The transformation took shape as Las Colinas. Beginning in 1973, the rancher and developer Ben Carpenter laid out a master-planned city-within-the-city on old family ranch land: office towers and hotels, a man-made lake, and the Mandalay Canal, a Venetian-style waterway where water taxis still slide past the shops. At its heart he set Williams Square, a stark plaza of pink granite — and into that plaza came the mustangs. In a single generation Irving had gone from cotton rows to one of the most recognizable corporate skylines in Texas. Carpenter wanted a touch of Europe on the Texas prairie, and the result still surprises first-time visitors who half expect oil derricks and instead find canal boats.
What Las Colinas chose to put at its center says everything about how Texas sees itself. Not a founder, not a logo — a herd of wild horses. The mustangs commemorate the free-running herds that roamed the Texas range before the ranches and the rails, the animals that carried the state's idea of freedom and grit. Today they are the city's signature, watched over by a small museum in the tower beside the plaza, and the reason a planned business district carries a wild heart. The sculpture took its maker eight years to model and cast, and the plaza around it earned a national landscape-architecture honor award soon after it opened.
Why People Visit Irving
Irving offers art, water, and wild bronze horses in the middle of the Metroplex. Visitors come for the Mustangs, the canals, and the music, and stay for a central, easygoing base beside DFW with museums, sculpture plazas, and trails close at hand. It is both a cultural stop and a convenient home base, with year-round appeal in its parks, paths, and public spaces.
