7 Crazy Facts About Dallas

Dallas, Texas. Big hats, big hair, big everything. But forget what you think you know.

Here are seven crazy facts that are true about one city on Earth, and only one. No copycats, no ties. These belong to Dallas, and Dallas alone. Let's ride.

#7: The flying red horse

Dallas has a flying red horse watching over it. In 1934, the Magnolia Petroleum Company mounted a giant, rotating neon Pegasus on the roof of the Magnolia Building, then the tallest skyscraper in town.

It was reportedly switched on to welcome oil executives arriving for a big petroleum convention, and for years it was the highest point on the skyline. Pilots reportedly claimed they could see its red glow from as far away as Waco.

Rust finally brought it down in 1999, so the city built a replica that lit up at midnight to ring in the year 2000. The original was tracked down years later, restored, and now glows outside the Omni Dallas Hotel. Most cities have one icon. Dallas has the same icon twice.

#6: The frozen cattle drive

There's a cattle drive happening in downtown Dallas right now, and it never moves an inch. Pioneer Plaza holds 49 bronze longhorn steers and three cowboys on horseback, pushing the herd across a limestone ridge and a flowing stream.

Each steer is about six feet tall. Sculptor Robert Summers created them to honor the old Shawnee Trail, which drove cattle right through Dallas in the 1800s. Together, they make up the largest bronze monument of its kind in the world.

Forty-nine steers. Zero cleanup. Best cattle drive in Texas.

#5: The cowboy who used to be Santa

Dallas is home to the world's tallest cowboy, and he started life as Santa Claus. Big Tex was built in 1949 as a giant Santa for a Christmas promotion in the tiny town of Kerens.

The State Fair of Texas bought him for $750, swapped the beard for boots and a hat, and in 1952 he became a cowboy. Then, during the fair's final weekend in 2012, an electrical short in his boot set him on fire. In minutes he burned down to his steel skeleton.

But you can't keep a Texan down. Big Tex came back the next year three feet taller, at 55 feet, with size 96 boots and a frame engineered to withstand a hurricane.

#4: A world's fair that never left

Dallas is sitting on a time capsule from 1936. To celebrate 100 years of Texas independence, Dallas beat out Houston and San Antonio to host the Texas Centennial Exposition, a full-blown world's fair. Architect George Dahl and his team built a gleaming Art Deco city in roughly 14 months.

Here's the crazy part: most world's fairs get bulldozed when the party ends, but Dallas kept its buildings. Today, Fair Park holds the largest collection of 1930s Art Deco exposition architecture in the United States, and it's a National Historic Landmark. Walk through it, and you're basically stepping back into 1936.

#3: A district full of Pritzker winners

Dallas has the largest contiguous urban arts district in America. The Dallas Arts District stretches across about 118 acres of downtown and is packed with the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Meyerson Symphony Center and more.

It also has the highest concentration of buildings designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects in the world. The Pritzker is basically the Nobel Prize of architecture. Most cities are lucky to have one. Dallas lined them up on the same stroll.

#2: Birthplace of the frozen margarita machine

Every frozen margarita machine on the planet traces back to one Dallas restaurant. In 1971, restaurateur Mariano Martinez had a problem: his bartenders couldn't make margaritas fast enough, or the same way twice.

Then he walked into a convenience store, saw a slushy drink machine, and the light bulb went off. He and a friend rigged up an old soft-serve ice cream machine, and on May 11, 1971, the world's first frozen margarita machine was born.

Today, that original machine sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Yes, a margarita machine is officially a national treasure. Salud.

#1: The microchip was born here

The device you're reading this on exists because of one quiet summer in Dallas. In 1958, Jack Kilby was a brand-new engineer at Texas Instruments who hadn't been on the job long enough to earn a vacation.

So while his coworkers were away, he stayed in the lab and worked out how to build an entire electronic circuit on one tiny sliver of semiconductor. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated the world's first working integrated circuit: the microchip.

Robert Noyce in California independently built his own version soon after, and both men are credited as inventors, but Kilby's worked first. It earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Every phone, laptop, car and game console on Earth carries a little piece of that Dallas summer.

So there you have it

A flying red horse
A frozen cattle drive
A cowboy who used to be Santa
A world's fair that never left
An arts district full of Pritzker winners
The frozen margarita machine
The microchip

Only in Dallas. Which fact blew your mind? Tell me in the comments, and follow for more crazy city facts.

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