I went to Dallas for a quick visit in April 2018, not really expecting to fall in love with the city, but hoping to be open to being charmed by it. But I felt afterwards that if my short trips to US destinations were like this, I would stop doing them. Dallas combined the difficulties of a big city (navigation around multiple freeways, long distances, traffic, parking) with a paucity of attractions. I found your average street in Dallas had lots of abandoned commercial architecture, like when they were finished with a store they left it there, and no one else wanted it. It felt like a city with very little grace. Nonetheless, I managed to take 600 photos and cull them down to a smaller number for your viewing pleasure.
Photo List (Total 321 Photos)
Click bolded headers below to view, or click "just the best" for quick tour
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Central Dallas (118 photos) - This gallery begins at Dallas's brutalist City Hall, and continues through the Pioneer Cemetery and through the great cattle run sculptures at Pioneer Plaza, and up the Reunion Tower (Hint to Dallas: if the view from your observation tower is almost entirely freeways, either don't built it at all or put it somewhere else). It also includes shots of the famous Dealey Plaza, and then through downtown office buildings and Thanks-Giving Square with its lovely chapel. The last tower in the group is Fountain Place, and perhaps I took too many photos of that but I really liked it.
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Trinity River (12 photos) - The Trinity River that winds through Dallas is more of a creek, really, a smallish brown depression in the prairie with steep muddy banks and fallen trees. It sits, however, in the middle of a vast floodplain, so the bridges that cross it are very long but cover mostly ground. The area around the river has an unloved and underused quality to it, but it offers some excellent views of the city and there are two Santiago Calatrava bridges that span the river.
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Arts District (63 photos) - I have never been fond of locating arts-related institutions all together in one corner of a city. To me, it always feels like they are contained, like there has been some attempt to manage the potential impact of the arts on the city. Dallas has a very intense arts district just to the north of the downtown area, nestled in a triangle between the 366 and the 345. This gallery takes us inside the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, and has external views of a symphony center, opera house, a few theatres, a performance hall and the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
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Deep Ellum (25 photos) - This area east of downtown is a former warehouse district now given over to restaurants and clubs. The area gets quite busy, and has a lot of public art and murals thorughout. I ate here one night.
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Fair Park (53 photos) - Fair Park is an assemblage of Art Deco buildings in the fairgrounds, which were created for the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936. The Art Deco here is slightly over the top, but is quite lovely as a complex. I also wandered into a women's art show in the former Women's Museum while I was here.
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Outlying Areas (50 photos) - This includes the Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, a night out on Davis Street where I saw Bebel Gilberto at the Kessler, the Bishop Arts District, and some buildings at Turtle Creek including the exterior of a Frank Lloyd Wright theatre.
