City of Dallas

The Trinity Groves project is still in its infancy. Babb Bros. BBQ and Four Corners Brewing arrived last year, followed by Hoffman Hots. The restaurant incubator hasn't just started incubating. The stores and apartments are still just a glimmer in Phil Romano's eye.

But backers aren't letting the preliminary nature of project stop them from making grand, eye-popping predictions about its future. And to give those forecasts a more authoritative gloss, they commissioned Weinstein, Clower & Associates, the local economic consulting firm that recently predicted an $11.8-billion boost from legalized gambling in Texas, to do a study.

Their conclusion, predictably, is that Trinity Groves will be huge for Dallas. How huge? $3.3 billion huge.

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Downtown's city-owned Omni Hotel has been a roaring success since it opened a year-and-a-half ago, routinely filling up and helping score such convention-business coups as the annual gathering of the American Meat Institute and the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Expo.

But the Omni was only one component of the city's plan to revitalize the newly rechristened Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and the southwestern corner of downtown. The convention center itself is getting a badly needed, $60-million update. A hotel-tax slush fund was created to help lure big meetings. Southside on Lamar is thriving.

Next on the list: drawing shops and restaurants to the area surrounding Omni and making walking from there to pretty much anywhere suck less. The former will be done using cash left over from the hotel's construction. The current plan is for 15,000 square feet of space and 350 spaces of underground parking, arranged as you see in the rendering above.

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Wikipedia

The USS Dallas, somewhere that's not the Trinity.

Tom Clancy buffs are already well-acquainted with the USS Dallas. The 5,700-ton nuclear submarine, a hair longer than your standard football field, was a main player in The Hunt for Red October. Back when the novel was published in 1984, the ship was still young, having joined the Navy's fleet just three years before.

Fast forward three decades. The ship is no longer such a vital part of U.S. maritime strategy and is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2014, at which point it will need to find a new home. And a new home is exactly what Dallas leaders are proposing to build, according to The Dallas Morning News. Mayor Mike Rawlings is expected to unveil plans for the Dallas Maritime Museum, which will be located on the banks of the Trinity River.

The logic here goes something like this: The USS Dallas travels in water; the Trinity contains water; therefore it makes perfect sense to build an $80 million naval museum in Dallas, several hours from a coastline or navigable waterway.

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thesanantonioriverwalk.com

Welcome to Dallas?

Right now, the City Council is debating whether to lower fees and loosen the rules governing what businesses can put on sidewalks and public rights of way, the idea being that more sidewalk cafes and awnings and creative signage and landscaping can help create a more enjoyable urban experience. Planners point to Lower Greenville and Bishop Arts as an example of what they have in mind.

Of course, such a sweeping policy change requires a lot of due diligence and debate, so, while both council members and city staff have expressed support, it's moving very, very slowly.

Dwaine Caraway for one is ready to start opening sidewalk cafes. At this morning's Quality of Life Committee meeting, he directed assistant city manager Joey Zapata's attention to the stretch of Cedar Crest Boulevard between Bonnie View Road and Stella Avenue. With a bit more sidewalk activity, Caraway thinks it's poised to become the next Bishop Arts. He's already imaging people sitting on patios eating pizza and sipping glasses of wine.

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baplaza.com

You know the building, even if you don't know its name. It's a neon silhouette that juts from the downtown skyline like a radioactive thumb. My 3-year-old calls it The Pickle, because that's kind of what it looks like, but its official name is the Bank of America Tower. Since it was built in 1985, it has stood as the tallest building in Dallas.

The Dallas Morning News' Steve Brown brings word today that the 72-story tower is in the beginning stages of a major multimillion dollar renovation. There's going to be a new entry, an updated lobby area and a remodeled retail court.

Now for the bigger news: "The project will replace the building's signature green argon exterior lighting with a modern LED system," Brown writes. The LED tubes will be sort of like what they have at the Omni.

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Gesler

A rendering of the new observation deck.

Reunion Tower will finally be reopening "soon," with a slew of renovations planned to make it bigger and glossier. Judy Pesek, a partner at the design firm responsible for the project, laid out the planned renovations to a crowd gathered on the tower's observation deck.

The renovations will include a new ticket office at the base, including walls of latticed metal meant to evoke the geodesic nature of the tower; a 52-foot interactive electronic terminal that will ring the inside of the observation deck; and cables to the hard-to-see-past mesh barrier.

Also on the outside will be new high-powered telescopes, through which you can read the shirts of people entering the Perot a mile to the north. (The crowd was assured that you won't be able to make out anything name-tag sized or smaller.) Above the observation deck will be a new café/bar run by Wolfgang Puck, who already runs the tower's other restaurant, Five Sixty.

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City of Dallas

The biggest tip-off that the above picture is a rendering of Victory Park and not a photo isn't the color saturation or its overall sketchbook quality. It's the presence of human beings, who have tended to steer clear of the rather forbidding development when there's not a Mavs game or a Lady Gaga concert.

Enter Fort Worth-based Trademark Property, which was brought in last year in hopes of breathing new life into the project. So far, Trademark has mostly busied itself with envisioning new parking garages. But starting last week, they began dropping details of a more comprehensive plan to remake Victory Park.

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Try not to pee here.

Are you excited about the George W. Bush Presidential Center? We're so excited. Not quite excited enough to fight our way through the throng of ex-presidents and "Bush-Cheney Alumni" attending the dedication tomorrow, but pretty goddamn enthused nonetheless.

So, it appears, are a few SMU students and some random non-affiliated individuals, who are celebrating the not-quite-opened center in a style W. himself would have once appreciated: with a little (alleged) drug use, some drinking, and a round of exuberant public urination.

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Via.

The last time I set foot in Valley View Center three or four years ago, it was eerily reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic zombie flick, and not the old-school kind with the undead lurching forward with laughable slowness. The zombies that come to mind are the type that are puma-quick and would have no trouble overtaking their prey across the depopulated expanse of brown tile.

For at least the past year, a plan has been taking shape to transform the mall and its surroundings from dreary movie set into the thriving center of commerce it was 20 years ago. Commercial real estate developer Scott Beck purchased Valley View last year, envisioning the construction "centralized urban village."

The big reveal came today when Beck and city planners presented their grand vision for the Valley View area And "grand" might actually be an understatement. This is a $10 billion-plus development on 450 acres bounded by Preston Road, LBJ, the Tollway, and Alpha Road. We're talking 1,000 hotel rooms, 5,000 upscale apartments and condos, 4 million square feet of office space, plus generous amounts of space dedicated to entertainment and retail. Pretty much all that will remain is Sears, JC Penney, and the AMC theater, and those will all have new digs. There will be European-style "bullet trolleys," 20 acres of green space, and connection, via bike trails, to White Rock Lake.

The whole thing has been dubbed Dallas Midtown.

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When I read a story in The Dallas Morning News this morning about a contest for ideas to link the Trinity River to downtown and saw that the contestants were required to include the city's stupid underwater proposed toll road on top of the river in their submissions, my first temptation, of course, was to write something sophomoric, irresponsible, counter-productive and unbecoming of a citizen of my years. Actually, that was also my second and third temptation.

The contest is called the "Connected City Design Challenge," sponsored by the CityDesign Studio, a worthy outfit as far as I know, and the Trinity Trust, a pro-toll road lobby and huckster outfit that I privately refer to as the Trinity Untrustworthy. So how much can we really expect?

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