A little while ago reports began to circulate that Dallas Police and Dallas Fire-Rescue were searching the Trinity River for a car thief who ditched out of his stolen ride and took a dive into the rain-swollen river. That search is over, despite the fact authorities have yet to find…
I’ve got a call out to Robert Edsel — founder of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which honors those who’ve spent decades scouring the globe for art stolen by Hitler and the Nazis — about news that hit The Los Angeles Times yesterday: George Clooney told…
About an hour ago Your Reigning World Champion Dallas Mavericks finally got their visit to the White House, where President Obama was presented with his very own Mavs jersey. Obama welcomed the team, former Mayor Ron Kirk and, of course, “the shy and retiring owner of the Dallas Mavericks,” as…
I’d forgotten all about Dylan Hollingsworth’s shoulda-been classic photo taken in January 2010, during what turned out to be the First Annual No Pants! Ride on Dallas Area Rapid Transit light rail. Then a Friend of Unfair Park shot me this video from yesterday’s third-annual balls-out trip on a train…
Drove the Continental Avenue bridge several times over the weekend on back-and-forth trips to Oak Cliff; the boy and I even pulled over on the west side, at the under-construction entrance to the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, to grab the quick pic seen below. As mentioned Friday, all that and…
On Thursday we plugged into the city’s interest in setting up electric-car charging stations on city property — at City Hall, the downtown library, Fair Park, Dallas Love Field and Dallas Executive Airport — with partners TXU and ECOtality, the latter a San Francisco-based company. As it turns out, per…
For several weeks we’ve known how 3700 Ross intends to deal with a budget shortfall in the coming school year — by closing schools (guesstimated to save $11.5 million) and jumping kindergarten to fourth-grade teacher-student ratios from 22:1 to 24:1 per classroom (which could result in the loss of 300…
Should have seen this coming, what with the new-look Reunion and the downtown Omni and the Chase Tower and all the other buildings illuminating the future Woodall Rodgers Deck Park. But one year after they turned on Margaret Hunt Hill in advance of the Super Bowl, City Hall and the…
Earlier today I spent as much time as I could, which wasn’t anywhere near close to enough, listening to a song Wilco posted to YouTube late yesterday: the band performing The Band’s “The Weight” backstage at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, joined by show-opener Nick Lowe and Mavis Staples,…
In October of 2009, James Capra, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Dallas Division, invited media to a press conference so he could show off the massive haul from a long-in-the-works bust involving the Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia: 220 pounds of methamphetamine, 4.5 kilos of cocaine,…
Barring an earth-shattering memo from Mary Suhm arriving in the in-box this evening, expect your Saturday-morning Unfair Park item to be filled with … wait for it, wait for it … conceptual renderings. But this is The Good Stuff, the real deal: the latest looks at the Continental Bridge, which…
Several Friends of Unfair Park have inquired: Whatever happened to Great City Attractions’ plans for that enormo Ferris wheel in downtown? Because last we heard, in a Halloween email from Nigel Ward, Great City Attractions’s head of global site development, was that while the original site — next to the…
Mention the words “Craig James,” and chances are at some point your comments section will fill up with something like, oh, I dunno, something like this: “I’ve heard CRAIG JAMES HAS NEVER DENIED THAT HE KILLED 5 HOOKERS WHILE HE WAS AT SMU.” Which the SMU Mustang never seemed to…
Thursday afternoon I met historian Alan Govenar at 508 Park Avenue, future site of the Museum of Street Culture. He was not alone: Joining him were developer Buddy Jordan, chair of the 508 Park Committee and a man who’s been pursuing the building for close to 20 years; Pat Bywaters,…
In October we noted a report from Pittsburgh-based Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights that said the Dallas Cowboys are having team-branded clothing made in “gross sweatshop conditions at the Style Avenue factory in El Salvador” — which Cowboys Merchandise Ltd. chief operating officer Bill Priakos denied in a…
Yesterday we got word that John McKeon, the president and general manager of The Dallas Morning News since October 2007, was leaving, which publisher Jim Moroney confirmed via email. At which point a press release went out, leading with news of fourth-quarter 2011 earnings (“decrease of four to five percent…
A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this report from the U.S. Geological Survey: My near-neck of Northwest Dallas had itself a teensy-tiny earthquake in the wee small hours of the morning — at 12:11:49, to be precise. As in: “Magnitude 2.0.” Or, as Matt Peterson calls it, a “microquake.” Which,…
Many have asked since yesterday if there will be a memorial of some kind for Gale Hess. Today I was told: No, not yet. There will be a small service for family and close friends, and there may be something else down the road. But, I was told, it will…
Saw this when I got home last night — an invite to attend a Grand Prairie Independent School District open house January 21 at the South Grand Prairie High School Coliseum. The postcard thinks that maybe my Dallas ISD-attending child would want to attend, say, the Garner Fine Arts Academy…
A few days back the great Alan Melson, KERA’s director of interactive, directed his Facebook friends to a great weather-geek (said with all due respect) site where folks are currently having a great debate about whether or not signs point to an icy deep freeze headed toward North Texas toward…
When I directed your attention to those pretty pictures filling City Hall’s 2012 calendar yesterday, I forgot to note: Those are the latest top-prize-getters in the third annual Trinity River Corridor Project Photo Contest. Tops, again, was the great Sean Fitzgerald, winner of the second annual contest. That’s his work…
In June 2010 we told you the remarkable tale of a rather unremarkable-looking building that stands at 4526 Leland Avenue, near the intersection of Hatcher Street and S. Central Expressway in South Dallas. It came to our attention because its owner, Vanessa Baker, was seeking landmark status for the property…
