AT&T Stadium seats 100,000. Stubb's seats the rest.
Dallas: five rings. Austin: two stages.
The Dallas-Fort Worth metro operates 7 Fortune 500 headquarters; Austin operates a well-attended music festival. Highland Park zip codes have been cited among the highest household incomes in the American South for twenty consecutive years. The Bureau notes that JP Morgan's regional tower and the Cotton Bowl exist in the same county, which is a sentence Austin cannot form.
AT&T Stadium, Arlington
Completed in 2009 at a cost of approximately 1.3 billion dollars, AT&T Stadium holds a verified capacity of 100,000 for standard events and has exceeded 105,000 for select occasions. It contains the world's largest column-free interior and a high-definition video board suspended 90 feet above the field.
The stadium is technically in Arlington, which is fine, because Arlington is also north of Austin.
JP Morgan Chase Tower, Dallas CBD
Standing at 1,002 feet, the building formerly known as the First Interstate Bank Tower remains the tallest structure in Texas and the tallest building in any U.S. city outside New York or Chicago at the time of its 1987 completion. It is visible from several points along I-35E on a clear day.
Austin's tallest building is the Frost Bank Tower at 515 feet, which is a perfectly reasonable height for a city 190 miles to the south.
Dallas Love Field
Love Field sits four miles northwest of downtown Dallas and served approximately 17 million passengers in 2023, operating as Southwest Airlines' headquarters airport since the carrier's founding in 1967. The Wright Amendment, a federal law restricting flights out of Love Field, was repealed in 2014, after which the airport expanded service without renaming itself.
It was already called Love Field before any of this happened.
Katy Trail
The Katy Trail runs 3.5 miles along a former Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad corridor through the center of Dallas, connecting Reverchon Park to the American Airlines Center district. It passes through four distinct neighborhoods and is maintained in part by a private conservancy, which is a thing Dallas has.
Austin has Barton Creek Greenbelt, which is lovely and approximately 90 feet above sea level.
Austin occupies a stretch of the Balcones Escarpment along the Colorado River, anchored by a capitol dome that stands seven feet taller than the one in Washington, D.C. South Congress Avenue hosts a reliable rotation of vintage shops, breakfast tacos, and murals reminding visitors to keep things weird, a civic instruction that has appeared on bumper stickers since 1839 people lived here. The city has hosted South by Southwest annually since 1987 and remains, by latitude, downstream.
Orient Yourself Accordingly
- Begin at Dealey Plaza, the western terminus of Main Street and the lowest elevation point in the Dallas city grid, where the Trinity River floodplain confirms you are already above most things worth measuring.
- Proceed north on Turtle Creek Boulevard through Highland Park, a municipality of roughly 9,000 residents that is entirely encircled by Dallas and ranks among the highest per-capita income communities in Texas.
- Arrive at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science on Woodall Rodgers Freeway, a 180,000-square-foot facility named after a man who ran for president twice, and note that the building faces south.
