Broken Bottle Blog

Speaking of the Deep Ellum tunnel, just found this video of all the great art work local artists put all over it. According to this post in the Dallas Observers blog unfair park some of the artwork will be held onto and kept somewhere’s else. I was down there about 3 months ago and half the tunnel was already gone, sad to see it go, it was the unofficial gateway/ entrance to Deep Ellum. I was going to post the video in here but wordpress gets screwed up now, when I post a video, so just go to the link, it’s on youtube.

Deep ellum is slowly dying. Clubs have been shutting down left and right. And now Dallas is making new club owners jump through hoops just to open up at all. Club trees is/was a landmark on the deep ellum music and entertainment scene has been shutdown for a while now, but the owners of a club in Lewisville bought trees and were trying to open it back up, under a different name of course. But now apparently may have to back out because of the red tape dallas causing. Here’s a excerpt from www.finelivelive.com

The saga continues…from the desk of Kenny Brattain Owner of Fat Daddy’s Sound Shack…

After what happened today (READ BELOW). I AM REALLY PISSED!

Why couldn’t the city have told us about the “non-paying” parking. Now we have heard two different answers about the parking from two different city officials. That being said, I AM GOING TO FIGHT LIKE HELL to get this resolved. I can only do so much, if you would like to help me please call the Mayor’s office and let them know that there is a REAL music scene in Dallas and you do not want Deep Ellum to die. Her is her office number: LAURA MILLER, Mayor of Dallas, Phone: (214) 670-4054 and ask for Norman Herrera or Laura Miller.

THANK YOU CITY OF DALLAS, YOU WIN!! WE GIVE UP! WE WILL NOT RE-OPEN THE ?TREES? BUILDING!

To whom this may concern, we have successfully filed our SUP for 2707-09 Elm Street, Deep Ellum. I personally spent over 2 days and over $1,300 filing for the SUP. Our SUP was accepted, and now we have to wait for the Dallas City Council to vote on it. That will take about 3 months; meanwhile we are paying rent on a building we cannot use.

BUT WAIT, THERE IS MORE!!!! THIS IS WHAT DID IT!!!

Of course, after we have spent the money with the city filing the SUP we are now told we need an SUP for the PARKING LOT.

David Cossum told us that under the new SUP law, we had to have 50 parking spaces. We only have 20. So we contracted with an independent parking lot owner to supply us 30 more spaces. We had planned on paying for the additional expense by charging to park in Deep Ellum, like everyone else does, even the City of Dallas.

Now we are told that we cannot charge for parking. So the 20 parking spaces we have, we cannot charge for, and we cannot charge for the contracted 30 remote parking spaces.

So the bottom line is this. We are being told that we need 50 parking spaces. We have 20 parking spaces, so we are renting the remote parking spaces for an additional $3,000 a month, and we will not be able to offset the expense because we can not charge to park. PLUS, we have to file another SUP for the Parking Lot and wait the 3 months for approval.

This makes this re-opening economically impossible. We are not a huge corporation; we are a small Mom/Pop business.

Well, City of Dallas, you did it. We are planning on not going forward with re-opening the ?Trees? building. I guess we will look at a city that cares about its citizens and the local music scene. Good luck.

P.S. ATTN: City of Dallas! How come you can charge to park, but we cannot. ALSO THIS IS A WARNING TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO OPEN A ?LIVE MUSIC VENUE? IN DEEP ELLUM, THAT IS NOT A CHURCH. DON?T DO IT. THE CITY OF DALLAS WILL NOT LET YOU!!

Thank you for your time,

Kenny Brattain Owner Fat Daddy?s Sound Shack http://www.fatdaddyssoundshack.com

If you want to try and stop the city, I guess all you can do is call the Mayor. LAURA MILLER, Mayor of Dallas, Phone: (214) 670-4054.

This sucks! Trees was my favorite venue down there. It doesn’t make sense really, I mean they have 50 parking places, but Trees holds a good 1000 people. The people that don’t get those first 50 spaces are gonna have to park and pay for city parking, either at a parking meter or in a city parking lot. Seems like a win win situation for the city of Dallas. We already let Dallas tear down a landmark (the deep ellum tunnel) to build a dart light rail station, to bring more people into deep ellum. It’s not gonna work if there’s no place to go. Dallas is really bassackwards in the way they think. A few years ago they were gonna “revitalize downtown” and bring residents and businesses in, but seem to let the ball down sometimes. I mean they let the Dallas Cowboys build in Arlington, they still haven’t revamped the Cotton bowl and the Texas vs. OU game could go away. The west end marketplace shutdown. I guess they have to save up for the trinity river project. A huge entertainment complex built in a flood plain. That floods fairly often I might add. The american airlines center is the only big thing going on down there. There are a couple of bigger venues opening up soon down there, but the are owned by national companies, like the House of Blues. Which is ok I guess, but I’d rather go to a small independently owned venue.

Ok, just updated to wordpress 2.0.6 (with a little help from my bro) I got the Askimet spam plugin taking care of spam comments, hopefully. I turned comments back on, so comment away. Still gonna change some more stuff, need to update the links to other sites as some have gone away, maybe change the theme and layout, also add some plugins maybe. I noticed the music player doesn’t have any music, I’ll work on that.

It was 70 degrees yesterday now it’s below freezing and will be like this for a few days. Supposedly some ice accumulation. Since I can’t or don’t really want to venture out anywhere, I’ve decided to try to update this site. I need to upgrade Wordpress to the newest version and maybe change the layout a little…..or I could screw it all up and lose everything. This blog will still be here, but what happens to the content remains to be seen. I will back it up of course, but I’ve never done the upgrade before so we’ll see.

Well I’m getting alot of spam comments again, awaiting my moderation. I desperately need to update and revamp this blog, but for now I’m just gonna disable comments. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend. So if this ticks you off, you can’t do anything. Because you can’t comment, HA-HA!

Whoa, where do I start. December seemed to crawl by, well, actually it was normal speed, but didn’t seem rushed like years past. I guess my birthday was the first major event, it was great. We got a keg of Bud Light to please the masses, and also had my homebrew on tap. Roger cooked up some gumbo, meatballs and spinach dip. The Dallas Cowboys were playing a rare Saturday game so we had entertainment, and we fired up the Guitar Hero II afterwards. Far and away better than Guitar Hero I especially when you get into battle mode (a friend brought over a second guitar). I don’t remember some of the party but I do remember a couple funny things like Jared eating gumbo out of a Martini glass and Amy opening up the Stout tap onto the floor, she thought they were fake. Like I would have taps on the fridge for decoration. It was really good, I was feeling good, and that’s all I wanted.

Christmas was good just stayed in town with the parents, which was good, no rushing around to please everyone. My sister and her family was supposed to come down Tuesday and stay until Thursday but my mom was really sick Tues morning and my sister just came for a few hours. They have friends half way between here and Houston and were planning on seeing them anyway, so they went there. They didn’t want the whole family getting sick.

New Years eve was interesting. Our friend Heidi was having a big party at her house, her birthday is New Year’s Eve and she was turning 30, so it was extra special. I’ve never been to their house but was assured that they throw a good party. Which I now know is true. We walk in and we were underdressed but it’s not that I really care about that. They had hired help to serve drinks and take our coats. Which kinda makes me feel weird because I can take care of my own coat and people seem to take advantage of that kinda thing. I don’t know, I just don’t like to ask to much of them. I did make friends with the bartender, I actually slipped him a twenty. They are working on New Years Eve, they probably have better things they could be doing, so I always tip well. Justin, Heidi’s hubby, has a pretty nice bar he built himself, and it was open bar, not fully equiped but good enough for a home bar. Plenty of liqour, beer , and wine with all the standard mixers. I started with beer, but it was open bar, so switched to whiskey and coke. Of course we had champagne at midnight. I guess it was a mix of all the different alcohols but I was feeling bad in the morning. I actually don’t remember how I got home, but knew there was a plan before hand so I got home safe. They had plenty of food, I don’t know if it was catered or what but they had plenty of food. Cheese, sandwiches, shrimp, scallops and the like. A great time especially for it being free. More about the New Year and what it may bring later. Sorry for the lack of blog entries, it’s been hectic.