After receiving the presentation from the city attorney’s office and the Dallas Police Department that we told you about on Monday, the Dallas City Council affirmed its unanimous distaste for sex offenders but raised questions about whether the city should enact tougher restrictions on where registered offenders can live. See…
Back from its July recess, a divided Dallas City Council took up work again on a package of regulations for cabs and ride-sharing services that aims to bring the city up to date with the changing transportation landscape. Wednesday’s hearing was one more step toward a final vote on the…
The highly anticipated Amazon same-day delivery service begins today in Dallas, Baltimore, Indianapolis, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. It’s an extension of the delivery service that was launched in four West Coast cities earlier this year. And with this official announcement, couch potatoes across Dallas no longer have…
We get the impulse. The easiest way to dive into a story about Oak Cliff, especially if you’ve never spent more than a few days there, is to talk about November 1963. Failing that, you can talk about crime, making it seem as if people who cross the Trinity heading…
On Tuesday afternoon, with summer vacation on the wane, a sparse a handful of families could be found at Fair Park’s entrance at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, en route to the aquarium or the Texas Discovery Gardens. Further into the park, there was a man sitting on a bench…
What kind of rich people would be more fun to have living along the Katy Trail — family-oriented rich people who prefer short buildings, or fast-paced rich people in high-rises? The current property on 4719 Cole Ave. is not habitable for any type of rich people. The Saltillo apartments building…
Pop quiz: What was Dallas Morning News personal finance columnist Scott Burns referring to when, in a July 1989 column, he described “a project that may give Dallas, particularly downtown Dallas, a better future” and a symbol of “what we need to be the city we want to be in…
Earlier this morning, a series of photos hit Deadspin ostensibly showing Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones engaged in various stages of sexually suggestive conduct with two unidentified women. In its initial post, Deadspin asked for help finding the photos’ provenance. The apparent story behind the photos, posted a few hours later…
For decades, the passenger railway system in the United States has been in decline. But dreams of a high-speed railway across Texas have persisted, and with a rapidly increasing population and accompanying traffic woes, it’s becoming increasingly necessary. Between a recent announcement of an environmental study and concrete funding plans,…
The Princeton Review on Monday released its annual package of mostly arbitrary lists about colleges that are fun to talk about but don’t really mean anything. The rankings feature categories such as “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians,” “Stone-Cold-Sober Schools” and “Is It Food.” So, when local schools show up on the…
Wednesday, when it returns from its month-long July hiatus, the Dallas City Council will be briefed on Mayor Mike Rawlings’ proposal for increased limits on where Dallas’ registered sex offenders can live. The city’s only current restriction forbids supervised sex offenders — those on probation or parole — from living…
If you think more poor people are living in the DFW area in recent years, you could be spot-on. Heck, after the 2008 recession you could be one of them. According to a recent Brookings Institute study, DFW, land of the suburbs, is quickly turning into the land of the…
Everyone who knew him could agree that Odell Lee was a nice guy. He was known to pull out his own wallet if you told him money was tight. He would offer you one of his cigarettes when the two of you were talking. He made a point to be…
If the point of a plastic bag fee is get people to stop using plastic bags, then it may not make sense to give the bags away to people who can’t afford the fee, though the Texas Department of State Health Services says poor people on federal aid shouldn’t have…
Ron Pinkston, the Dallas Police Association president, says the results caught even him off guard. According to a survey the DPA commissioned, 80 percent of the nearly 1300 members who responded to the online questionnaire rated the Dallas Police Department’s morale as either “low” or the “lowest it’s ever been.”…
In honor of the opening of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit’s new Silver Line, which connects previously unserved areas of Northern Virginia to the capital’s sprawling public transportation network, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight data journalism project has released an interactive chart of per capita public transit use in American metro areas with…
It’s been six months, 11 days, and, oh, about three-and-a-half hours since City Manager A.C. Gonzalez was voted into office on a promise to shake things up at City Hall, and it’s finally happened. The city announced today that Gonzalez has injected new blood into upper management by bringing in…
If you had planned to drive anywhere near Interstate 35W in Fort Worth and Denton County this weekend, we and the Texas Department of Transportation have one request: Don’t. Really. Please, just don’t. You may have seen some of the warning signs flashing from Waco to Denton County, telling drivers…
Freight trains that everyone says are way too old to still be working keep carrying more and more gallons of volatile crude oil through busy cities. What could possibly go wrong? Explosions. And do Unfair Park readers live in the path of these potential explosion sites? Probably. Dallas, like most…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown never gave a terribly convincing defense of an ordinance barring protesters from demonstrating near highways. He said it was intended to protect the safety of motorists who might be distracted by a sign-waving demonstrator, but as council member Philip Kingston highlighted as the City Council…
Over the course of four hours, the Katy Trail Ice House Outpost in Plano served Benjamin Crosby and Joe Grams the equivalent of 43 alcoholic drinks, a lawsuit filed in Dallas district court on Thursday claims. Robert and Cheryl Crosby, Benjamin Crosby’s parents, say that the ice house did this…
Earlier this month, as reported by Unfair Park and practically every other outlet in town, the Texas Education Agency began the process of revoking Prime Prep’s charter. The reasons for the potential revocation are convoluted, the upshot isn’t. Should its charter be revoked, the school would have to stop enrolling…
