DART: A view from Richardson

My wife, Chris, and I were at the Wildflower! Festival on the first night, Friday, May 15, sitting at the open area on the south side of the Renaissance hotel where one of the sound stages was set up. The Killdares, a Dallas-based Celtic/rock band, was one of the first acts to play at Wildflower!, and they were warming up the crowd nicely, to the point of bringing people in the hotel out on to their balconies to watch the performance.

Around the Eisemann Center and the other buildings, there were thousands of people already streaming around, stopping under tents to shop, watching a street dancing group whose acrobatics are amazing (and a little frightening), and moving from stage to stage nestled between the buildings that not only contain offices, but also have restaurants and shops on the first floor and apartments on the upper floors – in a fashion very much like long establish Eastern cities in the US or even Europe. Even the computer-driven fountain in the pavement – which pushed and stopped jets of water upwards from the pavement to the delight of dozens of children who were around it and in it on this warm Texas evening – provided the perfect example of an active life in an urban setting out in the streets and not behind closed curtains at home.

So, “Westmoreland”?

Well, not twenty yards behind the stage on which the Killdares were playing was one of the shells over the Galatyn Park DART station. A train was parked in the station, resting during one of its brief stops, and the electronic sign on the side of the car, barely visible through the shrubbery around the station, gave the name of the other end of the line as the train traveled south, that is, to the Westmoreland station.