Dallas Is Better Than Houston [February 1978]
"Good ol' boys still make it in Dallas. They catch the bus in from Winnsboro and come looking for the foot of the ladder. Not in Houston. You don't see good ol' boys on the elevators of Shell Plaza."
(Page 3 of 3)
Several news bureaus are based in Houston because of its national economic impact, but most of the news that comes out of them is of that same character—national and international. Houston today has raw energy but little mythology, no aura. When the Houston-based news bureaus want to give out something "Texas" they have to go to Dallas to find it. "I'm from Dallas," you say, anywhere in the world, and for the next few minutes you don't have to worry about making conversation. Everyone has an opinion about Dallas. But try saying you're from Houston, and after the words "petroleum" and "rich" have been said a few times, the dialogue lapses.
And there's no need to make odious sports comparisons, there being little to compare between the transcendent Dallas Cowboys and the perennially pathetic Houston Oilers. Even the emerging baseball Rangers give indications of outclassing the Astros as an exciting professional team. And Houston, despite contributing several national notables, particularly in basketball and football, has never had very many black heroes playing there—a significant fact, perhaps, when one reviews the racial relations in the two cities. Dallas, which had no riots or outbreaks during the turbulent sixties when Houston was experiencing pitched battles between the races, saw its professional football team soar out of mediocrity to repeated contender status on the legs, hands, and shoulders of black stars. It's impossible to be a Cowboy cult follower and remain a racial bigot.
I judge a city by its newspapers, and Dallas walks away from Houston here, for the seventies at least. The Dallas Times Herald has collected the best writers of any newspaper outside maybe New York, Chicago, and Los Angles and has become the most readable in the Southwest, if not the nation. The Houston Chronicle, saddled with a forties political outlook that damps every page, is a sad departure from its fierce glory days of the fifties. It makes the Dallas News editorial page, long considered the last outpost of Texas conservatism, seem downright contemporary. The Houston Post, which twenty years ago was as liberal a production as the Lone Star State afforded, seems to be wrestling with internal changes that take the edge off its coverage. If it retains some clever columnizing in Lynn Ashby, it still doesn't offer a superior replacement to the News' John Anders or the Herald's Dick Hitt. A Houston native son admitted recently, "Reading both Houston papers every day is a discipline I've yet to master."
Still extending comparisons: NorthPark Mall in Dallas—the prototype of that commercial innovation—still outstrips the newer malls of Houston. NorthPark is light and airy, while Houston's Galleria (which does have an ice-skating rink) is claustrophobic, like a winter head cold. And the Neiman-Marcus store there is so ordinary one blushes if one thinks about it while traversing the "real" Neiman-Marcus in downtown Dallas.
Houston has no concentration of eating and drinking places like Greenville Avenue in Dallas. In fact, for all its size, Houston has far fewer and less amusing dining or watering spots. The answer is as simple as the fact that Houston is, as noted, a blue-collar town in the way it lives. Dallas is fifteenth nationally in median family income, while Houston is twentieth.
You can't throw any eggs half as rotten as this damnable old town!
—evangelist Sam Jones, after being pelted with rotten eggs in Houston
Houston is run as much from the outside as the inside, but inside or out, the real kingpins are the big law firms: Vinson & Elkins; Fulbright & Jaworski; Baker & Botts; Butler, Binion, Rice. Even the international corporations have to come to them at times. Dallas is managed by managers: merchants, bankers, insurance people. Since lawyers seem to be above the law (especially lawyers of the Houston level), I'll take bankers. At least you can still put them in jail for their crimes.
As for the matter of size between Houston and Dallas, what really counts is something called (if you can get your mouth around it) the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area—and the Dallas—Fort Worth SMSA is the biggest in Texas. If Dallas wasn't completely cut off from expansion by the smaller municipalities surrounding it—Farmers Branch, Irving, Richardson, Garland, Mesquite, and the rest—it would come very close to matching Houston's population head for head. Fortunately for those of us who live in Dallas, this will never happen.
If there is an escape from the sterility of modern commercial architecture, which homogenizes every new office or business center in Houston, Dallas is coming closer to exploring it. The Dallas Hyatt Regency Hotel, which opens in ReUnion—a downtown project—this spring, is a dazzling polyhedral ziggurat, giving Dallas the oddest pile of glass west of the Mississippi, as well as Texas' tallest restaurant, one revolving fifty stories up on a glass-coated needle. And Dallas' new Municipal building, which New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable calls "a turning point for Dallas," will open about the same time, 560 feet long, many stories tall, and 200 feet wide at its jutting, cantilevered top, with a three-block-long public plaza to bring downtown to a logical center and (if nothing else) give the leg-weary a place to sit.
Houston has no Oak Cliff, and some readers familiar with the situation may sneer that Dallas acts like it doesn't either, even if Oak Cliff has been part of the municipality since 1903. Dallas, standing some 512 feet above sea level, is at least 450 feet higher than anything not man-made in Houston, and most of that superior elevation is in Oak Cliff, where hills, rolling scenery, and vistas dart off all the way to Fort Worth, if you pick the right hill. People who describe Dallas as "prairie" are untraveled imports who've never crossed the Trinity River to the south to view Big D's pretty part.
Most Houstonians will spend eternity in hell.
—Billy Graham
But as Jon Senderling, of the Times Herald, wrote, "There is an ineffability about a city, any city, that can be unlocked only after long familiarity." Living here or there is what counts, I guess. But I find more adventure to living in Dallas than Houston seems to offer—outside the thrilling prospect of getting murdered, a statistical nicety at which Houston annually surpasses Dallas. Dallas is still in the possession of its citizenry, run by people who consider themselves Dallasites. Houston belongs to someone else.
There are things—community things, public things—that give a city-wide unity to life in Dallas, and this sense of oneness extends top to bottom, east to west, or however city emotions might be measured. Just about every resident feels them, regardless of race or social status. The venerable old State Fair of Texas every fall has been a part of Dallas for so long that nearly all of us—even those who've moved in from other parts of the Southwest—have been going to the fair since we were kids. And even though you swear you're tired of Big Tex, the Midway, and the Belgian waffles, each October you find yourself getting excited as you head for Fair Park again.
Six Flags Over Texas is still the classiest amusement park in America, without the tinsel fantasy of a Disneyland or the tawdry sham of other parks, and although (like Texas Stadium) it's not in the Dallas city limits, Dallas takes a proprietary interest in it, almost considering it a civic project.
Then, there are the universal landmarks of the Kennedy assassination with their sad importance: the Texas School Book Depository, Dealy Plaza, the triple underpass. Living with them daily, being their custodians for the world, gives citizens of Dallas—even newcomers—a sense of historical obligation that is taken seriously, and has become a unifying, humanistic force in the city.
I take off from a Houston airport and look down on the miles of concrete spaghetti, the waves of housing, the dotted-swiss fabric of shopping centers stretching across Harris County, and I tell myself in some horror, that a man could get lost down there . . . lost, and never found again.
My Library
