“You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” 
—Charlie Brown

For New Year here in Dallas they put fireworks on the Reunion Tower downtown – which I’ve seen before and is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they had to cancel the drone show (I’ve never seen one – want to) because of the awful accident a few weeks ago.

Still, I had wanted to ride my bike down into the Trinity River Bottoms, find a spot on a levee, set up a tripod and my camera. Unfortunately RWD (real world disasters) intervened and I had to stay home, watch TV, and listen to distant booms at midnight.

More than a decade ago, (not on New Years Eve, I don’t remember why they had the fireworks display) I did ride my bike down to an abandoned parking structure (sprinkled with homeless shit) – which turned out to be an excellent vantage point. I took some pictures with varying exposure times (from a tripod of course – carrying one on a bike is something I’m still working on). Here’s what I came up with:

I remember the first time I saw the Reunion Tower. It would have been a year after I graduated from college, 1979. The thing was pretty much brand new then and we drove past it on the way from Hutchinson, Kansas (where I lived, working in a Salt Mine) to the beach at South Padre Island. I was gobsmacked – the thing was so modern and odd and unexpected.

Then I saw it in the PBS movie The Lathe of Heaven (I saw it on the only time it aired in 1979 – it had a long, odd history, disappeared for two decades, but you can see it now – here’s the part with the Reunion Tower) which was filmed in Dallas, and the tower was a stand-in for the evil scientist’s ultimate reality-bending dream machine. Dallas was considered very futuristic at the time and other spots (City Hall, the Water Gardens, DFW airport’s people movers) were also used in the movie.

Then, when I moved here, for years the revolving bar at the top was a go-to spot to take visitors or to celebrate special events. I haven’t been in decades… maybe it’s time for a re-visit.