You want accessibility? How about a city that’s within a three-and-a-half-hour flight of nearly every major metro area in the U.S., and sits smack in the middle of the country and the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex—one of the country’s best-equipped business destinations? That’s Irving.
The city is also next to DFW International Airport and Love Field. Abundant highways and Trinity Railway Express (TRE) give Irving easy connect to all the Metroplex offers in the way of attractions, accommodations, restaurants, and business centers. There’s even more ease of Metroplex transport coming soon via two new Irving DART stations between Dallas, Irving’s international business epicenter—Las Colinas—and DFW.
Hundreds of corporations make their homes in Irving, including over 40 Fortune 500 companies. Business groups have 12,000 hotel rooms from which to choose a base, including the Asian-style Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas that sits alongside the tranquil Mandalay Canal, and Four Seasons Resort & Club Dallas at Las Colinas.
Coming in 2010 to augment Las Colinas’ business bona fides is a new convention center offering 50,000 square feet of space, including a 20,000-square-foot ballroom.
Maura Gast, executive director of the Irving CVB, says the new center is meant to serve Irving’s midweek business meetings market, which has outgrown current capacity.
“Right now, a big group for us is 350 people,” Gast says, “and when we move into the new venue we’ll handle between 1,200 and 1,800 people. We are not trying to compete with any other large Metroplex venue—like the Dallas Convention Center, with a million feet of space.”
The new center will have a “multipurpose” design, she points out, and will also attract weekend consumer shows, assembly events, sporting events, as well as meetings during the work week.
Groups know they have arrived in Irving when the Mustangs of Las Colinas at Williams Square come into view. The nine larger-than-life bronze horses gallop across a granite stream of water, and are the largest equestrian sculpture in the world. The city’s other icon since 1971 has been Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. At the end of the 2008 football season the stadium—barring the playoffs, of course—will close and the team will set up shop in nearby Arlington. Demolition of the present stadium—a popular event site throughout its life—will make way for a plethora of new development to serve Metroplex visitors and residents.
“That intersection of roads where the stadium sits is one of the busiest in the Metroplex,” Gast explains, “and the site presents all kinds of redevelopment opportunities to us. Besides the new DART light rail stations, there are a lot of mixed-use components coming in, including new retail, restaurants and shops.”
Residential development will also be a major part of the site’s redevelopment, she says, soon to be known as “The Crossroads of Dallas-Fort Worth.”
Considering Irving’s present and coming crossroads amenities, groups will have even better access to not just the excitement of Dallas’ West End, Fort Worth’s famed Stockyards and the Southwest’s largest “shoppertainment” site, Grapevine Mills Mall; they’ll also have enviable one-plane access to most major U.S. cities.
All deep in the heart of the Metroplex.
