QUIT PLAYIN: Jim Schutze and I Listen!

By Vincent L. Hall

I love Jim Schutze! I hate Harlan Crow’s ugly building.

So it was a no-brainer for me to post Jim Schutze’s latest, well-justified rant on my Facebook page. As someone who has pursued writing styles since the 7th grade, no one is more entertaining and substantive. And generally, the best editorialists are one or the other. Jim is both and beyond. He can paint a picture to posit you into his perspective.

Harlan Crow is, by any standard, a wealthy man and a Dallas legacy. But, in my humble opinion, he is also a throwback to the “old Dallas” patriarchy and empire. When it comes to greed, Dallas business tycoons are mostly assholes and elbows. You’ll figure that out before church lets out next Sunday.

Listen to the profundity and symmetry of Schutze’s thought process. He backs up his decision to write on a given topic, researches it, and then crams 100 pages into less than 500 words. It is no small feat. Jim Schutze and I listen!

“It’s really interesting to me to watch the Dallas city council and mayor operate in today’s weakened media environment.

The general collapse of local media and aggressive local news coverage has allowed or encouraged the council to collapse into a kind of spineless puddle, which we must assume was always its natural state, absent any external pressure to do better.

This week the entire council except for one member engaged in a gag-worthy display of groveling that I just can’t imagine happening back when they had to worry about the coverage.

Paul Ridley alone voted against a measure that will wipe out 80 homes immediately and another 170 soon after, allowing a billionaire land baron to expand his quirky kingdom at the expense of affordable housing.

Instead, they fell over themselves to kiss the ring of the big guy, uber-right-wing land baron Harlan Crow, who is building a personal fiefdom around the old Parkland Hospital on Maple Avenue.

City staff had urged the council not to approve Crow’s request to crater residential zoning that had been in place for decades, wiping out 80 dwellings. The city’s plan commission agreed with staff and recommended denial.

But everything changed when the issue got to the council. All of a sudden, Crow was a hero and the Kingdom of Harlania was invincible.”

Harlania? Ooooweee, when I grow up, I want to write just like that!

For those who don’t know the history, Harlan Crow owns the Anatole Hotel and has financed two failed campaigns, namely, the Dallas Convention Center and the Omni downtown. In addition, he paid good money to finagle the citizens of this city into voting against their best interests. But in true Dallas electoral fashion, the White vote was split, and the Black vote sunk his ship.

My dad was a lifelong gambler, and the one thing he taught me is that you can beat a rich player back, but you can never beat him. You can win his money, but the “house man” will win it all back if you play long enough.

That was Jim’s lament. If you drive by the once beautiful corner of Oak Lawn and Maple, you are blinded by the drab, brick monstrosity with no warmth or aesthetic qualities. It looks like a four-million-square-foot tract home. It was once the old
Parkland Hospital, and now the “Neo-Trumpian” compound just obscures the landscape.

There is no impressive art or horticulture, just a hideous, towering stack of bricks interrupted by a few columns and windows. The sit-com family we know as “The Munsters” lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. If the City of Dallas was doing its job, that’s where this gaudy gargantuan of a building would be.

But yawl’s Mayor and all but one city council member allowed “Hungry Hungry Harlan” to lord over the city staff and the families in that area more significantly. Dallas needs housing and not an exaggerated replica of “Massa’s” colonial-style mansion!

You may not have guessed it by now, but I love me some Jim Schutze, and I hate Harlan Crow’s ugly building. Crow proves that Dallas accommodates the rights of the rich (read “The Accommodation”) and ignores the rights of its regulars.

Vincent L. Hall is an author, activist, and an award-winning columnist.