For several weeks we’ve known how 3700 Ross intends to deal with a budget shortfall in the coming school year — by closing schools (guesstimated to save $11.5 million) and jumping kindergarten to fourth-grade teacher-student ratios from 22:1 to 24:1 per classroom (which could result in the loss of 300…
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know squat about Dallas. Or rather, I don’t know squat about Dallas, the long-running, oil-drenched, big-haired, family-feuding epic that may still color how a lot of outsiders think about our city. When I found out some eight months ago that I’d landed this…
At 11 a.m. Friday morning, Lorene Turner got the call: Her granddaughter, Jakadrien Turner, who had run away from her Oak Cliff home and her life as a student at Kimball High School, was on a flight home from Colombia. Eleven hours later, the strong but exhausted grandmother finally walked…
Should have seen this coming, what with the new-look Reunion and the downtown Omni and the Chase Tower and all the other buildings illuminating the future Woodall Rodgers Deck Park. But one year after they turned on Margaret Hunt Hill in advance of the Super Bowl, City Hall and the…
Earlier today I spent as much time as I could, which wasn’t anywhere near close to enough, listening to a song Wilco posted to YouTube late yesterday: the band performing The Band’s “The Weight” backstage at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, joined by show-opener Nick Lowe and Mavis Staples,…
In October of 2009, James Capra, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Dallas Division, invited media to a press conference so he could show off the massive haul from a long-in-the-works bust involving the Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia: 220 pounds of methamphetamine, 4.5 kilos of cocaine,…
The days of lease-bearing landmen making it rain on the Barnett Shale are over. The industry became so proficient at fracturing the rock thousands of feet beneath the surface and extracting the gas trapped within that they glutted the market. Gas prices took a swan dive and have stagnated ever…
Barring an earth-shattering memo from Mary Suhm arriving in the in-box this evening, expect your Saturday-morning Unfair Park item to be filled with … wait for it, wait for it … conceptual renderings. But this is The Good Stuff, the real deal: the latest looks at the Continental Bridge, which…
Several Friends of Unfair Park have inquired: Whatever happened to Great City Attractions’ plans for that enormo Ferris wheel in downtown? Because last we heard, in a Halloween email from Nigel Ward, Great City Attractions’s head of global site development, was that while the original site — next to the…
Mention the words “Craig James,” and chances are at some point your comments section will fill up with something like, oh, I dunno, something like this: “I’ve heard CRAIG JAMES HAS NEVER DENIED THAT HE KILLED 5 HOOKERS WHILE HE WAS AT SMU.” Which the SMU Mustang never seemed to…
Thursday afternoon I met historian Alan Govenar at 508 Park Avenue, future site of the Museum of Street Culture. He was not alone: Joining him were developer Buddy Jordan, chair of the 508 Park Committee and a man who’s been pursuing the building for close to 20 years; Pat Bywaters,…
In October we noted a report from Pittsburgh-based Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights that said the Dallas Cowboys are having team-branded clothing made in “gross sweatshop conditions at the Style Avenue factory in El Salvador” — which Cowboys Merchandise Ltd. chief operating officer Bill Priakos denied in a…
Yesterday we got word that John McKeon, the president and general manager of The Dallas Morning News since October 2007, was leaving, which publisher Jim Moroney confirmed via email. At which point a press release went out, leading with news of fourth-quarter 2011 earnings (“decrease of four to five percent…
A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this report from the U.S. Geological Survey: My near-neck of Northwest Dallas had itself a teensy-tiny earthquake in the wee small hours of the morning — at 12:11:49, to be precise. As in: “Magnitude 2.0.” Or, as Matt Peterson calls it, a “microquake.” Which,…
Many have asked since yesterday if there will be a memorial of some kind for Gale Hess. Today I was told: No, not yet. There will be a small service for family and close friends, and there may be something else down the road. But, I was told, it will…
One night late last year, Jason Melbourne walked into a CVS pharmacy in Mesquite, hoping against hope to walk out with an emergency contraceptive, or “the morning-after pill.” It wasn’t the morning after. He and his wife had their “accident” a few days before, and the 72-hour window in which…
Saw this when I got home last night — an invite to attend a Grand Prairie Independent School District open house January 21 at the South Grand Prairie High School Coliseum. The postcard thinks that maybe my Dallas ISD-attending child would want to attend, say, the Garner Fine Arts Academy…
A few days back the great Alan Melson, KERA’s director of interactive, directed his Facebook friends to a great weather-geek (said with all due respect) site where folks are currently having a great debate about whether or not signs point to an icy deep freeze headed toward North Texas toward…
When I directed your attention to those pretty pictures filling City Hall’s 2012 calendar yesterday, I forgot to note: Those are the latest top-prize-getters in the third annual Trinity River Corridor Project Photo Contest. Tops, again, was the great Sean Fitzgerald, winner of the second annual contest. That’s his work…
In June 2010 we told you the remarkable tale of a rather unremarkable-looking building that stands at 4526 Leland Avenue, near the intersection of Hatcher Street and S. Central Expressway in South Dallas. It came to our attention because its owner, Vanessa Baker, was seeking landmark status for the property…
A Friend of Unfair Park passes along The Wall Street Journal’s latest look-see at how well the big carriers handle passengers and their luggage, and per the annual Middle Seat survey the two locally based airlines don’t do so well when it comes to getting your bags to your destination…
A couple of months back we noted that as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s $115-million EV Project, which will spend a few years analyzing if and how much folks actually charge their rides, San Francisco-based ECOtality will be plugging in electric vehicle charging stations at a handful of…
