Eric Nicholson
Dallas Observer
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Past articles by Eric:
Texas Anti-Towing Activist Also Serial I-35 Rock Thrower, Police Say
Among Texans who feel they've been screwed over by tow companies, Pat Johnson has established himself as something of a hero. Through his website, Texas Towing Compliance, his personal blog, and the advice he's freely dispensed pro bono over the phone on the finer points of towing law, such as... → Read More
In Trinity Golf Club Lawsuit, Dallas City Hall Admits That Its Promises Mean Nothing
Dallas City Hall's response to contractor's lawsuit: It's your fault for believing our promises. → Read More
DART Has Spent $5 Billion on Light Rail. Is It Worth It?
Twenty years ago on Tuesday, Dallas Area Rapid Transit officially got into the light-rail business, opening an 11-mile “starter system” that carried passengers between downtown’s Pearl Station on the north and Oak Cliff in the south (Westmoreland Station on the Red Line, Illinois Station on the Blue Line). Since then,... → Read More
Has Dallas ISD Finally Stopped Hemorrhaging the Middle Class?
Of Dallas ISD's 227 schools, eight are reasonably affluent, meaning half or less of their student populations are poor. Even then, to get to eight, one must count William B. Travis Academy (fourth and fifth grades) separately from William B. Travis Vanguard (sixth through eighth) even though they share a... → Read More
Steve Baxter Went to Extremes After His Son Lost His Basketball Position at Pearce High
On a chill night four days after Christmas, Steve Baxter settled into the molded plastic bleachers in The Colony High School gymnasium and beamed as his younger son, Andrew, took the court for his fifth straight game as the Richardson Pearce Mustangs’ starting point guard. Baxter had ample reason to... → Read More
Dallas' Black Population Faces Much Higher Odds of Arrest for Marijuana than Whites
Marijuana wasn't always illegal in the United States. In colonial times, hemp was used as legal tender in colonial Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. In the 1800s, cannabis was ubiquitous as an ingredient in tinctures and pharmaceuticals. Its highly concentrated extract, hashish, enjoyed a burst of popularity in mid-century, captured in... → Read More
The Real Dallas Millennial Isn't Who You Think
Last week, The Dallas Morning News' real estate oracle Steve Brown, who is still old, reported that goddamned lazy millennials won't get off their parents' couch. This is a real bummer for the real estate industry, which is booming but could boom even harder if millennials could cut their umbilical cords and act... → Read More
Crime, Race and Suspicion Converge on NextDoor in Merriman Park
The Merriman Park/University Manor neighborhood, which sits at the northern tip of White Rock Lake in the liminal space between Lakewood and Lake Highlands, is on alert. In recent days, a handful of residents, most of them with homes that back up to DART's White Rock Station, have had their... → Read More
Fight Over Texas Bullet Train — and Eminent Domain — Heads to Washington
In the four years Texas Central Railway unveiled plans to link Dallas and Houston with the country's first bullet train, officials with the private company have talked a lot about how quickly the line will whisk travelers between two of the country's largest fastest-growing urban areas, about how darn Texan... → Read More
Mayor Rawlings Unveils Vision for Trinity Park, Which Will Be Way Better than Dallas Having the Rangers
On any given day, members of the exclusive City Club can look down from the the 69th floor of the Bank of America Plaza, Dallas’ tallest building, and glimpse the Trinity River as it exists today: a rigid trickle of water confined by a straitjacket of levees, a denuded floodplain... → Read More
The Wild Legal Case at the Heart of Lawyer's Homicide Investigation
Over the past week, Dallas has been the backdrop for what is destined in short order to be made into a TV true-crime documentary. On Friday, officials responding to a North Dallas house fire found the body of Ira Tobolowsky, an attorney from a prominent local family. The fire was soon... → Read More
How Did Dallas Animal Services Get So Broken?
On Monday afternoon, The Dallas Morning News' editorial board reached a conclusion its been building to for months. In the wake of the unspeakably horrific death of Antoinette Brown, who was fatally mauled by a pack of dogs in South Dallas, Dallas Animal Services director Jody Jones has to go. The piece raises several... → Read More
Lake Highlands Finds the Secret to Great Public Schools: Getting Rid of Poor Kids
Erika Estrada never quite fit in with the moms of White Rock Valley. "It's very Stepford," she says. Estrada got an inkling shortly after she and her husband, Rick, bought a spacious ranch-style house on Highedge Drive in 2004 and they were peppered with invitations to living-room Bible studies. She... → Read More
Austin Can Find the Money To Fix Child Protective Services, If It Wants To
Texas' Child Protective Services is in crisis. In the wake of the brutal, March 13 death of 4-year-old Leilana Wright in Grand Prairie, a parade of news report have documented that the agency, through some mixture of incompetence and an acute staffing shortage, is fundamentally incapable, as currently organized, of... → Read More
Self-Appointed Bathroom Cop Catches Dallas Woman Using Women's Restroom
The way things are headed, with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick setting the state's legislative agenda, Texas may very well have its own crack squad bathroom police. In the meantime, it's up to self-appointed enforcers of traditional gender norms to adjudicate which bathrooms strangers should use. Case in point: the man who,... → Read More
At Lake Highlands Town Center, $37 Million in Public Investment Gets Basically Squat
Anyone who's passed the intersection of Skillman Street and Walnut Hill Lane (and who hasn't been reading the Lake Highlands Advocate for the past dozen years) has probably wondered about the shockingly large prairie at the intersection's southeast corner and the pseudo-urban apartment complex/parking garage that's been weirdly deposited in the... → Read More
The Legal Guide to Getting Drunk in Dallas This St. Patrick's Day
In an ideal universe, Dallasites would commemorate Ireland’s patron saint by drinking in moderation, designating drivers and otherwise behaving as sensible grown-ups. This, however, is the real world, which means that thousands of Dallasites will spend St. Patrick’s Day doing the exact opposite — i.e., getting smashed and making all... → Read More
DART Dropped Charges Against Avi Adelman, but the Battle's Not Over Yet
Avi Adelman was arrested on February 9, ostensibly for trespassing on DART’s Rosa Park’s Plaza, but really, the record suggested, because a DART cop didn’t like that he refused to stop taking photographs of paramedics treating a semi-conscious K2 user. A week later, on February 16, DART notified Adelman that... → Read More
9 Stupid Crimes in Dallas, or Why Not to Give Your Wife a Massage
At its most elemental level, government — at least the democratic kind set out in America's founding documents — exists to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens; the pursuit of happiness is more of a rhetorical flourish. Governments perform this function by passing and enforcing laws, most... → Read More
Meet U-47700, the Potent, Newish Painkiller Sending People to Parkland
Prescription opioids — painkillers like oxycodone, hydrocodone and the old standby morphine — kill more Americans than any other drug. In 2014, the official death toll was 18,893, which is probably an undercount but is nonetheless more than three times the number of Americans (5,415) who fatally overdosed on cocaine and more than twice the... → Read More