Just two days after suffering the worst defeat of his short political career, Mayor Tom Leppert offered something different from his typical canned State of the City address that we’ve grown accustomed to hearing around this time of year. “I am very optimistic about the state of our city, but…
Bobbie Wygant Interviews Robert Duvall for Tender Mercies from Atombomb.tv on Vimeo.I could read to you from this stack of press releases for big-deal Thursday happenings (“Boone Pickens, Mayor Leppert, Chief Brown unveil New Jubilee Park Buildings” and “Mayor Leppert, Dr. Hinojosa to launch first-of-its-kind nutrition education program tomorrow at…
McCarthy Building Company has built plenty of projects around town in recent years — everything from the Wyly Theatre to the W Hotel to the Dallas County Detention Center South Tower to the under-construction Dallas City Performance Hall. To that estimable list add another landmark project: the Woodall Rodgers Deck…
Portland-based urban planner John Fregonese’s name should ring a bell — he’s the guy behind the Forward Dallas comprehensive plan, now in effect four years last June. Saw his name again today in the USA Today: Waco’s done hired him too to create a plan “that includes mixed retail and…
Photo by Andrea GrimesA finished garden planter is born in Deep Ellum last Saturday.More than 30 folks came out to the Deep Ellum Community Day on Saturday, many of whom Deep Ellum Community Association president Randee Smith didn’t know from Adam (Hats). Which, for Smith, is saying something: She spends…
Saturday evening marked a big finish to Ella Garrett’s long, tough summer, with a party full of neighbors and friends outside her new house — the sixth home built by bcWorkshop’s Congo Street Initiative along Jubilee Park’s historic, improbably narrow stretch of road. June was the hardest for Garrett, who…
So, back on Wednesday, when it was, ya know, raining, more than a few Friends of Unfair Park wondered: Why, whenever it rains, does the city’s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge construction-cam revert to a dry, sunny day — in this instance, August 29? I asked Frank Librio at Dallas City…
Barry KoodaAs I was otherwise occupied yesterday, my wife and the 7-year-old who lives in our house made it over to Oak Cliff for the Blues, Bandits and Barbeque wingding, from which our own Kevin Todora returned with this slide show. But the weekend’s event also marked the return of…
Photos by Jeffrey LilesMount Pisgah Baptist built its first church at the corner of what’s now Preston and Spring Valley in the late 1800s; the structure that sits there now is a rebuild that dates back to 1945. But in 1981 the church bought property on Webb Chapel near Forest,…
The Dallas Business Journal this morning brings news of a $1-billion, 1-million-square-foot movie and teevee production facility being planned in Frisco, near the Dallas North Tollway and Warren Parkway. And that’s not all: According to Premier Studios’ elaborate website, filled with conceptual renderings and site plans and build-out phases and…
Ms. Greer called me this morning to tell me she made it through the night. She’s a courtly, pretty lady, 88 years old, whose house is at the very end of Rockefeller Boulevard by Moore Park, south of Cadillac Heights, about four miles down river from downtown. She’s the last…
Justin TerveenI woke up this morning to find this present in the Unfair Park in-box courtesy — who else? — our old pal Justin Terveen. It speaks, or sings, for itself — and needs to be seen much larger than I’m capable of displaying it here. (So too does this…
I’ve left a few messages today for Taylor Burns, the officer at Park Cities Bank charged with tending to 807 Elm Street. As I noted Monday, PCB, which got the property in foreclosure, would like to raze the 85-year-old building sitting in a parking lot across from El Centro, though…
UCR Urban’s Jack Gosnell — who helped convince Forest City to redo the Merc and the Continental — is among those who’ve been charged with recruiting retail to downtown. Which, presumably, is why Aaron Gentry, our pal Justin Terveen and the You+Dallas crew accompanied Gosnell on a tour of downtown,…
On Saturday we took the 7-year-old who lives in our house to the Trinity River Audubon Center, where he quickly became obsessed with the Pete Delkus-narrated flood-maker showing how high’s too high. So. This morning, out of nowhere, he asked: “Is the Trinity going to flood?” I told him to…
Patrick MichelsHow, ahem, “Walnut Park” looked in the summer of ’09. Now, there’s a little more grass … and graffiti.Twice last summer — in June, then again ’round this time of the year — we checked in on our favorite 42 acres at the intersection of Walnut Hill Lane and…
Bobbie Wygant Interviews Harrison Ford for Star Wars 1977 from Atombomb.tv on Vimeo.First it appeared on The New York Times’s Web site this morning, courtesy fellow nostalgist Dave Itzkoff (who actually stumbled across it on The Daily Wh.at); then, MTV’s. This six-minute clip of Channel 5’s Bobbie Wygant interviewing Harrison…
The Oak Cliff spirit of urban development and community outreach, which we are physically incapable of not writing about here in the paper and online, continues — this time, with an urban planning storefront that’s the result of a partnership between the Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce and the University…
The original announcement came back in May: The Texas Theatre, threatened by the wrecking ball as recently as the mid-’90s, was on the road to recovery as a revival house — a much-needed, much-welcomed addition to the local cinemascape. At present, the Texas is closed for much-needed, much-welcomed renovations with…
It’s been almost six months now since Jubilee Park residents began protesting the Dallas Independent School District’s plans to seize their businesses and homes by any means necessary to make way for a new O.M. Roberts Elementary. In that time there have been countless protests and meetings, and only recently…
It’s quite the reunion this morning: Ex-Dallas News-er Emily Ramshaw, now at the Texas Tribune, sits down with ex-Dallas Observer-er and former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, now director of projects for Summit Power, which is in the clean-coal (big) business. Miller, who hasn’t done many sitdowns since leaving office, opens…
This morning, First Presbyterian Church of Dallas’s senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Joseph J. Clifford, left a comment in Monday’s item concerning the church’s pending purchase of 508 Park Avenue, the beleaguered downtown site in which Robert Johnson, Bob Wills and, legend has it, Charlie Parker once recorded. Clifford’s office…
