Reflections on Dallas*

Plus A Few Odds and Ends

Over my lifetime I've returned to Dallas dozens of times. 

 

But it was the first visit that was the best. When I was a gawky fifteen or sixteen year old kid my family stopped in to see some of my dad's relatives in Texas and Oklahoma. The Texas relatives lived near Dallas in Keene. 

 

For me, that trip became momentous because they had a son about my age (whose name after all these years I cannot remember). I was in awe of him. He already had his own car and he owned his world. With him at the helm, windows open, we roared down an endless lattice of dusty roads dodging armadillo's and being chased by roadrunners. 

 

Right then I knew I had to get my license and a car to achieve true freedom.

On Saturday we experienced an endless Seventh Day Adventist service. It was nothing like the "59 minutes or die" Lutheran services I had grown up with.

 

But, church on Saturday freed up Sunday for a trip to Six Flags Over Texas. 

 

Now, I'd grown up soaring on the ancient Giant Dipper at Santa Cruz. And there was maybe three family visits to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. Rides to me meant tickets. On each trip we spent our ride tickets with military precision. We never, ever, left Disneyland with unused "E" tickets.

 

So when they explained the rides at Six Flags required no tickets, this kids mind was blown and we had the best day ever.

 

In the decades since I've returned to Dallas dozens of times planning public safety buildings and forensic science labs. And with every visit I come away amazed at Dallas' restless energy.

Last week I returned for the International Association of Chief's of Police Convention. And Dallas proved to be a perfect host. The weather was cool, the people were friendly, the food was great, and the conference was productive.

As with every place I go I set aside time to explore. Usually I sneak off to museums and local historical sites. And yet, after all of my visits, I know I have barely scratched the surface in understanding the cultural complexities of a region that just continues to evolve and grow explosively. Luckily I have a secret weapon in the form of a wonderful friend (and excellent guide) who shares a passion for exploring the obscure.

Past blog posts have chronicled favorite places: museums, restaurants, and the art deco masterwork that is Fair Park. And what I've gleaned is that Dallas is a place of incredible contrasts. The old and new literally slam into each other in a downtown that seems to defy boundaries.  

Here are a few things from this trip that caught my eye.  

First was the art glass in Lang and Witchell's 1931 Dallas Power and Light Skyscraper. After researching the building I loved that fact that, prior to the energy crisis of 1975, the whole building was illuminated each evening in revolving colors.

The God of Electricity

(The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company)

(The Dallas Power and Light Building, now the Pegasus Brewery)

Dallas is nothing if not a city of contrasts. There are leafy enclaves for the obscenely rich. There are edgier neighborhoods that seem to become hip overnight. And in between there are modest neighborhoods for everyone else. 

 

The metroplex is full of gentlemen's clubs and mega churches. Park City Baptist has a huge illuminated clock on its steeple with the two ominous words "Night Cometh" on the face.

New hotels pop up and restaurants come and go as if on a fast moving conveyor belt. I'd trade a day of my life for just one more slice of bourbon bread pudding in Richardson's long since closed Jolie's. I adore Joe T. Garcia's endless fiesta in Fort Worth. And great funky Bar B Que joints are everywhere. On the formal side, there were lobster tacos at the Mansion on Turtle Creek and a perfect steak in the original 36th floor Reata restaurant in Fort Worth. This is the restaurant that literally blew apart during a freak tornado just a few years later.  

Dallas and Fort Worth are awash in incredible museums. Many come with "starchitect" credentials. Most noteworthy is probably Louis I. Kahn's Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth. It opened in 1972 just two years before his death in Penn Station returning from a trip to India.

I particularly admire Tadao Ando's 2002 "The Modern" also in Fort Worth. The remarkable concrete work in that building is as soft as Venetian plaster. 

Renzo Piano has two museum's here: the addition to the Kimball and the exquistely delicate Nasher Sculpture Museum in downtown Dallas. 

Besides art there is Morphosis' brash new Perot Museum Nature and Science. Perhaps the the most chilling museum in Dallas is the 6th Floor Museum overlooking Dealey Plaza. This museum preserves the precise perch from which Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.  

Star Gazing in Texas (San Antonio 1938)

(Ida Ten Eyck O'Keefe 1889-1961)

However, this trip I spent the afternoon in the Dallas Museum of Art enjoying works by John Singer-Sargent, Thomas Hart Benton and a whimsical painting by Georgia O'Keefe's little sister Ida. Honestly I had no idea Georgia O'Keefe had a little sister.

Dallas always serves up the unexpected. This trip walking back to my hotel I came across a swirling 90' foot tall white chapel anchoring Thanks-Giving Square. Other trips I'd wondered what it was, but this trip I stopped to explore the non-denominational square created by Dallas businessmen who felt the City just needed a place to celebrate the spirit of giving (Damn, I'll vote for that!)

What a perfect message for a nation that has allowed itself to be polarized to the point of near civil war by cynical internet trolls in Saint Petersburg. Shame on us.

 The Chapel in Thanks-Giving Square

Phillip Johnson said his inspiration for this 1973 era chapel was the Great Mosque in Samarra, Iraq. And, while Johnson will never be my favorite American architect, I found myself loving this chapel as it rises like a swirl of soft serve. Its shape forms a marvelously simple and introspective interior space gloriously illuminated by a ceiling of stained glass. 

Thanks-Giving Chapel

This trip finished off with my friend Paul taking me cemetery hopping. In years past we visited the Western Hills Cemetery to see Clyde Barrow's grave (Clyde is buried next to his equally repulsive brother "Buck").

This trip we went to see Bonnie's grave.

Although Bonnie Parker wanted to be buried with Clyde her mother made sure those wishes were left unfulfilled. Instead she was buried in 1934 in the "Whites Only" Fishtrap Cemetery. In 1945 her remains were exhumed and moved to a plot next to her mother in the Crown Hill Cemetery.

 "This Old World is Made Brighter by the Lives of Folks Like You"

Bonnie's funeral service was estimated to have attracted between 20-30,000 spectators. Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger both sent condolences. Clyde's funeral also attracted thousands, although many fewer than Bonnie.   

Most kids growing up in the 60's knew the myth of Bonnie and Clyde based on Arthur Penn's 1967 movie. The film glamorized their lives, made stars of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, bagged 2 Oscars®, and then finished with a slow graphic portrayal of their death in the goriest and most agonizing detail delivered to date in a mainstream American movie. Everyone in 1967 talked about "that death scene". 

Of course a couple of years later the American appetite for graphic violence was sent into overdrive with films like A Clockwork Orange and Strawdogs.

In reality Bonnie started out as an honor student that wrote poetry. She married Roy Thornton in 1926 at the age of 15.  She never saw Roy again after he went to jail in 1929 (he died in an escape from Huntsville in 1937). A year later she met Clyde Barrow at age 19. Despite professing her love for Barrow, she was still wearing Thornton's wedding ring at the time of her death.

Clyde was raised in abject poverty. He opted to become a hoodlum in his attempts to escape the slums of west Dallas. His brother Buck was a good instructor and Clyde's petty crimes and auto thefts eventually landed him in Eastham Prison. While in prison he was subjected to repeated sexual assaults and eventually murdered his tormentor with a lead pipe. Another prisoner, with a life sentence, took the fall for Barrow and he was released. Other prisoner's said Clyde changed from a "schoolboy to a rattlesnake" in Eastham.

We also visited the grave of Conrad Hilton whose lonely solo tombstone contains the line "Christmas is Everyday". I plan to google that one someday.

The end of the trip was capped by the rude, maskless, jerk sitting behind me who coughed without ever covering his mouth the whole flight home. 

72 hours later I tested positive for Covid.

This Test is Dedicated to the POS Sitting in Seat 15A

 

Roadboy's Travels © 2022

 

*When I say "Dallas" I mean the Dallas "metro" area. It is sort of like when I say San Francisco I really mean the region from Napa to San Jose. And "LA" for me is everything from Simi Valley to the Orange Curtain.