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.
Irving itself is younger than the herd it honors. In 1903 two promoters, Otis Brown and J.O. Schulze, platted a townsite on the prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth, along the rail line that ran between them, and named it for the author Washington Irving — the New Yorker who gave the world Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. The young town farmed corn, wheat, and cotton and shipped its harvest down the rails to the two cities on either side; it incorporated in 1914. The literary name was a flourish for a dusty prairie townsite, but it stuck, and Irving has carried an author's name ever since. From the start, Irving's whole position was its in-between place: close to everything, beholden to neither neighbor.
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.
