In the four years Texas Central Railway unveiled plans to link Dallas and Houston with the country’s first bullet train, officials with the private company have talked a lot about how quickly the line will whisk travelers between two of the country’s largest fastest-growing urban areas, about how darn Texan…
On any given day, members of the exclusive City Club can look down from the the 69th floor of the Bank of America Plaza, Dallas’ tallest building, and glimpse the Trinity River as it exists today: a rigid trickle of water confined by a straitjacket of levees, a denuded floodplain…
Over the past week, Dallas has been the backdrop for what is destined in short order to be made into a TV true-crime documentary. On Friday, officials responding to a North Dallas house fire found the body of Ira Tobolowsky, an attorney from a prominent local family. The fire was soon…
On Monday afternoon, The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board reached a conclusion its been building to for months. In the wake of the unspeakably horrific death of Antoinette Brown, who was fatally mauled by a pack of dogs in South Dallas, Dallas Animal Services director Jody Jones has to go. The piece raises several…
Erika Estrada never quite fit in with the moms of White Rock Valley. “It’s very Stepford,” she says. Estrada got an inkling shortly after she and her husband, Rick, bought a spacious ranch-style house on Highedge Drive in 2004 and they were peppered with invitations to living-room Bible studies. She…
Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and confirmed member of the 1 percent, spent three hours on a DART bus on Monday morning. Granted, the bus had been chartered for the occasion, meaning that Kaplan didn’t get the full DART bus experience. No scruffy gentleman sat…
Texas’ Child Protective Services is in crisis. In the wake of the brutal, March 13 death of 4-year-old Leilana Wright in Grand Prairie, a parade of news report have documented that the agency, through some mixture of incompetence and an acute staffing shortage, is fundamentally incapable, as currently organized, of…
The sun shines brightly on Texas, and there’s a lot of Texas for it to shine on. Little surprise, then, that Texas has the potential to generate more electricity from solar — more specifically, the solar panels people and businesses can install on their roofs — than any other state…
Adam P. Smith stumbled into Tent City 10 months ago, soaking wet and shivering. He’d recently been released from federal prison, where he’d spent a couple of years after being picked up after a pair of ill-conceived bank robberies. (He likes to tell of how his defense attorney jiu jitsued…
In the 1970s, when Sam Tasby’s lawsuit forced Dallas ISD to stop slow-walking desegregation, white enrollment began to drop like a stone. In 1970, there were 94,383 white students in the district. By the end of the decade, the district enrolled fewer than half that many, 42,030. The rate of decline…
The way things are headed, with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick setting the state’s legislative agenda, Texas may very well have its own crack squad bathroom police. In the meantime, it’s up to self-appointed enforcers of traditional gender norms to adjudicate which bathrooms strangers should use. Case in point: the man who,…
Andy Seremetis likes to meditate. You might even say he needs to meditate. Too many days without meditating and his mood sours and days he would typically sail through become a slog. “It creates a feeling of being present,” he says. “I notice things around me more. I’m not thinking about…
Anyone who’s passed the intersection of Skillman Street and Walnut Hill Lane (and who hasn’t been reading the Lake Highlands Advocate for the past dozen years) has probably wondered about the shockingly large prairie at the intersection’s southeast corner and the pseudo-urban apartment complex/parking garage that’s been weirdly deposited in the…
America has many iconic streets. Some are famous as centers of commerce or government, others for their world-class shopping or music. Dallas has many of those same streets, except without any of the qualities that make them iconic. In fact, many of Dallas’ famously named streets aren’t really fit for…
Anyone who’s driven in Dallas for more than a few years has this experience. There you are, absent-mindedly piloting your automobile down a city street — likely one you’ve traversed unmolested every day for months — when you are stopped short by a peculiar sight. There, plodding across the intersecting…
On Saturday morning, Richard Greyson and a crew of his fellow master naturalists parked off Pemberton Hill Road and hiked across a meadow to the mighty bur oak that stretches over Dallas’ historic Big Spring. They had planted milkweed there the previous fall, sustenance for the clouds of monarch butterflies…
Evening descends on Tent City. Overhead, the incessant whir of traffic on Interstate 45 has become a muffled groan with the onset of rush hour. The sun hasn’t yet sunk low enough to squeeze between the underside of the freeway and the roofs of the low-slung warehouses that surround it,…
As drug reforms go, the cite-and-release marijuana policy Dallas recently considered was pretty tepid stuff. Getting caught with weed would have still been a class B misdemeanor, still carried a potential penalty of a $2,000 fine and six months in jail and still left a permanent mark on a convicted…
Every year around this time, the Center for Public Policy Priorities, Texas’ flagship progressive think tank, releases a report with lots of statistics and graphics and, you know, facts detailing how much it sucks to be a kid in Texas. On their measure of childhood well-being that takes into account…
Bridget Turner emerges from her tent and shuffles slowly but purposefully across Tent City’s southernmost section. She’s halfway across the sandy dirt when she stops short and looks around, face scrunched up in bewilderment. Lee Cadena, a street preacher who moved to Tent City two and a half months ago…
Why does it suck so much to ride DART? Anyone who’s tried to get from point A to point B in Dallas using public transit (with the possible exception of 9-to-5 commuters who live near a rail stop and work downtown, for whom the system works fairly well) has asked…
Three years ago this month, Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett were on a late-night patrol in South Dallas when they noticed a man behind Kwick Stop Liquor, later identified as 51-year-old Fred Bradford, riding his bicycle without a helmet and generally looking furtive. Burgess pulled behind Bradford…
