the Dallas Parkway, the toll-road that cuts north-south through the center of the city.

Our Galleria consists of three main floors and a basement with a central skating rink, several nice restaurants, and a sizable food court (there’s another food court on the third floor). Here’s what it looks like from the top of its three glittering floors, looking east along the long axis:

I suspect that most large cities have a Galleria, in style of not in name. Ours is the place where you go if you want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on clothes. In other words, it’s where Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and the like all converge, like huge masonry animals, to feed on the trough that is the Dallas fashion community. All those stores are anchors of this hugely popular mall, which drags people in from all over the area.

I usually park in the Orange Garage and come in by the Saks Fifth Avenue second floor entrance. Not for any particular reason, just from force of habit; when the women in my life first drug me here, this is the way we came. True story: the first time I came here I was escorting my teen sister, who wanted to see one of the Backstreet Boys, who was at Nordstrom’s flogging some of his sports wear. I don’t remember his name; it was the short one with a goatee who liked to do backflips on stage. I know this because my sister won tickets to their show at Texas Stadium that night, and I got to escort her. It’s bloody hot in Texas Stadium in the middle of July, you know that?  Must be that open top and lack of air conditioning. Did you know that back then (Y2K) the Backstreet Boys used 81 tour buses to ferry all their crap around? Now that had to be expensive.

Which brings us back to the mall. In I go through the Orange Garage Saks entrance. I always feel scruffy and common when I walk through Saks, probably because I’m scruffy and common. But the service staff are always nice, even when I just want to boggle at the price of a $9,500 mink half-coat and feel its wonderful softness. I can understand the cost of the furs, having been actively involved in the fur trade in my youth, but I find most of the clothing here to be outrageous in terms of style and price. Take, for example, the suit on the right in this picture.

That’s $1,450 right there, plus tax, for what appears to be an unremarkable natural/synthetic blend of some kind. It’s soft, but so are the items you can buy at more reasonable stores. What, is it made from the silk of some rare spider that lives high in the Andes and survives only long enough to spin a single tiny web before it expires? I guess I don’t understand women’s clothing, most especially why you’d pay that much for something so sheer that a single drop of wine or soda could ruin it. My whole wardobe doesn’t cost that much. But I have friend who’s a marketing guru (he’s built $300 into $100 million over the course of 20 years), and he says that products are worth what people will pay for them. I guess Saks is living proof.

Here’s another wonderfully expensive place you can visit here. Despite Truman Capote, Audrey  Hepburn, and Deep Blue Something, there’s no breakfast here. Maybe you have to go to New York for that. By the way, did you know DBS and their one hit song came from the Dallas area? Straight outta Denton.

Despite its luxury angle, the Galleria is still a great place to shop, and you don’t have to overspend if you don’t care to. They’re got a wide range of options, including some incredible toy stores, a puppet playhouse, and a Franklin Covey store. One thing the Galleria lacks, as far as I can tell, is a bookstore. The area’s premier shopping mall, and no bookstore? This really shows you what’s important to the shopping public in Dallas.  Hell, I don’t think there’s even a newspaper kiosk anywhere. Hmmmph.

As I write this it’s mid-November 2007, and the mall’s already gearing up for Christmas. They’ve planted this massive four-story Christmas tree in the middle of the skating ring on the basement level.  I’m glad I went this week because I haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else. Okay, I admit it — I’m kind of a yokel, and I’m a little awed. Maybe that explains the sunburn on the roof of my mouth after my one trip to Manhattan.

Here’s what the tree and the rink look like from the basement level. It’s not a huge rink, but it’s a nice one. If I could skate worth a darn and wasn’t so, ahem, hefty, I might have gone for a spin.

Another thing the Galleria has to offer, for those bored kids who are sick of walking back and forth in Nordstrom’s and Saks’, is a special playground. It’s not big, but it’s pretty sharp looking, and includes a variety of fanciful critters and rocks and plants made of plastic and such. Check it out.

For those kids who prefer to play outside the lines, there are also some fun statues scattered around outside the play area, including this lioness. Looks like someone’s tamed her.

Basically, the Galleria’s a nice, big sprawling mall with plenty of room to wander around, and some nicely-situated rest areas. If you feel the urge to go shopping on your vacation and you’re in the market for a $600 purse at Nordstrom’s or one of those $1,500 jackets at Saks Fifth avenue, well, here you go. If you don’t want to spend any money but still want to feel like one of the glitterati, then this is your place. And If you just want to experience the interior of a building big enough to have its own weather, then by all means check it out. It’s no Mall of the Americas, but it’ll do.

*Some people would say I am anyway, but that’s beside the point.

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