| District 1's Time Capsule |
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from Roy Appleton's DMN blog:
The Bishop Avenue “complete streets” redo will be officially marked at a Nov. 20 ribbon-cutting. Time:10 a.m. Place: Bishop at Colorado Boulevard.
Besides the celebratory words, a time capsule of Oak Cliff memorabilia will be buried nearby. And neighborhood associations, crime watch groups, individuals in City Council District 1 can participate.
“What can your neighborhood contribute?” asks a flier from District 1 Council member Delia Jasso, a project sponsor along with Methodist Dallas Medical Center. “A letter, photograph, a list of current officers, small electronics …GET CREATIVE!!!!”
The capsule will be reopened in 2027, a mere 15 years on. (How will Bishop at Colorado look then?) It measures 12 inches by 12 inches by 16 inches with an opening diameter of 9 inches. So don’t get carried away.
Deliver your items to Jasso’s City Hall office, 1500 Marilla, Room 5FS by 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9.
“I’m hoping someone will donate an iPod with music of the time or a flash drive with photographs,” said Gary Sanchez, aide to Jasso.
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| Sharrock Park Historic Overlay |
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News from Scott Griggs
 A few months back, Scott Griggs spoke during the Old Oak Cliff Conservation Leagues' Neighborhood Symposium on his work toward saving an old structure that has virtually been untouched since it was constructed around 1847. The Sharrock/Niblo Farmstead encompasses several historic structures and sites dated circa 1847 that are associated with Everard Sharrock Jr. and Dr. Grady Niblo Jr. A significant property must meet 3 of 10 designation criteria. This property has been determined to meet 8.
The site of these historic structures was originally owned by Evarard Sharrock, Jr. and most recently associated with Dr. Grady Niblo, Jr. and has a long history of documented ownership dating form the Peters Colony settlement.
The historic structures remaining today include a mid-nineteenth century log cabin and log barn as well as a root cellar and well. A newer plank barn, a tin chicken coop, and a farmhouse are located on the site as well, but considered non-contributing to the overall historic overlay.
Preservation and Conservation are important to District 3. Sharrock Park, which is home to the oldest existing buildings in North Texas, is nestled against Grady Niblo Estates and PD 701. On Thursday, November 15 at 1:30pm at Dallas City Hall, this historic site will come before the City Plan Commission and take another big step toward Historic Landmark Designation.
I hope you will join me in supporting this Historic District Overlay and preserving the oldest building in North Texas at it’s original location.
http://griggsfordallas.com/?infobox=grady-niblo-historic-buildings
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News from Scott Griggs:
 You may have noticed some construction between the levees at Westmoreland, and wondered what is happening. The City of Dallas is building an underground soil/bentonite cut-off wall along the levees to decrease the risk of water going under the levees and thereby collapsing the levees.
By way of background, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deemed the levees unacceptable in 2009. Following this determination, the Federal Emergency Management Agency threatened to redraw the 100-year floodplain maps as if the levees were not present. FEMA is requiring that the levees be certified to the 100-year flood standard in order avoid the redrawing of the floodplain maps without the levees.
Unfortunately, the Corps is no longer in the levee certification business. The Corps, however, has publicly stated that the probability of a levee collapse due to water going under the levees (the event the cut-off wall will mitigate) is 1 in 100,000 years even without the cut-off wall built.
Since the Corps is no longer in the levee certification business and FEMA is requiring the levees be certified or the floodplain maps will be redrawn, the City of Dallas hired an engineering and consulting firm at considerable expense. The engineering and consulting firm indicated that if the City of Dallas hired the firm to build an expensive cut-off wall, the firm would certify the levees.
As you can see, the cut-off wall is now under construction and following the completion of the construction, the firm will certify the levees and FEMA will redraw the floodplain maps with the levees present.
see: http://griggsfordallas.com/?p=901 |
| Historic preservation and green building:
Are they opponents or are they allies?
(to read the edc magazine requires logging in, however, it is free & worth your while)
For too long historic preservation and green building movements have been eyeing each other warily as if they were opponents.
 In reality, the movements are natural allies with much more in common than any differences they may have. It’s time for them to unite and seize vast opportunities to improve the environmental performance and longevity of buildings, both new and old. Now a new report developed by leading advocates for each movement has brought disciplined analysis to the debate, adding compelling fuel to the fire to merge efforts.
Earlier this year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Cascadia Green Building Council authored The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse1, which was the first definitive study to address a key question: Is it greener to retrofit or to demolish and build new? Skanska participated in the study, bringing vast experience from across building types in both new construction and retrofit.
The findings — long suspected but never as painstakingly demonstrated — showed that in almost all cases, retrofit yields better environmental outcomes than demolition and new construction.
Using life-cycle analysis, the study concluded that it can take up to 80 years for a new energy-efficient building to compensate, through  more efficient operations, for the negative climate change impacts created during construction. Most building types in most climates will require 20-30 years. When you consider only environmental costs and benefits, the lesson from the study was quite clear: fix it first. Because buildings consume more than 40 percent of the nation’s energy and emit nearly 40 percent of carbon pollution, they hold the potential for vastly improved environmental performance in both new construction and adaptive reuse of existing buildings.
It’s here that the two movements can come together to become a powerful force for change, working together to accomplish at leastthree related outcomes:
First, promote both capital and operating costs in decision making. Too often, our real estate sector employs pre-bubble logic to design buildings at a lower initial cost without consideration for even modest investments that would greatly reduce longer-term operating costs. In fact, many institutions and government agencies are explicitly prevented from offsetting initial investments that improve building performance with future savings in operational costs. This practice misses a huge opportunity to reduce the total cost of ownership, reduce pollution and reduce the risk of energy-cost escalation.
Second, we need to recognize a broader range of economic costs and benefits in our decision making. Today, we externalize many environmental and health impacts, transferring costs to future generations or others beyond our lot lines. A group called Economics of Change2 is trying to address these shortcomings by creating a new investment model for green building — one that makes sense in a world where investment managers are driven by the need to show profit on a quarterly basis.
Third, we need new ways to value building attributes that may be difficult to measure but are enormously important. Neighborhood texture, beauty, commerce, social capital and walkability are just some of the qualities shaped by individual buildings. For example, at the University of Virginia — my alma mater — there are many wonderful new buildings. But the Rotunda, designed by Thomas Jefferson close to 200 years ago, is the one used as the university’s logo, as well as for existing buildings in every community. Today, we don’t have the tools or practices to adequately value existing buildings in decisions between retrofitting versus demolition and new construction.
Green building and historic preservation are growing closer. Now is the time to develop a public and shared agenda. With a mutual set of national and local priorities, there is much we could accomplish. And with our economy still sputtering, the need is urgent for a real estate sector that promotes historic preservation and green building as two sides of the same coin.
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