Michael Ennis
The Mighty Metroplex
Dissed for decades as a colorless, conformist jumble of cities and suburbs, it has become a roaring engine of economic growth—and is reigniting Dallas’s fading star.
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All but besieged by ambitious neighbors, Dallas has come to a widely remarked tipping point: Either grow up and become the cutting-edge center of a mushrooming global megalopolis or devolve into an urban ghost town like Detroit. To avoid the latter, Dallas movers have focused on the same strategy as many of the Metroplex’s lesser municipalities: reinventing their city as, well, a city. Like, say, Chicago, which in 2001 beat out Dallas for the new corporate headquarters of aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing when company executives found that Big D’s cultural life wasn’t competitive. True, Dallas has long claimed the nation’s largest downtown arts district, but until recently it was basically an expanse of parking lots bound by a couple of astringently tasteful modernist monuments, the Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed Dallas Museum of Art and the I. M. Pei–designed Symphony Hall, both built back in the eighties. In a city where Picasso once touched off a Red Scare, and which remains one of the largest in the country without a contemporary-art museum (Fort Worth, of course, has one of the nation’s biggest and best), Dallas’s cultural ambitions have historically warred with its fundamental conservatism.
But getting bounced by Boeing was a turning point. The languishing arts district got new life (and, finally, a museum up to Fort Worth standards) when Dallas developer Raymond Nasher opened his Renzo Piano–designed Nasher Sculpture Center in 2003. Construction is imminent on a sleek new civic hood ornament, a futuristic suspension bridge across the Trinity River by Spanish modernist Santiago Calatrava, with two more planned. The great leap forward, however, will be two years from now, when the arts district debuts the Center for the Performing Arts, a landscaped ten-acre complex anchored by British architect Norman Foster’s opera house, which will be a startling translucent red drum covered with a giant high-tech sun canopy, and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s even more iconoclastic theater, a transparent twelve-story cube where backstage will essentially be stacked on top and bottom of the stage. Like Piano, Foster and Koolhaas create highly interactive buildings that expose their users to the city around them and invite passersby to become voyeurs; unlike so many of Dallas’s architectural baubles, these buildings are intended as icons of a city center that will actually be inhabited. And the inhabitants are starting to trickle in: Discarded downtown skyscrapers are being converted to luxury condominiums, and the high-rise mixed-use complex planned around the five-year-old downtown sports arena, after being put on hold, is starting to build out. Uptown, a stylish, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of shops, apartments, and restaurants linked to the arts district by trolley, has been booming for more than a decade.
Of course, the same kind of thing is happening nationwide, as well as in other Texas cities, like Houston and Austin (which currently has more downtown residents than Dallas); in a lot of places “culture war” now means duking it out with civic rivals over whose downtown has the most culture. But the Metroplex is a front particularly worth watching, because this red-state region has been so central to that other culture war, the one that for a time put Republicans in control of Congress and the White House. The GOP majority was as much sprawl based as it was faith based, with social conservatives fleeing as far as possible from Sodom-like city centers dominated, according to their rhetoric, by pointy-headed, Brie-eating, latte-sipping liberal “elites” intent on aping the morally bankrupt secular culture of “old Europe.” The Metroplex has long been one of the great engines of this centrifugal conservatism; veteran political observers oohed at the more than 70 percent Republican vote in Collin County, which includes Plano and newer, booming exurbs like Frisco, and saw in the ceaseless flight from the center—geographically as well as ideologically—the endless hegemony of social and religious conservatives.
But that too was then. With oil prices periodically spiking and energy addiction considered by many our most pressing national security issue, long commutes in gas guzzlers no longer represent a “blessed lifestyle,” as President George W. Bush’s spokesman put it before September 11. Now municipalities large and small are looking for the center, both geographically and, it seems, politically. And the model of this urban renewal isn’t just our own coastal cities with all their sushi-eating elites but the old Europe so many American conservatives despise for its lack of martial ardor, languorous lunches and month-long vacations, and seriously pointy-headed intellectuals like Koolhaas, who first made his reputation as an author of dense, rabble-rousing theoretical texts on urban planning and still publishes legendarily hefty polemics between projects. Stranger yet, the benefactors who earned the naming rights to Koolhaas’ subversive theater are Dallas financier Charles Wyly and his wife, Dee; he’s best known nationally as the big-spending Bush supporter who, along with his brother and business partner Sam, financed nasty attack ads against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primary. But Wyly is far from an anomaly; a lot of the same local plutocrats who reached deep into their pockets to underwrite Bush’s Euro-bashing, rural- and suburban-based, fiercely anti-intellectual presidency are writing big checks so that Europe’s intellectual elite can turn the center of their hometown into a place more like Barcelona or Paris. (To add to the irony, when President Bush leaves office he is expected to settle in Dallas’s most exclusive inner-city residential enclave, Highland Park—where Dick Cheney lived before he became vice president—and bring his presidential library to nearby Southern Methodist University.)
The rise of the Brie-eating, modern art–loving Republican elite in the heart of Bush country doesn’t even scratch the surface of the Metroplex’s political and cultural complexity. Its blue center now runs on black power: Dallas’s disciplined African American voters, who weren’t even fully enfranchised politically until 1991, propelled Democrats to a near clean sweep of the Dallas County courthouse in the recent midterm elections. Waiting in the wings is the area’s huge, yet-to-register Hispanic population, more than 350,000 of whom went into the streets last spring to protest Congress’s immigration policy. Think of the Metroplex as a giant test tube filled with all of today’s critical conflicts: secularism versus religious fundamentalism, immigrants versus nativists, urban versus rural, red versus blue, black versus brown versus white, environmentalism versus unfettered growth. Out of this primordial brew, twenty-first-century American politics and culture are going to emerge in all sorts of surprising new configurations. We had better learn how to say the name of our youngest urban giant with a straight face, because the complicated, rapidly evolving Metroplex now offers an attraction that should make all its metro-area competitors envious: an unmatched view of our nation’s future.
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