It would seem 508 Park Avenue’s been heavy on my mind of late, even more than usual, what with Robert Johnson’s just-passed 100th birthday and First Presby’s not-just-yet-sealed-deal purchase and Friday’s flashback to the sounds of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys cut at that very same spot two years…
A week ago today, as you may recall, the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute announced they’d be joining the growing ranks of universities with major studies of hydraulic fracturing, with a $300,000, nine-month project of their own. Today, thanks to the Texas Tribune and KUT News, you can…
In these final days of the 82nd Texas Legislature, lawmakers in Austin are throwing support behind Eastlake Rep. Jim Keffer’s bill that’d require drillers to report the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing at each of their drill sites. The bill got an overwhelming nod from the House yesterday (and just…
There’s really no bad time to check back in on construction at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science — but especially on a day like today, when some serious money has just changed hands. In a ceremony high atop the next-door Park Seventeen building, the museum announced Texas Instruments…
Anti-gas drilling activist Raymond Crawford sends word this morning: Moments ago the Dallas County Commissioners Court voted to adopt a resolution demanding the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency do something about cleaning up Dallas’s air. Long story short: The county wants state and federal…
Dallas anti-gas drilling activist Raymond Crawford just copied us on a letter he’s sending to state Sen. Royce West today, asking him to “personally get involved [and] do whatever it takes to help stop HB3105,” which is Rep. Jim Keffer’s proposed legislation that would essentially neuter cities’ ability to regulate…
At a campaign forum in far western Oak Cliff’s Mountain Creek neighborhood last night, David Kunkle and Mike Rawlings each said that if elected mayor, they’d push for a moratorium on gas drilling.”As I try to better understand the impact of the gas drilling issue, I believe that I’m becoming…
Not sure if there’s more fun to be had this election season than at the North Texas GLBT Chamber’s mayoral forum tonight, moderated by both Robert and Schutze — but tomorrow night in far western Oak Cliff sure might come close. That’s where all four candidates for mayor, plus District…
Natural gas activist and blogger Sharon Wilson was among the environmentalists out at Earth Day last weekend — not far from the EPA’s six-foot cardboard Al Armendariz — and she was passing out copies of a new report she’d helped produce on gas drilling in the Barnett Shale. Produced by…
The two-day Earth Day Dallas celebration kicked off in the Arts District at 10 this morning, and right from the start it was absolutely packed — thanks to the Trammell S. Crow-sponsored event planners, who footed the bill to bring in 200 busloads of kids from all over the Dallas…
Rick Perry has already asked the Obama Administration for help in combating the wildfires that continue to devour much of the state. Now, he turns to an even higher power: Moments ago the governor’s office sent word that Perry has proclaimed Friday through Sunday as Days of Prayer for Rain…
Frackers, oil companies, plastics makers, wastewater managers — more or less anyone who spews a little shit into our midst in order to keep things running around here has dumped some money into the lap of Rep. Warren Chisum, the Republican from Pampa heretofore known for his fight against gay…
The Pickens Plan — Dallas oilman T. Boone Pickens’s plan to equip every American with his very own riding natural-gas fracker — is enjoying a wave of consensus not seen since The Simple Life got canceled. Pickens’s latest pitch for an OPEC-free America would give large tax breaks to manufacturers…
Today marks the middle of SMU’s Engineering & Humanity Week, where, as Robert already told you, students are field-testing some the latest in emergency shelter technology, cooking their meals outside and carrying their own water in an operation called the Living Village. I dropped by this morning, where a few…
Speaking of big doings on the SMU campus …Next week brings the first-ever Engineering & Humanity Week to the Hilltop, courtesy the Hunter & Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity. And among its myriad highlights is the construction of the so-called Living Village, where students will “live, cook their…
If you need Governor Rick Perry or Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief this afternoon, they’ll be at the intersection of Belt Line Road and Montfort Drive at around 2:30 — at that Walgreens, to be specific. (Update: I’ve been informed that Perry and Moncrief will actually be at the Arlington…
Yesterday, in the comments accompanying the item about the old central library on Commerce, George Gimarc asked this of the sculpture Dallasites once knew as Youth in the Hands of God: “Anyone recall the gigantic statue on the face of the building of the two open hands holding up a…
Former New York State First Deputy Comptroller-turned-investment banker Tom Sanzillo released a report this morning, via the Sierra Club, demanding that Dallas-based Energy Future Holding (and its Luminant subsidiary) shutter three of its coal-fired power plants: Big Brown (in Fairfield), Monticello (in Mount Pleasant) and Martin Lake. In a press…
Alan Smith says he can’t get any clean water to drink because his tap’s poisoned — and that’s the same old tap water everyone else in Dallas is drinking. Every drop, of course, is treated with fluoride to reduce cavities — but each time Smith pours a cup of water,…
Six months ago came word: Park Cities Bank, which had taken possession of circa-1925 807 Elm Street in the West End, wanted to raze the building, which sits in a parking lot across the street from El Centro and which one Friend of Unfair Park had pursued, briefly, as a…
This week the Paper Version of Unfair Park’s cover is a profile of Al Armendariz, who took a leave from his gig as a Southern Methodist University engineering professor to run the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Dallas, stepping right into a simmering fight between the agency and Rick…
The McCord Theatre Museum on the SMU campus closed some 20 years back; says here that since then, the thousands of odds and sods collected by its curator, Edyth Renshaw, have been in cold storage. Five years ago, though, theater student Emily Grubbs decided to sift through the stuff –…
