Sweeping the Cycletrack

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Bill Chance

There are a lot of cycling events in Dallas, this time of year… even though the weather is extremely iffy. It can be freezing, wet, windy, or even hot – but at least it won’t be toxic, like the days of summer.

There were three things bicycle-wise I wanted to do on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but I didn’t commit to them (in this day and age, lack of commitment is a “maybe” on a facebook event) because my son Lee was in for the holidays from New Orleans (my other son was in New York with some friends) and I wanted to be free to spend some time with him.

What was I thinking? He has better things to do than to hang out with me.

The first event was an eleven o’clock sweeping at the cycletrack that runs over the Jefferson Street Viaduct.

In its never ending quest to climb out of the basement of the worst city for cycling in the US – one thing that Dallas did was establish a two-way cycle track across the Trinity River on the Jefferson Street bridge. I think it is semi-temporary and the route will move to the Houston Street bridge once the trolley route has been constructed there – but that will be years into the future.

The route is a lot of fun – one of my favorite rides in the city. When you think of cycling infrastructure that is used for transportation rather than recreation you begin to think in terms of “choke points” – place where you can’t cross easily or safely on a bicycle. Classic choke points are highways, rail lines, and rivers. A huge one in Dallas is the Trinity River and its river bottoms – it divides the metroplex in half and makes it impossible to commute the short distance downtown from Oak Cliff. Routes are opening up – such as the Santa Fe Trestle crossing, but they suffer from lack of connections on each end.

The Jefferson Viaduct Cycletrack was a godsend. It runs right from the heart of Oak Cliff into the center of downtown and is a great commuting route with a killer view from the top of the bridge.

View from the high point of the Jefferson Viaduct Cycletrack, Trinity River, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Lanes on the Jefferson Viaduct from Oak Cliff into downtown, Dallas.

The problem was that the city didn’t do a very good job of cleaning the track and it has been collecting a lot of junk, rocks, and dirt… and especially that bane of delicate bicycle tires, broken glass.

So on Saturday, local bicyclists banded together and a group was organized to sweep the entire mile and a half length. I wanted to go but didn’t realize until the last minute that I was able to work it into my schedule. I loaded up my car, dug out an old push broom from the garage and drove out. I have been trying to reduce the amount of driving I do (and have been more successful than I imagined) but today the timing was too tight so I cheated and drove. I parked in the old semi-abandoned parking garage (the place where I took the photos of Reunion Arena with fireworks after the Omni Hotel light show), walked out, and started sweeping.

Working in several crews spread out we swept the whole length in a little over an hour and a half. It was surprisingly fun, though my back reminded me of it the next day.

Sweeping on the Jefferson Street Cycletrack, Dallas, Texas

Sweeping in the other direction, towards Oak Cliff

SCABhenge

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Bill Chance

Closeup of the crazing in the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The last moments of the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

I have always been fascinated by ice as a sculptural medium. It is cheap, versatile, and, most importantly, temporary. It is fixed in time. What you see now is totally unique, it will never be repeated.

The coolest ice sculptures were Dane Pennington’s Transcendence – from the Arts District a couple years ago. Larger than life figures and monoliths slowly melted – releasing stones that were imprisoned within. I kept going downtown day after day to watch them melt.

Transcendence, on the first night.

After a day of melting in the rain

A few weeks ago, I went on (and wrote about) a fun bike ride organized by Dallas Cycle Style. It started at, and was part of, The Dallas Contemporary 35th anniversary celebration. Out in front of the Contemporary was an ice sculpture called SCABhenge, built by the Socialized Contemporary Artists Bureau.

It had been out all night and the ice had crazed and was falling apart. I was there for its final demise, melting in the Texas afternoon.

If you watch this time lapse video closely, you can see a few bicycles from our group go by.

Dallas Contemporary Street Art Bike Tour

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Bill Chance

First, let me tell a little story. It’s a story I’ve told too many times before, and if you know me, you’ve probably heard it more than once. But if I type it out here, maybe I can get it out of the way, and quit repeating myself.

When I first moved to Dallas, in 1981, I had no money (and I have no money now… how does that work?) and lived with some friends in Oak Cliff until I saved enough to get an apartment. I rode the bus down Sylvan and then across the Trinity River on Commerce into Downtown, where I worked in the Kirby Building (now converted into condominiums). The bus would go past the Belmont Hotel every day – I think it was abandoned at the time. It was a very nasty area in those years – if you stood on that corner very long you would probably get your throat cut.

I would tell people, “That Belmont property is so cool. Someone needs to buy it and fix it up. It sits up on a hill with a great view of downtown – wonderful Dallas Art Deco architecture. It’s a shame, somebody needs to do something.”

They would reply, “You are crazy. You’ll get your throat cut down there.”

Now, thirty years later, the Belmont is restored into a cute little boutique hotel, it boasts a famous restaurant, and the area around it is booming with cool hipness. I was thirty years ahead of my time… but then again, a stopped watch is right twice a day.

Thats out of the way….

Saturday the Dallas Contemporary was celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and they contacted Amanda Popken of Dallas Cycle Style to set up a bike ride from their location to look at a series of murals that they had commissioned/sponsored/managed in a few different spots. This looked like a lot of fun.

I decided to ride my vintage Technium instead of my commuter bike – in my constant efforts to keep the thing working I have rebuilt the rear wheel, lacing new spokes around a new hub and cassette and truing the thing – so I wanted to give it a try. I rode my bike to the train station for the ride downtown and, as always, right after I bought my ticket for the DART train at the Arapaho station, the train pulled in. You have to cross a street through a tunnel to get to the platform, so I usually miss my train and am therefore late for whatever I have planned. This time I hauled ass down the tunnel and caught it right as it was pulling out. The transit gods smiled on me that day.

There was a good bunch of bicyclists and we headed out from the Dallas Contemporary down to Commerce and across the river to the Belmont – following the bus route I remembered from thirty years ago. Along the side of the cliff up to the hotel three murals were painted. The first by Shepard Fairey (he’s best known for the Obama poster), the second by JM Rizzi, known as JMR, and the third by local artists Sour Grapes.

Bike tour group in front of the Belmont Hotel murals.
(click to enlarge)

Shepard Fairey mural at the Belmont Hotel, Dallas, Texas.

Sour Grapes mural at the Belmont Hotel, Dallas, Texas.

Closeup of the Sour Grapes mural at the Belmont Hotel, Dallas, Texas.
(click to enlarge)

One really cool part of the ride was that each stop had a talk by a docent – Erin Cluley from Dallas Contemporary who talked about the process of setting up the murals and getting the artists into town and working. I was particularly interested in how the out-of-town artists adapted their work to the more conservative attitudes here and what they thought of the city in general.

Erin Cluley, the docent giving a talk on the murals in front of the Belmont Hotel

From the Belmont, we went down the street and around the corner to Trinity Groves – a very interesting area of restaurant incubation. There were more murals by Shepard Fairey and JMR, plus some work by FAILE – a pair of Brooklyn based artists that had an amazing exhibition back at the Contemporary.

The murals from
Trinity Groves.

Shepard Fairey mural at Trinity Groves.

FAILE mural at Trinity Groves.

FAILE uses the year 1986 in their work – the year of the Challenger Disaster.

Murals by FAILE and Shepard Fairey, Trinity Groves, Dallas, Texas.

Bike tour stopping to look at a mural by JMR. The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and Downtown Dallas in the background.

It was time to ride back to the Contemporary, where there are murals by Fairey and JMR.

Back at the Dallas Contemporary.
(click to enlarge)

Shepard Fairey mural at the Dallas Contemporary.

JMR mural at the Dallas Contemporary.

The ride was a lot of fun and very educational – now I’m going to be looking for murals all over the city.

Carrollton Collages

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Bill Chance

To get to the Carrollton Festival at the Switchyard I rode my bike to the Arapaho Red Line DART station – hung my bike on the transit hook and rode downtown (as always, I was a minute late, missed my train, and was twenty minutes late downtown – I need to cut that crap out), met a friend, and we then rode the Green line out to Carrollton. It would have been quicker to drive my car down Beltline (to get anywhere in Dallas you start out driving down Beltline Road) – but then I would have had to find a place to park, plus there is a lot of freedom and flexibility in having a bicycle. With a bicycle and a DART pass – I can go anywhere.

At any rate, heading back downtown, waiting for the train, I had the time to look around at the artwork on the Carrollton station. To my uneducated, ignorant, and untrained eye, DART has done an admirable job of adding artwork to its train stations – at least as far as a giant government bureaucracy can be expected to go. Maybe I should do some blog entries on some of my favorites….

At the Carrollton station – elevated high in the air (cool view from up there) over where I suppose the old switching yard might have been, I noticed all these little windows cut into the concrete pillars supporting the roof structure. In each window was an old photograph combined with, or framed by, pieces of found metal. It made for a series of interesting and entertaining collages. The time spent waiting for the train was reduced by me dashing up and down, looking into the little windows at the parade of aged faces and arranged fragments of history.

Later, at home, an internet search led me quickly to the artist, James Michael Starr. Although, he seems to be unhappy with the initial installation – everything seems to have worked out and his collages are there for the enjoyment of the unwashed masses. The bits of metal seem to be mostly artifacts that the artist was able to dig up around the area, now on display, high in the air… forever waiting for the next train.

Collage by James Michael Starr, Carrollton DART station.

Fourteen and a Bonus

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Bill Chance

Now that the bicycle photo scavenger hunt for October that Bike Friendly Richardson did is over I wanted to do an entry with my photos and write about the riding. The idea was to ride a bike around the city and take photos of sculptures or fountains with your bike in the picture. There were fourteen sculptures and a map to help you out.

I did all fourteen sculptures (and a bonus) in three rides. It would not have been too hard to ride them all at once – but I didn’t have a whole day. As it was – it was a lot of fun. Quite a few folks did the hunt and posted their photos – pretty cool.

The photos are in the order I took them – the numbers on each description are the ones given on the original scavenger hunt list. These are all hosted on Flickr – click on an image to open up the flickr page.

I had a little time one Saturday Afternoon so I decided to take a quick loop and grab a few sculptures that weren’t too far away. The day was overcast – terrible light for photography… but nice, cool, and windless for bike riding.

14.2 mile loop

4) The Block Cylinder Sculpture – This one is the closest to my house, though it is more isolated from the rest of the sculptures. I rode over there, realized I had forgotten my tripod, then rode home and picked it up. This is an HDR photo made from three shots at different exposures. The day was overcast, the light was terrible.

7) City Hall Fountain – I rode across Highway 75 on Arapaho and was almost hit by someone making a left turn – rushing to avoid an oncoming truck, they didn’t see me. Another HDR image. I tried to take some shots by riding by and hitting the remote release… but that didn’t work very well. Need to work on that technique with a model on a bike and me behind the lens.

1) Humpty FOL Sculpture – Nearby, next to the library – this is the smallest sculpture on the list. It’s a nice peaceful reading area on the north side of the library.

12) Horse Sculpture – Rode down to Beltline to get this photo. The light was bad (still overcast) and the parking lot full of cars… didn’t work too hard – took the photo and took off.

11) Asian Sculptures – After crossing 75 on Beltline into Downtown Richardson, I popped up a couple blocks to get this shot. The DFW ChinaTown center is an old strip shopping area now dedicated to a wonderful selection of Asian Dining Establishments. Everything from Vietnamese Pho, to Ramen, to bargain Sushi, to Dim Sum, to Korean Bar-B-Que and everything in between. They have a whole collection of concrete statuary littering the parking lot. I chose to pose my bike, helmet, and glasses with this guy. I should have gone back with an extra tire and tube and had him pose with a pump in his hand… call it “Fixing a Flat.” I know that sounds disrespectful – but it’s only concrete decorations.

A couple weeks later I took the DART train downtown for a Bonnie and Clyde historical bicycle tour – but the event was rained out. I had my camera, so I rode back to the Galatyn station and rode around, trying to get as many as I could. I would have finished, but the sun set before I grabbed the last three. It was another overcast day, with spitting rain – again, terrible light – but it is what it is.

20.4 mile route (plus another ten miles or so on my trip to downtown)

14) Galatyn Park Fountain – Right off of the DART train is this fountain. Everybody likes this thing. If you look in the background, you can see a train pulling into the station.

9) Critter Garden – Only a little ways north is this familiar group of sculptures – a childrens’ playground along the nature trails that loop through the creek bottom.

6) Palisades Sculpture – I crossed 75 on the trail by the Heights Church, then made my way down to this one. The Palisades Tower piece is one of the sculptures on the list I was not familiar with. I had to lie down in the wet, muddy grass to get this shot – I need to re-do it in brighter light so I can get a little bit better depth of field. Another shot.

5) UTD Sculpture – This sculpture, informally titled “Love Jack” was really hard for me to find. I thought I knew my way around the UTD campus… and I thought that I knew where it was… but I was wrong on both counts. It was fun circling around and around, up and down sidewalks, past all the student and cool buildings – all over the campus for a total of a few miles and well over an hour – but I was getting pretty frustrated and was going to give up when I finally spotted the thing.

3) Heights Rocket Sculpture – this is the only sculpture on the list that I don’t like. It’s fine, as it is, but I don’t like what it represents. See, for a couple of generations, there was a famous rocket slide piece of playground equipment. It was removed due to “safety concerns and federal ADA regulations.” Instead of a cool retro playground they got this monstrocity. I am not happy.

10) Silver Tower Sculpture – This was another one I was not familiar with, though I have driven through the nearby intersection hundreds of times. It is set off behind a drug store and a parking lot – hard to see from the road. Cool, though. After I left – even though it had been a long day, it was starting to rain, and I was tired…- I wanted to get the last three sculptures, but the sun was setting so I clicked on my lights and headed home.

Another overcast day, not much light – but not much time left. So I headed out for one last ride to catch the last three sculptures. Ironically, these are the three that I am most familiar with – the ones I ride past the most – and the easiest ones for me to get. Also, I wanted to get one bonus sculpture – one that nobody else had bagged.

12.6 mile loop

13) DART Spring Valley Station Sculpture – I go by this one on my commute to work, but never really looked at it. It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

8) Box Sculpture – I found this sculpture a while back and wrote a blog entry about it. I didn’t notice the name “Egri” welded into the steel until now – that confirms that the sculpture is called “Strange Romance” by a late sculptor named Ted Egri from Taos, New Mexico.

2) DART Arapaho Station Sculpture – This sculpture is as familiar to me as any – I ride out of that station a lot. I have used some photos of it in a blog entry before. The sculpture is called Gateway by Hans Van de Bovenkamp. There is a bigger version in Oklahoma City.

Bonus Sculpture – I stumbled across this bronze a while back. It’s hard to find – you will never spot it from the road. But it is definitely in Richardson – but I don’t think I’m ready to say where.

Community Beer Bicycle Swap Meet

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Bill Chance

October in Texas is a special time. With the killer summer heat broken – we have a short time of pleasant, comfortable weather… no more than a few weeks before the violent swings of winter set in. There is so much crammed into this sliver of time – there is a desperate feeling of having to gulp it all down – do everything possible before it is too late.

That’s especially true of bicycling events. October is Bicycle Friendly Oak Cliff’s Cyclesomatic – a month long series of rides and events. I’m trying to do as many as I can.

So on Saturday I loaded my bike onto the DART line and headed downtown – then wound through the traffic under I35 and on to the Community Beer Company for a Mosaic IPA and a swap meet. Thinking about it, I’ve never driven a car to Community – but have been there for a couple of brewery bike rides… in February and a couple weeks ago.

I am a sucker for bicycle swap meets. I’ve been to a few, here, here and here. Sometimes you find something beautiful. My combination of a lack of pride and dire poverty means that I’m able to get by with old gear that is too worn out for the original owner.

Today, I didn’t buy too much – two dollars for a seat bag for my Technium and ten bucks for a new mini frame pump…. Still, it was cool seeing the bike stuff, talking to folks, and having a bit of brew. A nice day… getting while the getting is good.

Live Music at Community Beer

The good folks from Oak Cliff Cargo Bicycles

Nothing better than vintage bikes.

Bicycle Swap Meet

Tomorrow’s Legacy

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Bill Chance

Three more photographs I took as part of the Bicycle Friendly Richardson – bike photo scavenger hunt – Bicycle Ride and Seek.

This is Tomorrow’s Legacy by Jerry Sanders – located in the Palisades complex across highway 75 from Galatyn.

My bicycle parked next to “Tomorrow’s Legacy” by Jerry Sanders, Richardson, Texas
(click to enlarge)

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

My bicycle parked next to “Tomorrow’s Legacy” by Jerry Sanders, Richardson, Texas

“Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Tomorrow’s Legacy” by Jerry Sanders, Richardson, Texas

Milk Crate Bicycle

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Bill Chance

I’m working on DIY solutions for storage on my bicycle. Looking around at useful stuff I see, one of the most common, hipster, useful, cheap, and crunchy things to do is to simply bungee a plastic milk crate on to your rear rack.

Milk Crate Bike in the reading area in Klyde Warren Park.
(click to enlarge)

The Dallas Morning News Reading & Games Room area in Klyde Warren Park is one of my favorite spots in the city. It is a quiet, leafy, relaxing spot, with games and stuff to look at. I was there for a few minutes to catch my breath. The powers that be came by and made this woman move her bike (it was leaning against a tree) – but she didn’t seem to be too bothered by it all. I’m afraid that I had already given in to The Man and had my bike locked up on the official bike racks.

So sue me.

Galatyn Park Fountain

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Bill Chance

Another photo I took as part of the Bicycle Friendly Richardson – bike photo scavenger hunt – Bicycle Ride and Seek.

This is the fountain at Galatyn Park.

Fountain at Galatyn Park, Richardson, TX
(click to enlarge)

Bicycle Ride and Seek

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Bill Chance

The fountain in back of the Richardson Library.
(click to enlarge)

Bike Friendly Richardson has organized a bicycle photo scavenger hunt for October. The idea is to ride a bike around the city and take photos of sculptures or fountains (with your bike in them – to prove you really did it, I guess). There is a list of fourteen sculptures and a map to help you out.

This is a lot of fun and right up my alley. I’ve already taken photos of my bike in front of a lot (maybe most) of these already, though I’ll do it again in October. I rode around the other day and grabbed a few – now I’m working on post-processing the photos… uploaded a few to my Flickr page.

The cylinder sculptures at the Block.

I sort of wanted to use my old Raleigh Technium for the photos – it’s a bit more photogenic than my crunchy commuter bike. But I don’t want to pack my camera crap into a backpack and lug it around the city. I’ve pretty much worked out how to carry my camera in a pannier and my tripod bungee corded to the rack in the back of my commuter bike.

So it’s the commuter in the photos. Which is cool too.

The sculpture in the outdoor reading area at the library.

A couple older photos I had on here of the Richardson fountain.

Bill Chance

This is Not Going to Turn Out Well

Tag Archives: bike

Sweeping the Cycletrack

SCABhenge

Dallas Contemporary Street Art Bike Tour

Carrollton Collages

Fourteen and a Bonus

Community Beer Bicycle Swap Meet

Tomorrow’s Legacy

Milk Crate Bicycle

Galatyn Park Fountain

Bicycle Ride and Seek

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