Way back last April, the energetic, civic-minded hipsters over at Better Block turned the area around King’s Highway, W. 7th St. and N. Tyler St. in Oak Cliff into a nice little plaza space where it was entirely possible to sit without being, you know, repeatedly run over. That was…
Rebecca Avalon likes to say she did things backwards: went to college, got a master’s degree in science education, became an elementary school teacher, then started stripping. She’s quit dancing full time twice but keeps going back. “When people say to me, ‘You have a master’s degree, why are you…
Technically, the U.S. Postal Service hasn’t yet made a decision about whether it will close the processing center at the main post office near Sylvan and IH-30, just one of several local sites it’s considering shuttering as it looks to move operations to the Coppell and Fort Worth plants instead…
It’s 9 on a Tuesday night, and Jaguars Dallas, a big, boxy strip club between Stemmons Freeway and Northwest Highway, is almost empty. The club doesn’t have many neighbors, just a row of truck lots and vacant yards, plus one friendly rock ‘n’ roll strip joint called the Clubhouse. Jaguars…
On Monday a few Friends of Unfair Park seemed a little humbugged to hear that the Dallas Police Department, along with the mayor and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, would prefer you buy non-black-market items for your Christmas list this year. Nonetheless, DPD Chief David Brown, undeterred, stopped by…
Yesterday afternoon the Arts Culture and Libraries Committee took its quick tour of the construction site that will soon be the City Performance Hall, which they hope somebody might want to rent out at some point. City council members Ann Margolin, Jerry Allen and Delia Jasso called their committee meeting…
The answer is no, the question being: Will we ever stop writing about the city redistricting process? But it’s been a little while, so let’s review. Then we can discuss the dueling delegations who apparently met with the Department of Justice last week to discuss the (barely) council-approved map forwarded…
This holiday season, City Hall, the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office would like to remind you not to buy your gifts out of the trunks of cars or through sketchy-seeming eBay sellers. At a packed press conference at City Hall this morning, Mayor Mike Rawlings,…
A years-long dispute between a woman who runs a dog rescue out of her home and her increasingly annoyed neighbors has resulted in hundreds of phone calls to Animal Control, a felony robbery conviction, one dead dog and, we’re guessing, some pretty awkward block parties. “This has been going on…
In mid-October we predicted that the hearing before the Permit and License Appeal Board over whether the club Afterlife should have its dancehall license revoked would probably be the most exciting thing that’s come before the board in a very long time. In hindsight, that was probably an understatement. At…
Every decent-sized courthouse in the country has its own serial pain in the ass, the guy who thinks nothing of suing the kids who threw a ball over his fence or the cat who pooped in his yard. But there’s a special subset of filing addicts: the inmates who while…
Last night, Mayor Mike Rawlings hosted a community forum at Cedar Crest Golf Course, billed in the invitation as an “update on the City of Dallas.” Backed by council members Dwaine Caraway and Tennell Atkins and a large supporting cast of other city officials, he tried to reassure the crowd:…
If you happen to own or rent a house and you enjoy exploiting the elderly and the mentally ill, the city of Dallas has a legal loophole made just for you. A representative from Mental Health America of Greater Dallas warned the city’s Senior Affairs Commission yesterday that despite years…
A Dallas VA Medical Center nurse is on leave and her bosses are in full-blown groveling mode after a gay combat vet, in search of help for her deepening depression, said she was urged to come out of the darkness and to stop living in terrible lesbian sin. “I was…
For days we’ve been promised a major announcement today from the Perot Museum of Nature & Science; as in, said the week’s worth of press releases, “a MAJOR announcement” would be made this morning. And even though it wasn’t exactly a secret by the time the press conference rolled around…
After several hours of deliberation, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the felony animal cruelty trial of Tyrone McGill, the former animal shelter manager indicted in August 2010 following a May ’10 incident at the Dallas animal shelter involving a cat trapped behind a wall that wasn’t…
Late this afternoon, former animal shelter manager Tyrone McGill took the stand to testify in his defense at his felony animal cruelty trial, which began yesterday. While the prosecution attempted to paint a picture of McGill as an indifferent, unreachable bureaucrat who willfully allowed a cat to die behind a…
After completing jury selection yesterday, the prosecution began laying out its case this morning in the felony animal cruelty trial of former animal shelter manager Tyrone McGill, who is currently on administrative leave and continues to draw a paycheck from the city of Dallas. “This is not a difficult case,”…
Forgive us for seeming a little primate-obsessed today, but the Dallas Zoo is giving us an awful lot of material. Hot on the heels of the news that a Twitter-savvy “rogue” spider monkey got loose this morning and was quickly captured, we heard back from Dr. Lynn Kramer, the deputy…
An Occupy Dallas march and protest turned ugly this afternoon when police used pepper spray to subdue the crowd outside of the Bank of America building on Main and Lamar, protesters told Unfair Park. Eight people were arrested from the crowd of about 150. After the arrests, protesters continued marching…
The number of young people in Dallas contracting HIV and AIDS is increasing, KTVT-Channel 11 reported Monday, and those young people, ages 13 to 24, now make up 25 percent of all new diagnoses. And those stats were compiled before the state decided to gut family-planning funding and run Planned…
Sarah Vowell appeared on The Daily Show last year to promote The Wordy Shipmates, her set of essays on Puritan America. She was talking about the history of Rhode Island when the host suddenly interrupted her. “You’re very smart,” Stewart said dreamily, gazing across the table at her. She really…
