As we stroll from the ruins of the Baker Hotel lobby into what’s left of the dining room, Mark Rawlings points his flashlight through a hole in the paster ceiling, lighting an ornate stretch of the original moulding hidden underneath. Back in the ’50s, he tells me, an attempt to…
Last week around this time, the Wall Street Journal was telling us about three very private oil and gas companies — two of them based in Dallas — with designs on getting bigger in the gas drilling world. So, to help take their operations up a notch, both Talon Oil…
Damn it. I’d been meaning to mention this all day, and now the day done got away from me. But there’s still time — close to two hours till the Texas Theatre screens Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s easily…
They came in striped ties and checkered ties, sport coats and shirtsleeves and the beard stubble of Washington operators on the road. The four white-collar grunts from the Environmental Protection Agency were greeted in Arlington last night by townsfolk who drove in from around the Barnett Shale to woo them…
These are detail shots of the A26A before restoration from Franklin Poole on Vimeo.Thanks to an early-morning e-mail from Friend of Unfair Park PeterK, I spent the better part of the last hour getting a history lesson on the the Douglas A-26 Invader, which first took flight to fight in…
What you see above is the new bike rack in front of Dude, Sweet Chocolate in the Bishop Arts District — which I mention because, as Bike Friendly Oak Cliff points out this morning, it’s made from 107-year-old streetcar rail. So it’s, ya know, art. Writes Jason Roberts in the…
From time to time, downtown-dwelling Friends of Unfair Park will ask: What’s up with the Continental Building? Not much, of late: Forest City, also behind the Merc overhaul, had been hoping to begin work in ’09, but last May Jim Truitt, Forest City’s vice president of residential development, told us…
I was looking for something entirely unrelated on LoopNet this afternoon when I came across this: The family trying to sell the former St. John’s United Methodist Church on East Side Avenue has come off its asking price of $2.4 million, mentioned in The News back in February. It’s now…
At this very moment Preservation Dallas executive director Katherine Seale is at the Women’s Museum in Fair Park formally presenting its annual list of properties, neighborhoods and “historic resources” that are among the “most endangered” in the city. Even the most casual Friend of Unfair Park will recognize, perhaps, all…
On Christmas Eve we bid farewell to the Pate Museum of Transportation just outside of Fort Worth, the first museum I can recall my classic-car-rebuilding, auto-parts-selling father taking me to when I was a boy. A good Friend of Unfair Park — and a very good friend of the Pate…
For those who missed it: Yesterday, in the comments of the Downtown Dallas 360 update, Brother Bill Holston wondered if there was a “walking tour” brochure for those interested in touring downtown architecture. A little later in the day, Business Council for the Arts’s CEO Katherine Wagner chimed in with…
… which is, you gotta move it from where it currently sits at 3909 University Boulevard. That’s right smack next to the parking lot at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, which has big plans to make its parking lot, well, much bigger — plans that call for paving over not just…
As we discovered last month, the city of Dallas can’t even take care of the downtown cemetery in which several former mayors are buried (including John Crockett, who served during the Civil War). So how’s it going to tend to an abandoned graveyard buried beneath weeds in a field south…
Yesterday, we had planned to offer a sort of follow-up on the still-occupied house demolished on city’s orders at Greenville Avenue and Vickery Boulevard in late January. Of course, Wednesday had much bigger news in store for that stretch of Lower Greenville — and it will continue to do so for…
Only Tuesday we wondered how much longer the Dallas Independent School District — and, for that matter, the city and its code enforcement officers — would allow the boarded-up 107-year-old Davy Crockett School in East Dallas to fall to pieces. The district no longer has offices there; it hasn’t been…
Way back in ’97, and again last June, we told you the story of Sue Pope — a Midlothian rancher who became legendary for taking on pollution-spewing TXI — and the genesis of the fund named in her honor, which doles out green to groups cleaning up the air in…
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…
Much to the chagrin of the half dozen city attorneys attending this morning’s Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee meeting, members voted 5-1 to postpone a decision on a new ordinance regarding the demolition of structures in historic districts. The motion to postpone, made by vice-chair Ann Bagley, also urged Preservation Dallas…
This morning’s Wall Street Journal investigates the cause of the 18 earthquakes that have rattled the Dallas-Fort Worth area since 2008 — from just east of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport down to Cleburne most recently — and concludes, well, ya know, not really sure. Because on the one hand, you’ve…
U.S. Geological Survey This map of The Great North Texas Quake of ’08 is referred to as “intensity.” Which is, like, intense. In the comments to the morning’s first cup, former Dallas Morning News-er Bill Marvel suggests the following may be responsible for the morning’s wake-and-shake in Irving and the…
In case you missed yesterday’s All Things Considered, the National Public Radio show ran a lengthy segment about the Barnett Shale and, more specifically, Chesapeake Energy’s efforts to sell urban gas drilling to the folks getting drilled. And, yes, among the subjects discussed is ShaleTV, which hired Tracy Rowlett away…
