Recently, we hosted a Korean student who needed a place to stay in the week before the dorms opened. This was his first time in the U.S. so being good hosts, we were eager to show him around as much as we could. Park, our guest, is from Seoul, South Korea, one of the great mega-cities of the world. It's home to ten million people and center of a metropolis of twenty-five million. But it's also in the midst of a transitional period between traditional Asian culture and a more westernized one. Korean young people increasingly emulate American culture. For this reason, among others I'm sure, Park was very eager to learn and we were very eager to teach. As usual, I ended up learning more than I taught.
On Park's first full day here, we took him downtown in the late afternoon. It was the tail end of a chilly workday with the Thunder on the road. It was in the last few days of December. People were ice skating at the Myriad Gardens and snow sledding at the ballpark. A family was taking family photos in the Devon Tower atrium, hispanic students rode through Bricktown on Spokies bikes and people stood in a sizable line inside Starbucks. All in all, not a bad day. By Oklahoma City standards.
On the other hand, other than these few pockets of activity, not much else was going on. The Winter Shoppes had all closed but the temporary structures were still there. Ironically, these added to the feeling that nothing was going on. After all, what says "there's nothing here" better than structures where there is supposed to be something that is no longer there. Also, though it was the end of the workday, no one hung around to walk downtown or visit pubs to unwind from the day. Nobody was walking to nearby apartments or transit stops. Instead, and despite the huge growth of the downtown housing market, most people still got into their cars and drove back to their homes in the suburbs.
We walked all over downtown. We crossed streets with ease, went into the underground when we wanted to warm up (it was also empty), bought shirts at the Thunder Shop, stood in line for $4 coffee at Starbucks, took pictures from the top of the Bricktown parking garage and in the atrium of Devon Tower. As we were walking back to the car, Park said something in his broken English that brought into perspective just how far we've come (15 years ago, I would not have brought him downtown) but also how far we have to go. It was this:
"This city is very silence."I remember that, in college, international students from Albania who I worked a catering job with had been very disappointed in our picturesque but small college town in north-central Arkansas. They said that they had been expecting New York City. They thought all American cities would be like films of New York. I don't know whether or not Park had similar ideas when coming here, or if, more likely, he was simply comparing our city to his own. But his statement felt like a critique, or at least a counterpoint to our own rhetoric that we have come into our own as a big city. Certainly, silence is not what I want for or from our downtown.
A few days later, on New Year's Day, we took him to Qual Springs Mall. It was a totally different scene. It turns out, New Year's Day is a big shopping day (who knew). The stores and hallways were packed with people, the music was lively, people ate in the food court, and waited in line for movies at AMC. At one store, long tables of women's shoes were on sale, and the crowds had gathered to rifle through them, bumping into each other, spilling boxes onto the floor, arguing with each other and so on. We ran into people we knew at least three times, snacked, and window shopped. In other words, all the stuff that should happen on the street in healthy urban neighborhoods.
The message here, at least to me, is that with all our improvements, the centers of our lives are still out in the outskirts, where we park in huge parking lots and walk in the climate controlled, high-overhead, false urbanity of the shopping mall. One may argue that it was the cold weather than kept people from downtown, and it's not fair that I'm using a December day to critique our city. But urbanists love to point out that the number of months outdoor cafes are open in Stockholm is twelve, and the liveliest time of year in many cold German cities is Christmas, whose outdoor holiday markets are famously competitive. This may indeed be a factor here in OKC, but pedestrian cities with long winters know how to do winter.
The lesson here is that Oklahoma City is still, in large part, an event city. Downtown is lively in the hours before a Thunder home game. Midtown and SOSA is flooded on an H&8th night. However, we don't yet have a city that is organically vibrant, un-planned cool, naturally urban. We may be "on the rise," but we haven't yet risen.
