A Capital Time
Every January of an odd-numbered year, Austin is overrun by lawmakers who arrive to begin a new legislative session. No one knows more about that experience than Midland’s Tom Craddick, who was first...
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Jackpot of the Plains
“This is a land flip.”Early in my legal career, these words were spoken to me by an ordained Methodist minister. At the time, this young minister-turned-lawyer and I were associates in the Dallas...
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By Invitation Only
The acorns were the only unexpected guests. It was the night of the annual fall gala known as Two x Two for AIDS and Art, and a red oak stood tall over the tent that welcomed invitees to the North...
View ArticleDon’t Call It the Metroplex
The year was 1971. DFW Airport was under construction, and an alliance of business interests called the North Texas Commission needed a way to promote the region, which would blossom as jet fuel and...
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Sonya’s Homecoming
Touch ground.Rolling one medium, brown suitcase through DFW Airport to the shiny blue-black man who drives a yellow cab.Nigerian, he has lived here for the last fifteen years and knows Dallas like the...
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In Praise of My Sports Town
Growing up in Dallas, I hated sports. I wore my disdain proudly, like a varsity letter jacket. I believed in arts and culture and binge drinking, and I had no time for the bloated gladiator spectacles...
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All Hat, Some Cattle
Dawson Granade loves Fort Worth. His shirt from a local barbecue joint reads “Life’s too short to live in Dallas.” Twice a day, six days a week, Dawson piles visitors from Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and...
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Change of Art
Fort Worth’s once pastoral cultural district, overlooking the Trinity River west of downtown, is today the city’s emblematic construction site. The sprawling complex of museums and performance halls is...
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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...
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Pride and Prejudice
A thousand years ago, I was half of a young couple, attractive if I may be allowed, the happy parents of two handsome children, the big one still willing to hold the hand of his beautiful mom, the baby...
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The Best Laid Plan
These days El Paso can feel like a big city (especially during rush hour on Interstate 10), but it’s still close-knit enough to retain the qualities, both good and bad, of a small town: there’s a...
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A Night at Chico’s
Chico’s Tacos sits on Alameda Avenue in a humble area of El Paso known as the Lower Valley. Though a chain of five eateries now share the Chico’s name, el original is this one. Here, wedged between a...
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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,...
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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...
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This Is Texas
A great capital city, most everyone would agree, should be representative of the state or nation over which it presides. It should be preeminent not only in size but also in learning, power, and...
View ArticleA Tale of Six Cities
A steady stream of books about Texas is published every year, yet to date no one has written a history of the transformations that our cities have undergone in the past forty years. But perhaps no one...
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My Montrose
Each June, the gay pride parade surges down Westheimer Road, packing more than 200,000 celebrants into Montrose, the Houston neighborhood that nurtured and sustained the gay community when it was young...
View ArticleOn 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...
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Found in Translation
One of Houston’s most touted attributes is its diversity. Just last year sociologists at Rice University reported that the city had become the most ethnically diverse large metropolitan area in the...
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San Antonio Rose
A few months ago, my father, who was considering moving from his apartment in Alamo Heights to a town house down the street, asked me to drive in from Houston to help him assess the new place. The...
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The Artist and the City
This winter, I met Sandra Cisneros for lunch at Liberty Bar, the new Liberty Bar, which moved in 2010 to the King William District after 25 years in a ramshackle building near the Pearl Brewery. The...
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Considering the Cactus
When there was no water to keep the fields growing, they torched them, he said—used some special tool: chamuscadora, I think, to burn down the needles. And in the fuss, you might catch mice seeking new...
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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...
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Where to Eat Now
Numerous factors account for the urbanization that has transformed Texas over the past forty years. But perhaps the most important is an amendment passed by the state legislature in 1970 that paved the...
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What Nobody Says About Austin
When I moved to Austin in the fall of 2008 to teach at the University of Texas, I was the envy of nearly everyone I knew. Wasn’t it the coolest city in the state? The country? Quite possibly the...
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