Last night at La Grange, City of Aters had good beer, better tacos, and an hour of fantastic television on an enormous projector screen. It was the first City of Ate Top Chef Texas viewing party, and watching the show with a beer in hand, a selection of $2 tacos,…
Inside Sherwani Bakery (2040 West Spring Creek Parkway) in Plano, Salah Hassan, the Iraqi baker and proprietor, greets me by extending his forearm for a handshake. Caked dough and flour generously coat his hands, but his hospitality is as deeply ingrained as the dark burn scars along his arm. He…
Dallas Habitat for Humanity, which already claims to be the biggest single-family home builder in the city, will knock down and build more than 500 more homes in a $100 million blitz on the city’s blighted neighborhoods. The project, called Dream Dallas, was formally announced today at City Hall and…
At last night’s called meeting of the Dallas Independent School District’s board of trustees, representatives from PROACT Search, the matchmaking firm hired to help select a superintendent for the district, chatted casually with board members about the qualities they desire in a candidate. “I think there is a perfect superintendent…
At last night’s Gas Drilling Task Force public hearing at Dallas City, citizens’ outcries ranged from polite thank-yous to pleas for tighter restrictions all the way to full-on verbal assaults that made fracking sound like the onset of The Apocalypse. Several of the people who spoke at the task force’s…
Let’s talk (some more) about red light cameras, the subject of a report released today by the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG), a watchdog organization that researches various subjects of public importance. The report, Caution: Red Light Cameras Ahead, examines private companies’ agreements with municipalities (about 700 throughout the…
As chair of the city’s gas drilling task force, Lois Finkelman has a pretty tough job, directing task force meetings, guiding discussions, fielding calls and emails from concerned citizens. (Did we mentioned she doesn’t get paid? Strictly voluntary.). And with a public hearing coming up tomorrow, the task force’s deliberation…
Last night was a bit of a tease. Just after 5:30 p.m., Browder Plaza (outside the Dallas Power and Light Flats on Commerce Street) was packed with pedestrians mingling, snacking on street vendor food and enjoying drinks purchased at a kiosk on the square. City planners transformed the plaza into…
Thursday evening, Dallas Independent School District trustees approved resignation incentives for the 209 “unassigned” employees who are under contract but lack permanent positions after personnel cuts and rearrangements this summer. Teachers, principals, librarians and counselors in the pool now have the option of filing their resignation by November 1 and…
As a bulldozer chipped away at the sides of a hideously blighted cinder-block building in South Dallas this morning — forward, reverse, forward, reverse — a crowd of community members and Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity employees and supporters stared ahead with childlike gazes. And then, finally, the ‘dozer delivered…
Imagine spending five years in a Nebraska prison for having brutally murdered a teenage honor student but knowing that the real killer is at large. Or rolling over in the middle of the night to put your arm around your spouse, only to fall out of bed because you’re alone…
Today was supposed to mark the grand opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge — today, October 14, 2011. Alas, wind, rain, ice and other long-ago weather issues pushed back the date till March 2, when, as we noted but two days ago, those with $200 in hand will be…
A hearing this morning at the Earle Cabell could have been a First Amendment showdown over Occupy Dallas’s right to remain in Pioneer Park in downtown. Instead, it became a simple formality after protesters came to a late-night agreement to move to a plot of city-owned land at Akard and…
For Dallas-based EPA investigator Keith Phillips, the visits to a Louisiana oil refinery started in the late ’90s, and came, it seems, with dual purposes: business and pleasure. It started as an investigation into the refinery’s waste storage methods and refinery manager Hubert Vidrine, who was eventually prosecuted. But court…
XTO and Trinity East, two of the companies that have paid the city big money and signed leases to drill for gas within the city limits, have agreed to wait 30 months while the city rewrites its gas drilling ordinance. But one company has no such deal with the city:…
If you’ve received one (or several) of the 125,000 citations issued to those who’ve run red lights under the watchful eye of those cameras perched over 66 intersections, you’ve faced two choices: Pay the $75 fine and avoid further hassle, or keep your money and take comfort in the fact…
[Editor’s note: This post is best when read with the music from the haunted house’s website playing in the background.] A nimble devil beat-boxes from behind a fiery face at the Ross Avenue entrance gates while another cloaked in red busts hinge-jointed moves that would make Michael Jackson proud and…
Friday evening, two groups of protesters, Occupy Dallas and Occupy the Federal Reserve, lined opposite side of N. Pearl Street at Woodall Rodgers in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “We got sold out, Feds got bailed out!” Occupy Dallas protesters shouted in unison on the west side…
Those ideas, the ones you can’t shake and would love to invent, the ones you imagine would make a cool million in an instant — they’re the ones Buddy DiFonzo and Mike Solow are looking for. Friends from their software sales jobs, they started a company called Idea Harvest, which…
The Dallas gas drilling task force sees many of the same faces at each meeting: a small and dedicated group of Dallas residents who show up every Tuesday afternoon and, as it turns out, have formed an unofficial task force with the same goal as the city’s official entity –…
The voter ID law passed by Texas lawmakers in May continues its circuit among activists, lawmakers, academics and social commentators as a discriminatory, unjustified and absolutely necessary measure, depending on who’s yelling. Words like “voter fraud” on the right and “disenfranchisement” on the left stir up serious emotion with people…
Victor Recindos has aged 26 years by the calendar’s count since first becoming a mechanic at Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processing plant just south of downtown, but he says the decades of continuous labor have worn away at his body and left him run down. He feels ill-prepared to reenter the…
