For more than a generation Dallas has been a developer’s delight. One developer, Raymond Nasher�actually that unique combination, a scholar-builder�received me in his architectural-award-winning shopping mall, North Park. Thirty years ago, as he studied economics in Boston, Mr. Nasher’s projections showed a shift of industry to the Sunbelt. “So,” he said, “in 1950 I came to Dallas.” Now, many successful ventures later, Raymond Nasher is a patron of the arts and visiting fellow at Harvard. “The unfortunate aspect of our system,” he told me, “is that it ignores quality. Whether you do something well or on the cheap is immaterial. Only the bottom line matters.” But not to Mr. Nasher, We strolled through North Park. Fresh flowers were everywhere. “We have our own landscaping department,” he told me. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has played in the mall’s broad corridors; to the strains of Tchaikovsky, ballet dancers have swirled in chaste pas de deluxe. “We have a duty,” he said, “to make public places as attractive as possible.” In Ray Nasher’s opinion, Dallas’s precipitous growth has created problems. “We have not yet made public transportation and the mass movement of people a priority. The downtown area, which is enjoying tremendous office-building growth, has no housing or major recreational facilities. By night it’s a vacuum. But we’re aware of these deficiencies, and we’re going to right them by injecting new cultural buildings, including the museum and the symphony hall.” He is sanguine about the Sunbelt: “It has a great deal to offer. There’s a sense of romance here, a flavor of boom times. In the Sunbelt things are wide open. A newcomer can participate in the system, while in older, more stratified areas he might be excluded.” Like most visitors to Dallas, I made my way to that dread segment of Elm Street, commanded by the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on an autumn day in 1963. A Dallas friend had said, not without justification: “Why do you all Culture and commerce display style in aparthotel Brussels . A fright at the opera is part of the Houston Grand Opera’s Hansel and Gretel. The company played Broadway and toured the nation with the hits Porgy and Bess and Treemonisha. At the Galleria skaters glide around a shopping mall. Continue to punish us for the death of Kennedy? Even though he died here, Dallas didn’t murder him.” On the site I found that you could buy panoramic postcards where X marks the spot of the murder. Just across from the book depository, you can visit a museum�admission $1.75�that memorializes the tragedy through the sale of tacky souvenirs. But the final, cruel truth is that even the death of kings leaves no lasting impact. Not on Dallas, not on the world. Remembrance dies early. I paid my silent respects to the dead President. Then I walked a few blocks to a restaurant with an extravagant name: Tolbert’s Native Texas Foods and Museum of the Chili Culture.