The Dallas Museum of Art will reopen to the public after five quiet months on Friday, August 14 with limited capacity, timed entry, and fewer hours. Employees began returning this week. The news comes days after Dallas Contemporary announced that it would stay closed for the remainder of 2020, setting its planned post-COVID opening date for next January. The DMA isn’t the first to welcome back visitors, though; the Meadows Museum, the Modern, the Kimbell, and Amon Carter each reopened in July.
Meanwhile, other museums in the Dallas Arts District, like the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Crow Museum of Asian Art, have remained in limbo as the coronavirus pandemic keeps North Texas in its grasp. The divergent paths taken by our cultural institutions raises the question: is it even safe to visit a museum right now?
“It’s always a caveated answer. I think they can be on the safer side. I think a lot of it depends on their physical layout, their structure, the capacity of visitation that they allow, their air circulation, and of course, everybody wearing a mask–all employees,” says Dr. Mark Casanova, president of Dallas County Medical Society. “Then, that’s an endeavor that could be made safer. That’s how I would put it.”
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First it was the buses.
In 2015, Houston adopted a plan to completely revamp its bus system, changing from the hub-and-spoke network model Dallas Area Rapid Transit currently uses to a grid system that focuses on raising service levels to promote increased ridership. Since then, DART has begun the process of following Houston’s lead.
Now, Houston is adopting a slate of new ordinances designed to encourage more urban design. Dallas would be wise to take notes and perhaps explore a similar revision of many of its codes.
For a full rundown of what Houston plans, head here. I’ll touch on a few quick highlights:
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Pandemic-induced job losses in Texas have increased the uninsured crisis that already plagued the state. Dallas is the epicenter of the uninsured problem, leading the state in uninsured individuals, and the economic disruption caused by COVID-19 has only exacerbated the problem.
Before the pandemic, 20 percent of Texans were uninsured, the worst rate in the nation. It is one of 13 states that has not expanded Medicaid, leaving many low income working adults and families without insurance. But according to data from Families USA, uninsured individuals in Texas have increased by nearly 50 percent.
Between February and May, 5.4 million laid-off workers became uninsured nationwide, larger than any increase ever recorded. The Great Recession resulted in just 3.9 million non-elderly adults becoming uninsured. According to Families USA data, Texas’ uninsured adult rate jumped from 20 percent to 29 percent during the pandemic, still the highest in the nation. The next highest state is Florida, where 25 percent of adults are uninsured.
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The final death knell for one of the most promising, forward-thinking urban planning efforts in North Texas will be sounded tomorrow. During a joint session of the city of Plano’s City Council and Planning and Zoning Commission, Plano officials are expected to vote to repeal the city’s Plano Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan and replace it with the 1986 master plan—literally putting Plano a generation behind on planning for its future growth and success.
The Plano Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2015, and since then, it has been embroiled in a long legal feud seeking its repeal. Opponents feared the new plan and said it would allow dangerous amounts of density that would erode the suburban city’s character. To me, the Plano Tomorrow plan looked like exactly the kind of urban planning vision that could begin to reverse the damaging effects of 70 years of sprawl-style suburban growth.
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The Dallas City Council will soon vote to begin the overhaul of Hensley Field, the 738-acre former Naval yard at the western edge of town. Later this month, the full Council will consider spending $2 million in mostly bond dollars on a master plan to chart the redevelopment of the enormous parcel that has long been used for random storage.
The city housed the Robert E. Lee sculpture here until it was purchased and moved to a West Texas golf course. It’s where the police department keeps its aging vehicles. It’s where the city put nurse Nina Pham’s dog after her owner contracted Ebola. In its darkest moment, the city even considered shuttling the homeless here, a dozen miles from downtown.
There has not been a concrete plan for all these acres since the Navy vacated the premises in 1999 without cleaning it up. It’s near Mountain View College, Dallas Baptist University, the Potter’s House of Dallas, Mountain Creek Lake, a handful of neighborhoods, and a Home Depot distribution center. It’s about as close you can get to Grand Prairie while still being in Dallas. Councilman Casey Thomas, who represents the Oak Cliff district where it is located, called the land a “blank canvas,” one that is fewer than 100 acres smaller than the entire footprint of downtown.
“This is the type of project that not very many cities have had an opportunity to create,” he said.
On Monday, Peer Chacko, the city’s chief planning officer, briefed the economic development committee on the possibilities. It could support “7,000 new diverse, mixed-income dwellings,” another 7.5 million square feet of “commercial, institutional, and civic space,” and 15,000 “new jobs created across sectors and industries.”
Dallas has for years touted a neat number of how many more “affordable” units are required to meet citywide demand—10,000. It’s not hard to understand why Thomas referred to this as a “legacy project.” But there is much work to be done.
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Pay for seizure medication. Keep the lights on as electric bills pile up. Buy eggs and milk. Cover rent each month. These are some of financial realities many needed help with after they lost their jobs months ago when the pandemic reached Dallas. The vast hospitality industry was especially hard hit, which employed several thousands in Dallas County. Although this economic hardship isn’t unique to any one group in particular, the problems undocumented workers face—many of whom provide the backbone of the food industry—certainly are.
Despite paying taxes into government assistance programs, undocumented workers are left out of receiving those benefits. So they’ve turned to tiny, grassroots groups offering a helping hand.
Since March 22, just days after the county shut down, The Undocumented Workers Fund of Dallas (UWFD) has been distributing micro grants of $150—enough to keep food on the table and stay afloat in troubled waters.
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When this whole global pandemic thing kicked off some months ago, reports that the virus spread quickly through crowded, dense cities appeared to raise some sharp questions about the future of urban places. In cities like New York, subways were shuttered and residents who could fled the city. Were cities—and dense cities which rely on public transit, in particular—especially vulnerable to global pandemics? An article in Scientific American suggests that initial fears of COVID-19’s spread on public transit, at least, were perhaps a tad overblown.
The article addresses an Atlantic opinion piece written by Janette Sadik-Khan, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, and Seth Solomonow, the co-author of Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. The pair argue that public transit can’t be linked to as many major outbreaks as bars and live music venues. Furthermore, avoiding public transit increases car use, which can create pollution, which can make people more vulnerable to respiratory diseases.
My initial reaction to this argument was skepticism. The premise doesn’t seem to make sense.
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You may recall back in November 1994, Bradford Pearson and I wrote an oral history about the famed Plano East-Tyler John Tyler high school football playoff game on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. You can relive the madness here, a truly mind-blowing sequence of events that will probably never be topped, short of the scene from The Dark Knight Rises actually happening in a real game, or maybe the opening scene of The Last Boy Scout.
But maybe hold off and read this account by The Athletic’s Mike Piellucci first. Piellucci, who you may remember from this fascinating story about the Dallas Aces and the golden age of competitive bridge, wrote about the game for the site’s ongoing series about the 40 greatest comebacks in sports.
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