Property Trivia

♦Equastone also owns 125 E. John Carpenter Freeway in the Urban Center of Las Colinas and Las Colinas Plaza which is a retail center next door to the Four Seasons Resort and Club.

♦Irving will celebrate their centennial anniversary as a city in 2003. J.O. Schultz and Otis Browne founded the city, two railroad surveyors who were working on the Rock Island Railroad.

♦Irving is one of the largest metroplex suburbs with a population of 191,000 as of the 2000 census. It features 7,000 hotel rooms, three institutions of secondary learning and the world known Dallas Cowboys who moved to Irving in 1971 from the Cotton Bowl.

♦Irving and Las Colinas are home to 40 Fortune 500 companies and 80 multi-national companies.

♦Las Colinas was the vision of Ben Carpenter, who announced his project to much criticism in the early 1970's when Dallas and Fort Worth announced plans to build a huge international airport in between the two cities. At the time the Carpenter Ranch occupied much of the land that is now Las Colinas.

♦Las Colinas means "the little hills" in Spanish.

♦Ben Carpenter's father was John Carpenter who began Southland Life Insurance and Texas Utilities.

♦Ben Carpenter's vision resulted in one of the largest planned urban developments in the country encompassing 20,000 acres. Las Colinas is bordered by LBJ Freeway to the North, Northgate Boulevard to the South, the D/FW Airport to the west and the Trinity River to the east.

♦The plan for Las Colinas included five golf courses separating areas for residential use and areas for business and retail use, a system of canals and waterways for flood control and the APT (people mover). Lake Carolyn, which is the lake in the center of the Urban Center is over 60 feet deep in some area. This lake was built in order to use the dirt to raise the Urban Center of Las Colinas out of the Trinity River 100 year flood plain.

♦Las Colinas is still overseen by the Las Colinas Association which was formed by Ben Carpenter to oversee architectural control issues and maintain the common areas of Las Colinas.