As I’ve noted a few times, Mike Shropshire’s Seasons in Hell, about the “worst team in baseball history” (the ’73-’75 Texas Rangers), is my favorite sports book; probably has something to do with being raised on the ’73-’75 Texas Rangers. Anyway.On a very related note, a Friend of Unfair Park…
When we joined, which is to say “stumbled,” into Erykah Badu and the Rebirth Brass Band’s 407-foot-long drive-n-dance down Main Street a few weeks ago, we noted the many cameras on hand to film the brief trek; word was, per Badu’s business partner Paul Levatino, they were there for a…
A couple of years back we virtually toured the Mercantile Bank Building as it looked following its 1958 redo, when Heritage Auctions made available 17 never-before-seen photos of R.L. Thornton’s skyscraper taken by legendary Chicago-based architectural-photo firm Hedrich Blessing. Those photos, offered in a single package initially guesstimated to be…
Schutze broke the story a while back about a group of black people in South Dallas picketing the Diamond Shamrock gas station on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. People in the neighborhood claimed the station’s Korean owner had called black customers “broke-ass niggers,” imposed a $10 minimum on debit card…
A Perot Museum of Nature & Science curator wound us through the fourth floor of the partially completed space, calling upon visitors to imagine the 80-foot-long dinosaur that would soon occupy where he was standing. Next to that prehistoric giant will be the 25-foot Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, that horned dino named…
Spent a few hours today with Phil Romano, Stuart Fitts and Larry “Butch” MacGregor at their Singleton Boulevard HQ at the foot of the Calatrava bridge. It’s the brick building painted red — one of three on that side of the bridge now decorated with Shepard Fairey’s handiwork. When I…
When The Ambrose and DART’s Baylor University Medical Center Station on the Green Line finally, formally married three short years ago, Dallas Area Rapid Transit hailed it as the “consummate example of the new transit-oriented lifestyle.” After all, the complex at Indiana and Malcolm X consisted of 325 apartments and…
Last night, I got a text from Peter Schmidt, who could not believe I’ve never written about a short-lived 1966 TV show called The !!!! Beat, hosted by iconic Nashville deejay Bill “Hoss” Allen. Wrote Peter, who’d come across it yesterday after a lunchtime discussion about Etta James turned up…
Like I need to tell you, even if there were no photo credit, this is a Justin Terveen photo — one in a series of extraordinary photos of the rain-soaked city he’s taken in the past 24 hours. This one was taken earlier this evening, just west of the Houston…
For a long while now, the old Baylor offices at 2625 Elm Street in Deep Ellum have been on the market — for $5.5 million. And word was that a would-be buyer was eying the space for offices, which greatly pleased restaurant and bar owners, since it would have meant…
A Friend of Unfair Park reminds me: It’s that time of the year again — time for Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, to rank 75 major metros’ literacy levels using a handful of criteria (“newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational…
The place: the north side of the George Allen Courts Building, below the overhang. The date: February 7. The time: between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.That’s your invite to the foreclosure auction for Valley View Center, which, since August 2010, has been in the hands of LNR Partners out of…
If anyone would know the answer to the question, “Has there ever been an all-comedy radio station in Dallas?” it would be George Gimarc, who has spent most of a lifetime on Dallas radio whilst also collecting its related ephemera. No, he says. “Not that I’m aware of.” Not till…
Best I can tell using our half-baked search engine, we began writing about Jubilee Park-ers’ battle with the Dallas Independent School District over a new-and-improved O.M. Roberts in April 2010, when residents told Dallas County commissioners they were terrified of losing their homes in an eminent domain tug-of-war with the…
Well, here it is — at least HKS’s conceptual rendering of the “approximately 170,000 square feet, the six-story Jeffersonian-style building” that’ll be built on Crow Holdings’ Maple Ave. property across from Unfair Park HQ. And, no, the accompanying press release doesn’t mention, as many of you have, that Harlan Crow…
Around lunchtime at the Omni today, a crew was dismantling those enormous red Christmas balls that have been heaped up on the lawn for the past couple months, while in the Dallas Ballroom upstairs, Downtown Dallas Inc. was holding its annual meeting. It was a $100-per-head affair ($125 for non-members)…
This morning I called Karl Zavitkovsky, head of the city’s Office of Economic Development, about something more or less related when he mentioned the “Turkish Trump.” Say what now? Ah — turns out, he thought we wrote this piece about Mike Sarimsakci, the developer who came to the city with…
For the past seven years Teresa Woodard’s been a “popular” reporter and anchor for a Fox affiliate in St. Louis, where, as evidenced by the video sampler platter below, she’s donned many different looks for all kinds of stories. (Among then: The Banfield.) But it says here that Woodard’s about…
This is Ollie’s Place at 4909 S. Pacific Avenue, in the shadow of Fair Park. Till very recently the building, constructed in 1965, was owned by Martin Needom Jr., who lives not far away. It was once a neighborhood convenience store in an area zoned residential — not uncommon in…
Seems like forever ago we were getting our first look at the then-£300-million Stanley Park stadium Tom Hicks was promising to build for his, um, beloved Liverpool FC; ah, the good ol’ days — January 2008, before the cracks gave way to the complete cave-in. Back then, though, Hicks gave…
Till this morning, I’d never seen this 2-year-old Dallas-n-Arlington ad made by Victory Park-based TM Advertising as part of its Texas Tourism package; never had reason. (The Arts District! Souffles! The Dallas Cowboys!) But this morning we get word: The Texas Governor’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism has opted…
Last year, you may recall, Brent Brown’s bcWORKSHOP spent the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service by posting ’round town those cutouts intended to raise awareness about how to end homelessness; but in the end, the city didn’t take kindly to their presence, threatening to remove them for being…
