From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dallas (pronounced /ˈdæləs/) is the third-largest (according to 2000 census) city in the state of Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The city covers 385 square miles (997 km²) and is the county seat of Dallas County.[4] As of July 1, 2006, U.S. Census estimates put Dallas at a population of 1.2 million.[1]The city is the main economic center of the 12-county Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area—at 6 million people, it is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States.[5] Dallas is listed as a gamma world city by the Loughborough University Globalization and World Cities Study Group & Network.[6]
Dallas was founded in 1841 and formally incorporated as a city on 2 February 1856. The city is well known for its role in the petroleum industry, telecommunications, computer technology, banking, and transportation. It is the core of the largest inland metropolitan area in the United States and lacks any navigable link to the sea[7]—Dallas's prominence despite this comes from its historical importance as a center for the oil and cotton industries, its position along numerous railroad lines, and its powerful industrial and financial tycoons.[8]
History
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- See also: Historical events of Dallas, Texas
Before Texas was claimed in the 1500s as a part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain by the Spanish Empire, the Dallas area was inhabited by the Caddo Native Americans. Later, France also claimed the area, but in 1819 the Adams-Onís Treaty made the Red River the northern boundary of New Spain, officially placing Dallas well within Spanish territory.[9] The area remained under Spanish rule until 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain and the area became part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. In 1836, the Republic of Texas broke off from Mexico to become an independent nation.[10] In 1839, four years into the Republic's existence, Warren Angus Ferris surveyed the area around present-day Dallas. He shot the bears, poisoned the wolves, chased off the natives, and made the area safe for John N. Bryan to "found" the city of Dallas in 1841 . In 1846 the Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States and Dallas County was established.
According to the City of Dallas, the origin of the name “Dallas” is a mystery, despite claims to the contrary. The most probable claim is that George Mifflin Dallas (Who was named after the village of Dallas, Scotland), a Vice President of the United States, was the person who Dallas was named after. Bryan stated only that it was named “after my friend Dallas.” Another idea, was that the name was influenced from a small town in Pennsylvania, named "Dallas" [11]
Other leading candidates for Dallas's eponym are:
- 1. Commodore Alexander James Dallas, brother of George Mifflin Dallas, stationed in the Gulf of Mexico;
- 2. Walter R. Dallas, who fought at San Jacinto;
- 3. James L. Dallas, Walter's brother and a Texas Ranger;
- 4. Joseph Dallas of Arkansas, who lived in the Cedar Springs area in 1843, and moved from Washington County (near Bryan's land holdings in Crawford County) to the Dallas area a few years after Bryan's arrival. This possibility has much support, in that founder John Neely Bryan stated that he had named the town after "his friend," and he was indeed friends with Joseph Dallas at the time.[12]
A notable fact is that, while the namesake of the city of Dallas is not known for certain, the namesake of the county of Dallas is clear, as noted in the transcripts of the Texas legislature. Dallas County was named after Vice-President George Mifflin Dallas, leading to the intriguing possibility that the county seat was named for a different person than the county of the same name.[13]
Dallas was founded in 1841 and formally incorporated as a city on 2 February 1856[8] The city had a few slaves, mostly brought by settlers from Alabama and Georgia. Dallas was just another small town dotting the Texas frontier until after the American Civil War in which it was part of the Confederate States of America, and only legally became a city in 1871. The city paid the Houston and Texas Central Railroad US$5,000 to shift its route 20 miles (32 km) to the west and build its north-south tracks through Dallas, rather than through Corsicana as planned.[verification needed] A year later, Dallas leaders could not pay the Texas and Pacific Railroad to locate there, so they devised a way to trick the Railroad. Dallas had a rider attached to a state law which required the railroad to build its tracks through Browder Springs—which turned out to be just south of Main Street. [verification needed] In 1873, the major north-south and east-west Texas railroad routes intersected in Dallas, thus ensuring its future as a commercial center.[11]
By the turn of the twentieth century Dallas was the leading drug, book, jewelry, and wholesale liquor market in the Southwestern United States. It also quickly became the center of trade in cotton, grain, and even buffalo. It was the world's leading inland cotton market, and continued to lead the world in manufacture of saddlery and cotton gin machinery.[8] As it further entered the 20th century, Dallas transformed from an agricultural center to a center of banking, insurance, and other businesses.
In 1930, oil was discovered 100 miles (160 km) east of Dallas and the city quickly became the financial center for the oil industry in Texas and Oklahoma.[11] In 1958 the integrated circuit was invented in Dallas by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, which punctuated the Dallas area's development as a center for high-technology manufacturing. During the 1950s and 1960s, Dallas became the nation's third-largest technology center, with the growth of such companies as Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV Corporation) and Texas Instruments. In 1957 two developers, Trammell Crow and John M. Stemmons, opened a Home Furnishings Mart that grew into the Dallas Market Center, the largest wholesale trade complex in the world.[14] On 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Elm Street while his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
Dallas's skyline before a late spring afternoon thunderstorm.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Dallas underwent a building boom that produced a distinctive contemporary profile and prominent skyline for downtown Dallas. The 1980s also saw many oil industry companies relocate to Houston in order to be closer to offshore operations and the Port of Houston. However, Dallas was beginning to benefit from a burgeoning technology boom at the same time, driven by the growing computer, microchip, and telecommunications industries. Dallas also remained a strong center of banking, insurance, and business. The mid-to-late 1980s were tumultuous for the city when many Dallas banks collapsed from the Savings and Loan crisis. The hit effectively threw the city's economy to its knees and plans for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development were scrapped. The city remained in recession during the 1990s but the explosive growth of technology-based businesses kept the city's economy fairly stable—During the 1990s, Dallas became known as the Silicon Prairie, similar to California's Silicon Valley.[15]
Recession continued to plague the city into the early 21st century. From 1988 to 2005, not a single high-rise structure was built within the downtown freeway loop, and the city was running out of developable land in north Dallas and Lake Highlands. Totally hemmed in on the north by suburbs, most new housing was being built in Carrollton, Coppell, Frisco, McKinney, Plano and Richardson. By the mid-2000s, the dried up downtown market began to turn around with the construction of multiple art venues, office towers, residential towers, and residential conversions. Downtown housed little over 1,600 residents in 2000, but by the year 2010, the North Central Texas Council of Governments expects over 10,000 residents to be living in the neighborhood.[16] Just north, Uptown is one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, and major advances are taking place in the underdeveloped south Dallas and Oak Cliff areas, including the construction of the University of North Texas at Dallas.[citation needed]
Geography
Dallas is the county seat of Dallas County. Portions of the city extend into neighboring Collin, Denton, Kaufman, and Rockwall counties.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 385 square miles (997.1 km²)—342.5 square miles (887.1 km²) of it is land and 42.5 square miles (110.1 km²) of it (11.03%) is water. Dallas makes up one-fifth of the much larger urbanized area known as the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex—about a quarter of all Texans live in the Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington metropolitan area.[17]
Topography
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The DFW Metroplex at night, photographed from the
International Space Station in early 2003. Dallas is the larger
nexus of light on the right (east), Fort Worth the smaller on the left (west).
Dallas, and its surrounding area, is mostly flat and lies at an elevation ranging from 450 feet (137 m) to 550 feet (168 m). The western edge of the Austin chalk formation, a limestone escarpment, rises 200 feet (61 m) and runs roughly north-south through Dallas County. The uplift is particularly noticeable in the neighborhood of Oak Cliff and the adjacent cities of Cockrell Hill, Cedar Hill, Grand Prairie, and Irving. Marked variations in terrain are also found in cities immediately to the west in Tarrant County surrounding Fort Worth.
The Trinity River is a major Texas waterway that passes from the city of Irving into west Dallas, where it is paralleled by Interstate 35E along the Stemmons Corridor, then flows alongside western downtown, and through and alongside south Dallas and Pleasant Grove, paralleled by Interstate 45, where it exits into unincorporated Dallas County and heads southeast to Houston. The river is flanked on both sides by 50 feet (15 m) tall earthen levees to protect the city from floods.[18] The river has been treated much like a drainage ditch throughout Dallas's history, but as Dallas began shifting towards a postindustrial society, public outcry about a lack of aesthetic and recreational use for the river ultimately gave way to the Trinity River Project. The project, which began in the early 2000s and is scheduled to reach completion in the 2010s, will result in lakes, new park facilities and trails, and transportation improvements.[19]
White Rock Lake is Dallas's other significant water feature. The lake and surrounding park is a popular destination among boaters, rowers, joggers, and bikers in the Lakewood/
Classical
from 
