The political hush over the Ross Avenue headquarters of the Dallas Independent School District in the last week is no harbinger of peace. Things are quiet only because various business and political leaders are trying to make up their minds whether to do a bombing run. The good thing, or…
The longer you sit there, the creepier things get. Goose-bumps creepy. As you perch in a metal folding chair at one of three “discussion tables” in the all-purpose room of the Jaycee Zaragoza Rec Center, the evening’s events somehow seem the opposite of deja vu: A familiar event slowly begins…
The Freedman’s Cemetery Memorial, just south of Lemmon Avenue on the southbound Central Expressway service road, is already three-quarters complete. The memorial, whose front façade rises oddly from the rubble of the unfinished expressway like a wall left standing after war, will be an enclosed “pocket” park when completed. The…
Last week city council member Laura Miller barely had resumed her chair at the briefing table when the mayor seized the floor, followed quickly by several of her fellow council members, all eager to apologize for the attack she had just made on Dallas 2012 Olympics promoter Tom Luce. She…
How perfect. Just as they begin trying to hire a new superintendent of schools to replace the one who left to go to the Big House, the members of the Dallas school board have erupted into a particularly nasty behind-the-scenes battle over fraud, lawsuits, and their own personal liability. The…
In August 1997, when they took him to jail, Nick Jolly was 18 years old and had just graduated from Lincoln High School, where his mother and aunt both graduated before him. He was a third-generation Dallasite. His grandfather came here from South Texas to work for the Dallas water…
According to The Dallas Morning News and its City Hall reporting staff, the news on the Trinity River project over the last three months has been quite exciting. The city, according to the News, has decided to build an even bigger and better lake downtown than previously anticipated. The toll…
The act of stepping in off the street through this gate, into this place, is a silent shock to the system, a trick on the soul. You begin at the curb of North Fitzhugh Avenue at Live Oak Street in East Dallas, ankle-deep in fast-food wrappers, awash in racket and…
Every community in the world has some small subset of busy bees who work behind the scenes to make things happen, but in Dallas it’s always been much more than that, almost as if the delicious, exciting, vaguely sleazy appeal of secret power is the city’s dark and fatal flaw–the…
After a long weekend in Phoenix with officials of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Dallas boosters came home this week facing what may be the toughest challenge some of them have seen in their entire business and civic careers: If they’re serious about bringing the Olympics here in 2012, it looks…
Dallas Observer reporter Jim Schutze is claiming The Dallas Morning News “subtly misrepresented” remarks Schutze made to Morning News reporter Robert Ingrassia last week in response to questions for a story Ingrassia was reporting about a full-page ad in the Morning News that contained the complete text of a story…
Perhaps the mayor and The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Citizens Council forgot to mention it when they said a Dallas Olympic bid would not involve any real tax money. But shouldn’t the people of Dallas be informed about the $2 billion to $3 billion note they will have…
On his path to the White House, George W. Bush must pass by the Dallas Independent School District–the Bates Motel of local politics. (Think of school board meetings as the shower scene). Maybe that’s what the Fates were thinking of when they created DISD. Maybe it’s… The test. You can…
Dallas Morning News executives have threatened to halt publication of the Dallas League of Women Voters’ election guide because of the league’s official opposition to the Trinity River project. The executives who summoned league leadership to a knuckle-rapping session over the river issue were from the paper’s news side, not…
Buried at the back of a report by the Army Corps of Engineers is an admission that the $2 billion Trinity River project may make flooding in the region worse, not better. The Corps says the increased threat of flooding should be allowed because of the project’s value as a…
On his way out the door, departing City Manager John Ware is setting up a sweetheart tax-dollar giveaway to former Governor Bill Clements and oilman Ray Hunt that will make his Trinity River and sports-arena deals look like sound government policy. Impossible? Consider this: Clements and Hunt, both hugely wealthy…
Mexican-American leadership in Dallas has pretty much resolved the question of whether the city’s new city manager, Ted Benavides, is Hispanic. It has been decided that he is. The debate now has moved more to the question of how Hispanic. Nobody knows. And some people are even beginning to ask…
In late May, when Dallas AIDS activist John Thomas learned he was infected with a microbe called cryptosporidium parvum, he finally decided to conclude his private battle with death. Thomas had earned national respect over the last two decades for his leadership in the global battle against death by AIDS…
The early results are in. And preliminary indications are strong that Laura Miller’s transition from longtime Dallas columnist to neophyte Dallas City Council member will not necessarily be smooth. It will be interesting. But not smooth. And who thought it would be? Miller’s 15-year journalism career in Dallas and New…
A mini-revolt is brewing among Dallas Morning News reporters who believe the paper’s coverage of the Trinity River bond election was dishonest. At an angry newsroom meeting last week, reporters told top editors they felt the News’ so-called “fairness” policy had become a “euphemism for watered-down coverage and kowtowing to…
If boys could fly, the world would look like Eisenbergs. Scores of boys on in-line skates, skateboards, and BMX bikes are perched atop enormous plywood ramps like crows on a cliff. The place reeks of young men, slick with sweat, ostentatiously stoical in their Teutonic skate helmets and gladiator pads…
At the heart of Laura Miller’s investigative report “Clueless” on Al Lipscomb in the May 30, 1996, Dallas Observer was Lipscomb Industries, a chemical supply company that Miller said consisted of a “a black guy, a white guy, and an address book filled with the names of every big-shot businessman…
