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Column
Published in The Dallas Morning News, January 7, 2006
Some say the trio of bridges by Salvatore Calatrava will be the new emblem of Dallas, taking up where Pegasus and Reunion Tower left off. But what will this say about a city whose first idea of itself was a winged horse which sprang from the blood of Medusa, the only mortal of three sisters who had snakes for hair plus the power to turn anyone who looked at them into stone. Medusa bled because the hero Perseus had cut off her head. Pretty tough stuff, though Perseus then rode Pegasus into other worthy ventures, and the horse even caused a spring to rise from a blow of his hoof.
All this, from the Oxford Dictionary, suggests that Dallas people knew from the start how rugged it would be to build on territory so hot and punishing it seared the soul. But also there was hope. A spring indeed might erupt in unexpected places, called forth by the exertion of their own hands and determined feet.
Then came Reunion Tower, revolving with a view of much accomplished but much more left undone, to reaffirm their agonizing opportunity, steeped in the myth that emerged from every civic conversation. It was this: that Dallas had no reason for being. It had no seaport, no important river, no great lake, no nothing. Dallas was willed into life by a group of city leaders who went to Austin and hoodwinked the legislature into routing the Texas and Pacific Railroad through this struggling, small metropolis, where its lines crossed those of the Houston and Texas Central, and behold, a boomtown was born.
Later, leaders went back to Austin and won the right to host the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 at Fair Park, especially created for the project. Once again they proved that with canny politics and guts they could turn some problematic land, overlooked by nature, into something useful, even profitable, if not blessed.
But this was the Bible belt, and faith flourished, along with commerce. Both did so well that the writer Willie Morris once referred to Dallas as this "city of bank vaults and choirs." Wires got crossed in time, and people confused. A moment arrived when half the city was in Bible study class and the other half was courting indictment. Some were doing both. Piety was masking rampant materialism. People were pouring into Dallas to make their millions. Some settled in. Many moved on. The average stay of a family in Plano in the 1980's was four years.
But Dallas welcomed its newcomers. People here always have been flattered by those who want to link their fate with that of this city. And there is grief when the gifted leave. Dallas, it is felt, cannot afford to lose a single talented person.
It is dangerous, however, to be the head of a cultural institution that completes a new building. The next board will have nothing left to achieve but to hire a new director. I've seen it happen more than once. But usually it's handled very discreetly. This is, after all, a Southern city. Manners matter. They may cut you off at the knees in Dallas, but they'll be very polite.
Dallas is a Midwestern city too, where people get up early and work hard. There are a few who struck it lucky and decided they were smart, then talked a lot about it, but most make a maximum effort for everything they have.
Dallas also is capable of true spiritual insight. I'm always moved to remember the women who gathered when the streets were barely paved to study Shakespeare, and they still do. For all the excess, there is in Dallas a saving remnant of civilizing spirits who devote themselves to the deepest enterprises of the human experience. They knit prayer shawls for the sick. They knock themselves out for the learning of children. They raise more than money for the arts, culture and health of the whole. They also generate genuine enthusiasm for the future in the face of willful indifference and galling neglect.
So Pegasus is returning, in the soaring structures of Salvatore Calatrava, building bridges to our common possibilities from the aggregated wisdom of our highly varied past. He is telling us that entrepreneurism, however desirable, is not enough. Cities made by men and women with no natural need to be cannot rely entirely on their own record of resourcefulness. The real risk is not financial or political. It's personal. Do we have the nerve to be our best selves?
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