When They Tried Building Venice in Dallas | A Forgotten Urban Experiment

My name is Laura Carpenter and my father was the developer of Las Colinas. I grew up there on the ranch where Las Colinas sits. The Urban Center was a hay field at that time. Many of the suggestions in the responses were part of the original plan. There is residential in the Urban Center. It was planned from the beginning. And much of the entirety of Las Colinas is residential - also from the beginning. Las Colinas is larger than the Urban Center. The are schools, parks, shopping centers.... the only thing missing a cemetery, a decision my father made. The downturn in the real estate market in the 1980's precipitated by the savings and loan crisis in banking caused the many real estate ventures to falter. Las Colinas was one of them. The "developers" who took control of Las Colinas (like many real estate developers) chose to pursue quick money - not building a long term thriving urban environment, hence the slowness of the original vision to come to fruition. The bones are there: there are waterways and parks throughout, all utilities underground - 12,000 acres. And the area just passed downtown Dallas in employment. Also, the drive on Carpenter Freeway from the north entrance of the airport through Las Colinas has no visual clutter - no billboards, no car dealerships, etc. all because of the ordinances put in place before the development started. My father always wanted the urban transit to be a maglev system; he was just ahead of his time.

Wait, are we talking about the same place? I am a singing Gondolier on the canals of Las Colinas. We just opened The Toyota Music Factory complex with tons of restaurants, movie theater, and paddle boats on the lake. We are booming out here!!!

How did you manage to miss the huge fleet of gondolas that grace the waterway on a daily (and nightly) basis? How about the stand up paddle boards, kayaks, and pedal boats that take hundreds of people every weekend? You need to go back and shoot some current footage!! Weddings at the Venetian Terrace on the canals, photographers shooting engagement, family, and quinceanera photos, proposals and celebrations on the gondolas - at the right times, the canals are bustling. Did you shoot at 6am when no one was there?

Los Colinas was way ahead of its time - not just for Texas but for the nation. The "bones" are there to still turn this into something special, and it's a refreshing contrast to the "no trees" sprawl of suburban Texas cities.

I live on O’Connor and take 114 to belt line everyday. I’m 30 years old and have always loved las colinas. I remember my parents taking me to the mustangs fountain all the time. Recently the improvements they’ve made has been immaculate. For Toyota music factory, to the dart rail, and the convention center. Can’t wait to see what another 20 years does!

I was JUST walking along the Las Colinas canals last week and pondering why a development so close to being the most walkable and European-style neighborhood in DFW fell just short of that vision. Then this video pops up on my feed! Grateful for the attention paid to my city and the optimistic ending note - we can hope that developments like this do someday undergo a revival to fulfill their potential!

This video fails to mention several important key factors. The Toyota Music Factory has sparked a recent wave of development around it, including nationally acclaimed gourmet restaurants and attractions. The music venue is huge and brings in international touring artists, which has been prompting more developments in terms of housing, food, shops, and more. The Music Factory has been there for many years now. Eight Fortune 500 companies currently call Irving home for their global headquarters, and the more than 8,500 other companies have been bringing regular traffic for many years now. Unlike this video would have you believe, Irving Las Colinas is not a dead wasteland. It’s a quiet part of town where business professionals live, work, and play. Just because the canals themselves aren’t lined with business or people does not mean that it’s a ghost town. You were keen on calling out the shutdowns post-Covid but not as excited to mention the mass exodus of people and businesses from places like California who have descended on Las Colinas and are now supporting this infrastructure once again. This is another point you missed that could have easily been made. Additionally, I find it supremely odd that a video trying to put forth Las Colinas as a failed city resembling Venice and focusing so much on the water taxis brought in from Italy would not even MENTION the thriving gondola company on Lake Carolyn. It’s a best kept secret for locals and travelers, but the canals are far from deserted. This company has literally been on the lake for over 25 years and operates, by my count, over a dozen electric and actual Venetian gondolas, and partners with local restaurants to even do food cruises on the water. There is also a pedal boat and stand up paddle board company that has been operating for several years. I would trust your research more if you had thought to mention that. Seems like a crucial point to make for someone focusing so much on the water taxis, no? You haven’t done a bad job with the history, but if you choose to do any future videos about similar spots, please be sure to not just ignore those elements that are flourishing simply because they don’t fit into your narrative. I’m sure many of the businesses that DO currently operate in Las Colinas would have appreciated the attention to detail. They deserve at least a sentence.

Interesting story, thank you. Missing is the "Hollywood on the Prairie" idea that never materialized. The Studios at Las Colinas and the Dallas Sound Lab Recording Studios were supposed to be the first building blocks in an effort to bring a lot of big name / big budget Film and TV Production to Dallas. Which... never happened. This idea was not entirely without merit. Trammel Crow had done really well building the Apparel Mart which became a regional hub for the fashion industry. The nearby Infomart made a big splash with a building modeled after the iron and glass Crystal Palace, originally erected in Hyde Park (London) to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Infomart was intended to draw a lot of Hi Tech business. In the Production world, Dallas most accomplished player was Video Post and Transfer. Originally opened in the abandoned concourses of Love Field and led by the very capable Neil Feldman, Video Post quickly earned a reputation as a top-shelf regional Post house. Also worthy of mention was TM Communication - a powerhouse in the glory years of FM Radio. TM (and a few others) turned Dallas into the "Jingle Capital" that David Letterman famously mocked. While perhaps not a high art form, TM was such a prodigious producer of Radio Jingles, commercials and the like that they were (at one time) the biggest consumer of audio recording tape IN THE WORLD! (howls that for a trivia stat?) Did I mention the stars of the hit TV show Dallas would come to town every year for 4 - 6 weeks to shoot exteriors? Well... they dd. (so there's that) Anyway... Mr. Carpenter and others hoped they could fertilize these few eager seeds with some nice production facilities and the belief that people were tired of California and eager to get out. (they may have been a litte ahed of thier time on that one). They reasoned that Hollywood producers were incresingly looking for a right=to=work State, that was not too far away, that had a good airport and generally mild climate. All perfectly reasonable assumptions. But there was just one, teeny-tiny problem.... Not sure if they actually spoke to anyone in Hollywood before they went off and spent all this money. Movie producers hate the way Dallas looks. Okay, maybe the don't "hate" it, but talk to people in the Business and they'll tell you that Dallas just does not work well for location shooting. It's a relatively newly built city, so does not have diversity of style in its neighborhoods. There no water / beaches / pretty lakes to speak of. Is butt-ugly burnt brown at least 1/2 the year. Has ZERO hills or other interesting topographical features. And - fair or not - is seen as a boring "steel and glass" center surrounded by a lot of strip malls and shopping centers. (I head this directly from a very famous Rock Star who was rehearsing at the Studios at Las Colinas) So Hollywood DID NOT come-a-runnin' to Irving, Texas. Thanks to a couple of housewives with a great idea, The Studios did host a few seasons of Barney. And for a while there were a number of Rock Bands who did their Production Rehearsals at the soundstage, thanks to the fact that ShowCo was right down the street. But the Sound Stage languished and was sold (for almost nothing) to some has-been Christian Artist in the 80's downturn, who then turned the once promising Studios at Las Colinas into the hokey-est, most cringe-worthy Tourist Attractions you've ever seen: "The Studio Tour at Las Colinas" or some such thing. It was like "and this is the HAT worn by Harrison Ford during Raider of the Lost Arc". Only it wasn't that hat, it was a hat someone had found at a yard sale. Pretty sad. As for the Dallas Sound Lab, they had a big main room,, a very expensive mixing board and really nice looking facility - but did not have the clientele to support it. That caliber of room needs to be rented out for months at a time for major record work. They were renting by the hour for jingle sessions and voice over recording. It was never going to work. In the end... it was Vancouver BC that beat Hollywood. Fantastic, diverse exteriors of all sorts. Mild climate. Great nucleus of technical and craft skills that grew and grew and grew. Huge support from local and federal Government. And a place that a lot of "Hollywood Types" wanted to be! Again, not that anybody hates Dallas - but for someone who lives in Santa Monica it's not their first choice to go to 105 degree Dallas fow two months in the Summer to shoot a Cop Show. No Texan need feel any shame. You can't blame Texas for not trying! Andy hey... you still have The Cowboys@ Las Colinas was a cool concept in its' day and not every idea is a winner. Canals worked in San Antonio (of all places) but the "Venice Canal via Stemmons Freeway" thing just didn't quite catch on. (But please... let us know what else you guys are working on!)

What a colossal pity! Let's hope that this innovative development has a renaissance. Thank you for creating excellent video. 'A+'

I stayed there several years ago. It was very interesting to walk along the canals. But it was very eerie as it felt abandoned.

We used to go to Los Colinas on the weekends in the 1980s. There were all sorts of shops and a fantastic Italian restaurant right there on the canal. We would go eat, check out the shops and then we would take a break hopping on one of the Italian water taxes and go for a ride. It was really cool! I have been back recently, and it's like a ghost town. Walking around there now you get the feeling that you're the only person left on Earth.

San Antonio pulled this kind of development off quite well because it's in the actual center of the city and connections pre-existing buildings, streets, and public parks.

This is wild, I worked in Las Colinas for about 10 years and never knew the canal area even existed. I still go out there from time to time, and residential is growing. There is also a big music venue out there, Toyota Music Factory, as well as a growing number of unique restaurants, so it is slowly becoming a more popular place to be for leisure and living.

I lived there on a work assignment just over a year ago. I love the idea of Las Colinas and the thought that went into its design. Now it reminds of a dystopian city, something you'd see in a 1970s sci-fi movie. Gleaming highrise buildings, a people mover, yet largely devoid of life and activity. I'm glad it is well maintained and hope that it sees a resurgence at some point.

Great stuff! Historical urbanist content seems to be blowing up, and youve got a nice and polished vision with this video alone. good luck!!

you touched on this a bit, but i think the "why" of Las Colinas's downfall deserves to be fleshed out a bit. You gloss over things like lack of residential, poor connectivity, etc. All in all it seems like this was designed first and foremost to be an office-park novelty - if built as a community, with residential and other mixed-use construction and good integration to the surrounding areas, I could imagine this being an incredible little area. Great video!

It feels more like its moving slow than dead. In the north west they made a convention center and a concert stadium along with a lot of other retail and restaurants, and its been doing well. They have also been redoing all the roads on the west side. The east side away from the office buildings is almost built out with apartments. While it did not live up to the full vision I think overall it did well for an ambitious project. Even disney world and epcot never lived up to its full visions of their times.

i remember going to las colinas to help my mom out with work at the top of the summit. setting up classes, rolling around the hallways on rollie chairs and drawing things on the marker board to surprise the coworkers the next day. man i miss those days 😕

Well as someone who goes to las colinas pretty much every week I’m glad to see a lot of new improvements going on in the urban area, there’s 3 big apartments complexes being built, there’s two 10 stories towers that are beginning to be build and will be Wells Fargo regional campus which will add a few thousand people to the area, there’s another hotel being built and they are building a bunch of dense townhomes next to the DART station. The city in on the process of preparing a huge bike infrastructure plan for the city and I know it will improve Las colinas greatly, lots to look out for

So cool. I’m one of the DART rail operators who goes through here daily. Didn’t realize just how cool the history was!