There was a time when the sea was the great creator of cities. Ports such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport and Charleston arose on the eastern coast of what would become the United States. Then it was inland waterways that took urban America westward and led to the birth of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville and St. Louis.

Style, I have come to believe, is not necessarily a superficial matter. It exists on many levels. Style is an attitude of the spirit. Style, when it works, mocks fate, keeps fate at bay. So where, I wonder, do we go in search of the Dallas style?

Women's Equality Day -- that's what's coming to Dallas City Hall August 23, with a luncheon to follow at the Women's Museum -- all to celebrate the triumph of the suffragists, that great First Wave of feminism led by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others who won the right to the ballot box on August 26, 1920, when legislators in Tennessee approved the 19th Amendment by one vote.

This city -- every American city -- is beset by isms. For a long time leaders in Dallas thought they were free of such things. They believed, like John F. Kennedy, that they had no ideology, that their ideology was problem solving. This persisted through the years of Lyndon Johnson, who carried Dallas in 1964 despite the growing wave of Republican economic conservatism lead by Peter O'Donnell, Rita Clements and a band of breathtakingly effective forces.

How can we assess the essence of a city? It is to be found, I believe, in two aspects that never can be disguised -- the quality of its cultural life and the care with which it ameliorates the plight of the poor. The two are not unrelated.