A stalwart of the Preston Hollow neighborhood, North Haven Gardens, was hit hard by last month’s tornado. But the beloved nursery didn’t waste any time announcing that they planned to return, promising to once again become the horticultural resource Dallas has turned to for decades.

In early 2019, I found myself needing something I hadn’t had in a long time: a part-time job. For more than a decade, I’d worked as a freelance writer. It hardly made me rich. But I counted it a blessing to work from home doing something I enjoyed, until a major illness kept me from working at all for most of 2018, while generating new bills. Now my health was restored, but my finances were sick. I was a 51-year-old man in need of a gig. So I went to the mall.

At the executive offices of one of the large department stores at a mall in Plano, the hiring manager told me the store needed sales associates. But there was also another option I might consider: security.

It was a plainclothes position, behind the scenes, monitoring video from cameras spread around the store like far-flung eyes. I would communicate with uniformed security guards, store management, and mall and even local police about theft, customer injuries, active shooters, and the like.

“You’re the traffic director,” he said.

I didn’t play hard to get.

We’ve known this day was coming for some time now, but it’s still going to be surreal not to see Weir’s Furniture at its usual post on the corner of Travis and Knox. It’s been there since owner J. Ray Weir first opened the store in 1948. The store will close on February 2 to make way for a 12-story office tower.

We won’t have to mourn Weir’s entirely. The traditional furniture store has worked closely with the local developers behind the 12-story project, and plan to reopen in an even larger street-front retail space in the next two years. (They’re also working to protect the façade of the former Highland Park Soda Fountain.) Plus, it will be business as usual at Weir’s other smaller locations in Southlake, Plano, and Farmers Branch.

And yet, even with Weir’s planned return, the whole thing still stings. Knox District has changed a great deal over the years (feel free to revisit this D Magazine post from the ’80s for a wild retail throwback), but the most recent changes have gone beyond tenant turnover. One of the most attractive things about the Knox-Henderson area has always been how different if feels from other Dallas neighborhoods — and the fact that pedestrians actually use the sidewalks. Quaint, single-story storefronts giving way to towering multi-use developments, even ones that are working to preserve history, will be a notable change.

Clearly, Weir’s impending closure has sparked a bit of nostalgia in us, so feel free to join us in a walk down memory lane via this post’s slideshow, and be sure to take one final walk through the store as we know it before it closes Saturday.

With apologies to the Dallas Cowboys, the most popular pastime in this part of the world just might be shopping. The Dallas-Fort Worth area leads the nation in shopping centers per capita and ranks among the nation’s Top 5 with about 460,000 retail workers.

Perhaps it started with charismatic merchant Stanley Marcus, maybe it owes to something else, but, this former trading post on the Trinity River has inexplicably grown into one of America’s shopping superstars.

We all know, of course, that the internet set off a slow-moving earthquake under the traditional retail sector. The rapid rise of e-commerce in the past decade or so means more of our shopping is being done from home—or, data tell us, from work. It’s quicker, often cheaper, with wider selection and no traffic or parking hassles.

As consumers in DFW and the rest of the country shift more of their buying on-line, we wondered whether an unlikely brick-and-mortar superstar can transition to an e-commerce superstar.

Let’s start by taking stock of the region’s e-commerce industry. Among the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, DFW ranked fifth, with 10,056 companies operating in the e-commerce space in 2016, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. These companies employed 384,000 workers, fourth in the nation. Payrolls at DFW e-commerce firms exceeded $20.4 billion, seventh among MSAs. The North Texas region’s e-commerce sector is the largest in Texas.

She’s just that into me. Photograph by Melissa Romig.

The first time I saw Serena Williams play, I cried. It was 2009 and I was in NYC for a trademark and copyright seminar. Bored out of my mind during one of the sessions, I decided on a whim to see if I could get a last-minute ticket to the U.S. Open. The heavens shone down upon me, and I scored a loge seat for the night matches in Arthur Ashe for like $100. I hopped on the 7 Subway to Queens, found my seat, they dimmed the lights, and, as the Black Eyed Peas’ newly released single “I Have a Feeling” blared over the sound system and the spotlights chased each other around the arena, Serena took the court. The crowd went wild, and I sobbed like a 5-year-old meeting Elsa on a unicorn made of candy. That song still makes me tear up every time I hear it.

That was the same year that Serena threatened a line judge with physical harm, which I wasn’t cool with. But I soon forgave and forgot, because, in the end, she always gives more than she takes, to both the sport and the world at large. I haven’t missed a U.S. Open since. This past Labor Day weekend, I hovered behind the windscreen of the practice court as she sat just feet away on a bench, laughing with her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, during a water break. I figured that was the closest we would ever be, and I was fine with that.

Then I got an invite to the VIP launch event Saturday night for her Great Collection at Neighborhood Goods, in Legacy West. Yes, that’s right: the GOAT has gone beyond 23 Grand Slam wins and a Nike catsuit controversy and the Beats “Queen of Queens” video endorsement and marrying that Reddit guy and motherhood posts about teething and being the newest board member of Survey Monkey and showing up to gal pal Megan Markle’s wedding in Valentino trainers to personally stock and style the shelves of a small pop-up shop in Matt Alexander and Mark Masinter’s new take on a department store.

In Dallas.

And so, of course, I went.

When it comes to dress shirts, men are often forced to sacrifice functionality in the name of professional appearance. Mizzen+Main CEO Kevin Lavelle figured that by substituting performance fabrics for cotton, he could counter many of the undesirable aspects of the traditional button-down: the tendency to wrinkle, untuck, and put perspiration on display.

“When you’re working hard, our shirt’s going to move with you,” Lavelle says. “It’s never going to restrict you, whether that’s putting a piece of luggage in an overhead bin, running to the train, running to your car—and that’s absolutely essential for our guys.”

When we caught up with Lavelle around the recent opening of the brand’s West Village flagship store, he could not have been more enthused. “Dallas is our home base,” he says. “This is where we launched. This is our headquarters. This is us: Dallas.”