Dallas Will Temporarily Halt Demolitions in What's Left of Historic Tenth Street District

The Dallas City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to stop spending city money demolishing what's left of the Tenth Street neighborhood. A victory, at last, for a historic district being rendered history by bulldozers sicced by city attorneys bearing court orders for demolition. Once the votes were counted and came up 15-0, the gym in the Lake Highlands North Recreation Center, where council was holding its monthly offsite meeting, reverberated as though someone hit a game-winning three-pointer. Carolyn King Arnold, the Oak Cliff council member who proposed this timeout in a May memo, said later she was "thrilled, because it's for the people."And make no mistake: This is a victory for the neighborhood settled by freed slaves. The council did Wednesday what a federal lawsuit could not: For the foreseeable future, city attorneys will no longer parade in front of the Landmark Commission or the City Plan Commission demanding demolitions meant to be rubber-stamped because of a 2010 city ordinance. This area, now on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's most-endangered list, was deemed historic by the City Council in 1993. Since then, about 80 of the 257 contributing structures, the shotguns and Craftsmans and the in-betweens, have been torn down — most, because the city deemed them unsafe.  Continue reading...