It’s been six months, 11 days, and, oh, about three-and-a-half hours since City Manager A.C. Gonzalez was voted into office on a promise to shake things up at City Hall, and it’s finally happened. The city announced today that Gonzalez has injected new blood into upper management by bringing in…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown never gave a terribly convincing defense of an ordinance barring protesters from demonstrating near highways. He said it was intended to protect the safety of motorists who might be distracted by a sign-waving demonstrator, but as council member Philip Kingston highlighted as the City Council…
The Oakglen Apartments are, for lack of a better term, a craphole. Long-abandoned with boarded-up windows and, unless City Hall made good on its promise to mow the city-owned property on Wednesday after WFAA ran a story about neighbors’ complaints, completely choked with brush and weeds. It’s not supposed to…
The regulations the Dallas City Council might eventually maybe get around to putting on Uber, Lyft, and the like could include a provision requiring a certain portion of their fleets to be handicapped-accessible. But there are already laws in place requiring transportation providers to accommodate passengers with disabilities: the federal…
There are, out of the tens of thousands of homes and apartment units in the city of Lewisville, a total of 466 places where a registered sex offender can legally reside. Theoretically. In reality, since all or almost all of these homes, which fall outside the city’s 1,500-foot sex-offender buffer…
The Fort Worth Police Department has come a long way since 2009, when it marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark Stonewall riots, sparked by the ill-conceived, poorly executed raid of a New York gay bar, by conducting an ill-conceived, poorly executed raid of the Rainbow Lounge. The department reprimanded…
If you more than glance at the website for NuVision Pharmacy, you might start having second thoughts about having the Dallas-based company compound your pharmaceuticals. Why, you might wonder by looking at the home page, did quality testing have to be expanded to check for endotoxins? Why is the “about…
In the end, W.T. White alum Brent Herling never had to make good on his threat of a citizen’s arrest. The unhappy neighbor, who smeared beige paint across the funky, half-mile long Forest Lane mural Herling and a rotating corps of more than 100 volunteers were busy restoring, never returned,…
Emma Tutt remembers perfectly the day police came to rip her family apart. She was standing outside their Duncanville home wondering at a flock of birds that had descended on the yard in front of her. It was a warm afternoon a week before Thanksgiving, and she thought it was…
Seagoville, Texas, the spot where 635 dead-ends into despair, has long been a destination for lives that have taken a seriously wrong turn. Typically, these folks wind up at FCI Seagoville, the town’s federal prison and third-largest employer. More rarely, as in the case of a family of bald eagles,…
The conventional wisdom at the moment is that when Tesla Motors gets around to announcing details of its highly coveted, $5 billion battery gigafactory — the type of economic development that gives red-state governors with ill-concealed presidential aspirations wet dreams — it will land in one of two places: Reno…
The Dallas Morning Newsbroke the news over the weekend that the state of Texas is planning to kill off its least popular specialty license plates, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Not because we take perverse pleasure in the notion that Highland Park ISD could only find 66 drivers to…
Wendy Davis’ 11th-hour filibuster in June 2013 didn’t ultimately stop the Texas Legislature from passing some of the country’s most sweeping abortion restrictions, nor did it stop abortion clinics across the state from shutting their doors when they couldn’t meet the stringent new standards or obtain the newly required admitting…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t need to be told there was unrest. The barest recitation of…
The Year of the Bible in Flower Mound is at its midpoint, and Mayor Tom Hayden says it’s been more successful than he could have imagined. Since he delivered the proclamation at a Town Council meeting last December, more than a million people from 80 different countries have visited the…
Summer is upon us, which means public health officials in Dallas are well into their annual battle against West Nile. Mosquitoes throughout the county are being trapped and tested to detect the spread of the disease. Ponds and sizable puddles are being treated with larvacide or stocked with mosquito-eating minnows…
Total Wine, the chain of delightfully enormous alcoholic beverage emporia, might never have made it to Texas were it not for a strip club. Twenty-four years ago two guys, one from Florida, one from Tennessee, decided to buy a San Antonio Baby Dolls. They had the cash. They had the…
Life isn’t fair. It’s why kids starve. It’s why puppies suffer. It’s why the people who live next to Cityplace will soon also be living next to a 130,000-square-foot Sam’s Club. Dallas’ City Plan Commission confirmed this afternoon that yep, the big box Trammell Crow has planned for the corner…
On Sunday afternoon, a “ping” from a tracking device confirmed scientists’ suspicions: Katherine, a 2,300-pound great white shark tagged last August off of Cape Cod, is headed straight for Texas. Right now, she’s about 100 miles from the Florida panhandle. In another week, she could be past the Mississippi. Then,…
This past spring, Dallas ISD rolled out a generally successful push for eligible families to sign their 4-year-olds up for pre-k. Early registration more than doubled, from 3,288 to 6,905, and while the increase in the number of kids who ultimately enrolled was slightly less impressive — from about 9,000…
In December 2003, across the street from London’s Tate Britain museum, artist Monica Bonvicini debuted her latest installation. Titled “Don’t Miss a Sec,” it was a public toilet inside a cube of one-way mirrors. The bathroom user could gaze out upon the passing museum goers and see the construction workers…
Chivalry, you’ll be happy to learn, isn’t dead. Almost, maybe, but it still burns on in the heart of former Dallas police officer Michael Mosher. Mosher was one of seven officers who responded to a report of three potentially suspicious young men walking through an alley in the 6600 block…
