LUNCH WITH ED OAKLEY

Today I had lunch with Councilman Ed Oakley (pictured above, with his hand in a chocolate cake) and Peggy Levinson. We ate at Al Biernats. Ed ordered a cup of the blue-cheese-and-potato-soup and chicken caesar salad. I love Ed. I wanted to talk to him about a couple of things. Here’s what he had to say about the Dallas Design District and his beloved, The Trinity.

The Trinity project first. When he talks about it, Ed gets all excited and, frankly, until we had lunch I was bordering on clinical D.; his enthusiasm pulled me right out of it. Thank you Ed. He had just come back from a meeting where they discussed the naming — or renaming, I should say — of Industrial Boulevard. “This is going to become the Main Street of Dallas,” Ed said, pretty pleased with his sound bite. He told us that “Riverside Drive” was already taken. Too bad, that would have been perfect. Anyway, after the first of the year there is going to be a town hall gathering, for residents to have their say and to figure out a)if the street should be renamed and b)if it is renamed, which part of the street will be renamed. Sounds like a long meeting.

Ed also allowed that investors and developers are running up and down the Trinity which (I had no clue) runs some 26 miles from Lancaster to Farmers Branch. “There is so much opportunity that no two investors are looking at the same sites,” Ed said. “Right now, 80% of the development on the Trinity is functionally obsolete.”

Of course, as much as I love Farmers Branch. I really don’t care what gets developed up there. I care about the Design District. Rumors are flying like bats at twilight (sorry). I had actually heard that Joe Minton was leaving Slocum Street (he isn’t, that was a rumor) and that Restoration Hardware was coming to the Design District (it isn’t, at least not yet). Which is why I wanted to buy Ed blue-cheese-and-potato-soup in the first place. When Peggy and I asked in particular about the impact of all of this on the Dallas Design District, Ed got pensive. No one had ever asked him about that before, he said. I pressed, wanting to know if he felt the Design District was in a perilous position, with encroaching multi-use: retail, condos, entertainment, etc. He realized, only at that moment, that no cadre of showroom owners or managers — whether they owned property or (more likely) leased it — had ever shown up as a group or individually, to influence the process, zoning changes, etc. etc. “Perhaps we could have set aside a zone for the Design District years ago, but no one spoke up.”

Ed also told Peggy and me about the search lights that are up and visible from the Commerce Street Bridge, tracing the actual size and shape of the Calatrava Bridge. That was a much happier subject. He said we should take in the lights, then run over to Oak Cliff to the newly remodeled Belmont Motel, a Dilbeck design — no two rooms alike — basically the coolest thing to hit Dallas in ages. But I can’t write about this because Todd wants to. He called it. So read his blog.