Culture
Downtown Dallas has undergone a series of important changes that city officials believe will drastically improve the city's core. These changes are located in four downtown areas: Victory Park, the Arts District, the Trinity River, and the Convention center corridor.
Victory Park, named one of the nation's most successful Brownfield reclamation projects, is home to the American Airlines Center, built in 2001, as well as several new high-rise hotels, residential towers and office buildings including the 33 story "W Dallas Victory Hotel and Residences" (2006), the 28 story "Cirque" residential tower (2007), the 29 story "The House" residential tower (2008), the 20 story "One Victory Park" office tower (2009), among others. Also currently under construction in Victory Park is the new "Perot Museum of Nature and Science", a $185 million dollar 14 story ultra-modern addition to Downtown Dallas scheduled to open in late 2012.
The Arts District, Dallas, Texas, already one of the world's largest, is in the final stages of a massive ten year construction project that will result in a new 2,300 seat opera house, a series of theatres, residential space, retail, parks, and a gleaming 42 story residential tower known as Museum Tower which is scheduled to open in 2012.
Of all the changes in downtown Dallas, the Trinity River corridor is undergoing the most dramatic. Currently the river runs in an artificially straight line a large distance from any part of downtown; however, Dallas is currently in the process of returning the river to its natural course, creating two large lakes to border the downtown area, and has commissioned two large cable stayed bridges to be built across the river and new lakes. Dubbed the Trinity River Project by local officials, plans are also in place for improved levies to protect downtown from possible flooding.
Separated from Victory Park and the Arts District by the Downtown Central Business District, the Convention Center corridor is the site of a new convention center hotel. Currently, Dallas stands as one of a few major American cities without a hotel accompanying its convention center. The currently under construction $500 million dollar 23 story hotel is the Omni Dallas Hotel, which is scheduled to open earlier than planned in November 2011. Dallas hopes these changes will bring more permanent residents into the downtown area; as of the 2010 Census the downtown population has grown to 6,074 from the 1,000 citizens who lived in downtown at the end of 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Downtown Dallas
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)