Downtown's Beaux-Arts Skyline

For most of the twentieth century, this was where Dallas dressed up. Along Main and Elm streets, oil money and retail fortunes raised a wall of ornate towers, grand hotels, a glittering theater, and department stores that drew shoppers from across the Southwest. This walk threads through the commercial heart of downtown, looking up at the buildings that gave the city its first real skyline: the Beaux-Arts hotel a brewing magnate built, the office tower famous for the flying red horse that still turns above it, the last of the city's great movie palaces, and the stores whose names — Neiman-Marcus, Sanger Brothers, Titche-Goettinger — were household words for generations. The route runs about a mile through busy streets, so watch the traffic, and remember that the best details are above the storefronts: cornices, columns, carved stone, and that glowing Pegasus that has signaled Dallas to drivers for ninety years.