Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
65° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

Pulse OF THE City

By D Magazine |

Things Fall Apart

A swank Turtle Creek address struggles to recover,



“THIS THING,” SAYS DEVELOPER DALE Bullough,”is going to get ugly.” He means the eruption of law-suits over who’s to blame for the mess at 3535 Gillespie St., the unfinished Plaza on Turtle Creek, a seven-story “luxury” building known to tenant Gayle Fogelson as “Sarajevo West” ever since the electricity was shut off last year and his ceiling caved in.

Waco investor Larry Meyer, who purchased the troubled $17 million building after lenders foreclosed late in 1997, traces the problems to Bullough, his erstwhile partner, whom Meyer says in legal filings “squandered time and partnership money.”

Meyer accuses Bullough of wasting $125,000 on a grand opening party and another $20,000 on a video, as well as nepotism, lack of professional ism, and “gross mismanagement,” putting The Plaza “behind schedule and over budget.”

Bullough, in a $250 million counter suit, contends that the delays and cost overruns weren’t his fault, but Meyer’s and Henry Builders’, also known as HB, the project’s general contractor. HB, together with a number of subcontractors, also has filed suit-against both Bullough and Meyer.

Bullough further alleges that one of the building’s financial backers-a Waco-based charitable trust called Christ Is Our Savior-in fact is secretly controlled by Meyer and conspired with him to oust Bullough from the project.

About the only principal actor so far not to stir his onetime Plaza associates’ public ire is Robert Edelman, who has kept a low profile after doing prison time for his own conspiracy: a plot to kill his wife, Linda.

Edelman did not return telephone calls, nor did Larry Meyer.

The Plaza, meanwhile, limps toward an uncertain future. Realtor Carolyn Shamis says the new management “is doing better,’1 and the building, where leases average $3,500 a month, is renting well.

Fogelson reports no further problems and a general improvement in conditions. True, he concedes, the swimming pool so far is a hole in the ground, and construction debris still litters the west side.

But Fogelson intends to stay.

“The view’s nice,” he explains. “And the location’s nice, too.”

United Airlines

In Search of Friendlier Skies

Is United Airlines coming in from the cold?



United Airlines may be about to desert its busy Denver hub for a new one in Dallas. The Illinois-based carrier, which currently maintains a minimal presence at DFW Airport, recently made a hefty donation to a ma or Dallas performing arts group. Why? The informed, off-stage presumption is that the contribution was a community-relations gesture in advance of the airline’s relocation from Colorado to North Texas.

United is known to be unhappy with winter weather problems in Denver, according to an airline industry insider, who says the air line considered building a new hub in Atlanta but could not find sufficient space there. Houston, another possibility, was rejected as too southerly for United’s East-West connections.

That leaves convenient DFW.

Kristina Price, a United spokeswoman, says it’s “completely untrue” the airline wants to quit its Denver hub for Dallas. “Denver’s a great location for us,” says Price. “We have every intention to remain there.”

His Uncommon Eye

Finding a home for an outsider’s art.



ART IS MOSTLY FOR OTHER ARTist’s sake. At least, that’s how it looks to me when I visit contemporary art galleries. It could be me. Perhaps I lack the intellectual energy to answer the high-concept questions posed by modern artists.

I watched Wolf’s hand, carefully coloring in the tiny spaces between the rose thorns on his picture. He’d used up the magenta marker and now was substituting a lighter color. He had to make do because the materials weren’t his. Wolf doesn’t own a home, or a car- much less his own markers.

Wolf is homeless, just like Junior and Marina, who are working at the table with him. Every Saturday morning. Wolf and 15 other homeless people come to the basement of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church for the Body & Soul art program organized by Carol Brewer. They eat breakfast and make art. There’s music, too, and of course there’s some preaching, but these artists don’t stop working, even when they respond. Amen,

This spring, works by Body & Soul’s homeless artists were exhibited as part of the gallery tour sponsored annually by the Dallas Gallery District Association.

Wolf’s meticulous marker pictures were the must-sees on the tour. A percentage of the proceeds benefited Body & Soul. I hope that means more markers for Wolf.

Somehow, I don’t think Wolf is making art for other artists. He’s making art because that’s what holds the soul together even when the body is falling apart.

-Mary Brown Malouf

For the Record

“He was surprised to hear about what had happened, and he was sort of out of the loop, and he was kind of sorry for everything. But he knew the Lord had other plans for me.

“Ben Bell, 48, president ofWalter Bennett Communications, onhis uncle, Billy Graham, 79, whose evangelistic association has pulled its $25 million advertising account from the Dallas-based agency, effectively putting Bennett out of business.

Chicken Little, Editor-in-Chief

Toxic shock at the Star-Telegram.



LOCAL HEALTH OFFICIALS SCRAMBLED TO calm panicked callers to Poison Control hot lines early last month after Fort Worth Star-Telegram editors gave page one play in their Metro section to a pair of toxic mercury spills that the paper’s own reporter described as harmless to humans.

“There was some overreaction,” says Lena Williams, director of the North Texas Poison Center. “We did our best to reassure the public that there was not a problem.”

Under the April 7 headline, “Spill Forces School Evacuation,” Star-Telegram education writer Michelle Melendez reported that a “tiny”” bead of mercury had spilled from a third-grader’s broken necklace. Even though the mercury, “posed no harm,” wrote Melendez, 49 kids and two teachers at Manuel Jara Elementary School were “decontaminated” by the Fire Department and then sent home with the rest of the student body and staff.

Next day, another of the popular necklaces was discovered to have leaked an equally inconsequential drip of mercury in a hallway at J.R Elder Middle School, across the street from Jara.

“School Finds Mercury Spilled From Necklace,” the paper informed its readers, again on page one, even though Melendez carefully advised in her second paragraph that the spill “was so small that fire department and hazardous materials officials determined it posed no danger. No one was injured or evacuated.”

Says Williams: “I guess some people just react to the word mercury.’”

YESTERDAY

High Spirits in Old Dallas

When amber fluid flowed freely.

DURING PROHIBITION, DALlas county moonshiners and bootleggers wore out five sheriffs, including Dan Harston, shown in this 1922 photo sporting a mustache and presiding over the booze room in the county jail. Harston’s booze squad captured 10 stills a month and still lost ground. Ahalf-dozen bootleggers sold chock beer and illicit liquor from the back rooms of dry cleaning shops and shoeshine parlors within a two-block radius of Hotel Adol-phus. The beer was made from black-strap molasses and the spirits were distilled from alcohol provided by thriving local businesses, ostensibly engaged in the manufacture of patent medicine and hair tonic.

By the summer of 1929, Dallas had become so renowned for its flagrant disregard of the Volstead Act that Collier’s magazine published a tongue-in-cheek exposé by Owen P. White called “Dripping Dry Dallas,” where. White proclaimed, “drinkers consume more kinds of detestable liquor than any drinkers I ever met” The embarrassed constabulary retaliated with massive raids on local stills and a public outpouring of the booty into the gutters of Main Street near the courthouse.

According to local legend, an inebriated onlooker tossed a match into the flammable stream, igniting a blaze that destroved 20 parked cars.

ON MY MIND



It is a point of pride with me that I unerringly negotiate Tollway lanes with the fewest cars, without braking (needlessly), while I simultaneously fish for (the exact) change. I see myself as the quintessential “Exact Change” driver; I am living my life in the fast(est) lane.

Alas, I am a disappointment to the Tollway’s operators,They want me to be a Tolltag driver. I work downtown. I use the Tollway at least twice a day. I get from here to there on the Tollway-even when “here” is downtown and “there” is someplace like NorthPark. I am advised I should buy a magnetic Tolltag, but I will not.

This is why:Tolltag drivers traveling north from downtown have rendered what was intended to be the truly fast(est) lane useless. The single “Tolltag Only” lane has become two, thanks to Tolltag drivers who insist on stopping at the booth (still recovering, no doubt, from life in the “Change Made” lane).

In Piano,Tolltag drivers getting from thereto here, conversely, reveal a modern sense of purpose. Unfettered by the past, they don’t stop. They don’t even pause. They sail through without fear. Maybe because they’re leaving there. (For here.)-Kimberly Goad

RESTORING REPUTATION

A Dallas professor defends the Founding Fathers.

OUR FOUNDING FATHERS, AUTHORS of the noble American democratic experiment, once were preserved stiff as their periwigs in the nation’s collective regard.Then came the reaction. Leftists attacked their identification of property with individual rights. High-minded constitutionalists as prominent as the late Thurgood Marshall argued that Washington, Jefferson, and the rest were a pack of racists who might have ended slavery, but did not, or would not, because they didn’t really believe that blacks and whites are equal.Now Thomas G. West, a professor of politics at the University of Dallas, reclaims the framer’s good names in his new book, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America.Published to generally admiring reviews (at least among conservative critics), Vindicating the Founders presents abundant evidence mat its subjects, in fact, abominated slavery. West argues, in part, that they chose not to abolish the practice lest the new-bom United States be instantly, irreparably severed by the issue, as the country nearly was anyway by the Civil War, 80-odd years later. ” Every leading Founder acknowledged that slavery was wrong,” West writes.

Related Articles

Image
Arts & Entertainment

Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: March 28-31

It's going to be a gorgeous weekend. Pencil in some live music in between those egg hunts and brunches.
Image
Arts & Entertainment

Arlington Museum of Art Debuts Two Must-See Nature-Inspired Additions

The chill of the Arctic Circle and a futuristic digital archive mark the grand opening of the Arlington Museum of Art’s new location.
By Brett Grega
Image
Arts & Entertainment

An Award-Winning SXSW Short Gave a Dallas Filmmaker an Outlet for Her Grief

Sara Nimeh balances humor and poignancy in a coming-of-age drama inspired by her childhood memories.
By Todd Jorgenson
Advertisement