A little after noon Monday, some 100 members of the Angry Deep Ellum Business Owners Association (not an official name) gathered for a righteous spleen-venting on the sun-baked patio of St. Pete’s Dancing Marlin. Because it’s always a good idea to set the unhappy to broil on a late-July afternoon. That’s how you wind up with news stories about entertainment districts with the words “war zone” in the headline.
I’ve been to meetings like this before — many, spread over several decades. The handwringing, finger-pointing, voice-raising gatherings about crime, policing, violence, one bad club spoiling the whole batch of small businesses trying to survive. The outcomes have always been the same, too: promises made, policies changed, bad actors sidelined, bad clubs shuttered, crisis averted until the next one and the next one and the next one.
I saw a few familiar faces among the relatively fresh ones Monday, among them muralist and mentor Frank Campagna, proprietor of Kettle Art Gallery on Main Street. In 1982, he opened Deep Ellum’s first punk rock club, painted its walls and now-torn-down tunnels, and became as much a part of Deep Ellum as concrete and crime.
I remember sitting with Campagna at the Gypsy Tea Room on Feb. 28, 2006, when the mayor, police chief and city officials pulled more than 200 people into the venue for a come-to-Jesus about the sad state of Deep Ellum. In that very club, on July 26, 2004, a man who’d brought his teenage daughters to an Old 97’s show was savagely beaten and paralyzed by a former skinhead.
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On the agenda that morning in 2006: high crime, low morale and the awful owners savaging the neighborhood’s businesses and reputation. Don Nedler, then the owner of the Lizard Lounge, stood up and said, “We have allowed a band of teenagers to take control of a major entertainment district in a major city.” Same as it ever was.
Deep Ellum, always under construction — literally, as seen here along Commerce Street, and metaphorically(Angela Piazza / Staff Photographer)
Campagna, who has survived the skinheads and speculators, told me later that Monday’s meeting actually felt different than its predecessors. This one, he said, “felt like a community uprising.” This wasn’t another formally scheduled sitdown with city officials trying to calm the waters. Said Campagna, “This was straight-up business owners concerned about the direction the neighborhood is taking.”
The meeting was sparked, in part, by the early morning shooting on July 5 at Canton Street and South Good Latimer Expressway. When cops arrived on the scene, it was chaos; “people running everywhere,” Dallas police Chief Daniel Comeaux said a few days later. Six people were shot — some, multiple times — and taken to the hospital, where 22-year-old Caylen Fritz died as a result of his injuries.
It was the fourth homicide in Deep Ellum in 2025, following a year during which there had been none.
Property and business owners point to a handful of clubs causing all the problems. Chief among them, they say, is the bar Rodeo Dallas, which essentially sits in the middle of the neighborhood on Crowdus and Elm streets. Videos taken outside the venue are sent regularly to city officials showing young patrons clogging up the intersection with open containers and closed fists.
Its owners deny any wrongdoing, insisting that anyone going after Rodeo Bar is “trying to get rid of people of color in the area,” Joseph Ybanez told me this week. “People try to sugarcoat it. But I know what they’re trying to do.”
Frank Campagna, seen here in 2006, has been in Deep Ellum so long he was once the only person in Deep Ellum. Now, he closes his Kettle Art Gallery and leaves the neighborhood before dark on weekends, before it the chaos descends.(GUY REYNOLDS / 104432)
Nonetheless, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission confirmed that Rodeo Dallas is one of two Deep Ellum venues under investigation for allegedly selling alcohol to minors. And the Dallas City Attorney’s Office confirmed that Community Prosecution “has opened a case to address ongoing criminal activity and code violations,” with a demand letter expected this week.
Enough’s enough, said the business owners on Monday, demanding more cops on more corners making more arrests. Campagna joked that it’s a sure sign a punk rocker’s getting old when they want to see more cops and paddy wagons in their neighborhood.
Jesse Moreno, Dallas’ mayor pro tem and Deep Ellum’s City Council rep, left Monday’s meeting promising to come back “with a list of suggestions” from Dallas police within 30 days.
“Everyone at that meeting was a good operator,” he told me later. “We didn’t see the operators who require police-assistance calls, who are out of compliance, who are under investigation by TABC or community prosecutors. We’ve been addressing public safety in Deep Ellum and will take an even stronger stance going forward.”
Moreno said “a path to a plan is realistic” within the 30 days he promised everyone Monday. “But it will have to evolve.”
Police officers patrol the Deep Ellum neighborhood in Dallas, TX, on Nov 8, 2024.(Jason Janik / Special Contributor)
As will Deep Ellum, where everything old is new again. And again and again and again. This city has a bad habit of telling the same tale over and over, rewriting the same chapter without being creative enough to come up with a different ending.
I’ve always taken this personally, too: My grandfather had his furniture store and auto parts shop down there from 1927 through the mid-1950s, where The Epic now sits on Elm. His brother Eli was down there, too, a year earlier, when he spent $11,000 to construct a storefront on Elm that still stands today. It used to be Cobble and Wilonsky. For a long time, it was the Anvil Pub.
I now see it’s about to reopen as something called TRAKA$$ Bar & Lounge. Just as Uncle Eli intended.
For decades, the cycle has been set to rinse and repeat: a story about The Death of Deep Ellum, followed, weeks or months or years later, by a story about The Rebirth of Deep Ellum. On Monday, though, there was a small twist to this tale: Moreno stood up at the meeting and said the city would not be declaring “a state of emergency and shutting down Deep Ellum.” I didn’t even know that was an option.
The Twilite Lounge has been open 12 years now — a lifetime in Deep Ellum years. But co-owner Danny Balis says it would kill the venue if it had to close at midnight.(Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer)
As it turned out, earlier this month nine of the neighborhood’s biggest property owners sent a letter to Moreno, the mayor and the city manager begging the city to “take immediate and decisive action” while they come up with a long-term fix to the “public safety emergency that continues to spiral out of control.”
The letter asked City Hall to “implement a city-mandated curfew requiring all businesses in Deep Ellum to close and all patrons leave the district by midnight.”
The missive was sent to City Hall by Jon Hetzel, managing partner at Madison Partners, the landlord for the likes of Cane Rosso, Angry Dog, the AllGood Cafe, Dallas Comedy Club and The Nines. The July 5 shooting occurred just behind Madison’s offices, in full view of its security cameras. Hetzel said he watched the video that morning and that “it looked like Call of Duty.”
“Our biggest issue, in my opinion, is that the neighborhood turns at 11 p.m., midnight,” Hetzel said last week. “It’s a wonderful, vibrant mixed-use district until that point. But because of the reality and perception of safety and violence, the patrons who come down here to have a good time and enjoy the neighborhood leave, and then we get the big crowds of young men and women, a large contingent of which are bringing guns, settling scores, getting into fights and doing some bulls–t. … As a result, a lot of our mainstay mom-and-pop bars and restaurants can’t get their customers down here during their prime revenue-generating hours, which is midnight to 2 a.m.”
Yeah, but getting the city to declare an emergency and shutter Deep Ellum at midnight would be just as bad, if not worse. Because that would be a surrender.
Danny Balis, owner of the Twilite Lounge on Elm Street, told me that forcing him to close at midnight “would be our death rattle.” Twilite’s only been open 12 years and already feels like the old man on the block. Maybe because a lot of its patrons are those of us still nostalgic for the Deep Ellum of the 1990s.
“If you’re walking down Elm and you’re 21, 22 and looking for the kind of action someone in their 20s is looking for, you poke your head in and go, ‘Oh, this is an old folks’ bar,’” Balis said. “Which is what we want. Problem is, the old folks who frequent our establishment have no interest in fighting through that madness on weekends. And losing 14 hours a week would make us unable to operate.”
Speaking of nostalgia, there’s a long-term fix Hetzel and Moreno point to that’s actually been around for 20 years: requiring Deep Ellum’s bar and live-music venues to get specific-use permits to keep their doors open.
Back in 2006 and ’07, that’s how the city chased off the underage dance clubs and the problems they brought into the neighborhood. A few years after that, the city also used SUPs to clean up Lowest Greenville, then overrun by the same issues plaguing Deep Ellum today.
This is what the Anvil Pub used to look like inside. My great-uncle Eli built the place in 1926. It’s about to become TRAKA$$ Bar & Lounge. (Jeremy Hallock)
Two years ago, nine Deep Ellum landlords asked city leaders for “a zoning change that requires all businesses in Deep Ellum that operate after midnight to obtain an SUP through the City of Dallas.” That request has seemingly stalled, much to Moreno’s chagrin.
Yu Liu, the city’s director of Planning and Development, said via email that her department is working with the Deep Ellum Foundation, multiple city departments and the City Attorney’s Office, among others, “to develop a comprehensive solution.” She didn’t offer any specifics or timetables.
“SUPs, if used properly, can be very beneficial, but they have to have teeth in them,” Moreno said. “From what I gather, our planning staff is more interested in addressing density than this policy that, in my opinion, is a matter of life and death. I want to have the discussion about the midnight SUP. I want Deep Ellum to remain a vibrant and safe entertainment district. Those businesses are what make Deep Ellum special. Deep Ellum is the soul of the city.”
And, once again, that soul needs saving.