Reinhardt and Vickery

During my time off I have spent some time in the Dallas history section of the downtown library looking at old maps from 1900-1945.  My main goal was to track the changes to the part of east Dallas where I live, but I was also looking for urban ghost towns — places that used to [...]

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Booker T

Another example where you really have to ask “what were they thinking?”
Some rich person named Nancy Hamon donated a zillion dollars to help renovate The Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and in recognition of that the school district decided to name the new part the “Hamon Arts Magnet“.  The [...]

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Bungled

In order to distract the public with shiny blinky things, the Dallas city council provided an online poll to allow people to vote on which one of 5 names they liked for the soon to be upgraded and prettified Industrial Boulevard.  The problem is that the public picked the wrong name: Cesar Chavez Boulevard.  Now [...]

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New house?

So we put an offer in on a new house, and it has been accepted. It’s over on Bryan Parkway, about 5 blocks from where we are now. It needs some work but nothing major, it’s not like it is about to fall over or something.
Of course I haven’t actually seen it yet, [...]

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Democracy in much more action

As my legions of loyal readers probably remember, I attended our precinct caucus four years ago and wound up being selected to be a delegate at the senate district convention (see Democracy in Action). Well caucus time rolled around again last night and it was a lot different this time around.
For starters instead of [...]

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Not so cold?

Happy Getting Warmer Day everyone in Dallas!
Getting Warmer Day is that day when the average temperature starts going up again: January 14 in Dallas (OK, I’m a couple of days late with the post).  On average in Dallas the second week of January is the coldest part of the winter.
Of course this year the second [...]

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Landmark Commission

We had our hearing in front of the Landmark Commission yesterday for our proposed addition. This was the third and final step of the approval process for the Junius Heights Historic District (the first two were the Task Force and the Staff Review).
The meeting started a few minutes late, at about 1:10. Since [...]

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Coffee shops

I think this article at Slate has a point: Don’t Fear Starbucks.  Before Starbucks (at least in Dallas) the only place to get an espresso was after supper at an Italian restaurant.  Or at least that’s my guess — I never got espresso B.S. (Before Starbucks) and never even looked for it.  Back in the [...]

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Big time

It appears that the Old East Dallas ECPTA has now hit the big time.

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Task Force

We survived our first encounter with the historic district approval process relatively unscathed. We are thinking about doing an addition to the back of our house to add a new bedroom, bathroom, office, and utility room/pantry. Since we live in the Junius Heights historic district, we have to get a certificate of appropriateness [...]

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