Dallas has terrible streets. Ask any driver who hasn’t been rendered prematurely senile by the constant jostling over disintegrating pavement or any cyclist who’s survived a run-in with a man-eating pothole. Hell, ask City Hall, which estimates that it will take three-quarters of a billion dollars to get the city’s…
Say what you will about boring stuff like feasibility — as surrealist art the latest renderings of potential park-like amenities between the Trinity River levees are pretty damn amazing. Tragically, the solar-powered water taxis we’ve all grown to love from earlier sales pitches for the Trinity project are gone, but…
The problem, according to City Council member Philip Kingston, is that red light cameras seek to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. “[Red light cameras] are based on two fallacies,” Kingston says. “The first is that there are a bunch of people out there who intentionally run red lights. Those…
You heard it here first: Former Dallas City Council member Linda Koop next month will waltz to victory in her Texas House race. We know this not because Koop is running as a Republican in a North Dallas district that, aside from an anomalous Democratic victory in the pre-Tea Party…
If you hear the word “sanctuary” and think of the scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which Esmeralda pleads with the cathedral priest for shelter (or, be honest, you think of Logan’s Run), you might be surprised to learn that actual sanctuaries are a growing movement in many…
Four-and-a-half years ago, Mayor Tom Leppert stood overlooking the old Trinity River channel, now a forlorn muddy course that snakes through the Design District, and unveiled Turtle Creek Plaza, a handsome semi-circle of concrete adorned with a red water fountain that very much resembles a fire hydrant and a blue…
Mike Rawlings has hired Laurey Peat + Associates, a Dallas-based public relations firm to handle media relations for the mayor’s office. The firm replaces Sam Merten, the mayor’s previous manager of public affairs and communications, who left the office on September 19 to make a run for the District 9…
A school bus parked in front of the Ivy Apartments yesterday afternoon and let out dozens of kids as reporters filmed B-roll and took photographs across the street. The news stations had already confirmed that this apartment complex in Vickery Meadows was where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed in Dallas before…
Vinny Minchillo had seen enough. “Everyone talks about civil discourse, but when we talk to each other, especially on social media, there’s no civil discourse,” he says. “It’s really, really funny. It’s become OK to talk about Republicans in the most horrible terms possible. In the ’80s and ’90s on…
Update: The Dallas Morning News’ Robert Wilonsky reports that Caraway has pulled the Mandela renaming plan and is now calling for Lancaster to be renamed for legendary Booker T. Washington and Roosevelt High School football coach Raymond Hollie. Earlier in the week Dallas City Council member Dwaine Caraway told The…
The Dallas Morning News’ Rudy Bush got the scoop: a copy of memo from City Attorney Warren Ernst that says the City Council could walk away from building the Trinity River toll road despite the city’s contract with the North Texas Tollway Authority to build the thing. “There is no…
For the last few days, you may have been busy warding off a flurry eager people with clipboards. This weekend marked Dallas County voter registration days, and volunteers from both sides of the aisle were hustling to try to get your vote in November. They had good reason to be…
It’s really easy to recycle in Dallas if you live in a house. Just dump that unsorted mass of old newspapers, empty soda cans and milk cartons into a cavernous blue bin, drag it to the curb and let one the city’s lumbering dump trucks haul it away. For those…
Tim Headington, the oil billionaire behind the Joule Hotel, has a weird relationship with local preservationists. On the one hand, Preservation Dallas honored him with an achievement award last May for his work on the hotel, which sits in a restored 1927 building. On the other hand, Preservation Dallas Executive…
After being inundated with images of poverty stricken unaccompanied Central American children this summer, you might be surprised to learn that the stereotype of the poor working class immigrant is rapidly changing in Texas. The growing demographic, it turns out, are educated and highly skilled — and the Texas economy…
After last week’s trading of contemptuous memos, Unfair Park was pretty excited about a potential confrontation between Vonciel Jones Hill and Scott Griggs at Monday’s meeting of the city’s Transportation and Trinity River Committee. As far as city hall showdowns go, this one was likely to be pretty good, pitting…
One of Downtown Dallas’ oldest buildings, a 129-year-old Romanesque Revival structure at 1611 Main St., was razed on Sunday to make way for an expansion of The Joule hotel, the latest in a line of historic Dallas structures sacrificed on the altar of progress. A few blocks to the southeast,…
If the city won’t give money to Dallas libraries, maybe the community will. Thursday was North Texas Giving Day, which means Friends of the Dallas Public Libraries, along with other north Texas do-gooder groups, were busy rattling their tin cans for spare change to raise money that, in the library’s…
Rather than, you know, enunciating her concerns at the city council briefing both she and Scott Griggs attended on Wednesday, Vonciel Jones Hill fired off a memo Wednesday morning chastising her fellow council member for his “inaccurate, incomplete and insulting” writing. The rest of Hill’s memo is less alliterative, but…
A.C. Gonzalez took the time at the end of Wednesday’s City Council briefing to at least wink in the direction transparency. He didn’t jump into the open government pool by any means, but he took about 15 minutes at the end of the meeting to spew jargon in the general…
In a memo prepared in advance of Dallas City manager A.C. Gonzalez’ first of what he promises to be periodic progress report to the City Council, council member Scott Griggs outlined multiple issues with the city’s Trinity office and transportation department. Among them is the stagnation of the Oak Cliff…
Last night in Houston two masked men, armed with a revolver and a shotgun, stormed a Denny’s and raided the cash register. The same scene has played out on security footage at dozens of Houston-area IHOPs and Denny’s, albeit occasionally with bloodshed. Houston police officer James Taylor, testifying before a…
