West Seventh, looking east; notice the stepped-back facades

Developer Alamo Manhattan’s revised design for apartments and retail in the Bishop Arts District received positive nods from the panel of architects tasked with critiquing it.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

Members of the city’s Urban Design Peer Review Panel agreed last week that the developer’s new design is much better than its original plans for boxy, block-busting five-story buildings on Zang at Davis. The new plan, with its cake-tiered facades and mix of styles is more in tune with the neighborhood, they said. But it still needs work.

In the meantime, the developer is moving forward with plans for the project, which includes about 200 apartments with retail on the ground floor. The developer has said demolition of the Sonic Drive-In, the Zoli’s NY Pizza building and the adjacent collision-repair shop could begin as soon as this coming summer.

So Zoli’s owner Jay Jerrier told the Dallas Morning News this week that he plans to close the pizza shop as soon as this coming spring. He said he might consider reopening somewhere else, but not in Oak Cliff.

Jerrier told  Guide Live: “For Zoli’s, we really want to find a place with more neighborhood traffic so it can be a neighborhood pizzeria.”