Whenever I visit a new city for the first time I like to go to its highest point first to get a sense of where I am and where I’m going. In Seattle, the Space Needle, in NYC, One World Trade Center, in Chicago, Willis Tower Skydeck and in Dallas, it’s Reunion Tower.
Reunion Tower aka “the Ball” is a little different from most “needles” or “observation towers” in that it wasn’t built for a world’s fair or any other global event, as is typically the case, it was built as part of an urban redevelopment project. That project included the Hyatt Regency hotel which the tower is connected to and is also a transit hub for the city. The GeO-Deck, or observation deck, includes some interactive digital activities to introduce the city. And in Dallas you REALLY want to hit the tower first. Why? Because the city of Dallas is not good at promoting itself with attraction maps and such. Item of note: Wolfgang Puck has a restaurant in the tower that rotates named Five Sixty. If you want to go, book waaay before you make your trip. It’s understandably a hot spot!
One of my other favorite things to do when I first visit a city is take in beautiful bridges. Perhaps it’s because one of my favorite words in Italian is attraversiamo. If you’ve seen the movie Eat, Pray, Love, you know that it means, let’s cross over. Let’s go from here to there. Bridges are powerful life metaphors to me. A structure straddling two locations, where you were, and where you are going. At some point, you will most certainly find yourself traversing a “life bridge” taking you from one season, into another season of life. In Dallas, the most beautiful bridge is the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. (featured image)
The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge (see featured image) opened in 2012 and spans the Trinity River in Dallas connecting Woodall Rodgers Freeway to downtown Dallas. It’s named after an heiress/philanthropist and stands 40 stories high running parallel to the Ronald Kirk walking bridge. It’s estimated that the cost to build the bridge sits around 180M USD and has won several design awards for steel bridge construction both in the US and abroad. It’s an amazing structure to behold with the Dallas skyline behind it, but my friends and I found it a little tricky to locate the spot where my photos are shot from. Best bet is to map getting to it by locating the entrance to the Ronald Kirk walking bridge. It’s well worth the frustration once you find it! That’s metaphoric too…sometimes finding the entrance to a bridge is more difficult than the crossing. Think about it…