The 50 Moments That Made Modern Dallas (2024)

October 6, 1970: If it had taken Dallas ISD 13 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision to stop operating a segregated school system—as it claimed—that would have been bad enough. But it was actually worse: it hadn’t stopped, leading Tasby, a plumber and father of six, to bring a federal lawsuit against the district.

Even after Judge William “Mac” Taylor ruled in July 1971 that “a dual system” did indeed exist, the school board continued to fight against court-ordered desegregation plans until 1983. Not that it ended there. Incredibly, Tasby’s case would not be fully resolved until 2003. Only then did Judge Barefoot Sanders, who inherited the case in the early 1980s, declare that DISD was finally desegregated, at least as far as the legal system was concerned. Some would still suggest the result was less than perfect.

But like a river carving a canyon out of rock, and taking almost as long, the lengthy legal battle did eventually reshape the district, adding more magnets and learning centers and a focus on bilingual learning. For their efforts, Sanders became the namesake of DISD’s law magnet at Townview in 2009, and a middle school in Vickery Meadow carries Tasby’s name.

July 24, 1973: Santos was only 12 years old when he and his 13-year-old brother, David, were taken from their beds, cuffed, and put in the back of a Dallas police squad car. Only 12 years old when officer Darrell L. Cain, trying to force the boys to confess to robbing $8 from a gas station vending machine, put a .357 Magnum to his head and pulled the trigger. Only 12 years old when he said his last words: “I am telling the truth.” The 30-year-old Cain, who said he thought the gun was unloaded, was convicted of murder, though his sentence was a mere five years, of which he served just two and a half. He would live until 2019.

It took the city 40 years to formally apologize to Santos’ family and almost 50 for the DPD to do so as well, after it hired its first Latino chief, Eddie García. There is now a statue of Santos at Pike Park, where he played with his brother in what used to be Little Mexico, and the recreation center there is named for him. But Santos’ lasting legacy is perhaps how his murder brought the city’s nascent Latino community together in a way nothing previously had.

October 1, 1974: The Dallas skyline has taller structures, certainly, and it contains more than its share of iconic symbols and shapes—the Mercantile’s neon clock tower, Chase Tower’s six-story keyhole, the fiery red Pegasus atop the Magnolia. But nothing is quite so identifiably Dallas as the lighted ball of Reunion Tower.

The deal that made it happen—the nation’s first public-private partnership—is also very Dallas, if not singularly so, only because it was an idea so good that everyone adopted it. City Manager George Schrader and Ray Hunt, the scion of Hunt Oil, hashed it out over an early morning breakfast at Denny’s in 1973. Both sides had adjacent properties that were essentially worthless on their own. But put them together with a bit of civic muscle and commercial funding? “It was a classic one plus one equals five,” Hunt told the Dallas Morning News in 2013.

The project (which would include the tower and a hotel, plus Reunion Arena and a refurbished Union Station) was such a new concept that District Attorney Henry Wade and the IRS both looked into it. But it survived to spread across the country and city. You can see it in the Arts District and Klyde Warren Park. More important, you can see it in the sky.

March 13, 1975: Dallas would come to be known as the proving ground for any budding chain-restaurant concept, thanks to ideal demographics for market testing. Ground zero was a converted former post office on Greenville Avenue. Larry Lavine didn’t know he was creating his own chain when he opened the first Chili’s, just that he wanted to make money and have fun, as he would describe the company’s philosophy later. “Our idea was to create a place that was cool enough where you could get a great burger and a margarita at dinner as well as lunch,” Lavine said in 2010.

There are now more than 1,200 Chili’s locations.

November 27, 1979: The Diamonds launched with a sparkle befitting their name. Tennis great Martina Navratilova, a local resident at the time, tossed up the ceremonial jump ball at the Dallas Convention Center’s arena, and Zales gave away a real diamond (and a bunch of fake ones). The ensuing 116-100 win over the California Dreams was the highlight of a rough inaugural campaign. It would get better.

Professional basketball had been tried before in Dallas: the Chaparrals were charter members of the ABA in 1967 but never drew well and moved south to become the San Antonio Spurs in 1973. The Diamonds, on the other hand, showed that fans would support pro ball, provided there was star power. That arrived in the form of flashy point guard Nancy Lieberman, nicknamed “Lady Magic.” In her rookie year, the Diamonds’ second in the Women’s Professional Basketball League, the team’s attendance topped the Mavericks’, who had just joined the NBA.

The WBL didn’t last, but women’s pro hoops came back to the area in 2016, when the WNBA’s Tulsa Shock relocated to Arlington and became the Dallas Wings. The circle will be complete in 2026 when the Wings move to downtown Dallas to a renovated Memorial Auditorium at the Convention Center. Perhaps with Lieberman in tow: she joined the Wings broadcast team in 2024.

March 27, 1980: Pizza Hut, PepsiCo, JCPenney, Keurig Dr Pepper, Toyota, the PGA of America—they all call Dallas’ northern suburbs home. But none of that would have happened if Perot hadn’t bought 2,655 acres in the summer of 1979. It was empty prairie, close by but not technically part of Plano yet. On March 27, 1980, he spoke to the Plano Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club and formally declared his intentions: “We want to try to build a corporate headquarters, a campus-like development on this property that will attract corporate relocations to the area,” he said at the luncheon, describing what would become Legacy Park.

It was the first that many of Perot’s employees had heard of the plan to uproot EDS, then operating out of North Dallas. Soon after the company moved in, JCPenney bought land from EDS and relocated its own HQ from Manhattan in 1987. Others followed suit, in Plano and Frisco and elsewhere, igniting the suburbs’ explosive growth over the past three decades.

August 13, 1983: The creation of the Lone Star Transportation Authority, which would have served Dallas and Fort Worth, had been soundly defeated three years earlier, with only a little over 10 percent of eligible voters participating and just 20 percent of those approving of the measure. This time around, thanks to a heavy marketing and fundraising push, voters in Dallas and 14 cities overwhelmingly said yes to a 1 percent sales tax that would finance the new agency.

The four decades since then have not been without controversy. DART has made curious decisions, such as locating its Love Field station more than 2 miles away from the airport. A downtown Dallas subway line is no longer in its long-term plans, and its suburban partners have recently made noise about reducing their contributions to the organization’s budget. But there is no denying its impact or still-untapped potential.

November 27, 1983: Pyles changed the city’s palate when he opened his first restaurant, which took the French technique and theory he had learned in the kitchens of chefs such as Jean and Pierre Troisgros and Julia Child and applied them to homegrown ingredients. It was part of the New American movement that was slowly migrating east from California. Routh Street Cafe’s early menus featured catfish mousse with crayfish sauce and mesquite-broiled venison in white peppercorn sauce. The Morning News’ five-star review, published a few weeks into its run, gushed that “never has Dallas seen such a restaurant.”

But Pyles wasn’t satisfied. He refined his vision as he narrowed his search parameters, coming up with dishes that weren’t just American but decidedly Texan, featuring pasilla chiles and tomatillos. Together with a group of cooks also using regional flavors and ingredients—Dean Fearing, Avner Samuel, Anne Lindsay Greer, and Houston’s Robert Del Grande—Pyles helped introduce what came to be called Southwestern cuisine to the rest of the country. And made Dallas into a restaurant city to be reckoned with.

January 29, 1984: It’s hard to imagine now, but when voters passed a bond in 1979 to help the museum move to its current location, the neighborhood wasn’t much to speak of. Its new home was occupied by a crowd of old warehouses and a Chevrolet dealership. Since then, though, DMA has been joined by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Crow Museum of Asian Art, Green Family Art Foundation, Meyerson Symphony Center, Wyly Theatre, Winspear Opera House, and Moody Performance Hall, not to mention Klyde Warren Park just across the street.

The Arts District’s first member will, sometime in the next few years, also be its freshest. In August 2023, Madrid’s Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos was chosen to head up a renovation of the building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes that will amount to a full reimagining of the space and its relationship to its surroundings.

March 14, 1984: Empire Savings and Loan Association, a small institution with one office and no branches, had practically on its own funded a condominium boom along I-30. To onlookers, its wild growth—from $30 million in assets to $270 million in 1983 alone—seemed unsustainable. It was. When the Federal Home Loan Bank Board shut down Empire Savings, it called out “questionable lending practices” and “artificially inflated” real estate appraisals. Board chairman Edwin Gray noted that Empire had helped facilitate one property changing hands four times in one day, its worth going “from $1 per square foot in the morning to $6 per square foot by late afternoon.”

It was the biggest failure in the history of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. The FSLIC had to pay out more than $250 million in insured deposits. Dallas itself remained the money center of Texas for a few more years. But beginning in 1986, the shenanigans at Empire and other outfits such as Sunbelt Savings (nicknamed “Gunbelt Savings”), plus a massive bust in the oil market, combined to practically wipe out the banking industry in the city. By 1992, 506 financial institutions had closed, and dozens of downtown office buildings had emptied.

May 6, 1984: As last year’s The Iron Claw dramatized, the Von Erich story had turned toward tragedy when Kerry won the NWA World Champion belt with a backslide pin in front of more than 30,000 fans. His older brother David, in line for the title shot, had died suddenly and mysteriously during a tour of Japan a few months earlier.

Wrestling did what wrestling does and turned a problem into opportunity. The Texas Stadium show cemented Dallas as a wrestling town and the Von Erichs as its biggest stars. It would prove to be little more than symbolic, however. Kerry’s title reign lasted just 18 days, and he never wore the belt again. Though Kerry signed with WWE, the years that followed would ultimately prove to be so devastating that The Iron Claw writer-director Sean Durkin left some of it out. He felt it was too hard for audiences to believe that three of the Von Erich brothers (Mike then Chris then Kerry) would take their own lives less than a decade after David died.

Kevin, the only survivor, left Dallas for a long time. But he was onstage when The Iron Claw had its world premiere at the Texas Theatre in November.

February 25, 1987: The SMU football team, attempting to keep pace with the bigger schools in the Southwest Conference such as Texas and A&M, began paying players in the late 1970s. It worked. By 1983, powered by running backs Eric Dickerson and Craig James (nicknamed the Pony Express), the Mustangs had won three conference championships in four years. The team finished the 1982 season with a win in the Cotton Bowl and a No. 2 ranking.

There was a price beyond the cash school boosters were doling out, however. In 1985, after an investigation by the NCAA, the program received a two-year postseason ban, a one-year ban from live television, and a massive reduction in scholarships.

But that didn’t change much. On November 12, 1986, ABC Channel 8 aired a 40-minute special report from Dale Hansen and his producer, John Sparks, revealing that SMU was still paying players. A few months later, the NCAA turned to its recently passed bylaw, the Repeat Violator Rule (which quickly became known as the “death penalty”), and shut down the school’s football program for one year. SMU voluntarily chose to cancel the 1988 season as well, since it would not have been allowed to play any home games. The existing probation was extended to 1990.

It took more than two decades for SMU football to recover from the punishment. The devastation was such that the NCAA never invoked the rule again, even in the face of much more serious infractions on other campuses.

January 1, 1987: Jim Schutze’s exploration of, as its subtitle says, “The Politics of Race in an American City,” was pulled from presses on the day it was supposed to be printed by its original Dallas publisher and abandoned. The book was salvaged by a New Jersey publisher a few months later and treated to a small press run, but it went out of print almost immediately. And there it remained for decades, as used copies went for almost $1,000 on Amazon and people traded illicit PDF copies. Even without officially existing—or at least only barely—it was the most important book about Dallas, cutting through the civic boosterism of the 1960s and beyond, telling the real story of the city.

In 2021, Deep Vellum made a deal with Schutze and Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who shared the rights, to at long last put The Accommodation back on shelves, giving a new generation a chance to learn from it.

November 1, 1987: When Purefoy arrived, Frisco’s population was just over 5,000 and the city was perhaps best known for Cloyce Box Ranch, which served as Southfork during the first season of Dallas. In fact, at the time, Frisco was barely a city. It had finally gotten big enough to qualify for home rule, adopting a charter that year that set up its government: six at-large council members, a mayor, and a city manager. Purefoy would hold the latter job for the next 35 years, until his retirement in 2022. During that time, he helped guide Frisco through a massive population surge that he was largely responsible for. (There are currently more than 230,000 residents.)

The growth was fueled by the shrewd way he turned the city—perhaps the most dominant suburb in North Texas—into a sports powerhouse, luring teams from every major sport as well as the PGA headquarters. Frisco City Hall is now housed in the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center.

February 24, 1989: NBC 5 reported during a Thursday-night episode of L.A. Law that Jones, then a virtually unknown wildcatter from Arkansas, was going to buy the Dallas Cowboys and bring in Jimmy Johnson, his old friend and Miami Hurricanes coach, to run the team, replacing the legendary Tom Landry. But no one in Dallas believed it until Mark Kegans, an intern at the Dallas Morning News, got a tip that Jones and Johnson were having dinner at Mia’s, the Tex-Mex restaurant on Lemmon Avenue. Kegans approached the table and got off five snaps, one of which appeared on the front page of the next day’s edition.

The duo would win two Super Bowls together before an acrimonious parting that was only recently fully resolved, when Johnson was finally inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor.

March 21, 1989: The subject of Errol Morris’ 1988 documentary, The Thin Blue Line, had been in prison for 12 years, sentenced to death after being convicted of shooting and killing Dallas Police Officer Robert Wood in November 1976. Adams had received his sentence based on the testimony of Dr. James Grigson, who earned the nickname “Dr. Death” after testifying in more than 100 death penalty cases and each time saying the defendant would be a danger to society if he wasn’t executed.

Morris came to Texas in 1985 planning to make a feature about Grigson but changed his mind after coming across Adams’ case and finding indications of misconduct by the prosecution, including hidden exculpatory evidence. Based on The Thin Blue Line, Adams was granted a new trial and all charges against him were subsequently dropped.

But Adams was never paid back for the years he lost. He didn’t even receive the $200 prisoners got upon completion of their sentence or release on parole. He died in 2010.

July 22, 1989: Before the McKinney Avenue Trolley launched its initial 2.8-mile route, there hadn’t been a streetcar in the city since service ended in 1956. Along with the recently opened restaurants on the street, the trolley line helped define the neighborhood that would become Uptown.

Now known as the M-Line, the trolley’s service area has almost doubled in size since, expanding to include a southern loop through downtown. The city added its own modern streetcar line in 2015, traveling a 2.45-mile loop from Union Station to Bishop Arts.

June 7, 1991: The home of the Mambo Taxi—the frozen margarita-sangria concoction just about everyone in the city has had one too many of at some point—sprang to life in a foreclosed space at Preston and Forest. Serving customers in a tiny dining room with just 12 tables, the upstart Tex-Mex restaurant was a long way from the M Crowd dining empire it would beget, with more than 20 Mi Cocinas spread across the city.

But the elements were in place. There was Michael “Mico” Rodriguez, the former general manager at Mia’s, along with his backers Ray and Dick Washburne and Bob Mcnu*tt. And there was the formula they came up with: rock-solid takes on classic dishes served in a slightly upscale environment that made even a weeknight dinner feel like an occasion.

Two years later, another Mi Cocina opened in Highland Park Village and unofficially added people-watching to its menu. It would prove to be almost as popular as its fajitas and aforementioned Mambo Taxis.

November 5, 1991: Roy Williams and Marvin Crenshaw filed suit against the city in May 1988, arguing that the council system of eight single-member districts and three at-large seats (including the mayor) was discriminatory against Black people. Their lawsuit was later joined by West Dallas’ Ledbetter Neighborhood Association, which held that the system was also unjust to Latino citizens.

The situation had actually been worse prior to 1976, when the 8-3 system went into effect. Before then, all 11 places were elected at-large, with two reserved for minorities. After the suit was filed, the city repeatedly attempted to get a 10-4-1 system (10 single-member districts, four regional seats, mayor elected at-large) approved by the Justice Department, to no avail. In March 1990, federal Judge Jerry Buchmeyer struck down the 8-3 model, saying that it was merely “what Blacks and Hispanics had been permitted to do by the White majority.”

In the first election using the new 14-1 system—14 single-member districts with an at-large seat for the mayor—four Black (Al Lipscomb, Don Hicks, Charlotte Mayes, and Mattie Lee Nash) and two Hispanic (Domingo Garcia, Chris Luna) candidates won spots on the council. The system also had the unintended result of electing four women (Donna Halstead and Lori Palmer along with Mayes and Nash) for the first time.

December 24, 1992: In 1991, the house of worship serving the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community went by the relatively anonymous Metropolitan Community Church of Dallas. The moniker wasn’t meant to hide who made up its congregation, which was hit hard as the AIDS epidemic made its way through Dallas in the late 1980s. (Rev. Michael Piazza has said there was a period when the church would perform eight funerals in a week.) But it wasn’t a name to rally around, either. So the Cathedral of Hope was born.

The next year, just before Christmas, the newly christened Cathedral got a sanctuary to match, designed by legendary architect Philip Johnson. Its first Christmas Eve service in the new building made it onto CNN. By Easter, membership had grown from 280 to more than 1,000, making it the largest LGBTQ+ church in the country.

March 10, 1993: If not for Disney, the Stars might have ended up in Anaheim. Owner Norm Green wanted to move his franchise to a new hockey arena in the city, but the House of Mouse offered to back a team there instead and use its actors and characters to help bolster the NHL’s brand. Unable to say no to that, the league told Green he could relocate wherever he wanted. Cowboys legend Roger Staubach helped him choose Dallas.

The city took to the sport immediately. It helped that Green brought a good squad with him, one that had been in the Stanley Cup Finals two years earlier and was led by a young Mike Modano, just entering his prime. (The marketing department also did a bang-up job, coming up with slogans such as “The Ice of Texas Is Upon You.”) The Stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999 (on Brett Hull’s controversial goal) and have been back to the final round twice, including the 2019–20 season. Beyond the team’s on-ice accomplishments, they have helped hockey take root as a youth sport in North Texas.

August 28, 1996: Dallas has been wrestling with the Trinity since before there was a Dallas. The Caddo tribe spoke of a “Big Flood” on the river they called Arkikosa around 1822. It surged over its banks again a few years after founder John Neely Bryan first arrived in the area. The city hired city planner George Kessler in 1911, in part to help control the river, which had yet another massive flood in 1908.

The modern wrangling has its roots here. After more floods in May 1989 and December 1991, Dallas worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a plan for a series of wetland ponds on the west side of the river, extending from Cedar Creek to Loop 12, that would limit flooding and help establish the Great Trinity Forest.

This would later evolve into the Balanced Vision Plan, approved in 2003, which included, among other components, a massive park between the levees and a parkway (which itself would metastasize into a tollroad before being officially eliminated in August 2017). The park, budgeted at $325 million, is now set to be built outside of the levees.

November 10, 1999: Jim Lake Sr. saw the vision when he started buying boarded-up properties in North Oak Cliff around Bishop Avenue and Seventh and Eighth streets in the mid-1980s. But it would take more than a decade to fully realize it, even though he had done what he could to make the location attractive to potential tenants, offering a year of free rent and turning one storefront into a police substation.

The turning point came when future Mayor Laura Miller, then a council member from nearby Kessler Park, pushed the city to give the neighborhood what she called a facelift, which included infrastructure upgrades (sewers and streets) as well as wider, window-shopping-ready sidewalks, more trees, and the kind of brick pavers that tie everything together. Just as important, around the same time there was a zoning change in the area that reduced the number of required parking spaces a business needed. As a result, more restaurants were able to open, and the Bishop Arts District as we now know it began to come into focus.

December 7, 1999: George Kessler had included a Central Boulevard running along an old railroad right-of-way in his A City Plan for Dallas, 1911, a tree-lined north-south route connecting Richardson to downtown. What was finally built there decades later, and opened for traffic in the late 1950s, was not quite so picturesque, and no one was ever really happy with it for various other reasons.

Construction on a newer, bigger, better version began in 1990 and, thanks to prodding from project champion Walt Humann, wrapped up early, just before the turn of the century. To mark the occasion, a parade of vintage vehicles took off just south of LBJ at 2 pm on December 7, on its way to a celebration at Fountain Place. Thousands gathered along the trenched road to see it.

December 31, 2000: Marguerite and Robert Hoffman and Cindy and Howard Rachofsky were celebrating New Year’s Eve at a Napa Valley resort, sharing a bottle of wine, when the Hoffmans had an idea. A challenge, really: if the DMA could meet its goal during a capital campaign leading up to the museum’s 2003 centennial celebration, they should all agree to donate their vast contemporary collections, as well as work they would buy in the future. The Rachofskys threw in their Richard Meier-designed house. A third couple, Deedie and Rusty Rose, soon joined in the pledge.

The museum did not reach its goal, but it still won. Director Jack Lane convinced all three to go ahead with their donation anyway, which amounted to around 900 artworks valued at the time at more than $300 million.

August 26, 2003: Over the better part of a year, WFAA reporter Brett Shipp and his producer, Mark Smith, aired a series of Peabody Award-winning reports in 2002 (“Fake Drugs, Real Lives”) that revealed a scheme between Dallas Police narcotics officers and paid informants. In short: they had planted Sheetrock—to look like cocaine or meth—on dozens of Mexican immigrants and then arrested them. Shipp and Smith found that almost half of the cocaine seized by the department in 2001 contained, at best, trace amounts of illegal substances.

More than 50 defendants had their drug charges dismissed, though many of them had already been behind bars for months. Settlements from the resulting lawsuits cost the city at least $6.5 million. Two DPD officers were fired, a supervisor retired, and Bolton also lost his job in the wake of the scandal. Bolton was also later fired from his job as the police chief in DeKalb County, Georgia.

January 1, 2007: After a surprise victory over Republican Toby Shook, Watkins took his oath of office from the retired Judge L.A. Bedford, the first Black judge in Dallas and a lawyer who had fought in court to desegregate the city’s schools.

“I was looking at him when he was swearing me in, and he was trembling and almost teary-eyed,” Watkins told D in 2009. “I was like, why is he so emotional for me? And then I realized: all the struggles that he had been through were really for me to have this opportunity. He said at the end of his little thing, ‘You’re the first. Let’s make sure you’re not the last.’ ”

He wouldn’t be. Faith Johnson was appointed in 2016 to serve the remainder of Susan Hawk’s term, and John Creuzot was elected in 2018. But Watkins—who helped Dallas County free more wrongly convicted men than anywhere else in the nation—would live a troubled life after leaving office in 2015. He died last year at 56.

June 2, 2011: The Mavericks were close to going down 2-0 in the NBA Finals when forever villain Dwyane Wade hit a three in front of their bench, giving Miami a 15-point lead with 7:14 left in the fourth quarter. After taking down the defending-champion Lakers and an on-the-rise Thunder squad with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden, it looked like Nowitzki and the Mavs were out of postseason magic. But from there, they reeled off a 22-5 run to end the game, finished off by The Big German’s left-handed layup with four seconds left, sending them on their way to their first and only NBA title.

October 27, 2012: A 5-acre park on top of a highway—as close as possible to conjuring a green space out of thin air—first existed as one of those ideas that would draw a smirk and a roll of the eyes. Then it was a drawing on a napkin that elicited a reaction more along the lines of, “Wait, you’re serious?” Even after there had been feasibility studies and bonds were passed and construction had actually begun, people were still taking a wait-and-see approach.

But the park that bears the name of energy magnate Kelcy Warren’s son was an unqualified success from the moment it opened, attracting huge real estate plays on either side, filling up office buildings, inspiring the Dallas Museum of Art to completely rethink its space, and prompting the city to try to re-create the accomplishment with the Southern Gateway Park spanning I-35. Nothing has changed the look and feel of Dallas’ core more.

October 13, 2014: Enacted in 1979, the Wright Amendment limited air travel from Love Field, allowing carriers to operate full-size airliners only to airports in Texas and Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. It was put into place to protect DFW Airport, opened five years earlier, from competition, since Southwest Airlines had announced its intention to begin interstate service. Mostly, it punished Southwest for refusing to leave Love Field.

Over the years, the Wright Amendment was modified (Missouri was added in 2005) and partially repealed in 2006. But in 2014, the restrictions went away completely. Southwest Flight 1013 from Denver landed at Love at 7:51 am, and never again were travelers forced to stop at Houston Hobby before continuing on to their chosen destination.

It began just before 9 pm near Luna Road and Spur 348 and stayed on the ground for 32 minutes, its highest winds reaching 140 mph as it spun across a trail more than 15 miles long. As the twister made its way east-northeast, it built up to EF3 levels along Northaven Road, tearing off roofs and leveling brick walls. The $1.55 billion in damage made it the costliest tornado in Texas history (and fourth on the U.S. list), and its impact can still be seen almost five years later.