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A Daily Conversation About Dallas

Yes, the Mavs can be headdeskingly frustrating to watch at times, and if you have young children, you should just permanently outfit them with earmuffs until the team’s post season play is over. These are all facts we can agree on.

After the fetal-position inducing Game 4 against Portland, the Dallas Morning News‘ Jean-Jacques Taylor apparently wrote a column that, according to former DMN writer Ed Bark, eviscerated the team. Taylor apparently said the team was “gutless.” I say apparently, because the Taylor’s musings are so valuable the paper has put them behind their paywall, meaning anyone who isn’t paying to read the paper or the website is now bereft of Jean-Jacques Taylor columns.

I will pause in case you’re sad.

Uncategorized

The Parks, Mixing and Mashing

Patrick Kennedy
By Patrick Kennedy |

From the afternoon session, I must say this was my first time seeing James Burnett speak. I must apologize for jumping the gun lumping him in with most of the landscape urbanists who speak in such jargon-y nonsense and use words like “urbanism” to describe some faux nature. Burnett’s design of the Woodall Rogers Park is great. Absolutely great.

Not sure any of the watercolors available online really do it justice. It’s organized. It’s formal. It’s designed for people. It’s wonderfully clever structurally, figuring out how to get trees on it without making them look like odd, potted lollipops. It adds enough structure to add verticality and (hopefully) help to block the serpentine like rising and falling of the freeway on both sides.

It’s unfortunate though. I find it diametrically opposite to the two “gardens” also known as parks on Main Street. As I’ve pointed out in the convergence studies of downtown, those two parks are in the absolute perfect location. Perfect to build upon and bookend the success of Main Street. Perfect to revitalize the areas adjacent as they are the precise point where downtown begins to fall apart. However, the designs leave a lot to be desired. Particularly Belo Gardens. Yet another public open space downtown designed for “quiet contemplation.”
On. Main. Street… Downtown. Where 100,000 people are everyday (give/take). This killed Thanksgiving Square and everything immediately around it.
As for Main Street Garden, I’ve made my points about it. Again, perfect location. Great buildings along it. Downtown badly needed some breathing room. A multi-purpose lawn, which bizarrely rises to fall, fighting natural topography. My bigger point is with the over-programming. Which, Burnett himself went out of his way to point out about his design. That he didn’t want it cluttered with programming and wish lists that often accompany places/parks trying to be all things to all people. I don’t know how coincidental that is given some of the consultants for Woodall Rogers Deck Park reached out to me some time ago to get my opinion of it after I squealed like a baby on an airplane about MSG.
So on Main Street, we’ve got great sites, perfect for economic development and to work as a centerpiece of neighborhoods in downtown, yet less than desirable designs.
At Woodall Rogers Deck Park, we have a tremendous design, but less than ideal location. I know, I know. Globally, it is supposed to seam together uptown and downtown, provide a new heart of the city as downtown has migrated north, and all of that. However, all the land is immediately spoken for (with the notable exception of the drive-thru (!) bank).. What is to leverage?
Developers I know have poked around on that site, but I’m guessing the bank (or whoever owns it) wants an absurd amount. Way too much given the spaghetti nonsense and non-neighborhood of LoMac to the north. There is no street life because of the suburban road dimensions. How are the new towers in this area supposed to hold value in urban sites without any urbanism? You tell me. I’m glad I didn’t buy there. If I was to advise the homeowners associations, I’d suggest pooling money to get redesigns of all the streets in LoMac to protect their investments. But that’s just me.
But back to the point, and you know where I’m going with this. It seems to make so much more sense to remove freeways and use the revenue generation from land sales to pay for amenities like parks to stitch areas back together than band-aids, like this one. It will be interesting to watch it going forward because it is impossible not to compare it to the big dig, which besides the absurd $20 billion price tag is both a design and functional disappointment (again, especially at the price). It made an area less bad. Not great. We need great great.

The general manager of Toyota’s Lexus division predicts gas prices will keep rising and will stay at higher levels for the foreseeable future. “I don’t seem them coming back down again,” Mark Templin said in Dallas Friday. “I see them at $4 a gallon in the short-term. We’re already paying $5 in California. Long-term, I think they’ll go even higher.”

The top Lexus boss was in North Texas for something called “An Evening with Lexus,” one in a series of exclusive, focus-group-style dinners he’s hosting in homes around the country. Part of the carmaker’s “epicurean marketing” strategy, the dinners are attended by Lexus owners and their friends and are catered by celebrity chefs. The local one will be tonight at a house in Rowlett, where Casey Thompson will serve up salmon, veal tongue and buffalo to Templin and 13 others.

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Education

DISD Purges 450 From Central Staff

Dan Koller
By Dan Koller |

That news just arrived in my inbox. If you read the full release, which comes after the jump, you’ll see that the 450 positions mentioned in the headline bring the grand total of central administrators laid off since 2007 to 779. That prompts two questions from this DISD product: 1. How many central administrators does it take to run a massive school district? 2. How many people are left in that building on Ross Avenue?

20110429-011120.jpgRemember Byron Harris? I do. So I got a giggle when, while having lunch at the Press Box, I saw him schlepping a camera tripod down Ervay Street. “Hey, Byron!” I said as I approached him to take this picture. “Remember when you screwed me on TV?”

“No,” he said, grinning awkwardly.

“I’m Tim Rogers,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Oh, you’re that guy from Dallas Magazine.”

Yes, I am, Byron.

Dallas Issues

Identity Crisis

Patrick Kennedy
By Patrick Kennedy |

The burning rot beneath our roads…

…and a bit of brief rambling down allegorical culs-de-sac.


You hear this often, that Dallas has an identity crisis. It’s a precept that I not only buy, but have probably helped to sell to some extent. The physical implication is that of an urban frankenstein, a monster loosely pieced together, but nothing quite like an actual human. I guess that is what happens when you try to engineer or fabricate life, particularly without the right DNA. We’re not exactly technically proficient enough to engineer a robot with a heart of gold yet like Wall-E.

To mix metaphors, trying to great authentic, real, livable, walkable urbanism in DFW is like trying to run PC apps on Mac platforms. Feel free to reverse those two if that is your preference. Ya know, customize.

The deeper question is WHY does Dallas have an identity crisis. This morning, I was sitting in the Peter Walker lecture at the Nasher Sculpture Center. At these kind of events, something never feels quite right about them. The grip and grin. The glad-handing. I often feel a bit like Nick Carraway at a socialite soiree in West Egg. This particularly time thinking about the local predilection for bringing in national celebrities from the design world.

It should be stated that I like Peter Walker’s design work, at least when framed carefully like photography. It lacks either a locational self-awareness or a desire to broach bigger issues (despite occasional claims to the contrary). Here’s a spot, it will have a nice little design on it. It is elegant and simple. Highly abstract. It lacks complexity and works well as an object itself just like the buildings he lamented “often getting plunked” into spaces. In a way, a perfect mirror for his lecture delivery. He wasn’t talking down to people, but speaking in lay terms. It wasn’t overly academic, but I’m also not sure that the complexity of urbanism resides in him. He does his job, he does it well.

But when it comes to bigger, systemic issues of what makes Dallas “green,” or sustainable, or livable, or resilient, these kind of out-of-town experts invariably resort to placation and pandering. “You’re Dallas. You’re the bees knees.” What was billed as “Designing Green Dallas,” or whatever, was predictably little more than green smoke.

When you love someone you’re honest w/ them. You don’t only tell them what they want to hear, to manipulate or use them. That’s more like a hooker/john relationship. Ya know, sort of like the relationship between Highland Park and Dallas.

And there Dallas is left, on the side of the road, like a sex crime victim by its abuser who claims, “taxes are too high in Dallas.” Well, they’re high because the city was gutted by sprawl and the money that left the taxable boundaries yet is more than happy to take advantage of the economic engine that the core city provides.

I wonder if out-of-towners are capable of the appropriate kind of direct honesty that a broken, brittle, monoculture needs when approaching collapse. Does anybody from the outside love Dallas enough to say what needs to be heard? Or are they pandering for high fee, landscape decoration work? You’re the bees knees. Please hire me.

Let’s be honest, Dallas is built around the car. Not because any imaginary market demanded it, but because of the desperate grasping at federal dollars, mostly for highways, which then created markets. Value in land that had none prior. And the term, “green” implies little more than the color itself. Some grass, some trees. That oughta take care of it.

Unfortunately, that land, based on that transportation system, requires oil to be tremendously cheap. We thought that roads and houses as far as the eye could see created the middle class, forgetting about the spoils of war. Now, we’re seeing the destruction of the very middle class that is now in homes worth less than what was paid, built to last only about 20 years or so, and stuck out in the middle of nowhere and forced to slurp up rising gas prices. Imagine what happens to gas prices when the economy actually picks up. Do we really want more of that kind of economic “progress?” Sex crime victim. Used.

So who loves Dallas? Are they even from Dallas? And in a city so atomized, so fractured into not just dividing into a dozen municipal boundaries, but even within Dallas, and more particularly the socio-economic stratigraphy, is it the people who bring in, or hire, or pay for Calatrava bridges, not once, not twice, but thrice, even though his first design/constructed bridge was pulled off the shelf from one of his very first bridge designs. You have an abusive spouse Dallas. One who treats urbanism like a shopping spree.

A city where much of the wealth was built on sprawl, itself cannibalistic by nature, much like the economic equation behind it, led to incredible wealth disparity. Layers so far apart they can’t even relate to their needs. One side, with money keeps dropping new pyramids at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And since there is no structural foundation, those pyramids are only to fall down upon those at the bottom. Burdened, trying feed itself (in a food delivery system so abstracted beyond any nutritional content), trying to learn how to read from a school system itself broken by the economic implications of sprawl.

What’s left to love? Hope, I guess. Or is the one we love still just a child that needs to fall down a few times before it learns? And do we even have the time to wait? Isn’t it our job, as locals, as citizens, as caretakers, and stewards, to tell our child, not to take candy from strangers?

Citing “health concerns,” Bill Lively says he’s stepping down as president and CEO of the DallasBill Lively IMG_0534 Symphony Orchestra. The DSO made the bombshell announcement today, just 29 days after the fund-raising maestro took over the position part-time. The announcement quoted Lively, 67, as saying that on the advice of his physician, he would have to “prematurely” resign and “devote significant time this summer to rest and recuperation.”

In an interview this morning, Lively said that in recent weeks he’d lost 10 pounds and begun having headaches and became alarmed, mindful that two of his brothers had experienced strokes. His doctor suggested that working long hours for many years had led to “cumulative fatigue and stress,” Lively said, and that, in order to get better, he needed to recuperate. He’ll do that this summer at a second home in Estes Park, Colo., Lively said, before returning to Dallas in the fall and “considering another assignment.”

DSO Board Chair Ron Gafford said the board would “start the process of identifying interim leadership” immediately. Lively (pictured in photo by Jeanne Prejean) had been scheduled to wrap up his commitment with the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee late next month, and then to start full-time with the DSO in June.

Because of his fund-raising prowess with Super Bowl XLV and in previous positions, Lively had been widely viewed as a “savior” for the symphony, which has been plagued by budget deficits in recent years. At a D CEO event just last week, he hinted at a methodical plan for revamping the organization significantly. Lively said this morning that the DSO is in good shape overall, except for one thing: “Their only weakness is that they’ve been leaderless for too long.” Now, it appears, they’ll be leaderless for awhile longer.

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Happy weekend, everyone. As usual, I start off thinking with my stomach.

Friday

The big deal Dallas Food and Wine Festival continues this evening with the Texas Salute!* dinnerfest at the Farmers Market. You get a complimentary wine glass, which you can then fill (and refill) with the alcoholic fruit juice stuff we all like so much. Once that’s taken care of, create a hodgepodge meal of shrimp cocktail from Big Shucks, tamales from La Popular, and plenty more. Whiskey Cake will be serving their signature namesake dessert, which, according to Sarah over at SideDish, is a must eat. In fact, if there’s a line, you should probably fight your way to the front of it to make sure you don’t miss out. And if you happen to step on some cowboy-booted toes in the process, well, that’s just the way the cake crumbles. Attire is “western chic and casual,” making this a golden opportunity to whip out your rhinestone-studded belt.

Local News

Ben Stein Gets In Dutch for Dallas Remarks

Tim Rogers
By Tim Rogers |

A financially minded FrontBurnervian points us to the news that Citigroup fired Ben Stein from a corporate gig for making jokes in Dallas that were allegedly and supposedly disparaging of women. Two things I’d like to see in the comments: 1) a report from someone who was present at the private-equity gig whereat Stein made these jokes and 2) some really offensive jokes that disparage men, just to balance things out.

After the jump, the fourth quarter from the deciding Game 7 from the last time these two teams faced off. I hope and expect it to go better this time. Anyway. Magic! Aguirre! Kareem! Blackmon! It’s the NBA on CBS.

Local News

Leading Off (4/29/11)

Bethany Anderson
By Bethany Anderson |

Dallas Cowboys Get Another Smith. This one’s named Tyron. Without an E. That is so weird.

Miss USA Says She Was Groped in Dallas. Susie Castillo, who was the 2003 Miss USA, used the Internets to say that a TSA agent at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport groped her. Only the TSA says they’ve interviewed the agent and found nothing wrong, and are going to the tape of the incident to make sure. In a related note, I haven’t watched a Miss USA pageant since 1991.

Campaigns Are Not For Doing the Maths. When Fort Worth mayoral candidate Cathy Hirt claimed in a forum that 47 percent of Fort Worth ISD students will not graduate, I’m sure people thought she misspoke. But then the same claim showed up in campaign material, too, and now the FWISD board is kind of politely asking what Hirt smoked, because the graduation rate is more like 76 percent to 80 percent.

The Case of the Sartorially Challenged Bank Robber. Listen, I’m no criminal mastermind (that you people know of), but if you’re gonna rob a bank, don’t you kind of dress for it? Maybe a disguise of some sort, and not whatever you bought at Forever 21 last week?

So, Did Anything Interesting Happen This Morning? No? Good. As you were.

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