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Brave new'' burbs: maybe you''ve been wondering what happened to the old, ultraconservative Dallas. Look north.

Article Excerpt
"ARE YOU A TOURIST?" ASKED the pretty young salesclerk at Candy World in the massive Stone briar Centre mall in Frisco. [paragraph] It's always a little embarrassing to be asked that, but I tried to muster my best patronizing, big-city smile. [paragraph] "Well, yes, I'm from Dallas," I replied. [paragraph] She seemed thoroughly unimpressed. That's the way it is in the suburbs these days. People have gotten downright disrespectful of their urban neighbors. Twenty years ago, when I was researching a book in the then nascent suburban sprawl north of Dallas, folks seemed pretty interested in the hipster journalist from the city, with his black jeans and jogging shoes. Now I'm a "tourist. " Maybe that's because it's harder to be a hipster at 53 than at 33, but it's also because, during the past two decades, the axis of commercial and political power in metropolitan Dallas has shifted unmistakably northward. Those of us from Dallas are not only old guys, but old guys from the Old World. [paragraph] The New World is Collin County, a collection of once and future suburban boomtowns just north of Dallas that includes Piano, Allen, McKinney, and Frisco. Each one has reenacted the Dallas success story: A little town with no reason for being--no port, no river, no founding industry--but its own ambition and pluck suddenly finds itself growing exponentially. Plano, which was mostly prairie only twenty years ago, now has a population of 285,000 and is nearly completely "built out." It is no longer merely a bedroom community but a commercial hub in its own right, which companies such as J. C. Penney, Frito-Lay, Electronic Data Systems, and Alcatel call home and where residents can dine at second editions of almost all of Dallas' finest restaurants. A decade ago, Frisco was a wheezing old farm town (population: 6,138) of the sort that you passed through when trying to avoid construction on the interstate and admired for its quaint grain silos. Today it is the fastest-growing town in the fastest-growing county in the slate, a bustling suburb of nearly 60,000 mostly college-educated Gen X'ers whose median age is thirty and whose average annual income is $80,000. At current rates of growth, in...

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