Bolsa’s sister market concept, Bolsa Mercado, is now open in the former Kemp Garage space on West Davis.

Art Conspiracy raised $30,000 for Musical Angels in November. The charity provides music lessons to children in Dallas-area hospitals. Its founder and president, Dr. Gustavo A. Tolosa, called the donation “one of the highest points in Musical Angels’ history.”

Crossing guard, organization leader, mailman — these neighbors are ordinary people. But, oh boy, do they have stories to tell.

 Urban Acres market is cutting back its hours starting Jan. 16. The store will be open noon-6 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. It will be closed Monday-Thursday.

Retail business typically is slow on week days anyway, manager Liz Goulding says. And they decided to focus more on co-op business  — a recent Groupon deal resulted in more than 500 new co-op members.

It looks like plans for a Walmart store on Fort Worth Avenue have been scrapped.

Cielo Realty Partners has shown off its plans for the former Colorado Place site on Fort Worth Avenue, and they include some unique amenities for this mixed-use development. (Click on the rendering for a larger view, and see below for better views of notes on the rendering and, our favorite, a key to the various trees that will be planted on the property.)

The site has been vacant since the old apartments on both sides of Fort Worth Avenue were demolished and, hopefully, these new plans mean that a proposed Walmart-lite strip shopping center is now gone for good.

The new development is called The Collective, and the name plays off the collaborative interaction between the 320 apartments, retail space, artist studios, commissary kitchen, community garden, dog park and innovative office arrangements. Cielo hopes the configuration of the development will lead to weekend markets with food and art,  a “live/work” lifestyle and pedestrian-oriented activities. Ground-breaking is planned for May, with a 22-month construction schedule. Here’s more from Councilman Scott Griggs’ blog:

“The $48 million project includes approximately 320 rental residential and/or live-work units and a minimum of 40,000 square feet of commercial, office, residential and/or live work space. No zoning change is being requested. The site is designed so that buildings are pulled up to the street, front doors and windows face the street and the impact of surface parking is minimized. The developer is working with the City to create bike lanes on both Colorado Boulevard and on Fort Worth Avenue and will add bike parking throughout the project. Wide sidewalks, street trees, pedestrian lighting, and park/plaza space are included throughout. Nearly all of the first floor units that face a street or a park have entrances directly on the street or park space.”

As Griggs also references on his blog, the project is requesting $7.5 million in TIF funds, which will be considered by city council in late January.

The project notes from the above rendering, which are too small to read, are after the jump: (more…)

Bolsa Mercado opened Dec. 12 on 614 W. Davis. It’s a market/cafe concept from the owners of Bolsa that make their dishes in-house. You can stop in to eat or pick up items to take home, items that are all natural, local and organic. In this video take a look inside the new place, located in North Oak Cliff.

One of the biggest winners in Trader Joe’s decision to open its first Dallas store on Lower Greenville in East Dallas could well be Oak Cliff. The reason? Because Oak Cliff’s redevelopment is following more or less the same path that East Dallas’ has taken, and Trader Joe’s arrival points to the success of the East Dallas approach.

How important is Trader Joe’s decision to open its first Dallas store on Lower Greenville, instead of the usual suspects like the Park Cities and Far North Dallas? Very important. Retailers don’t get much better than Trader Joe’s, which has a cult-like following among both consumers and retail analysts. It’s the kind of company that cities woo and shoppers start Facebook campaigns to attract. Consider just one fact: One of the selling points for the wets in last year’s wet-dry referendum was that the city couldn’t get top retailers like Trader Joe’s and Costco as long as its most desirable neighborhoods, like Far North Dallas, were dry.

But Trader Joe’s isn’t opening in Far North Dallas, is it? It’s opening in a neighborhood that’s very much like Oak Cliff.

This doesn’t mean that top retailers like Trader Joe’s are going to start looking at Oak Cliff right away. Rather, it means that they’re open to neighborhoods that don’t fit the 1990s model for retail location — Anglo families with children and higher incomes that are neatly located inside 1-, 3-, and 5-mile circles around the store’s location. They’re looking for neighborhoods that are more urban, where density and foot traffic are as important as traffic counts. And that’s Oak Cliff.

In this, Oak Cliff is closer to current modern urban development theory than neighborhoods like Lake Highlands and Far North Dallas, which conform to 1980s models — strip centers built around larger single family homes, and where the car is paramount. And it’s another reason to stay the course for sensible development that reinforces what makes Oak Cliff unique, instead of development that turns the neighborhood into a Plano clone.

Pictures and happenings around the neighborhood, like the Real Estate Council fireside chat at Eno’s Pizza Tavern in Bishop Arts.

The Bishop Arts Winery is expected to start serving wine and food around the middle of January. Owner Elias Rodriguez has been open, serving coffee and bagels for several months while he waits for approval so sell and manufacture wine.

• Read our January 2012 cover story about the changes to communication that social media has brought to local life.
• Read about how the Advocate is using social media.
• What’s a friend and a follow? Click here for a glossary of basic social media terminology.

Remember when mailing … more