Category Archives: Dallas

Late Night at the Dallas Museum of Art

Posted on by Bill Chance

I remember when the Dallas Museum of Art was constructed (its building – the first edifice in the Arts District, before that it was in Fair Park) – I was working in the now long-imploded Cotton Exchange building right next door. In those salad days, the museum was free and almost empty. I would go over at lunch, eat from a sack and look at my favorite sculpture – Rhythm in Space (now gone, I don’t know where)  in the garden and then stroll past the Stake Hitch (gone too, sadly, controversially,  and inexplicably) to see what was up.

That was a long time ago.

A few days back, looking ahead, I found information on the festivities in the Dallas Arts District on Friday Night. This was their Late Nights at The Museum where the place would be open until Midnight with all sort of activities scheduled. It was also the birthday of the museum and also, outside, the Crow Musuem of Asian Art would be celebrating Chinese New Year.

My intention was to leave from work and get down there at about six. I was exhausted, however, and went home for a quick power nap and a bite to eat (I ate at home to save money, there would be food trucks in the district) before I caught the train downtown.

I was glad that I had wolfed down that sandwich – sure enough, there were eight trucks in a double line along Flora Street, but they were engulfed in a massive crowd. The lines to get some vittles stretched out hundreds of yards.

The crowds mobbing the eight food trucks along Flora Street in the Arts District.

I continued on down the street to the Crow. There was a dragon dancing in the middle of the street but I could not even see it through the massive throng of spectators. It looked cool, but I decided I would flee from this crowd by retreating into the Dallas Museum of Art.

That didn’t work. The museum was even more packed that the street outside. Everyone coming through the door was immediately directed into a long line to purchase admission tickets. Everybody (except me) was dressed to the nines. The The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk is the exhibition that has all the town talking and everyone had dragged out their best fashions. There were two tall beautiful women wearing short metallic dresses in line behind me and we talked about a Lady Gaga lookalike contestant (there was going to be a contest later) that slowly tottered by. Her massive platforms made for difficult walking across the glass-smooth and rock-hard polished granite floors.

There were many Gagas in attendance – in many different incarnations. There was the big blonde hair and high platforms with sunglasses and  fishnets mentioned above, a lot of long platinum wig with bangs and glued facial bling (Poker Face) and I saw one with drink cans in her hair (Telephone). I didn’t see anyone in a meat dress.

Before long, a young man in an expensive Italian suit walked up and gathered the women and their extensive entourage from the queue behind me and whisked them off. He had some sort of connections and was able to bypass the waiting. The line did move quickly and before long I had paid my ten dollars and received a little purple cardboard square that went around my wrist on an elastic band.

I fought my way through the thick and fashionable crowd to the restaurant area at the North End. The Dallas Museum o fArt is not set up to handle large crowds very well. There was a stage set up and a Madonna impersonator with two dancers were gyrating around, but it was almost impossible to see anything. A few folks had arrived earlier and taken possession of the few tables and were holding their turf like a Roman legion. The museum guards were rushing around making sure nobody leaned on a balcony edge or stood on a stairway, making it impossible for anyone else to get a glimpse of what was going on.

I have been to the museum hundreds of times, so I knew of a hidden little slit window up on the top floor that looked down onto the festivities. I walked up there and watched for a while.

The Madonna Show

Gawkers reflected in the windows behind the Chihuly glass flowers.

The Gaga lookalike contestants parade around in front of the judges. This is the best view I could get, from the little slit window high above.

For a couple of hours I walked the galleries. Back amongst the paintings, it was fairly empty, actually. The massive crowds were concentrated out in the main hall -where folks waited to get into the Gautier exhibition or simply milled around aimlessly.

The crowds in the central hall of the Dallas Museum of Art.

I wonder what this guy was thinking... "Wow, there are too many people here! I give up!" or, more likley, "Hey! Quit staring at my penis!"

I always criticize Dallas for not having a culture or a scene of its own. Now, with the rise of the Dallas Arts District and the explosion of people actually living there (Uptown, Downtown, the Cedars) there is a chance for something exciting to develop. Of course, that means I give up the experience I used to love – of being there almost by myself, of the feeling that all this was built just for me. It means fighting the crowds, which I don’t like. Of course, I can always find someplace else.

At ten I fought back into the festivities to listen to Brave Combo (another blog entry). Then I retreated back into the European Painting Galleries. Earlier, I had noticed a sign promoting a late night DJ back there promising, “Stroll through the galleries while listening to retro and punk French music spun by – DJ Wild in the Streets.” Oh that sounded like a plan.

In the foreground, The Masseuse, by Edgar Degas. In the background, DJ Wild in the Streets.

The DJ and her entourage.

DJ Wild in the Streets

And it was very nice. I was tired by then and it was very relaxing to look at the Impressionist paintings while the DJ spun her disks. It wasn’t too loud and there weren’t too many people and I liked it a lot.

At midnight I hoofed it back to the train station at Pearl before it turned into a pumpkin. A couple was having an amazingly loud an angry argument – I heard her yell, “His name is Maurice… OK! OK!.” and the response, “I don’t give a fuck what his name is!” I moved on down the platform and considered calling 911 before they came to blows. There were no police at the station, even though there was a deadly shooting there only a couple days ago. Before I did anything, my train pulled up and off I went.

I almost nodded off on the ride home – but at one point a couple of folks standing at the front showed each other their Museum of Art purple wrist entrance things, and I, and the rest of the train car, raised our arms and showed them ours.

Gawking over the Gaultier Exhibit

“Like a Virgin”: Countdown to Gaultier’s First Exhibition

DC9er Mixtape, Vol. 12: DJ Wild in the Streets

Style Alert __ Jean Paul Gaultier

From The Sidewalk To The Catwalk

Enfant Terrible

Fashion World Of Jean Paul Gaultier At DMA

I always think of this clip by John Hughes as the quintessential Art Museum experience. Late Night at the DMA is not like that.

Super H Mart

Posted on by Bill Chance

I love the Saigon Market near my house, but I have been hearing the virtues of an even larger Asian Market called Super H Mart. It’s in north Carrollton, which is on the other side of the Metroplex from my humble home, but my car gets good mileage and I had some time today, so off I went.

It looks like a Kmart

Super H Mart is a chain, which started on the East Coast. It’s a huge place, with a massive grocery store surrounded by little stores and a long corridor of a food court. The biggest draw is the produce department with an endless assortment of fruits and vegetables… from normal looking peppers to the strangest looking spiky fruits from the far corners of the globe.

The place was packed with shoppers, noisy and active. It’s not very well organized, so you get to walk around a lot looking for stuff. It’s really clean though, and it’s an odd contrast, with the exotic selection presented like a typical American Megamart.

A great selection of Ramune

Of course, like any good Asian market, the seafood section is a treat. The back wall is full of tanks with every sea creature you can imagine. What isn’t swimming around is lined up on rows of aisles of ice. I wandered around looking at the stuff, watching some woman probing a case of blue crabs, watching them jump around, trying to decide if they were active enough.

Are your Abalone fresh?

Fan mail from some flounder?

Saigon Market in my neighborhood specializes in Vietnamese Fare, of course. Super H Mart specializes in Korean Food. I have never seen so much Kimchi in my life. Glass jars, plastic tubs, and big bags of a bewildering array of different kinds of fermented goodness – whole head cabbage, napa cabbage, radish, and many more that I didn’t really understand.

Jars of Kimchi, half and full gallons.

I like to buy my kimchi by the bag.

So I picked up a basket and filled it with a six pack of Ramune, some Udon, a big bag of Tobagi Kimchee, a bag of nectarines, and some Jufran hot banana sauce. Just another day at the grocery store.

There is a large section of teas and herbal remedies. Including this one, "Super Colon Sweeper." You have to admire a product with a drawing of the human lower digestive system on the label.

BigDNYE

Posted on by Bill Chance

We had decided to go downtown to Victory Plaza for the Big D NYE new year’s eve extravaganza. This is Dallas’ small-time answer to Times Square – a free outdoor party for as many folks as can cram into a public space. I thought about not going – it’s a big hassle to get down there with all those folks and, especially, to get back home again, plus – I was feeling pretty nasty with a cold coming on.

But we decided to give it a shot anyway. I didn’t want to hassle with parking so we took the DART train down. Here’s a hint for taking the train to big events, if you live along the Red line, like we do, drive a bit east and catch the Blue line in Garland. A lot fewer people ride the Blue, and the trains won’t be as packed.

So we made it into downtown and the weather was nice and balmy, though there was a promise of a cold front with north winds to come. When I had walked around the nightime skyscrapers for Unsilent Night I was surprised at the amount of activity that was going on in Downtown… I was used to the sidewalks being rolled up when the businessmen went home to the suburbs. I remembered a pizza joint that promised to be open ’til 3AM and had that sort of Italian down-home greasy look to it that promised delicious pizza.

We walked around and never found the place. However, everything was hopping, and we ended up at another, more pedestrian pizza spot, The Original Italian Cafe and Bar at the corner of Field and Main. We sat outside on a sidewalk table and enjoyed a really good pizza, terrible service, and a parade of interesting folks walking by on new year’s eve. There were women in sequined evening wear and impossibly high heels stumbling along, homeless drifters stunned by the activity, and groups of football fanatics (holiday bowl games in town) wearing their teams colors and wandering around staring at tourist brochures. One group called out, “Does anyone know where Main Street is?,” while standing under a street sign that spelled out “Main and Field.”

I only intended to eat a little because the big celebration at Victory park promised a lineup of food trucks, but I gobbled down too much pizza anyway.

Which was fine because, once we hoofed it over to Victory Park, worked our way through the security checkpoints we were presented with the tasty lineup of food trucks, and none of them had a line less than a hundred yards long.

We arrived at about ten and Candy found her usual spot of grass at the corner of Houston Street and Olive.

She set up the folding chair we had brought and sat down to relax while I, as she said, “walked out into that mosh pit.” It’s true, sometimes I like to simply mix with humanity, and a street party on New Year’s Eve is good for that. There are a lot of people, incredible diversity, and everyone is in a good mood. I’m big and tall enough to not feel too intimidated by the crowd, as long as it isn’t pushing, moving, and swelling (like it sometimes does at Mardi Gras on Bourbon).

I managed to get back to check on Candy and she said Lee had come by with his friends. They were out in the crowd somewhere.

The festivities began to heat up and the crowd began to grow as we approached midnight. There were the usual lineup of bands. We didn’t have Lady Gaga, but we did have Sleeperstar. Lee knows that band from their early days – he said he’s gone out to eat with them a few times.

The crowd kept growing, pumped up when the Dallas Stars hockey game ended and dumped another ten thousand or so out on the streets. I tried to get back to check on Candy, but the crowd was getting really dense and I couldn’t move more than five feet. Midnight arrived, we all yelled and the fireworks went off. It’s an impressive display, fired off from the roof of the American Airlines Center and the buildings around it. By that time the cold north wind was really blowing and the smoke and burning embers blinded me to some of the spectacular. At least I was able to see a few rockets blown astray by the wind scream into the expensive balconies of the W hotel next door – that alone was worth the price of admission (it was free).

I didn't want to carry my good camera in the crowd, so this is the best I could do. Fifty thousand of my best friends.

That always fascinates me standing there trapped in the rowdy crowd in the street. I can look up where the skyscraping towers of the W hotel and luxury highrise condominium towers rise up into the night sky until they almost seem to touch their blue-neon lined tops together, far overhead. I can see lonely rich folks standing at their floor-to ceiling windows, in suits and evening gowns, holding champagne flutes in their hands, staring out and down onto the massive dense crowd stretching out, filling the streets for blocks on end. What are they thinking? What is their opinion of the rabble in the streets below? Are they happy? Are they having fun?

I’m sure they are glad they don’t have to wait in line at the porta-potties.

There is nothing more boring than blurry, shakycam, youtube footage of fireworks – but here is some anyway.

This footage is from within Victory Plaza itself, I was outside in the streets, at the foot of the W Hotel – the tall blue neon-topped building in the footage.

This youtube video was taken only a few feet from where I was standing.

Once the fireworks died down I fought my way through the huddled masses to where Candy was and found she had been pushed back behind a line of trees by the growing crowd. I’m afraid that the current location may be about maxed out as far as the number of people that it can support. I would guess that about fifty thousand were down there – if they want it to grow larger they are going to have to figure out how to get some more open space involved.

Walking out, I looked up and noticed the ball on top of Reunion Tower was multi-colored. This was something new.

We didn’t want to get involved in the crowds fighting onto the trains at Victory Park itself, so we walked back into downtown and caught a train at Akard Station. It was packed up until Mockingbird, when the Red line folks got off, and as I thought, the Blue line was fine from then on.

It was fun and I was glad I went, but I think this might be the last year for me to go down for the big crowd event. The crowds are getting a bit large, and I’m not sure what else it will have to offer in the future. I think I might find a nice little party somewhere next year. Even though I don’t think I can afford one of those glass-lined suites overlooking Victory Plaza.

New Book of Mountains and Seas

Posted on by Bill Chance

One of the hidden gems down in the Dallas Arts district is the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

I was working in the Cotton Exchange building in downtown Dallas (the Cotton Exchange is gone now – they blew it up a couple years after I left) while they were building the skyscraper tower of the Trammell Crow Building. The construction site was visible from the windows of our office suite. I watched the steel skeleton climbing up and up – watched the workers scrambling over the latticework of girders. I watched the granite and reflective glass being raised and affixed to the building’s outer skin.

There is always a connection with a building that I watched go up. Since I saw it stretched out in time from the inside out – I feel I know all of its secrets. I know the shortcuts the architect made to get the outer shape. I saw the ventilation, plumbing, and elevator shafts carved out of the interior.

At one time the walkway around the base of the building contained an amazing collection of European sculpture and was one of my favorite places. The sculptures have been removed – and there is the promise to replace them with Asian pieces.

Behind the office building, on a floor level below, facing Flora street across from the Nasher Museum is the Crow Collection of Asian Art. Trammell and Margaret Crow have been collecting Asian art since the 1960’s and built the museum under a pavilion in back of the office tower. It is a small but effective museum, and a welcome addition to the other museums and performance venues in the Dallas Arts District – helping the area move towards the tipping point of becoming a well-known destination. In addition to exhibiting pieces from the permanent collection – the Crow Museum has developed a reputation for hosting impressive visiting temporary exhibitions.

Oh, one more thing. Admission to the museum is free.

A free museum is viewed in a different way than one that you have to pay to get in the door. Instead of making a big deal out of it – preparation and anticipation – you tend to simply wander in and take a relaxed view of the wonders within. I like it.

I have a confession to make – this time that I walked in to the museum it wasn’t because I had heard of some revelatory amazing exhibition or even that I felt the need for peaceful contemplation of a thousand years of artistic production.

I had to pee.

There are not a lot of public restrooms in a big city downtown. The homeless tend to take over and destroy any facilities that are open to anyone. So I decided to duck into the Crow Museum to use their restroom. Since I am a person that likes to meet their obligations – even though I should be able to use the bathroom and leave, there have been many times I’ve been to the Crow to see their art and not used the bathroom – I felt obligated to at least take a quick walk through the galleries.

I walked into the big room past the gift shop and found that it had been emptied. There was a bench in the center of the room and three digital projectors were shining on a long wall. The effect was that of a widescreen film being shown in a bare wooden room – very clean and beautiful. One guy was sitting at one end of the bench – I walked over and sat down on the other.

At first the film was showing some credits and bits of poetry while the soundtrack played some electronic music. It was very peaceful, but not much too it and after a few minutes I wondered, “Is this it?” It was an interesting thought – all this space and technology used to simply throw a few words on the wall along some jangling sounds. I began to wonder if it was an elaborate joke.

It wasn’t. I had come in right at the credits at the end. Soon the presentation looped back to the beginning and the real show began.

This was a film by Qiu AnXiong, an artist from Shanghai. The exhibition was called Animated Narratives and consisted of a two-part video installation called New Book of the Mountains and Seas, along with paintings associated with it.

The video started with a hand drawn animation of waves on the sea, then moved to a pastoral landscape. Soon, a farm appeared to grow on the land like an organic thing. The farm quickly grew to a village and then a walled town. Civilization continued to grow in an organic way – with fantastic animals taking the place of oil rigs, pumps, transportation, and warcraft. Everything grew and grew, with many scenes reminiscent of recent events, but warped into a strange surreal organic landscape. The Middle East (or something resembling it) is ravaged by oil production, the terrorists strike in a version of 911 even more surreal than reality, and then the inevitable disaster and destruction obliterated everything.

The film was in black-and-white and appeared to be animated ink drawings. After walking around and looking at some of the paintings, it was clear that it is actually paint on canvas. The artist overpaints as he photographs his work and generates the animation that way.

I really enjoyed the film and its presentation. You really have to see in it in its carefully constructed widescreen format to appreciate the work, but if you can’t make it to the Crow:

Here’s an online version (wait through the ads). I’m not sure how long this will be online.

Here’s another link to a version of the piece.

If that link doesn’t work for you, here’s about three minutes of the film. This section is near the end, and it does not do justice to seeing it live.

I enjoyed it enough to come back a couple days later and take a look at part two. This is another widescreen video set up in the mezzanine two floors higher up in the museum. It’s another animated work, this time concerning mad cow disease, genetic programing, biowaste disposal, environmental catastrophe and man’s eventual fate among the stars.

I couldn’t find the whole thing, but here is a bit of part two.

Don’t be afraid to wander into a museum, more or less unplanned. I should do this more often. I should not be so cheap to be afraid to do this even when I have to pay for it.

Unsilent Night

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was looking for something to do on a Saturday night – and through the power of this interweb-thingy here I discovered that there were going to be Food Trucks in the Arts District… and then there was going to be something called Unsilent Night.

The idea was to get a group of people all carrying boomboxes – each with one of four MP3 files boomboxing away. These were selections of electronic music – bell sounds and such. This group of people making music would march through downtown Dallas at night with the sounds bouncing off skyscrapers and such.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

But first, I had to get a boombox. I dug around and found a small white soundthrower that used to belong to Candy’s mother. It was portable enough and put out a bit of sound, but I needed batteries – plus, it didn’t play MP3 files.

So off I drove to the local everything store and bought a small pack of blank CDs (no blanks at home, only DVDs). My idea was to burn the 44 minutes MP3 I had downloaded from the Unsilent Night web page onto a CD that would play in the boombox. The thing takes six C batteries. At the store I discovered that they don’t sell six C batteries – only packages of 4, eight, or ten. The pack of ten costs less than the pack of eight – so I have four C cells left over.

At any rate I sat in my car at the DART station and burned the CD, loaded it into the boombox along with six of my ten C batteries… and I was ready to rock and roll. Well, maybe not rock and roll, but at least ring the bells a little.

When I climbed out of the train at the Pearl station I walked into a huge crowd of Santas milling around, working their way to the Arts District. I found out later that this was something called the “Santa Rampage” – a combination flash mob and pub crawl. There were about five hundred people in various versions of Santa Costumes – and I kept running into them all night. It looked like fun.

I manged to get a brisket and grilled cheese sandwich from Ruthies while the Santas were all having a pillow fight up by the Opera House. I’m glad I bought mine early because five hundred hungry Santas make for long lines at a handful of food trucks. I walked around the Arts District looking at Santas until it was time to hoof it over to the Akard DART station to meet up with the other folks for Unsilent Night.

At first I was disappointed because there were only a handful of people standing there with a half handful of boomboxes. The Cowboys were on TV, maybe people stayed home for holiday football. But as seven o’clock neared, a good number of latecomers appeared and we became a healthy little group of close to a hundred people.

We all synchronized our boom boxes, waited for the music to build a little, and then off we went. I have to admit, it was cooler than I had expected. The music was mesmerizing. It’s is interesting how it changes – both as the four different pieces of music cycle through their various peaks, valleys, and changes in instrumentation (the one I had – #1 – was mostly bells, but others sounded like voices, or drums, or other stuff) and the way the music bounced off the buildings and blended with the background noise of the city.

You could vary the sound a lot by moving back and forth in the line of people walking along the sidewalk. Not only were we playing different pieces of music, started at slightly different times (I jostled mine too much and had to start over – it didn’t matter) but everybody had different players. Most used iPhones with hand-held speakers – but some folks were prepared with more hefty weapons. On guy pulled a cart with a computer UPS – this gave him power for not only some serious speakers but flashing lights that he wired himself up with.

We walked down Main Street which was really hopping. I need to visit this area again – it wasn’t as dead as when I worked down there. The restaurants were open late, the bars were filling up, the street was full of cars slowly working their way through. We looped around Neiman Marcus – the Christmas Displays were awesome, past the Joule Hotel then back through some narrow alleys. These were especially cool – the music would bounce around in the enclosed spaces until it was almost deafening.

I really liked it.

We made it back to the Akard DART station after about an hour of walking and then took a break. While we were there, the five hundred Santas – most of which had been drinking quite a bit – showed up and crammed aboard a Green Line Train – off to their next stop. They seemed happy and full of… well, they were full of Christmas Spirit – along with other stuff. The Santa thing looked like fun. I’ll have to check it out next year.

Then we did a second Unsilent Night walk – this time back through the Arts District. This walk was more out in the open and the sound wasn’t as impressive – except when we paused for a while under the canopy next to the Trammel Crow Museum of Asian Art. It was shaped like a giant reflector facing down and we all stood along the stairs with the fountain bubbling in the center – that was magical.

By the way, we did walk past the Wyly Theater and the Transcendence art installation. The ice is now, of course, completely melted, and the remaining stones sit there in the gravel. There are still some white squares of gravel left where the original blocks were. Nobody payed attention – or even noticed that the raked gravel was there – it was very dark.

We walked back to the station and I was getting tired – a lot of walking. The organizer talked of next year and trying to increase the participation (the New York Unsilent Night walk has been going on for decades and has thousands of participants).

I’ll definitely do this again. It was fun to walk through downtown on a holiday evening, looking at the lights, the buildings, and the five hundred drunken Santa Clauses. The music was almost an added bonus – though it is the reason for being there.

Lots of fun. See you next year.

A few Santas check out Three Men and a Taco gourmet food truck.

Ruthie's before the Santas show up.

The organizer of Unsilent Night gave us some instructions before we set out with our boomboxes.

The usual crowd at the Akard Street train station on a Saturday Night

A train full of Santas

Matilda

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was walking through downtown on my way to take pictures of a giant naked man when I walked across Akard street. Peering down the canyon between edifice walls of glittering glass I spotted an ancient little machine shaking on its set of steel rails. The sign under its cyclops eye of a light said “Matilda.” It was an M-Line trolley car I have not ridden yet. So I detoured and climbed on board right before it took off for its route down McKinney and around uptown.

Matilda was built in 1925 in Melbourne, Australia, for the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board. It operated in Australia for sixty years until it was purchased for use in Dallas. It still ran great and only needed cosmetic modifications (it looks like these were new paint and added air conditioning).

It’s a long car, with an unusual configuration. It is divided up into three sections, with longitudinal red velvet benches on each end, and ordinary wooden seats in the center. It’s a beautiful streetcar with a gorgeous interior. Matilda runs a lot smoother than the older (by only a few years), shorter car, Rosie, I rode a couple of weeks ago.

It was bitter cold outside and very few people were out and about. A couple of commuters were on the car, plus a mother and her five sons. Yes, five boys – the oldest looked about twelve. They were good kids… but… man! Five! The youngest was a toddler and he had that devilish smile. Whenever they looked away from him he would take off running down the aisle.

When we reached the end of the line I was talking to the boys about the turntable under construction (it is almost finished) when one of the boys said, “You know we’re going to have a sister,” and pointed to their mom.

Man… five boys and a girl. I don’t know if I could do that.

The M Line Trolley in Dallas

Dallas M Line Trolley

Car 636, “Petunia” coming back the other way. I’ll have to get down there and ride that one soon.

Golden Boy

Posted on by Bill Chance

In 1914 the American Telephone and Telegraph company commissioned Evelyn Beatrice Longman to create a sculpture named The Genius of Electricity for their new headquarters at 195 Broadway in New York City. The final design was a massive winged nude male figure clutching lightning bolts in one hand and a coil of high-voltage cable wound around his body held in the other.The sculpture was completed in 1916 and hoisted to a pyramid constructed on the top of the building.

It was twenty four feet in height and was cast in bronze and covered with gold leaf. It weighed over sixteen tons. The statue towered over lower Manhattan until 1984. During the 1930’s the name of the statue was changed to The Spirit of Communications – although most people knew it by its nickname, Golden Boy. In 1984 AT&T moved up the island into the famous postmodern building designed by Philip Johnson. There was no perch on the roof, but the massive lobby contained the statue with no problem.

I visited New York about this time and remember seeking out the AT&T building as I walked the streets. Its architecture was still new and exciting. I remember the building, but I don’t think I actually entered the lobby. Now, I wish I had – I wonder if I would have remembered a huge naked gold statue standing there.

The next decades were turbulent times for the telecommunications industry and for Golden Boy. The AT&T building was sold and became the Sony Building. Golden Boy went across the Hudson and for years was displayed at two different locations in New Jersey. AT&T, of course, was carved up by the Federal Government – broken down into the baby bells.

One of these, Southwestern Bell, grew until in 2005 it swallowed its parent and became the new AT&T. Soon, the headquarters ended up in downtown Dallas, in the Whitacre Tower. Finally, in 2009, Golden Boy followed suit and was installed in the lobby of the building.

I stumbled across this history… I don’t know where. I have a book that lists notable Dallas sculptures but it was published prior to Golden Boy’s cross-country journey. Once I learned he was there, I had to go see him.

After I took at look at some melting ice (a sculptural form far more fleeting than bronze and gold leaf); I took a ride on a streetcar, then hoofed it across downtown to the AT&T headquarters.

I looked a little scruffy with my cheap jacket and bag of camera stuff – but garnered no more than a glance from the guard at the huge round desk at the entrance as I circled around taking pictures. The statue dominates the lobby – there is even a really nice curved couch behind the sculpture where you can sit down, relax and stare up at his golden ass. Yes, by the way, he is completely nude and, more or less, anatomically correct.

I had arrived near the end of the day and the lobby was dotted with serious-looking men in expensive suits shuffling on their tailored overcoats for the cold trip home at the end of the workday. The lobby is lined with cellular stores that open outward onto the street. These were full of folks looking for Christmas presents – for themselves or others.

It’s a modern, clean space – the almost-century old statue looks great but maybe a little out of place. Maybe he should be up on top of the building after all. He could spend his days staring across the street to the roof of the Magnolia Hotel down at that other Dallas iconic rooftop sculpture – the Pegasus.

Golden Boy - in all his glory

It is a beautiful statue... but somehow - he doesn't look too happy. I think he wants to be outside.

The view of the statue from AT&T Plaza through the entryway.

The statue on his perch at 195 Broadway. Photo by Lee Sandstead.

There is another famous statue in the distance. Photograph from Lee Sandstread

Beck Park

Posted on by Bill Chance

From when I worked Downtown I have had an fond appreciation for small “pocket” parks in the dense urban core. I have a deep love for these tiny jewel-like pieces of nature stuck down in the concrete vastness.

A really nice one in Dallas is Beck Park, a private oasis that is open for public use. Carefully designed, it is a set of four “room” with a waterfall, some rocks, grass, and tables.

I like it and miss the days when I worked down there. Maybe some day during the holidays the weather will be nice enough for me to go down there and sit for a while, read a little, write a little, relax. That would be nice.

A skyscraper towers over the water feature in Beck Park

 

I forgot to write down the name and artist of this sculpture in Beck Park

Rosie

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was sitting around with a head full of memories of one of my favorite things – the St. Charles Streetcar in New Orleans. I came to a sudden realization – Dallas has a streetcar too. It isn’t as famous or as beautiful – but it is there

It’s called the McKinney Avenue Trolley, or the M-Line. It’s an important part of Dallas’ hard work at becoming a real city, with a vibrant downtown. The line has been here for quite some time, and runs along McKinney Avenue from the Downtown Arts District out through the West Village and on to connect up with the DART train line at the underground Cityplace Station. Although it is operated by DART, the trolley is free.

Originally, the trolley was viewed as a small, quaint tourist attraction – and it is. However, now that a large population is beginning to move into tony uptown condominiums it is becoming an important transportation artery for the young professionals to get to their offices in downtown. Now, the trolley line is about to expand – first through the new park being constructed atop the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, then on through downtown and across the river into Oak Cliff.

Again, I remembered the trolley as I was on the DART train headed downtown and decided to take a ride. As I walked along the sidewalk a couple of tourists from Henderson, Nevada asked what train to take to catch the trolley.

“Well, actually, the trolley is only a few blocks away, and I’m walking there now, I’ll be glad to show you,” I said.

“Does it go around downtown?”

“No, it doesn’t go around through the skyscrapers. It goes out through Uptown, which is more interesting anyway – there’s a lot of restaurants, shops, and stuff.”

So we chatted as we walked. I always wonder about tourists in Dallas. It’s a pretty nice place to live, but a terrible place to visit. It’s not a tourist type of place.

So I dropped them off at the trolley stop by the Dallas Museum of Art and went on – I wanted to visit a couple other places before I rode the trolley. A couple hours later I was back and sat down to wait for a car. While I waited, trying to read a little, I was bothered by an aggressive, obnoxious panhandler who became abusive when I didn’t give him any money.

Experiences like that make it difficult to maintain feelings of charity and goodwill to all even during the holiday seasons. Downtown is getting a growing population of hard-core homeless panhandlers that are becoming problematic as the city is trying to increase the livability of the place.

While he was yelling at me, my streetcar arrived so I turned and got on board. The car was packed with about half tourists and half office workers on the way home. The residents helped the tourists with information on the trolley route and points of interest along the way.

Dallas doesn’t have a neutral ground like New Orleans does, so the streetcar has to fight its way through traffic like everybody else. It makes for a slow, rattling ride.

Another difference between Dallas and New Orleans is that here, all the streetcars are unique. This day, I was lucky enough to draw Rosie, the oldest operating streetcar in the country.

Rosie, turning around at Cityplace

She looks good for 102 years old

Rosie was built in Philadelphia by the J.G. Brill company in 1909. It spend many years running along the rails in Porto, Portugal. It was the first car that the M-Line restored and ran on the opening day in 1989. Since it ran past and was sponsored by the Crescent development they gave it the name “The Crescent Rose.” This was shortened to “Rosie.” Since it is now over a hundred years old, it is usually used for special events and charters, it was a rare treat to have it out on a regular run. It’s a popular car – a common subject (another).

Down at Cityplace Station they are building a turntable so that they can begin operating some trolleys they have that are only able to run one way.

The turntable under construction

I wasn’t in the best of moods and the trolley still can’t hold a candle to the St. Charles line – but I am excited about the plans for expansion. I can see sitting for a while watching that turntable go round. I think I need to come down some more and ride some of the other trolley cars – the “Green Dragon” looks like fun