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A cool thing about working in an archive are the discoveries revealed through customer requests. While looking for a photograph of a cemetery, I stumbled across photographs related to the funeral of Mildred Noble. She was the wife of a well-known Dallas gambler from the 1940s named Herbert “The Cat” Noble, who was the intended target of the car bomb that took her life. While I was aware of Noble, this aspect of his story, that his wife was killed instead of him, is one of the many rabbit holes one can go down in the Dallas Public Library archives.

Herbert Noble did eventually die on August 7, 1951, ending a feud with then-Dallas gambling kingpin Lester “Benny” Binion that began in 1946 after Noble refused to pay an increased percentage of his gambling profits demanded by Binion for “protection.” Noble survived at least 10 attempts on his life including multiple shootings in which he was wounded several times and two car bombs in 1949. Ultimately, it was an explosive in his driveway that killed him while he was retrieving mail. His death was featured in Time magazine a week later.

What else happened that year of poor Mildred’s unfortunate demise? I found many fascinating 75-year-old images, all from 1949, which cover a wide range of events. There were other photographs related to organized crime in Dallas, such as a series that shows authorities conducting a police raid on a policy game gambling operation in December 1949. A policy game operates like a lottery, in that people bet on numbers with the intent that their selection is chosen in a drawing. The illegal policy ring was operated in part by the Urban Distribution Company and none other than Benny Binion.

Details Emerge About Rev. Haynes’ Exit from Rainbow PUSH. Roland Martin is a journalist and the CEO of Black Star Network. He says that Rev. Frederick Hanyes III’s abrupt departure from leading Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition was because he didn’t have full autonomy in the role. Martin told a CBS affiliate that “Jackson hadn’t really fully ceded control of the organization he founded in 1971,” but said there was no “bad blood” or “anger” between the two men.

Murders, Violent Crime Continue Declining. There were fewer violent crimes in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the prior year, a trend accelerated by a steep drop in total murders. Violent crime has fallen nearly 20 percent compared to 2023, and there have been almost 30 percent fewer murders. Members of the City Council praise the chief’s violent crime plan, but there’s still concern about the seemingly annual summer increase.

Dallas Stars Draw Las Vegas Knights in First Round. The Stars are the best team in the Western conference, but they’ll have to go through the Stanley Cup champions to get to the second round. Vegas topped Dallas in 2023’s Western Conference Finals, so it’ll be the Stars’ chance to avenge last year’s ending. The series begins Monday at 8:30 p.m. The Mavericks, meanwhile, tip off in their first round series against the Clippers at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday.

“Oh my god,” a friend texted me Monday morning. “Have you seen the DCAD appraisals yet?” A few minutes later, I got another message on Facebook: “These appraisals are insane.”

And so I looked at mine. Casa Erickson is in North Dallas, just off of Forest and Marsh. For the last two years, the valuation of our three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,900-square-foot home built in 1961 has been exactly the same. This year, it increased by more than $85,000, or 26 percent over last year.

“WTF is DCAD’s deal?” another friend asked. Indeed.

So I asked around. A coworker in Oak Cliff’s Elmwood neighborhood didn’t see any increase, but a friend who lives just three blocks north saw her market value go up by almost $71,000, with most of the increase attributed to land value. My land value didn’t go up at all—the increase is solely in the home itself, which hasn’t seen any substantive improvements since last year. 

I’ve talked to people throughout Dallas who saw their property values go up substantially. A homeowner in Old East Dallas saw her home’s improvement value go up by $64,000 and the land by $95,000, but she says in reality, “My house is falling apart around me.” Another who lives off of Westmoreland and Jefferson in Oak Cliff says after her protest was denied last year, she made about $8,000 in repairs and saw her market value go up by $102,000 over last year. A homeowner in Capella Park in southwest Dallas says that homes “are not selling” but says his valuation went up by $212,000. Another property in South Oak Cliff jumped from $117,000 to $230,000. 

And it wasn’t just single-family homes, either. A condo-dweller near Mockingbird Station saw her valuation increase by 18 percent. Bisnow reported that commercial property valuations in Dallas County increased by an average of 21 percent, despite the fact that transactions were down by almost 60 percent last year.  Multifamily property valuations were up 20 percent, retail was up about 10 percent, and industrial properties were up a whopping 50 percent. Offices, which have stagnated the most among these non-residential uses, rose between 5 percent and 10 percent.

So why such large increases?

Prepare to Pay $$ to See Caitlin Clark. Fresh off the NCAA tournament and the WNBA draft, Caitlin Clark’s debut with the Indiana Fever will happen May 3 in Arlington against the Wings. Tickets went on sale today, and season ticketholders got first dibs on that preseason opener. The Wings-Fever game will be subject to dynamic pricing, which means that tickets are already going for more than $120. 

Fruitcake Happening, Probably. A movie based on the Texas Monthly story about the erstwhile Collin Street Bakery accountant who embezzled millions will now star Jennifer Garner. Filming will start this summer in North Texas.

Weather Will Get Very Weathery. We’re due for storms starting this afternoon, and they won’t really go away until Sunday. Hope you mowed your lawn yesterday, and don’t forget to turn off your sprinklers.

You don’t need a demographer to see that Dallas isn’t sharing in the rapid growth of its northern suburbs. This reality is beginning to settle in at City Hall, where, in discussions around land use and other policy decisions, planners wrestle with how to encourage more people to move, and afford to stay, in the region’s largest city.

The trend affects transportation decisions, too. Dallas is now staring at a future where it no longer controls a majority of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board, whose seats are appointed based on the population share of Dallas and the transportation agency’s 12 suburban partners.

DART and the City Council’s transportation and infrastructure committee held a dual meeting on Monday to explore the region’s changing demographics. The population trends show the board makeup flipping as soon as 2025, the next time apportionment gets reviewed, and almost certainly by 2030. (The makeup of board seats is adjusted every five years based on how many people are living in DART’s service area.)

Why is this important? The state statute that created DART tipped the scales to allow the region’s largest city to have a critical eighth seat on the body that sets policy. But since 2010, Dallas’ population has increased by only 9 percent while the surrounding service area has jumped by 40 percent. By 2030, projections show that most of DART’s service population will live outside the city of Dallas for the first time in the agency’s existence.

“I’ve been on the board, at the pleasure of the City Council, for almost three and a half years,” said Trustee Rodney Schlosser, a Dallas appointee who put the report together. “In those three and a half years, I have picked up on what I think is obvious for any of us who are watchful of what’s going on in the region, which is there are differences of opinion between what someone in Dallas might consider to be a priority and what someone in a suburb might consider to be a priority.”

Rev. Frederick Haynes Resigns as CEO of Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Three months after the Rev. Jesse Jackson selected him to succeed him as head of the important civil rights organization, Haynes announced he would be resigning. In a statement to WFAA, the Friendship-West Baptist Church pastor did not detail a reason for his exit but said “[r]est assured that my work in the fight for liberation and freedom continues.”

Sexual Assault Lawsuit Dropped Against Dak Prescott. Attorneys for a woman who sued the Cowboys quarterback for an alleged 2017 sexual assault in the XTC Cabaret parking lot asked the judge to dismiss the case. Prescott has denied the allegations, but the woman can still refile the case later.

Dallas ISD Trustee Speaks After School Walkout. Students at Wilmer-Hutchins High School staged a walkout on Monday, two days after a fellow student snuck a gun past the school’s metal detectors. Ja’Kerian Rhodes-Ewing, 17, shot another student with a .38 revolver in the leg. The district’s trustee, Maxie Johnson, held a community event to question how the incident occurred. Dallas ISD isn’t commenting, pending the ongoing investigation.

In 1935, when the Texas Theater replaced a furniture store in what is now downtown Denton, the city’s town square consisted of a two-story brick courthouse, a row of storefronts, and little else. The theater’s building predates the city’s existing courthouse by five years, and eventually rebranded as the Fine Arts Theatre in 1957.

Since its closure in 1981—and a fire the following year—the structure has essentially sat empty as Denton’s downtown square has grown up around it with shops and restaurants and bars. Used only sporadically for church services or meetings, a critical piece of the city’s history has sat derelict for over four decades. Earlier this month, the Denton City Council approved $1.6 million in tax breaks to help turn the lights back on, bringing back a redevelopment effort from 2018 that cratered under the immense amount of money it would take to fix up the space. 

“If you Google Denton, the Fine Arts Theater is going to come up. It’s a kind of cultural, iconic building,” says Assistant City Manager Christine Taylor. “It’s sitting with a low tax base for the city. It’s not activated.”

One of the partners involved in reopening the theater has been in this situation before, just 40 miles south in Dallas. Jason Reimer was a founding partner with Aviation Cinemas, the entity that turned the similarly-derelict Texas Theatre—built by the same architect, W. Scott Dunne—on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff into a cultural institution. Denton-based NorthBridge Realty Holdings bought the Fine Arts property in 2018 and engaged Reimer to handle its programming and operations. The building is in rough shape, and the money didn’t pencil until the City Council came to the table with tax incentives.

“Whenever it was raining outside, it was raining inside,” says Brad Andrus, a principal at NorthBridge. Post-COVID, the costs of the repairs soared even higher, says Reimer, which made the challenge “insurmountable” for a time. 

More Grumbling Over City Manager Payout. Mayor Eric Johnson doesn’t like that City Manager T.C. Broadnax is getting a year’s salary, $423,246, as he heads to Austin to be their city manager. Johnson wants state lawmakers to ban such payouts. But City Councilmember Adam Bazaldua said the mayor has a “whining tone,” and Councilmember Jaime Resendez said part of the reason Broadnax is leaving is the mayor’s “consistent dishonesty and self-serving agenda.” So it seems like everything is going fine.

Inwood Tavern Gets Pub Thanks to Scheffler. I think we are the last outlet in town to mention that the night Scottie Scheffler won the Masters, he flew back to Dallas and went to the Inwood Tavern. This photo on the bar’s Instagram has been everywhere. Good for the bar. And good for Ryan, who wrote “pee pee poo poo” on the wall behind Scheffler.

Andy Reid Comments on Rashee Rice Hit-and-Run. But he didn’t really say anything. The Chiefs head coach said, “As far as Rashee Rice goes, his situation, I’m leaving that, like we’ve done with most of these, for the law enforcement part of it to take place and then we’ll go from there with that.”

Giraffe Born at Dallas Zoo. The birth happened April 1, but the Zoo officially announced the news yesterday. The baby boy doesn’t have a name yet. My suggestion: T.C. Broadnax.

Dallas’ update to its land use plan, which includes reexamining the city’s predominantly single-family zoning, has been met with significant pushback among vocal residents. But if some conservative state policymakers have their way, the debate could become moot. Lt. Dan Patrick has indicated a desire to at least discuss zoning as it relates to housing affordability in the next legislative session. Some conservative groups have also indicated their support for this legislation.

ForwardDallas, the city’s not-yet-adopted plan, would only inform the city’s land use and zoning in the future. A great deal of concern around single-family neighborhoods centers on where and how to allow for more density—specifically middle or “gentle” density like triplexes, duplexes, and the like. In our April issue, Matt Goodman wrote about how Dallas needs density to survive, and about just how nasty the fight over density has become. 

At a public information session at Samuell Grand Recreation Center recently, a mostly hostile audience took turns at the microphone, reiterating their distaste for the idea of eliminating what they felt protected “the character” of their neighborhoods: single-family zoning. 

There are very real questions about how and where to introduce middle density. But state Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, issued a warning before the discussion began: the harsh reality is that Dallas might not have the final say in its zoning updates. Bryant warned that there is an effort to change zoning “at the state level,” too. He couched this as another way Austin would wrest local control from cities and counties.

“The Legislature passed over the vigorous opposition of myself and others in this last session a bill that began the process of limiting the ability of cities to deal with a large number of matters that relate to us as local citizens,” he said. Bryant was referring to House Bill 2127, the so-called “Death Star” bill that limits city’s abilities to create ordinances that are more strict than state law.

While urbanists and historians have long pointed to the racist history of exclusionary zoning, removing lot size minimums has long been considered somewhat of a “liberal” idea. In fact, four years ago conservative policy analyst Stanley Kurtz warned in the National Review that then Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden planned to “abolish the suburbs” by eliminating single family zoning.

“It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live,” he warned.

D Magazine’s new editor-in-chief wanted to make a splash in 1992. She wanted a celebrity cover, and the Dallas Cowboys’ dashing new quarterback, Troy Aikman, was her No. 1 pick. While the editorial staff knocked around some possible freelance sportswriters to take on the story, Eric Celeste, a 24-year-old editorial assistant, shook his head. “This is the story I’ve been put here to write,” he said. 

Now, an editorial assistant is just a squeak above intern on a magazine’s masthead, and they don’t typically get cover stories, let alone the year’s juiciest assignment. But growing up in Oklahoma, Celeste went to school with one of the top two quarterbacks in the state. The state’s other top quarterback was Aikman. “I was invested,” Celeste says. He told the magazine’s new editor that he would give the story time and energy that no one else would. This was much the same argument he gave Aikman’s team. “I basically challenged him,” Celeste says. “Don’t do this if you just want to half-ass it. I want to actually give a full picture of who you are.”

Over the course of Aikman’s three-month off-season, Celeste met with the athlete on about a dozen occasions, a level of access unimaginable today. Celeste sat in on Aikman’s business meetings, and then they hit up Jason’s Deli. He joined the quarterback at a barbecue that turned into a dance party. (Thus the cover line “Troy Aikman Won’t Dance.”) Sometimes Aikman would pick up the young journalist, and they’d just drive around. 

The 8,000-word story was as in-depth and revealing a portrait as one could write of a celebrity who guarded his nice-guy image like Aikman did. Except for one detail. 

Scottie Scheffler Wins Masters. That makes two Green Jackets already for the 27-year-old Highland Park grad. Pretty decent. Scottie, quit ducking us and come on EarBurner.

Wings Pick No. 5 in Tonight’s WNBA Draft. Consensus of the various mocks I’ve looked at suggests UConn forward Aaliyah Edwards will be the choice here. (The Wings also have the No. 9 pick in the first round.) Aaliyah, quit ducking us and come on EarBurner.

Mark Cuban Reveals Tax Bill. He said he would wire $288 million to the IRS today, which is obviously tax day, as well as my nephew Jonah’s birthday and the day that Joey Ramone died. Mark, quit ducking us and come back on EarBurner.

‘Mavs’ Lose Big. They rested their entire playoff rotation in the regular-season finale, so the 49-point loss, the second-biggest in franchise history, should have an asterisk. (Their first-round series against the Clippers tips off Sunday.) Anyway, Brandon Williams had a season-high 22. Brandon, quit earing us and come on DuckBurner.

Verne Lundquist Retires. The veteran broadcaster, who got his start in Dallas, signed off for the last time at the Masters yesterday. Here is a great story about how he met his wife at Arthur’s. Verne, enjoy your retirement. But also come on EarBurner and show Tim how to stop interrupting guests.