February 2013
-
Features
-
-
Urban Cowboys
The cities have prevailed—but we’re still rural at heart.
-
Horsemen, Goodbye
Thoughts on the gradual march of civility and urban sprawl across the lost frontier.
-
The Walking Deadline
For decades, the state’s big urban newspapers helped bind together the inhabitants of our major cities. Now those papers are threatened by a rapidly evolving (some might say collapsing) business model. Is there hope for daily journalism in Texas?
-
All Grown Up
Austin is booming with jobs, condos, festivals, traffic, hipsters, joggers, and high-concept dive bars (anyone for Lone Star and seared foie gras?). Does that mean it’s no longer Austin?
-
An Ode to Mount Bonnell
Taking Austin in from the city’s most iconic summit.
-
What’s With Austin’s Traffic?
Two questions for Ginger Goodin, of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
-
A Capital Time
Midland’s Tom Craddick shares a few memories from his forty-plus years in the Legislature.
-
Jackpot of the Plains
My unsentimental education in the wheeler-dealer ways of the most American of Texas cities.
-
By Invitation Only
In a city that loves its parties, there’s perhaps none so aesthetically significant as Two x Two for AIDS and Art, Dallas’s most cutting-edge fundraiser—and one hell of a good time.
-
Don’t Call It the Metroplex
The nomenclature of the area known as Dallas–Fort Worth.
-
Sonya’s Homecoming
A return to the Trinity.
-
In Praise of My Sports Town
How I’m learning to love the Cowboys. And the Mavericks. And the Rangers. And the Stars. And . . .
-
All Hat, Some Cattle
In search of the authentic spirit of Fort Worth.
-
Change of Art
Just over forty years ago, Texas was the kind of place dismissed as hopelessly provincial and culturally mediocre. But then came the Kimbell Art Museum.
-
Do Call It Dallas–Fort Worth
All my life we’ve wanted top billing. But in the eyes of the world, we’re forever the sidekick: Dallas–Fort Worth. We’ve tried, over the years, to use that thirty-mile-long hyphen between the cities like a battering ram, deriding our rival for having fewer museums, no Bass brothers, and no sense of place. But four decades …
-
Pride and Prejudice
It’s time for Texas to get smart about its westernmost—and most ignored—city, where an old pass tracks the route of our future.
-
The Best Laid Plan
El Paso’s latest urban redevelopment scheme is one of the nation’s most far-reaching and innovative. It is also, as any resident will tell you, one of its most contentious.
-
A Night at Chico’s
Savoring an institution from 9 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.
-
An Ode to Album Park
Forty years ago I would burrow inside the nose cone of a three-story rocket slide at Album Park. Not Eastwood Park—officials have force-fed El Pasoans that name since the park opened, in 1968, but, like ketchup on hamburgers, we don’t ever use it. Peering through the steel rods that made up the rocket walls, I …
-
The Other Ellis Island
Segundo Barrio, with its turn-of-the-century tenement buildings and dozens of brightly colored murals, is one of the most historic neighborhoods in the country. As the first community that immigrants encounter after crossing the Rio Grande from Juárez, it is known as the Ellis Island of the border, and over the years it has played a …
-
This Is Texas
Why the capital should rightfully be Houston, not Austin.
-
A Tale of Six Cities
Modern Texas, as told through the archives of Texas Monthly.
-
My Montrose
Forty years (and more) of the exuberant, eclectic neighborhood where I was born, grew as a writer, and found inspiration for the early pages of this magazine.
-
On Hillcroft
When driving down 59 after work you squint at the setting sun that glares redly in your eye, and around you the cars have become an ocean of unmoving metal, come to Hillcroft. Nothing to eat at home except what you might pull out of the freezer. Piles of bills, TV, unwashed laundry, and your …
-
Found in Translation
Activist Glenda Joe on the immigrant experience in Houston.
-
San Antonio Rose
I used to think my hometown was a sleepy, slow-moving place where nothing much would ever happen. But forty years after I left, the city is a bustling, economically vibrant, progressive place I hardly recognize—in a good way.
-
The Artist and the City
For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?
-
Considering the Cactus
A Lament on Roots, Bexar County, TX
-
The Cities Issue
Chances are you are reading this in a Texas city. Though our rural population of 3.8 million is still the country’s largest, we are, for the most part, a bunch of city folk. Almost 85 percent of the state’s population now lives in urban areas. That may not be how others see us, but it’s …
-
Where to Eat Now
And the year’s best new restaurants are…
-
What Nobody Says About Austin
Is Austin the state’s most segregated city?
-
-
Columns
-
The Texanist
On pecan picking, marrying a Californian, and apartment dwelling . . .
-
-
Miscellany
-
February 2013: The Cities Issue
Looking ahead to our next forty years.
-