Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

Last episode I waxed poetic (as I so often do) about Dallas Heritage Village, which is located on the environs of the big D’s original city park — which is called, cleverly enough, Old City Park. The curators have collected and maintained 38 wonderful old buildings from all over North Texas, including a log cabin (and the mansion its owners subsequently moved into), barns, animal pens, a bank, a saloon, a law office, a print shop, et cetera. They’ve basically created a small North Texas village from the turn of the last century, and have included sweet little touches like a fountain, a clock on a column in front of the bank, benches, fences, and connecting streets to add to the verisimilitude and tie what could have been a jumble into a unified whole. There’s even a bandstand with a surrounding village green, shaded by majestic trees.

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By an accident of history, it just so happens that there isn’t that much of it in the New World. (History, I mean.) Whereas it’s not uncommon for people in England or France to live in homes built four hundred years ago, in the U.S. structures of that age or older are vanishingly rare and, usually, heavily protected (few people would dare to live in one, given all the rules and regulations). We just don’t have that much historical time-depth to work with. In fact, the oldest continuously-occupied Euro-American city in the new world is St. Augustine, Florida, which was established in 1565 by the Spanish. Hell, London has privies still in use that are older than that, and some records (especially the Church’s) go back well over a thousand years. Longer, even.

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 As long-time readers may recall, I currently live in Garland, which happens to be the tenth largest city in Texas (no, really). As such, it actually has a lot of good stuff going on, though by no means as much as Dallas, Fort Worth, or even, say, Plano or Arlington. Much of its cultural wealth is concentrated in old downtown Garland, which has existed as such since 1887, when the local post office was created midway between two rival towns, Duck Creek and Embree; the new post office was called Garland Station after the U.S. Attorney General of the time, Augustus Hill Garland. That’s him down there. Please note that I didn’t take this picture; I’m not quite that old. It was probably taken by the famous Mathew Brady, though no one’s sure.

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When last I wrote, Gentle Reader, I was regaling you with tales of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, where the flowers are now in bloom and spring is in the air (intermittently, anyway). The Arboretum is in the middle of its annual Dallas Blooms festival, which will continue until April 13 (mostly on the weekends), so this is a great time to visit the place and get to know all 66 rolling acres.

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In the 1930s, the good city fathers of Dallas, all of whom were white as the driven snow, decided that those newfangled horseless carriages that were getting so popular needed a better way to get from south to north and vice versa than the surface roads they already had. This was right around the time when the marketing geniuses of Madison Avenue (not to mention their clients in Detroit and out on the oilfields) had started pointedly suggesting that us independent-spirited Americans needed individual conveyances, so we wouldn’t have to use public transit with all the other riffraff.  The fact that said public transit was cheap, in place, and quite effective was of no consequence; over the next few years the rails were grubbed up or paved over, the overhead copper wire recycled into alternator motor windings and the like, and the Car became King. It was only in the late 1980s, as both car and fuel prices skyrocketed into the stratosphere, that we realized the error of our ways and started putting all those things back, at hideous expense.

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Downtown Ft. Worth has many things to recommend it, but one of the most majestic is the beautiful Bass Performance Hall.

Located in historic Sundance Square, just across the street from the famous Flying Saucer Pub, the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall Complex (as it’s officially known) takes up the entire block bound by Calhoun, Commerce, 4th and 5th streets. It’s described in its literature as “the crowning jewel of a city which boasts the nation’s third largest cultural district,” and yes, it definitely is that. Poor Dallas; compared to Ft. Worth, the Big D’s pretty much a cultural backwater, and the existence of the Bass — which would not be out of place in New York or the Continent, incidentally — just makes it all the more obvious.

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At the corner of East Randol Mill Road and Stadium Drive in Arlington, Texas, roughly midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, stands this monument to the Metroplex’s love of baseball. It’s had several names, but since March 2007 it’s been called the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. That’s because it’s where the Texas Rangers play their home games.

As you can see, I took these sucky photos during the off season, when the place was shut down for repairs. Here’s how it looks from a distance, on a brighter day than the one I visited on:

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A while back I wrote a brief entry about the Sixth Floor Museum – the facility in Dallas’ historic West End that celebrates the life (and tragic death) of President John F. Kennedy, who was murdered by an assassin stationed in the very warehouse, and on the very floor, where the museum is located now. The Sixth Floor Museum is the most obvious of the local tributes to that day in November 1963, but it’s not the only reminder of our shared civic tragedy.

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