Nowadays, Dallas’ network of tunnels are pretty widely reviled as an urban planning nightmare that have sucked the life off downtown’s streets. They are a “sordid story,” Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crawford told the City Council this morning. “Frankly, we’re trying to do away with them as quickly as…
Congratulations, Dallas. Your never-ending quest to become “world class” has finally paid off. Not in the sense that Dallas will now be mentioned in the same breath as London and Paris or transformed into a international tourist hotspot. But you have finally succeeded in scrubbing off the redness the rest…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t think his proposal to secure access to a federal database of private banking and financial information would be controversial. It sailed through the City Council’s Public Safety Committee unopposed last week. Then again, that committee didn’t have City Councilman Lee Kleinman. “‘The right of…
High school students in Texas can take, and get credit toward, electives like floral arrangement, team sport officiating, and turf-grass management. But not for Mexican-American studies, something activists, education groups, and several dozen state lawmakers are pushing to change. They came out in force for Tuesday’s State Board of Education…
Orville Paul Dunagan and Bryan Coleman are friends. Scratch that. They were friends, neighbors and longtime softball buddies and teammates in a slow-pitch league in East Dallas. The moment their bond began to dissolve, on June 21, 2005, is now immortalized in Dallas County court records. That’s the day Dunagan…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wears many hats. He’s a “man’s man,” a pizza lover, a terrible actor, the titular head of a major American city. He is also, you might be surprised to learn, a distinguished journalist. So says the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism. It has…
Until now, there have been only vague hints of improprieties in Garland ISD’s H1-B visa program. There was an investigation serious enough to call in the feds, possibly involving foreign teachers paying fees they shouldn’t have had to pay, and a bunch of teachers’ visas were set to expire. Today,…
Craig James, the former SMU football star and Senate candidate whose retrograde views on homosexuality, litigiousness and overall mediocrity have made him unemployable as a football analyst, has fallen into a new career as a mouthpiece for the religious right. The Family Research Council, labeled by the Southern Poverty Law…
Remember that story a couple of weeks back about how Dallas was sitting on 25,000 municipal court warrants? And how you were probably safe ignoring your traffic citation with impunity? That was caused by a technical glitch, and technical glitches get fixed. The reprieve was temporary. The broader trend is…
The town of Hutchins doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. There’s Hutchins State Jail, the town’s second-largest employer, and new intermodal facilities centered on the Union Pacific train tracks and I-20 (this presumably explains how the population doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 5,338), but it has otherwise…
Tyler, Texas, which has produced many yellow roses and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, is also home to Neal Barton. Barton is the news director of KETK, the local NBC affiliate, who occasionally takes the liberty of delivering a bombastic on-air op-ed. Think Dale Hansen, minus the humor and self-awareness. On…
Transforming Valley View Center from a dystopian wasteland into Dallas Midtown, a mammoth, 450-acre complex of restaurants and offices and stores and apartments and retail, won’t be cheap. More than $10 billion was the figure floated when developer Scott Beck first went public with the idea last year. Most of…
Those of you who listened to Friday’s Final Four games on the radio were forced to endure not only a complete lack of moving images but also sportscaster Jim Gray’s brief but remarkably inane sideline interview with Jerry Jones, in which the Cowboys’ owner noted approvingly that AT&T Stadium’s TV…
The Dallas Public Library has a fraught relationship with downtown’s homeless population, on the one hand reluctantly accepting that they are members of the “public” the institution was built to serve, while simultaneously wishing they weren’t. So feel free to be deeply cynical about the library’s new “Homeless Engagement Initiative,”…
On paper, Patriot’s Crossing is still going to be a pleasant, 162-unit development on Lancaster Road offering military veterans affordable housing with easy access to the VA Medical Center. The problem — one of them, anyway — is that the generously subsidized project is can’t seem to make the jump…
You needn’t stray far from where where the Texas Horse Park’s barn and activity building are going up off Pemberton Hill Road to start finding goat skulls. A couple of feet into the mesquite trees should do; the bleached white bone is impossible to miss against the underbrush…
Two years ago, SMU finally climbed off the Princeton Review’s list of the country’s most “LGBT-unfriendly” schools. The news was welcomed by administrators, who have worked hard to shed the university’s homophobic image, but it hardly meant that The Hilltop had suddenly become a bastion of progressive inclusiveness. Case in…
Robbing someone is, without exception, a terrible idea. Robbing someone in broad daylight one block from police headquarters? About as dumb as ideas get. That seems what happened this morning in the 1200 block of South Lamar Street:…
Among the things you’d probably rather not see at a baseball game, coming in somewhere below a barrage of apocalyptic hell fire but slightly above an opposing team’s walk-off home run, is a tornado looming over the left-field fence. It’s a vision concern that might inspire panic in some. Ah,…
The Texas Department of Transportation and its transportation-planning surrogates have unsheathed their latest weapon against the proposal to tear down I-345, and that weapon is poor people. The argument was first voiced by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rodger Jones, who wondered a few days ago why the urban types…
In the two years since the Dallas City Council made twice-per-week watering restrictions permanent the water situation in North Texas hasn’t improved much. We’re still in severe drought, lake levels are still low and long-term projections of drought and population growth still aren’t pretty. A slightly less verdant lawn seems…
The margins in the illicit cigarette trade are relatively low. Tobacco is legal, for one, eliminating the risk-based premium that comes with trading in illegal drugs, and there’s a lot of competition, which puts downward pressure on retail prices. But there is a margin, enough of one to attract entrepreneurial…
