The playing field sits 25 feet below ground so the stadium would not loom over the mansions of University Park - a football cathedral politely half-buried in one of Dallas's wealthiest neighbourhoods. Gerald J. Ford Stadium, at 5801 Bush Avenue on the Southern Methodist University campus, opened on 2 September 2000 with a 31-17 Mustangs win over Kansas, returning SMU football to campus for the first time since the 1980s. The 42-million-dollar horseshoe by Ellerbe Becket rose on the site of 1926.....

The murals inside were painted by the same artists who decorated Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and the ceiling still carries their mythological film goddess standing over a reel of film. The Granada Theater, at 3524 Greenville Avenue in Dallas's Lower Greenville neighbourhood, opened on 16 January 1946 with Mildred Pierce - a 950-seat Art Deco movie palace that became one of Texas's best-loved music venues. Built by Phil Isley Enterprises - whose founder's daughter became Hollywood st.....

The sister club to Fort Worth's longest-running comedy room gives Dallas the same formula: road-hardened professional comics, an intimate showroom and a full bar, week in and week out. Hyena's Comedy Nightclub Dallas, at 5321 East Mockingbird Lane in the Mockingbird Station development, has served the city's stand-up scene since around 2010. The parent operation supplies the DNA: owner Randy Butler learned club management at Albuquerque's Laffs Comedy Caffe in the 1980s and opened the original .....

Dallas's serious dancers know exactly where the underground lives: a raw, industrial room on Elm Street east of Deep Ellum where house and techno play on a surround sound system and the disco ball works overtime. The It'll Do Club, at 4322 Elm Street in Old East Dallas, has been the city's definitive underground dance club since its 2012 relaunch. The name and building carry older history - the address hosted neighbourhood nightlife for decades before developer Jeff Swaney's group bought the pr.....

Every guest at the 1921 opening got chocolates, all 3,000 seats filled, and Houdini, Mae West and Bob Hope would all work the stage - the last survivor of Dallas's Theatre Row is still open for business. The Majestic Theatre, at 1925 Elm Street downtown, opened on 11 April 1921 as the two-million-dollar flagship of Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate vaudeville empire. The pedigree is theatre royalty: John Eberson - later famous as the father of the atmospheric style - designed the Renaissance Reviva.....

The 1956 US Olympic basketball team beat a Southwest Conference all-star side 90-66 to christen the floor - the largest basketball crowd the Dallas area had ever assembled. Moody Coliseum, on the Southern Methodist University campus in University Park, opened in November 1956 as the SMU Coliseum. The building was a leap: 230 feet wide and 414 feet long, sunk 10 feet below ground for sightlines and acoustics, the 2.5-million-dollar arena replaced a 3,000-seat gym with roughly 10,000 seats - the .....

Kelly Clarkson auditioned for American Idol in a German lodge hall with a haunted reputation and a bar shipped from the old country. Sons of Hermann Hall at 3414 Elm Street in Deep Ellum was built in 1910-11 by four Dallas lodges of the German fraternal order, designed by William Martens as a supposedly temporary frame building - now the last surviving wood-frame commercial structure in downtown Dallas. The building was made for gathering from day one: an upstairs ballroom for dancing, a ground.....