Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

From the website for the proposed Dallas Backyard Music Festival​After this, I'll let Pete handle whatever becomes of the Dallas Backyard Music Festival -- since, ya know, it's a music festival? But we begin on Unfair Park for a couple of reasons: It's on the Park and Rec board's agenda for its Thursday meeting, which is where I was introduced to the planned event, and it's scheduled to take place in Trammell Crow Park on the Trinity River, which my boy loves even if the cows there don't. Only, isn't Trammell Crow Park supposed to close down in a few months? Let's come back to that.Says here the Park Board's going to "authorize an alcohol permit request for Volition Productions to serve alcohol at a festival and concert at Trammell Crow Park located at 3700 Sylvan Avenue on Saturday, June 2, 2012 and Sunday, June 3, 2012." The city hopes to make around $7,000 from that. Anyway. That sent me to The Google Machine to find out more about Volition Productions. A few short clicks later, and we discover that that the concert's really more of a concept at this point: Its Kickstarter page says organizers are $100 on their way to the $20,000 needed to put on the event, with just 57 hours left in fund-raising. And the June dates aren't set in stone: The website for the event, which was created last month, is taking votes, asking folks to choose between May 18-20 and June 1-3. So. Lots of questions about the event, the biggest one being: Um, isn't the city about to close off access to Trammell Crow Park to make way for the Sylvan Avenue bridge redo? Because last I looked, Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan told the council's Trinity River Corridor Project Committee back in April that "to help minimize the construction duration and reduce costs, the committee previously voted to close Sylvan Avenue, Trammell Crow Park and the Sylvan Boat Ramp for the duration of construction." So I called around City Hall today to see if maybe they'd changed that plan or perhaps pushed back construction on the Sylvan Avenue bridge. Far from it, turns out.

SMU student Christina Rancke and her father, who was killed in the World Trade Center's collapse​After the jump is a video just posted by SMU and the school's Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility in which student Christina Rancke, Class of 2013, talks about losing her father in the collapse of the World Trade Center's south tower on September 11, 2001. She was in seventh grade at the time, and was pulled aside in gym class, she says, and told "there was an accident at the World Trade Center." It would take months before her father was officially pronounced dead.Ranke and Rais Bhuiyan are among those scheduled to participate in myriad events planned on the Hilltop beginning September 7 and culminating with a Service of Remembering, presided over by SMU President R. Gerald Turner and chaplain Stephen Rankin, on September 11. A full schedule of events also follows.On September 8, in the Meadows Museum Sculpture Garden, the university will also plant 2,977 flags, one for each of those killed in the terror attacks of 10 years ago. The university has also launched this website: 9/11 Remembered, where the university requests you "share with us your memories of that fateful day."

Couple of days back, in this poorly written item, we looked at LBJ Infrastructure Group's proposed change to the design for the LBJ Express -- at least the section of sunken managed toll lanes originally designed to run beneath the Dallas North Tollway. Spokesman Andy Rittler also noted a new video of the project was forthcoming, after it made its bow at last night's public meeting. So here it is -- an excerpt, at least, featuring the new-look LBJ-Dallas North Tollway meet-up.And speaking of the LBJ Express: I was just invited to attend one "final walk over" the Joe Ratliff Pedestrian Walkway Saturday night, from 7 to 9 p.m., in advance of its Sunday shutdown. Say this for us native Northwest Dallasites: We're a proudly nostalgic lot, and we know how (and where) to party.

Photo by Alex Scotthe West Dallas Chamber of Commerce hosted a luncheon to raise funds and honor the area west of the Trinity.​Yesterday afternoon, the West Dallas Chamber of Commerce hosted what was essentially a baby shower for the nascent neighborhood on the other side of Dallas's ballyhooed architectural statement, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. The luncheon at Salon Las Americas -- across Fort Worth Avenue from Smoke, which catered the affair -- raised $8,000 for the Chamber's Future Fund, which will finance education, internship opportunities, and small business opportunities for people in West Dallas. The fundraiser also celebrated the main factors slated to turn regular old West Dallas into new, improved, more economically sound West Dallas. The three projects highly lauded by the chamber are the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, the CityDesign Studio plan for the area's revitalization and Sylvan Thirty, a planned mixed-use development at the location of the former Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts east of the Belmont Hotel. If you need a primer on all that's going on across the Trinity, we explored West Dallas development earlier this summer in this here cover story. The room was full of heavy-hitters, among them Mayor Mike Rawlings (who stopped by after his morning school supply fair), several council members, land developers, investors, planners from the CityDesign Studio and representatives from the Trinity Trust Foundation. If attendance is indicative of support, it seems the city is firmly standing behind West Dallas revitalization. It's fair to say the huge, and hugely expensive, bridge is an effective catalyst. And to think: "Some people have been mocking it as a Bridge to Nowhere," said Texas Capital Bank's (and the chamber's secretary) Mary Bailey as she spoke about the Calatrava bridge. Who'd do a thing like that?

Photos by Alex Scott, slide show here​With a bright blue Frisbee on his head and a blow-up ball hanging from his lips by its mouthpiece, 9-year-old Emanuel spins around in circles so fast, his new camouflage backpack lifts from his body like a parachute at the moment of landing. Today is his birthday, but it feels more like Christmas morning as he hops from stand to stand at the Mayor's Back to School Fair in Fair Park, where he gathers free school supplies, candy and juice. Emanuel and his family arrived at 1 a.m., early enough to land the first spot in line. For the third year in a row, his mother, 29-year-old Tyeisha Montgomery, packed up her children and made the short drive to Fair Park to stock up on school supplies. "It helps me a whole lot," says Montgomery, who raises her six children as a single parent in South Dallas. "They get the basics and I take it from there." The 15th annual fair helps low-income families with students in the Dallas Independent School District by doling out pens and notebooks, as well as dental and vision screenings, immunizations, even haircuts. ​Mayor Mike Rawlings addressed the crowd as they waited for the doors of the Centennial and Automobile buildings to open. "We've got to have parents that support the child -- parents are the key," he said, repeating, "Parents are the key." He was joined at the event by several council members and Dallas ISD trustees, including school board president Lew Blackburn and interim superintendent Alan King. "This is what I like about being mayor," Rawlings told Unfair Park before the event, at which thousands were expected once again. "What's amazing is the scale of it." Rawlings called the day a "perfect starting point" to the emphasis on education he began calling for on the campaign trail. "There's just something exciting about seeing this many people caring so much about their kids."

Via.Boston, Burns and C.J. Wilson when the doc-maker was in town for the Tenth Inning​Prohibition, the latest doc from Ken Burns, doesn't premiere on PBS till October 2. But if you're hankerin' for a sneak peek at the five-and-a-half-hour three-parter, which the The Civil Wars and Baseball maker directed with Lynn Novick, look no further than the Belo Mansion on August 17: The Dallas Bar Association sends word this morning that Burns will bring his icy glass of Eighteenth Amendment to town for an open-to-anyone chitchat, scheduled to kick off at 6 p.m. that Wednesday. May wanna stash a flask in your car for an after-hours drink.Burns will be interviewed by Winstead's Talmage Boston -- no surprise there, given the baseball historian's history as a Burns interviewer (they recently chatted up Tenth Inning at the Anatole). And when they aren't talking, they'll screen clips from the doc. The Dallas Bar Association, which is sponsoring the talk with the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Ft. Worth, says the event's open to the all comers, sure, but you may wanna reserve your ducats now: They run a mere $10 and can be gotten here. Speaking of Prohibition ... is it too early? It's too early.