The land shaped the city as much as the people did. Dallas sits on the Trinity River — three forks of it — in gently rolling, near-treeless prairie, with no natural advantage but the crossing itself; everything else was made by rail and nerve. Early attempts to make the silty Trinity a navigable river failed, so Dallas bet on the railroads instead and won. White Rock Lake and the Great Trinity Forest give the city its green, and the wide prairie light gives the neon signs and glass towers room to show off. It is a city built on ambition rather than geography, and it has never pretended otherwise.
What followed was a boom the city more or less willed into being. Dallas made itself the largest inland cotton market in the country, then turned cotton money into banks, and banks into the financial capital of the East Texas oil fields — “Big D,” where the money was. Style came with the money: Neiman Marcus opened its doors in 1907 and gave the city a name for fashion and luxury it has never let go of. By the early twentieth century the prairie trading post had become one of the great commercial cities of the Southwest — glittering, ambitious, and a little theatrical about it.
Why People Visit Dallas
Dallas rewards visitors who like a city with confidence: a skyline you can read like a history book, a world-class arts district, museums of real weight, and food worth crossing town for. Add the flying red Pegasus, the Art Deco of Fair Park, and Texas hospitality scaled up, and Big D makes a strong case for itself.
