Vintage (and more) in Oak Cliff

On my first and most recent trip to Oak Cliff, I didn't make it deep enough into the Bishop Arts District to get a true sense of what a really great place this is! Today I was on the hunt for vintage stores and found several there-one of them even featuring mens wear. There are also plenty of eateries in oak Cliff and sweet shops. Check it out.

Find more vintage retailers on The New Colonist's Dallas page 

So, What's Wrong with Lemmon Avenue?

Removing San Francisco's Central Freeway

To the average observer, it would seem to be very hard to divert the auto traffic enough to make Lemmon Avenue a pleasant thoroughfare for pedestrians. To the average drive, any attempt to do so would impede the flow of traffic and make it take longer to cut across town. Yet both have been convinced in other situations that it can be done.

During the years I spent in San Francisco I saw two major pedestrian improvements, neither which seems to have done much to impede traffic flow and made a world of difference for pedestrians and neighborhoods.

The first was the replacement of the double tiered Embarcaderro Freeway with The Embarcaderro, a lively bicycle, walking and pedestrian street that extends from the Ferry Building at Market Street to Fisherman's Wharf. Soon after the Market Street Railway tracks were extended from the Ferry Building, along the Embarcaderro to Fisherman's Wharf. That's right, two layers of freeway were successfully replaced with a boulevard without resulting auto traffic jams.

The second was the replacement of the Central Freeway with Octavia Boulevard, which now includes lanes for bikes and pedestrians, and yes, cars.

Before Octavia Boulevard, the Central Freeway emptied directly onto a San Francisco neighborhood busy with pedestrians.

Car-Free on New York's Park Avenue

Of the two, Lemmon Avenue is probably closer to the example of Octavia Boulevard, although may be ahead of the game because there is no freeway on ramp leading directly onto it. According to the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, the Octavia Boulevard project has delivered a transportation facility that provides neighborhood access to a regional freeway while providing an attractive public space.

The biggest difference may be a large amount of retail along Lemmon Avenue. That however brings more pedestrians, which makes the improvements all the more critical. Part of those improvements will be to begin to rebuild the retail into sidewalk-oriented storefronts with parking more condensed or in the rear of buildings to limit auto traffic turning on and off of Lemmon Avenue.

The short of what's wrong with Lemmon Avenue is that it's unfriendly, unattractive and worse, dangerous. As it exists, it's the result of years of misguided traffic planning that focused on the movement of cars, in some cases completely disregarding the existence of pedestrians. It's the result of suburban traffic planners who thought not of living in Dallas neighborhoods, but of making it easy to drive through them. It's also obvious not one ounce of thought was given to building a thoroughfare that added to the attractiveness of its location.

Today more than at anytime in recent memory, Dallas is a place where demand for housing is increasing. There will still be a need for others to pass through, but not at the expense of safety or aesthetics to the residents. Today we understand that a great city must have arteries that take into consideration a variety of transportation forms including bicycles, foot traffic, buses and automobiles. The businesses along those routes must also consider multiple routes of pedestrian entity.

Experience shows, it won't stop traffic. New York City is a prime example. Multiple acres of roadway have recently been completely closed off to traffic, including areas of Times Square without much impact on traffic flow. It's made New York a better place to live.

Let's try it. Close Lemmon Avenue for a car-free day and see what happens. It may just turn out to be no big deal. Cars will find alternative routes and patterns will change without much prodding (Hey, it worked on Park Avenue). In the long-run, closing it off to traffic won't be necessary. Auto traffic is part of the urban mix, but so are parking bump outs, safety barriers, bike lanes and wider sidewalks.

Rethinking and Rebuilding Lemmon Avenue will help do the same for Dallas.

Dallas Mayoral Debate at Cathedral of Hope

Mike Rawlings and David Kunkle debate in Dallas

It was the calm before the storm inside the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas as former Pizza Hut CEO Mike Rawlings and former Police Chief David Kunkle debated in preparation for a runoff. The candidates seemed mostly agreeable, and so the storm was reserved for later outside.

Leaving the Cathedral, we noticed on the I-phone there were three separate tornado warnings, one near Grapevine, and so we decided to stay in Dallas for a while. The sky outside had that mysterious calm threat of a look.

At Panera on Lemmon Avenue, more reports and warnings came in and we prepared to spend some time in the store room. The weather intensified and sirens went off as reports indicated a tornado could hit nearby Highland Park. In the end Dallas was pretty much spared. Home in Grapevine we were welcomed by a baseball-sized hole in the skylight from the hail storm.

Back to the debate for a moment, neither candidate was particularly inspiring, but it seems Kunkle has a genuine love of cities and a very good sense of how a city government operates. If the differences can be outlined, it would seem Rawlings campaign could be described with two words, economic development. Kunkle's campaign could be described with one, neighborhoods.

Of course Dallas needs economic development, but the particulars of what that means could be called into question. The Arts District and the new park over the highway could fall into the large economic development project category- and those are things I would not want to do without. I would also not want to trade like projects that could have a positive impact on the city as a whole for a focus on individual neighborhoods. Yet there is a highway or two that could fall into the large project category I could do without.

Yet, Kunkle completely resonated when he talked about cities existing to make good places to live for the residents. He spoke of his own walkable neighborhood and of what makes it a good place to live. This is something I've talked about for a long time. Cities need to be good places to live. The work of the city government should focus on serving the residents and making the city a good place to live. "Economic development" on the other hand is often done for someone else living somewhere else, ie tourism. It's no surprise to those who understand this that the cities known for tourism are also great places to live- and attract tourists because they are great places to live. San Francisco, Savannah, Charleston, Boston and Portland, Oregon are just a few examples.

So, if I could vote in this election, I would probably be supporting Kunkle. Although Rawlings did say he knew how to win the election- say the most important thing is to fix Lemmon Avenue, which is very unfriendly to pedestrians and cuts through prime neighborhoods. That would be a major step in making Dallas a great place to live, so, Mr. Rawlings, I urge you to say it.

Cathedral of Hope and Peace Chapel

Can Dallas do it? Can van Zweden do it?

Inside the Meyerson

A central figure in the cultural scenes of a metropolis is the music director of the city symphony, as it has always been since the 17th century in Europe. One can argue that curators of museums or historical societies could be equally important, but only the chief director will be seen almost weekly under the spotlight in public and then examined, evaluated, discussed and gossiped about for the rest of the week.

The rise of Dallas Symphony Orchestra during Jaap van Zweden’s tenure is evident as now DSO has joined the rank of other prominent orchestras such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, all which frequent Carnegie Hall in New York City. Thanks to the overall economy in Texas too, DSO does not have to battle with the financial woes that have been around with many older establishments such as Detroit and Philadelphia.

Yet, van Zweden’s emphasis on precision and intensity can occasionally go too hard. At the season finale, his choice of Beethoven’s Chorale Symphony can hardly be argued, but I am glad that Norio Ohga, the inventor of compact disc, had not had the chance of listening to this performance, not to mention agreed with his tempo; otherwise the total length of music CD would have been shortened to merely one hour.

In choosing between Beethoven’s own metronome markings and the standard adopted from historical reference, van Zweden preferred the former. It was exuberating to hear the brisk tempo of the first movement, or was exhilarating to follow the prominent timpani beat in the Scherzo; yet in the slow movement in which time seems to suspend and the air we breathe carry meditative echoes, I was pushed up and down in a Wagnerian music flood instead.

Last night, right after the thunderstorm with hail, I listened to Furtwangler’s 1942 performance. The sound was nothing comparable to the magnificent acoustics in the Meyerson Symphony Center; yet Beethoven was one of those composers whose music spirituality and profundity is immune to the sound quality of recordings. I noticed that there are some unexplained moments when Furtwangler held the silence longer or accelerated suddenly. In certain passage, the orchestra’s sonority clashed nearly in a state of abandonment, possibly due to the sound quality; yet my mind was more convinced with this kind of chaos amidst breathing tempos than the tightly-knit all-out performance.

In my first season as a subscriber to DSO, there are some memorable concerts such as all Beethoven night with rarely-played Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello, Brahms’ requiem, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (a perfect fit for van Zweden’s DSO), Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a successful casual Friday event), and Olga Kern’s appearance on all Tchaikovsky night. Of all, the performance of Mahler Symphony No. 6 was the one together with Mahler Symphony No. 2 from the last season, defined the sound of DSO in my heart.

Merely in his third year as the music director, van Zweden has already extended his contract. He is less glamorous than his mentor Leonard Bernstein, and less public-centric like his peer Michael Tilson Thomas. He transforms himself into electrifying rod when on stage with his bodily language an embodiment of music notes. It is a sharp contrast when he greets patrons in the green room of the concert hall – a stocky, bald-headed guy with a European accent. A banner hanging outside Meyerson Symphony Center features a cartoonish version of van Zweden, with his stooped back and raised baton hinted by a few curved lines. Yet he has a face that seems to attract attention regardless how tall surrounding people are, like those of famous maestros in the past, like Stokowski or Karajan. Under his guidance, DSO now has filled some of the most important positions, such as the new concertmasters. His inclination to theatrical affectation occasionally conflicts with his heed to the original scores. Yet critics have agreed that the orchestra sounds more coherent and tighter like a small ensemble with a big voice.

It takes decades to project a phenomenal sound that is instantly recognizable with an orchestra. Reiner and Solti stayed in Chicago for three decades, Stokowski and Ormandy covered nearly seven decades of Philadelphia Orchestra, enough for a regular concert-goer’s life span.  Will Dallas be able retain van Zweden long enough to form its unique voice? (Or should I say can van Zweden get acclimated to the Texas heat? Luckily regular seasons skip the hottest months!) Dallas has much more to do to make it attractive, besides the Cowboys and Mavericks. In presenting it as a cultural center of the southeast, Dallas needs a central figure not only to reinvigorate the spirit of city and its people, but also to make it a destination stop for his charisma and power. Can van Zweden do it?

Get it at Grimaldi's Before You Go

You could spend two hours or more of your New York City vacation waiting for a slice of Grimaldi's pizza, or you could stop by the West Village location in Dallas before you go. The slice you see here is a Brooklyn favorite known as Margherita pizza. This is pure pizza without blinding flavors and a recipe that allows you to taste the purity of the sauce, cheese and crust. When I used to order it in Brooklyn at Amorina Pizza on Vanderbilt, it would come with sauce, basil and round pads of mozzarella. Grimaldi's came close, though I think I would prefer it without the tomatoes. Anyway, the atmosphere is great, it's located on the McKinney streetcar line and you'll find it hard to argue with a more than 90 percent favorable rating on Urban Spoon.

A Sunday Bike Ride on the Katy Trail