Can A City Have A Second Act? Welcome to Irving, Texas

We're going to mix things up a bit with today's episode. Instead of focusing on an individual's story, we're going to ask the question, "Can a city have a second act?" And that brought me to Irving, Texas – a city of about 240,000 people.

Irving
has a lot going for it. It is in the center of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
It is contiguous to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the 4^th busiest airport
in the United States. And it has Las Colinas, an innovative business park that
is home to seven Fortune 500 company headquarters including Exxon-Mobil,
McKesson, and Kimberly-Clark.  

And for
nearly 40 years, the city was also the home of the world-famous Dallas Cowboys
football team, one of the most successful sports operations in history.

But in 2004, the city faced a traumatic event. The Dallas Cowboys announced they would be leaving Irving, opting to build a new $1.15 billion stadium in Arlington – about 25 minutes away. In 2008, the Cowboys played their last game in Irving's Texas Stadium. And on April 11, 2010, the stadium was reduced to a pile of rubble in a controlled implosion that took less than a minute.

The City of Irving's Texas Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys played for 37 years, was demolished in a controlled implosion on April 11, 2010.

I traveled to Irving to explore how the city responded to the Cowboys departure and adapted to keep the community moving forward.