When the NBA Finals tip off on Thursday night, pitting the Celtics against the Mavericks, Boston and Dallas will be facing off as well, with civic pride on the line. How do their respective institutions and traditions stack up? Boston has Dunkin’. Dallas has 7-Eleven. (They’ve got us there.) Boston has baked beans. Dallas has barbecue. (Dallas, in a landslide.) Boston has Sam Malone. Dallas has J.R. Ewing. (I’ll take both.)
In their geography and history, the two cities stand in dramatic opposition. Boston, founded in 1630, has more than 200 years on Dallas. It is a dense coastal city in a decidedly liberal state. Dallas, by contrast, is young (incorporated in 1856) and sprawling, an auto-centric Sun Belt city landlocked on the prairie in a far more conservative state.
Boston, despite what some fictional band managers might tell you, is at heart a college town, a metro area with dozens of colleges and universities and a population that swells with disheveled, sandal-wearing students during the academic year. Dallas is a city of management and business, of khaki-clad commuters climbing the corporate ladder.
These are stereotypes, of course, but there is more than a kernel of truth to them, and they extend to the characteristics we ascribe to the respective populations. By reputation, the Bostonian is impatient and rude — a proud “Masshole” in the local parlance. My theory is that this temperament can be traced to Boston’s industrial past. Like other northern cities, Boston was ruled by the clock, with the daily pressures of deadlines and efficiency — along with the harsh climate — resulting in a no-nonsense, suffer-no-fools Yankee personality.
The stereotype of the Dallasite, conversely, is one of ostentatious Southern hospitality born of an agrarian, frontier past. In its early days, Dallas was ruled not by the clock but by the sun. Neighborliness was essential, because on the prairie neighbors relied on each other.
As a resident of both cities over the last few years, I’ve seen these cultural distinctions gradually erode. Americans move around so much that there is an increasing homogeneity. Social media has only amplified this trend, collapsing barriers between places. There has been a general loss of civility in this country, where everyone seems to be angry all the time.
Dallas has certainly benefited from migration from Boston. The businessmen and philanthropists Ray Nasher and Ralph Rogers were both graduates of the Boston Latin School. It is hard to imagine the city without their contributions.
Indeed, for all their differences, Boston and Dallas are bound together and share considerable DNA. They are linked above all by tragedy, by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Boston’s favorite son, on his route through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.
In Dallas, the assassination was the impetus for a fit of civic reinvention. Among the principal products of that burst of energy was the construction of a new City Hall, a forceful declaration in beige concrete of the city’s emergence from trauma. The architect was I.M. Pei.
Boston was struggling with its own grim circumstance in the 1960s, an economic crisis driven by the flight of business and population to its growing suburbs. As in Dallas, the response was a fit of reinvention, or “urban renewal.” Among its chief products was a new downtown government center with a majestic concrete City Hall as its centerpiece. Pei was not the architect of that building — Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles won an international competition to design it — but he was responsible for the urban plan that determined its location and scale.
The two city halls are rightly understood by historians as masterworks of brutalist architecture even as they are widely misunderstood by a public who sees them as inhumane symbols of government authority. Both, in fact, were conceived as celebrations of democracy and civic pride.
The Pei firm has also given both cities a defining skyscraper, in each case a pristine glass prism designed by Harry Cobb. Boston’s came first. The 60-story John Hancock Tower, completed in 1976, is a sharp-edged, flat-roofed exercise in precision, with gridded windows that slide endlessly into the sky. A decade later, Cobb gave Dallas Fountain Place, taking the Euclidean purity of Hancock and twisting it, the result being a shape-shifting tower that rises to a sharp point: building as rocket ship. Both are magnificent.
The urban reinventions of the 1950s and 1960s are something both cities have been wrestling with over the ensuing decades: a recovery from the recovery, so to speak. In Boston, the centerpiece of this process was the Big Dig, the removal of the elevated Central Artery highway that cut through the heart of the city. The project took more than 30 years in planning and construction, at a cost of more than $8 billion.
With Klyde Warren Park, Dallas has become an unlikely model for highway mitigation, and it is now considering its own inner-city highway teardown, with Interstate 345.
Whatever their differences and commonalities, there is one thing that defines both Boston and Dallas, and that is an obsession with sports. Each city has seen its share of recent winning, and also plenty of losing. Now, one city will be adding to its legacy, and the other will be very disappointed.
Let’s go Mavs.
