February 2013 Archives

On the Cover

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

Features

The Culture

Urban Cowboys

The cities have prevailed—but we’re still rural at heart.

By Gregory Curtis

Books

Horsemen, Goodbye

Thoughts on the gradual march of civility and urban sprawl across the lost frontier.

By Larry McMurtry

Texas History

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?

By Evan Smith

The Culture

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?

By John Spong

Austin

An Ode to Mount Bonnell

Taking Austin in from the city's most iconic summit.

By Michael Hall

The Culture

What’s With Austin’s Traffic?

Two questions for Ginger Goodin, of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

By Sonia Smith

Austin

A Capital Time

Midland's Tom Craddick shares a few memories from his forty-plus years in the Legislature.

By Brian D. Sweany

Business

Jackpot of the Plains

My unsentimental education in the wheeler-dealer ways of the most American of Texas cities.

By Ben Fountain

Dallas

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.

By Skip Hollandsworth and Jason Sheeler

The Culture

Don’t Call It the Metroplex

The nomenclature of the area known as Dallas–Fort Worth.

By Tim Rogers

Dallas

Sonya’s Homecoming

A return to the Trinity.

By Regina Taylor

Sports

In Praise of My Sports Town

How I’m learning to love the Cowboys. And the Mavericks. And the Rangers. And the Stars. And . . .

By Sarah Hepola

The Culture

All Hat, Some Cattle

In search of the authentic spirit of Fort Worth.

By Sterry Butcher

Art

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.

By Michael Ennis

Fort Worth

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

By Bud Kennedy

El Paso

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.

By Dagoberto Gilb

El Paso

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.

By Debbie Nathan

El Paso

A Night at Chico’s

Savoring an institution from 9 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.

By Jazmine Ulloa

El Paso

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

By Christine Granados

Border & Immigration

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

By David Dorado Romo

Houston

This Is Texas

Why the capital should rightfully be Houston, not Austin.

By John Nova Lomax

Media

A Tale of Six Cities

Modern Texas, as told through the archives of Texas Monthly.

By Jeff Salamon

Houston

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.

By William Broyles

Houston

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,

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Houston

Found in Translation

Activist Glenda Joe on the immigrant experience in Houston.

By Erica Grieder

San Antonio

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.

By Mimi Swartz

Books

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?

By Jake Silverstein