For half a century Irving stayed a quiet farm town of churches and cotton fields. Then the postwar boom found it. Through the 1950s and 1960s the prairie filled with subdivisions, schools, and highways as families poured into affordable new homes within reach of both downtowns. The decisive stroke came on the town's western edge, where the giant new Dallas/Fort Worth airport opened in 1974 — suddenly Irving sat beside one of the busiest gateways in the country, and the farm town's in-between location turned into a business address.
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.
