We’ve written quite a bit about the Dallas Police Department’s efforts to treat prostitutes not as criminals, but as victims: In ’06, Jesse Hyde profiled the so-called “whore cop” who works truck stops; two years later, he wrote about the Letot Center, where minors on the run from their pimps…
Flipping through the agenda for today’s meeting of the Dallas County Commissioners Court, I came across an interesting item on page 193 concerning potential plans to privatize “all security functions in the County.” What the …? Because last I remembered reading, the county was going to put the Sheriff’s Department…
TCU-Boise State — so far, quite the sloppy, defensive time-kill till Thursday night’s Big Game. Speaking of which, here’s a warm-up from tomorrow’s New York Times: a profile of University of Texas linebacker Sergio Kindle, who grew up in South Oak Cliff and shoulda gone to SOC but instead went…
A good, but clearly very cheap, Friend of Unfair Park who shares my affection for the old Statler Hilton hotel downtown sends word: An Arkansas eBay’er is looking to offload some coffee creamers and a sugar bowl that came out of that hotel way back when. Says the seller: “The…
A little while ago, the Dallas Film Society — which operates the Dallas International Film Festival, also known as The Film Festival Formerly Known as AFI Dallas International — announced some changes at the top, the biggest of which has to do with Michael Cain being promoted to the title…
It may be a few weeks before we know for sure, but after years of wondering what to do about the Bama Pie mess, the city’s inching closer to filing a lawsuit over the empty building in South Dallas. Oh, right — what Bama Pie building? Longtime Friends of Unfair…
Last we talked to Jose Escobedo (actually, his daughter Brandy), he wasn’t going to yank out his fake lawn, no matter what the city said. But that was in August, before he spent months learning you can’t fight City Hall — especially when it comes to planting turf in a…
Dallas-based 7-Eleven’s in the midst of a major expansion in Northern California, and, last we looked, the oh-thank-heavens was looking “to accelerate store development over the next several years through organic growth” in the DFW and elsewhere cross the country. (In ’08, shortly after the chain shuttered its Knox-Travis hot…
Just got around to reading the latest issue of Wired, which details the myriad delays that made the title of Duke Nukem Forever painfully appropriate. The Garland gaming developers at 3D Realms wouldn’t talk — there is, after all, that mammoth lawsuit pending, in which publisher Take-Two, which fronted 3D…
Maybe you heard a few days back that Van Morrison had another kid. Except, whoops, no, he most certainly did not: “The comments which appeared on my website did not come from me. They are completely and utterly without foundation.” Wouldn’t even mention it except the woman at the center…
It’s no longer the Cotton Bowl Parade that snakes through downtown Dallas on New Year’s Day. Wouldn’t make sense — the Cotton Bowl’s now in Arlington, in case you missed that breaking news. And so it was the rebranded Comerica Bank New Year’s Day Parade that had downtown tied up…
Woke up this morning to find in the in-box this six-minute blast from the past courtesy — who else? — the great George Gimarc, who’s got a treat for every occasion. It’s a New Year’s Day in the life of KAFM in 1973, shortly before the then-year-old progressive-rock outlet perched…
No doubt we’ll call it an early day — I can tell the Friends of Unfair Park have better things to do, and good for you. But before we say, “Till next year,” a few words, very few, about a night spent in Deep Ellum — my first since, well,…
As it’s the last day of the year and all, let’s wrap up some unfinished business — like, oh, the fact your gas bill is going up in the spring of 2010, in part thanks to City Hall. Maybe you remember: Back in September, when the city was trying find…
Several years ago, out of nowhere, a reader sent me a copy of the four-disc Rock and Roll Cowboy collection, which consists of Neil Young live tracks spanning ’66 to ’94. It was an astoundingly kind gesture: The set had been compiled by an industrious (Italian?) bootlegger tired of waiting…
I went over to the Dallas Public Libraries’ Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division Web site in search of something entirely unrelated to this post. (Hint: It has to do with this photo taken by our pal Justin Terveen.) There, I noticed that the department was still in the process of…
View Larger MapWhile we’re on the subject of North Dallas shopping malls, this significant bit of real estate news: Around this time next year, Crate & Barrel’s leaving its Alpha Road location, across the street from the Galleria, and heading further north up the Dallas North Tollway. Quite a bit…
TRAILER and INTRODUCTION from JOSHFOX on Vimeo.The folks at the Thin Line Film Fest in Denton, an annual affair devoted to documentaries, send word of a major premiere scheduled to open the festival on February 17: Gasland. Formerly known as Rage of Nature, as evidenced by the trailer above, this…
Christine Romero, spokesperson for Valley View Center owner Macerich, called back to say, well, she doesn’t have much to say about the state or fate of the beleaguered mall at present: “We don’t have any final plans to share,” she tells Unfair Park. “We plan to take our time to…
Another day, another bike plan for Oak Cliff. But Jason Roberts, founder of Bike Friendly Oak Cliff, says the Seventh Street proposal and another for Bishop Avenue are all part of efforts to brand the neighborhood “a major bicycling corridor.” The Bishop Ave. concept is this: Install bike-only lanes connecting…
The New York Times gives you $600,000 and three homes from which to choose: a 172-year-old hacienda in Pomona, California; a one-bedroom condo in Boston; or a 105-year-old, four-bedroom craftsman on Swiss Avenue near Fitzhugh voted Preservation Dallas’s top redo of ’07. And … go…
When I was a kid, Valley View was my mall — bought my first skateboard (a Powell-Peralta purchased at the stand beneath the escalators), my first album (KISS’s Double Platinum at the Disc Records) and my first guitar (thanks, McCord’s) there. But now it’s a ghost of a ghost of…
