Dallas
"Everything here is bigger, they kept telling us, and annoyingly they were right."
I will admit I was ready to dislike Dallas. From the highway it looked like a city assembled entirely from mirrored glass and ambition, and Lia caught me sighing as the towers rose ahead of us. Then we parked, walked into the shade of the Arts District at dusk, and a saxophone drifted out of an open door somewhere, and my resistance began to soften. Dallas does not seduce you the way an old European city does, slowly, with cobblestones. It grabs you by the collar. But there is a real heart under all that glass, and it took us three days to find it.
Dealey Plaza and the Weight of History
We went to Dealey Plaza first, because you cannot not. It is smaller than the footage makes it feel, a modest green triangle with a road curving through it, and there is a single white X painted on the asphalt where the car was. Lia and I stood on the grassy knoll saying nothing. Inside the old Texas School Book Depository, the Sixth Floor Museum lays out that November day in 1963 with a restraint I did not expect, and by the window itself, boxed exactly as it was, I felt the ordinary horror of it settle in my chest. We walked out into the Texas heat quieter than we went in.
The Arts District and Klyde Warren
By evening we needed lightness, and the Dallas Arts District gave it to us. It is the largest urban arts district in the country, and we drifted from the Nasher Sculpture Center’s garden, where a Rodin sat calmly in the last light, to Klyde Warren Park, a green deck built straight over a sunken freeway. Food trucks lined one edge, kids ran through a fountain, and Lia bought us tacos that we ate on the grass while traffic rumbled invisibly beneath our feet. There is something very Dallas about paving over a highway to make a lawn, an act of sheer will, and I loved it for that.
Barbecue and the Real Texas
Our last full day we drove out to Deep Ellum, the old brick warehouse district east of downtown, its walls covered end to end in murals so bright they seemed to hum. We had come for the barbecue, and Pecan Lodge did not disappoint: a tray of brisket with a black peppered bark, ribs that gave way at a touch, and a slab of white bread that nobody expected us to eat. Lia, who claims not to like meat much, went suspiciously quiet over the brisket. Afterward we wandered the murals with grease on our fingers and gospel leaking from a bar, and Dallas finally felt less like a fortress of glass and more like a city that knew how to enjoy itself.
Getting There
Dallas Fort Worth International (DFW) is one of the busiest airports on earth, so getting here is rarely the problem; Love Field (DAL) sits closer to downtown if you can find a flight into it. Dallas is a driving city, spread wide and stitched by highways, so we rented a car and made peace with it, though the DART light rail covers the core neighborhoods well enough for a car-free few days. Come in spring or autumn, because a Dallas summer afternoon is a physical event you do not forget.