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From the Department of Ornithology

 

Last Saturday I spotted the elusive Gull-Winged Mercedes.

This was fortuitous but not altogether surprising, as they are usually only sighted on weekends during beautiful weather.

Known nesting places are usually raked-gravel mews behind absurdly high thick hedges in the better zip codes, and they are known to winter mostly in temperature-controlled storage.

Like eagles, they do not flock, but they can be seen in the company of birds with similar plummage. Actually, their owners usually do most of the preening.

While most people will be familiar seeing them in the background of Ralph Lauren print ads, they also can occasionally be seen roosting in close vicinity of five-star restaurants, golf and yacht clubs, and the front valet lot of the Meyerson.

Dreamtime

After what has arguably with few exceptions been the dullest forty-five years of car design, finally some cars are coming around that get my blood pumping.

I nabbed this pic from the Mercedes Facebook page (figured they wouldn't mind)  ... but it doesn't near do it justice. Someone keeps pulling up in front of the restaurant in an SLS AMG just like this one, and the valets do their duty and park it as conspicuously as possible so that mere mortals can bask in its glory and walk away swearing a new purpose in life.

If car companies designed cars like this all along they wouldn't be mere bankrupt companies, they would be nation states.

Step up!

This Afternoon at White Rock Lake Spillway

A view of the refurbishment of one of Dallas' hidden treasures.

 

And the classic White Rock Lake pic ...

More Streetcar Fun, Then and Now

Throckmorton Street, sometime in the 50s, and today with brand new curbs.

Up close, you can still see the bricks along the streetcar tracks.

By the way, the brick pavement on Gaston Avenue between Hall Street and Good-Lattimer which was recently let out to breath for a week, after probably sixty years or more under bitulithic, now has been paved over again with asphalt. Guess we'll see them again in another 60 years!

Meditations on Public Transportation

Lately because of the predominance of SNAFU and FUBAR in my life these days due to The Great Recession, I have been walking a great deal and getting into top shape, if not gaining shin splints, and occasionally I have started ... yes ... riding the bus.

Now, I love buses. I ride them to Mexico frequently. On the whole they are cheap, safe, and they get you there reasonably and with the added benefit that you can sleep along the way. What could be more marvelous?

Its just that over the past 50 years Dallas never has been much of a public transport city. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, that can walk or crawl owns a car so that they may drive instead. There simply has not been any provision for years and years and years for workable public transport. There just hasn't. No, there hasn't. No. No. No.

Well, there were the streetcars.

Used to be, you could hop a streetcar and go all over Dallas for a nickel. While we were working on the documentary about the "Pegasus" sign restoration, I saw films that some trolley-spotter made in the 1950s of Dallas streetcars. Bullet-shaped, they sailed at an appalling speed all over town. Street after street this guy had documented the course of every line. It was breathtaking. So modern.

But, streetcars were privately owned ventures then. Not a Public Good, oddly enough. I guess the government horning-in on private enterprise was a big hoary no-no and would drive them out of business and they knew better how to do it anyway.

Of course they all went out of business.

 

That's my great-grandfather standing in the doorway of the eleventh street trolley outside the Electric Park in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The streetcars in Fort Smith went out of business November 15, 1933 during the Great Depression. Of all times, can you imagine?

Fortunately there are people bringing back the streetcars in Fort Smith to boost tourism and the general well-being of a long-suffering downtown.

The good news in Dallas is that there is a groundswell in city hall to get our streetcar service back online, at least in the 214, and this I heartily support. The tracks are all still there ... its just a matter of peeling back the past 50 years of macadam and putting them to work.

 

This was Throckmorton street this afternoon. Keep scrapin' men, you're almost there!

Gaston Avenue at Gaston Yard, looking West, 6:10PM

While driving around this afternoon I was pleased to happen upon some road construction on lower Gaston which revealed the original brick pavement. I hope they cover it again with new bitulithic and leave it alone.

Of course the romantic in me really wants it all to be brick again, but the tender-footed pussy-wussy suspensions of Hummers and Beemers just can't take a brick street at 50 mph-on-a-residential ... hence McKinney Avenue, originally considered a found jewel, a lady amongst thoroughfares, was hastily stripped bare of her noble bricks and redressed in cheap tarty concrete. A fallen woman.

Brick is meant for thinking and contemplation, pedestrians walking and being neighborly while noble horses with wagons and streetcars and vehicles that putt-putt-along pass by.

My hometown was still replete with brick streets at the time I was born. Later when I was a kid in the '70s we took the highway west of Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake and great stretches of it were brick as well, but when I tried to do an internet lookup to find pictures for this article, all I could find were vague references to it by third parties who figured it was probably apocryphal, but I am here to tell you it was there.

Considering this brick was probably laid in the 1890s, imagine the traffic it saw!

Just Don't Tell John Travolta ...

This entry has kind of an expiration date because a 1943 DC-3 is for sale on ebay right now. If you go NOW (May 9, 2008) you probably can check it out.

Isn't it COOL?

Winged Things

I let too much time go by without commenting on the magnificent flying machines that rumbled over my place continually a couple of weekends ago.

Evidently, they were giving rides to folks at about $450.00 a pop. If I had known, and if somebody would ever buy something from me ever again, I would have gone for it.

These pictures absolutely do not do them justice, but my ride money would be on the B-17 Flying Fortress, sitting in the nose cone. I think I made a model of this once in the `60s. These are also the planes you see taking off from the ice in Huston's "Report from the Aleutians", and coming back in pieces and still landing, which this model was famous for.

This was a B-24 Liberator, still impressive.

This is a Mitchell B-25.

There was also a Mustang zipping around that some guy was able to pilot for a hefty fee, but I just got to film him real quick and I'm not sure the video really does it justice because it looks like a buzzing speck compared to the rolling low frequency growl the big bombers made.