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When I think of Dallas, I think of oil. When I think of oil, I think of gas--Hopper's painting Gas, which contains an image of a sign for Mobil Gas, whose headquarters are in Dallas. For years Mobil's building was the tallest in Dallas. In fact, it was the tallest building south of Washington, D.C., and the huge Pegasus statue on its roof presided over downtown Dallas and the entire American South like the one presiding over Hopper's painting.
The building had since been transformed into a hotel and surpassed in height by many more modern skyscrapers, but the city had adopted the Pegasus as its symbol. Pegasus medallions topped the lamp posts downtown streets, and the public sculpture theme in this town was corner statues of variations on Pegasus. The one in front of the preserved cabin of area pioneer John Neely Bryan had on a tie and reading glasses. In front a building at Bryan and Harwood was a version of the statue 
Pegasus and Man by Carl Milles, a copy of which I had seen in the courtyard of the Des Moines Art Center. At the corner of Main and Akard was the Pegasus Credit Union.
Also, when I think of Dallas, I think of 
November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed here. The sixth floor from which the fatal shot was fired (depending on who you believe) was now a museum devoted to JFK and that fateful day. I got spooked thinking that I was about to walk the same steps that someone (allegedly) took that day. The exhibit did a great job of clarifying what was known about that day and the people tied to it--and what remained unknown about it. An exhibit of important moments of loss in the U.S. already had already added the Attack on America September 11, 2001, though my visit was only three months after that.
One thing I do not think of when I think of Dallas is lighthouses. However, that's what I was here to see. Edward Hopper's painting Lighthouse Hill in the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Lighthouse Hill shows a series of darkly shadowed hills topped by a pale yellow lighthouse set against a blue sky. One of the few well-known photographs of Hopper shows him painting this canvas. Jo wrote they "lived curiously for [the] sake of [this] canvas. Lighthouse Hill came out of housekeeping with water from village pump--& the toilet in a shed shared with lobster bait." More so in person than in reproduction, the painting gets across a sense of isolation. Partly it is the separation between the two buildings. Partly it's the anonymizing sunlight broadsiding the white façades.
The painting was so popular that immediately after the DAM purchased it, another admirer wrote to inquire about obtaining it. The DAM wrote back, "neither the owner or the museum would care to relinquish this particular painting." However, someone seemed to dislike it. Lighthouse Hill was one of three paintings scratched by a vandal in the museum. Luckily, the needed repairs were relatively minor. Hopper suffered at Dallas's hands an attack just as did John F. Kennedy.
In the gallery with me stood a freckle-faced teen with blue eyes and a cowlick in his hair, his slight frame draped by a lightweight jacket. He shrugged, "I don't come here often actually. I'm here because my uncle is having an opening in the next gallery."
"I'm really happy for my uncle," he stated. "I just don't like big functions like this. I'll wait a couple of days until it dies down, then let him know I liked it. It means a lot to my grandparents. My grandfather was curator. When I was younger, I would come here every now and then with him. That was usually after we would do our painting. He was an artist, too. My whole family is a little bit surrounded in art.
"My uncle's painting has a lot of symbolism in it, not all of which I understand. It shows my uncle as a child painting, when he was younger. Before my father was born. See that easel in the painting? 
I have a portrait of my grandfather painting my grandmother in a chair, and that's the easel that he used. And that easel he passed on, so that [easel] has symbolism. And then also…" He looked around and then continued sotto voce, "My grandfather's ashes are in the painting. Not a lot of people know about that. We didn't know what to do with them. When this came along, we said, 'that's perfect.'"
When I asked my question, he seemed confused. "Isolated from each other? In Dallas? I don't think they are. I know that some people want to be. But they just put their happy face on and kind of cover up."
His dad called out, and the teen yelled back as if worried he had done something wrong. I felt a little like that myself as his father arrived and glared at me. I apologized for detaining his son and slunk off.
After that group left, in walked a slight-boned man with a thin face and a gray mustache. A black leather jacket was slapped on his back, and he had a thick gray duckbill haircut. Behind him trailed a stocky Hispanic with a buzz cut who had on jeans and a gray zippered athletic suit with a pull rope through the neck.
The one with the duckbill murmured, "I teach art, so I do know about Hopper." He spoke in short phrases that gave the impression he was shy. "I work with airbrush. And work from photographs. Like photo-realism. Hopper's always someone who I've liked for that reason. He was heavily influenced by photographs. I think he was very much talking to everyday people. He was not talking to only artists. You don't have to be trained in art. It's not that I think bad about him or lesser of a painter than other trained artists. But this is a very clear statement to which everybody could relate."
When I asked about Hopper's isolation relating to Dallas, he shook his head, "Boy." After a pause, he pointed to his friend. "You're from Houston. Have you ever thought about it?"
"I don't think so," the other man stepped forward. "I think the Dallas community is a bit isolated. We're from a really small town a bit out of town, really rural. Where we're from, I wouldn't say that we were isolated. Though you see a lot of houses just out in the field. 
That painting's not un-Texas-like, minus the lighthouse." He in turn pointed back at the teacher. "He might have a different thought about Dallas."
"Yeah," The art teacher posited, "I think Dallas is isolated. There's not really any other places like Dallas. Dallas has a way of really balancing the opera and Red Rock Renaissance Festival real well. And I feel that makes them less isolated. I've seen more like that," he pointed to The Hutter Barn beside the Hopper, the Andrew Wyeth painting showing a lone barn below a moon at dusk.
His partner agreed, "There's a lot of places around this part of the country that build houses and there's no trees around. It makes me feel like it's more isolated because you've got just this single dwelling out in the middle of nowhere. And it's not very comfortable. There's nothing to block the wind."
"I think," the art teacher pursed his lips, "of isolation a bit differently than physical. I guess I think of it as psychological. This [Lighthouse Hill] is physical, but it also could be psychological. The lighthouse keeper, he's separated from other people. And I think in the city, you have that choice. Sheer numbers. You can be surrounded by people. But you can be all alone. And that's your choice. And even though you can be alone, perhaps when you're walking downtown or going through a neighborhood, you have a friend you feel connected to who lives next door or miles away in another part of the town."
More people came in. Stephanie was short, with a Roman nose, dark skin, and short, thick hair. She wore a suede suit and a camel-hair coat. Her tall husband had big ear lobes that folded sharply outwards, sincere blue eyes, and brief hair flipped up in front, making him look like Fred Gwynn from The Munsters. He was in a tawny tweedish jacket and a bright multicolored tie on a white shirt, very business-like. Stephanie's dignified, gray-haired mother sported a tasteful gray sweater and held her brown coat folded over her forearms. Her thin father had on a blue button-down oxford shirt open at the collar draped in a dark blue blazer. They were joined by a woman who had cellophaned red hair, waxy skin, and a wide-eyed forcefulness that made her seem to be leaning into me.
When I mentioned that Hopper's paintings were associated with isolation, they all agreed with a chorus of "yeah," "absolutely," and "it's amazing." Then when I asked about Dallas's isolation, Stephanie didn't hesitate, "Yes, people are isolated here."
"I don't really think so," her husband dissented. "To me, Dallas doesn't have that cold, urban feel that pervades so many of those paintings. I'm from Minneapolis. My father moved here 30 years ago, and I moved in with him. It's very easy to move to Dallas and be connected to the rest of Dallas because there's so many people coming from somewhere else. Most of the people you'll meet are not native Dallasites. Dallas had such a boom in the '70s and '80s where companies were relocating here. I'm in banking. Dallas is a banking town," he noted drolly. "It has become so. There's a Federal Reserve here. Right across the street. It's a mint; they print there as well." [That's a use for etching that Hopper would have been humored to consider.] 
"There are enough people from out of town," he pontificated, "that it tends to be the kind of town where you introduce yourself. It's not really a typical southern town except in that respect: the warmth and outgoingness is definitely there. Texas isn't really the south; it's very much its own state. It was its own country at one point. It came into the fold just before the Confederacy. Then it joined the Confederacy because of proximity--as well as other issues. But it's really always been its own state. Texans will invariably tell you that Texas is the only state in the union that has the right to secede. It's not true, but they feel that just the same. They want to be able to do so."
"I work for a senior agency," Stephanie finally burst in, "and the older tend to be isolated, definitely. I don't see Dallas as special in that way. The elderly rely on public transportation, and Dallas is not a great town for that."
When I asked the cellophaned drama queen 
("DQ," I thought of her as), who was a native Dallasite, she yipped, "OK," pronouncing it "Kyay. You don't care that I don't know anything about Hopper? Do I think people in Dallas are isolated?" She paused. "Yes." She paused again. "Isolated from what? Jeez, you know, it's something I've never thought about. In a Hopper way? He's very Midwestern. So that kind of fits isolation there. A lighthouse is always terribly isolated."
"But," Stephanie's mom countered, "it doesn't speak to me because it doesn't look like anything that's a part of my life."
DQ clarified, "I was thinking of individuals. You can be in a big city with a lot going on around you (even though Dallas isn't New York) and feel very isolated. Big cities breed a lot of lonely people because you get lost."
"OK," Steph's mom nodded, "I would agree with that. I don't think Dallas is that way, but yeah. I would think that Hopper was going for that."
"But Dallas isolated that way?" DQ mused, "I think socially, no; politically, well..."
"It used to be," Stephanie's dad intoned. "I've lived here for 40 years. And I am a Texan. I don't think it is any more."
"I think it is," his wife jumped in. "Politically. Geographically. When I was a child, people didn't travel that much." She chuckled. "I was twenty-one before I left Texas. Texans like to set themselves apart from the rest of the country."
"There is that," Stephanie smirked.
"Yes," her dad agreed, "there's definitely that."
[Dallas Museum of Art]
In 1956, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) came under attack by locals who thought that abstract art was "communist." Maybe that's why its current building looked like a fortress. It was entirely concrete and U-shaped. A four-story glass wall rose above the food court by the entrance, from whose ceiling hung 
Dale Chihuly stained glass flowers. At the museum's core, a series of long stairs and ramps led to side galleries, which provided a 
disorienting flow of traffic--more like an 
Escher than a Hopper. This vertigo was heightened by 
Claes Oldenburg's oversized circus tent spike with the rope wrapped around it beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Hopper and other American artists were exhibited in the "Art of the Americas" section of the museum, which I naively imagined would hold pre-Columbian relics. I forgot Texas's view of what constitutes "American."
In a Hopperesque marriage of architecture and art, the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection was displayed in a re-creation of their villa on the French Riviera. It was only when I went to Kansas City and saw Winston Churchill's paintings on Hallmark greeting cards that I realized Churchill painted. He was friends with Wendy Eaves, and four of his paintings adorned the walls of a room entirely devoted to Churchill and his paintings. As some kids looked at the paintings in the living room of the Reves Villa, a child asked his mother, "Well, where's the TV?" Paintings were television before there was radio.
The woman who showed me the files dismissed my question with a flick of her wrist, "I'm anti-social. I don't think that isolation is a bad thing. I like the anonymity of a large city."
She had brown hair down past her shoulders, black-rimmed goggles with dark tortoise shell sides, and dark brown eyes. She wore a soft green button-down sweater and black pants. Her watch bore a skull and crossbones.
"I'm glad that people are finally getting around to viewing the light in Hopper's work psychologically. Although when they go too far with it, I'm not happy with that. I used to live in Chicago. There's a Chinese place at Lincoln, Irving, and Damen: Orange something. 
I remember that façade and that place as being similar to Chop Suey."
Dallas's Visitor Center was inside the 
Old Red Courthouse, a huge Richardsonian Romanesque building in the West End. The guy behind the counter there upon learning my hometown croaked, "I like Chicago. On Michigan Avenue, I always see people talking and touching and laughing. We don't see that in Dallas. We're afraid to make eye contact in case someone asks for you for a cigarette. There's no one in Chicago asked me for a nickel. I don't know if they're just not on Michigan Avenue or what. But here everybody was looking for a handout."
The city was named in honor of George Mifflin Dallas, a Pennsylvania democrat who was elected Vice President in 1845 on a platform favoring Texas's annexation. John Neely Bryan arrived from Tennessee and established a trading post on the bluff on the Trinity River. Land title was granted to settlers who worked at least 15 acres and built "a good and comfortable" cabin. Many who came raised cattle, and the state soon became synonymous with cattle ranchers. Pioneer Plaza featured the world's largest bronze monument in tribute: forty longhorn steers being driven through a river by three cowboys on horseback. 
Now a major center for oil and gas, Downtown Dallas at first glance struck me as sleepy and soot-filled. If Texas were a country, it would rank seventh in the world in air pollutants. A tourist Web site directed me to one neighborhood "to get away from the fast pace of the downtown." I couldn't find anyone downtown to get away from. During my morning walk, the streets were deserted. When it was 11:40, there were lines longer than I'd ever seen at every chain restaurant in town. Dallas had four times more restaurants per person than New York City and more shopping centers per capita than any other major U.S. city. By 2:00, downtown was deserted again. Walking or driving, everybody here moved slowly and expected me to do the same.
I found several Hopperesque buildings downtown. 
The Katy Building, named for the MKT (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway) was decorated with painted terra cotta. The old Greyhound bus station at Griffin and Young still had its art deco blue neon dog and lettering. The 1916 Greek-revival Union Terminal was still used as an Amtrak station. The original Nieman Marcus store was in Dallas, with an N and an M on their door handles. As fate would have it, I was there the day he died. A display window already bore a poster "Stanley Marcus, 1905-2002." Business at the store looked dead that day, too.
Outside of the Hopperesque ones, most buildings were modern and faceless. Many featured shiny glass facades, as if they were giant mirrors reflecting the city back to itself. Reunion Towers was formed of four slender reinforced concrete cylinders, topped by three levels of activity, all encircled by a geodesic dome that lit up its round ball of lights at top, looking like its own solar system. 
[Dallas Skyline]
I.M. Pei designed Fountain Place, Energy Place; and 
Dallas Symphony Center. A food court attached to Renaissance Tower reproduced Pei's 
Louvre Glass Pyramid. His City Hall was an inverted pyramid. Starting from a modest ground-floor entrance, each successive story was a concrete square larger than the one below it. The red Pegasus, lit up and spinning atop the Magnolia Building, looked down on it all, like the ghost of JFK or the one in the Hopper's painting Gas. 
Modern architects might find a lot to talk about in downtown Dallas, but I sure don't find anything. One building looked like a rising green glass arrow. I asked two guys passing by, "What building is that?"
"That's Fountain Place," one pushed ahead of his friend toward me. 
"Why do you want to know?"
"I'm visiting from out of town and an architecture fan."
"Are you an architectural terrorist?" the other giggled. "Because we'd love to have you blow that thing up."
Thanksgiving Square was a 3.5-acre site, purchased in 1968, managed by the Thanks-Giving Foundation, a Texas non-profit corporation. The area featured bells, meditation garden, fountain, and a spiral chapel. It was devoted to "honouring the spirit of gratitude to God." Although whose god and what schedule he keeps is open to interpretation. The chapel was open 8:30 to 5:00 Monday through Friday. God apparently keeps business hours. And, though the design attempted to incorporate architectural designs from different religions, there's actually a very specific entrance and a very specific path you're supposed to follow. The mosaic of all world religions included the words "where the people and sheep of his pasture enter His gates with Thanksgiving and his courtship praise. Give thanks to Him and bless His name." Don't suppose by "His" they meant Buddha or any female deity. Not when the next sign read "Love the Lord your God with all your heart." I thought Lord was a Christian thing. Other signs quote Psalms and other Bible passages, but absolutely nothing from other religions. And what justified the Thanksgiving wall of U.S. Presidents?
In an irony that seems like biblical retribution, the Biblical Arts Center featuring all Christ-related images was destroyed by fire.
Pegasus and Man by Carl Milles, a copy of which I had seen in the courtyard of the Des Moines Art Center. At the corner of Main and Akard was the Pegasus Credit Union. 
November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed here. The sixth floor from which the fatal shot was fired (depending on who you believe) was now a museum devoted to JFK and that fateful day. I got spooked thinking that I was about to walk the same steps that someone (allegedly) took that day. The exhibit did a great job of clarifying what was known about that day and the people tied to it--and what remained unknown about it. An exhibit of important moments of loss in the U.S. already had already added the Attack on America September 11, 2001, though my visit was only three months after that.
