Style is not necessarily a superficial matter, but rather exists on many levels. Style is an attitude of the spirit. Style - when it works - mocks fate, even keeps fate at bay. So where, I wonder, do we go in search of the Dallas style in 2006?

Neiman's meant more than fashion. It signified the striving of a prairie settlement, perched on the black-lands of nowhere, to civilize itself, to become a place of sophistication.

Later, the Cowboys said a lot about the city, proclaiming its power, energy and drive, only to give way to Southfork, a synthetic diversion from the horror of Nov. 22, 1963, a celluloid substitute for the genuine article.

But perhaps Dallas expressed what Dallas couldn't for so long. Lee Harvey Oswald shattered not only a presidency, but the composure, even the soul, of a city. Mayor Erik Jonsson did his best to restore it with I.M. Pei's City Hall and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Both were important - life-saving, in the case of the airport - but something, nonetheless, slipped away during those years.

It was that old ease of doing business in Dallas, where deals were sealed by a handshake - nothing more was needed - and banks offered "character loans," caring little about collateral and relying instead on their hunches, placing their bets on people with unproven possibilities.

Throughout the years, as Willie Morris once described it, Dallas remained a "city of bank vaults and choirs." He saw the Dallas style in its religiosity and understood too well that piety sometimes was masking rampant materialism, with some in Bible study classes, others courting indictment and more than a few doing both.

There were churches built in the 1980s that looked like fortresses; "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," certainly was the theme. But what were those walls designed to keep out? What was the thing to be feared?

In those days, it was loss - loss of money made too soon, loss of status, loss of self. Today it is the velocity of shifts in human relations that are said to be unscriptural, unacceptable, impossible to bear. Yet they must be borne.

Whatever the turmoil, Dallas has at its core - and always has had - a remnant of extraordinary citizens who build houses for the poor, flock to book clubs, prepare papers on Shakespeare, scoop up tickets to Arts & Letters Live and sacrifice endless hours to extend the community beyond its own conception of itself.

People like Joe Chow, mayor of Addison; Tom Kim, school trustee in Lewisville and Prasad Thotakura of the Indian American Friendship Council are creating a variation on the cotton-fed Southern city of 100 years ago or the Western metropolis of 50 years later that sought prosperity in banking and insurance.

The style leaders of today are pointing the way toward a broader intelligence, a deeper experience that surely will be seen in landscapes, institutions, and public and private settings. The thing now is to open the fortress, let them in and learn to be not only a city of strivers, but also a place of both repose and adventure.

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