Plaza Mayor WILL Fail. . .Thank God

I spent the early part of my career on the south side, patrolling from Santa Fe to Portland and the river to SW Grand Blvd. SW 29th street is the main artery of the area and so I was up and down that street a dozen times a day. Though the traffic is at times horrendous, one of the things I loved about SW 29th street, then and now, is that so few of the signs are in English.

For me, the presence of districts where the signs are in languages other than English is a sign of a great city. They suggest a number of things that are important in a thriving urban area. First, they suggest international influence and diversity (albeit a limited type of diversity, since a possible drawback of these districts is that they may allow people to remain segregated in their own neighborhoods). They also suggest a strong sense of community and loyalty, anchored in a sense of place. This sense of place, of being grounded, promotes community involvement, responsibility, and ownership.

While certainly the international neighborhoods in Oklahoma city, notably the SW 29th Street corridor and the Asian District, cannot rival neighborhoods in other cities like the Chinatowns of LA, NYC, and San Francisco, or the North End in Boston, they are hidden gems in our city, deserving of attention and investment. One of my frustrations working on the south side was that it had so much potential but received so little investment.  I've believed for several years that SW 29th Street, already a natural commercial district by virtue of its location within OKC's sizable Hispanic community, could become a thriving destination, a place where Hispanic business owners might enjoy the benefits of the kind of local chic, hipster vibe of places like Paseo and the Plaza District (though there's admittedly drawbacks to this, like gentrification. A subject for another time).

So, in 2013, it was with great irritation that I learned of plans to rebrand the old Crossroads Mall into Plaza Mayor in an attempt to lure Hispanic businesses into one place to "serve" the Hispanic community (and to save the dying mall). This plan horrified me for a number of reasons. First, it felt a bit gross that developers seemed to be trying to save a failing business model by passing it down to a minority community. Something just didn't feel right about, once again, bequeathing to minority communities our used-up, hand-me-down, middle-class commodities.

My greater fear, however, was that it would work--at least a little for a little while. My fear was that Plaza Mayor would pull Hispanic businesses and services away from SW 29th street, Commerce Avenue, and other Hispanic business districts that were embedded within the actual Hispanic community. Of course, developers tried to sell the idea that the Hispanic community in OKC was centered in the south side and so, Crossroads being on the the south side, this was a perfect place for such a development. We're putting businesses for the Hispanic community where the community lives. Sounds great, right? Of course, the fact is that this is only true if we're still thinking in terms of middle-class suburban car culture. This is because, in reality, no one lives near any mall. Just look at the overhead view:

Even if the mall wasn't surrounded by interstate on the west and south sides, big-box stores and warehouses on the north side, and fields, railroad right-of-ways, and a landfill to the east, even if the closest house was right at the edge of the mall's property line, the family in that house would still have to travel the equivalent of several blocks just to cross the parking lot. Part of what is so awful about malls, after all, is that they are not close to anything. So they idea that Plaza Mayor "serves" the Hispanic community by pulling their commercial district away from the neighborhoods where people actually live and transplanting it into an un-walkable, ugly vestige of failed WASP material culture is ghastly. Instead, if Plaza Mayor were to work as a commercial venture, it would do to the already beleaguered commercial districts of the Hispanic south side what suburban malls did to our cities' downtowns in the later half of the 20th century. It would pull important businesses, cultural sites, and services out of the neighborhoods they serve, leaving the neighborhoods to die and abandoning the people far from these services. Then, like the failing suburban mall it replaced, it would itself eventually die because of the ridiculous overhead costs of operating a climate controlled, indoor false-downtown.

This is why every time I drive past the empty Plaza Mayor parking lot, I'm encouraged by the hope that it will die sooner rather than later, before it is able to destroy the neighborhoods I grew to love early in my career. I'm also encouraged by today's report by the Oklahoman's Brianna Bailey that community leaders on the south side have begun working to secure public support for development on SW 29th street.

After all, many of the pieces are already in place to make SW 29th the kind of thriving urban neighborhood that might rival international districts in other cities. There are loyal, grounded residents in close proximity. There are a few well-established cornerstone restaurants like Taqueria de Los Desvelados (my favorite). On weekend nights, the street is teaming with taco trucks and people cruising in customized cars, giving the street healthy potential for a thriving street festival scene.

One of the things the area needs is some coordination--someone to connect with in-place neighborhood associations like the College Hill NA, a well-run, highly involved model of a neighborhood association. College Hill, hosts its own neighborhood movie nights, projecting movies onto screens in members' backyards, meets with police and fire officials for Neighborhood Night Out, gets together for ice cream and "Mexican Bingo," and so on. With support from and coordination with other NAs and business owners, these types of events could easily become district events rather than neighborhood ones.

But the area also needs and deserves some public investment. The area needs better sidewalks and well marked crosswalks to make 29th street more walkable and more suited to gathering. As it exists, SW 29th street is pretty uncomfortable if you're not in a car. The street, which has a reputation for being in a "bad side of town" could also use more highly visible but benign police presence, like one might see in Bricktown or at the Fair, in volumes high enough to make visitors feel safe but laissez faire enough to be part of the atmosphere. Finally, district signs, decorative lighting and other "placemaking" amenities visible in other neighborhoods would help to give the residents in the district a sense of pride and the affirmation that the city supports their efforts.

There is enough neighborhood loyalty, community interest, and embedded commercial presence on the south side that, with some reasonable public investment to support what's already being done there by private citizens and business owners, the SW 29th street corridor could become one of OKC's really cool places. Though, admittedly, Big Truck Tacos should worry about what would happen if hipsters were to find out about south side truck tacos. And perhaps the south side should also be a bit worried about hipster-creep.

Alternative Other Cities: Chicago-and its Suburbs

Being good urbanists and all, our family doesn't go to resorts or lakes for our family vacations. We go to cities where we don't rent a car, but rather use public transportation. We try to break free from the tourist areas and break out into neighborhoods where we can explore local haunts, talk to people live there who don't make money by catering to us, listen to the accents, and so on. We try to learn the individual character of cities.

This summer, when a large family trip to Germany was cancelled, we decided instead to visit Chicago, a city that my wife Charissa has never been to, and that I have only been to once when I was 14. We did plenty of touristy things, like taking in the museums and Navy Pier and the chrome bean in Millennium Park, but we also branched out to visit the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge in the near west side, a dive Pierogi restaurant underneath the "L" train, a rich-people neighborhood north of downtown where we found an early Frank Lloyd Wright (designed with Louis Sullivan), and a small chocolate shop in Old Town where one can buy a chocolate popsicle shaped like the Star of David or a chocolate Colt 1911.  I even got us going the wrong direction on the green line and took a ride through the high rise projects in south Chicago.

On about the third day, we began to notice just how often we were hearing references to the "suburbs." Obviously, this isn't particularly uncommon in cities, but something was different about the way Chicagoans use the word--with a kind of tone of voice. The word was used as a kind of blanket to refer not to a place so much as a nebulous concept. In seven days, I never heard the actual name of a town, but rather only heard references to the generic "suburbs." One of the more telling uses of "suburbs" came from the semi-official language of television news, when an anchor discussed a large traffic accident on an inbound interstate, mentioning that "police, along with 'suburban' departments" were on scene. "Police" meant Chicago PD. Meanwhile, the "suburban" departments were not named. Even in the official discourse of the news, there seemed to be Chicago and everywhere else. Charissa even overheard a conversation in Wrigley field where a woman told a Chicagoan that she lived "in the suburb northwest of here," as if even a local would not have known where she was talking about if she had used the name of the town.

These are just a couple examples of this usage that we heard over and over. I have never been in a city that has such a self-conscious divide between city and suburb. I asked a architectural tour guide (one of those touristy things we did) about this, asking him why people seemed to have such disdain in their voices when they used the word "suburbs" here. He rolled his eyes and explained this a couple ways. First he said that people who live in the suburbs are "always telling people they live in Chicago, but they don't." This explanation is pretty common in big cities, even in Oklahoma City. The more telling explanation to me, which seemed an aside for him was this: "When I go out there, I get lost." A similar sentiment was echoed by my friend Michael, who we met for lunch while we were there. I forgot to ask him specifically about this issue (though I planned to) but at one point I complained about my own recent move to a suburban neighborhood and how I couldn't bike everywhere anymore. He mentioned that his wife's parents live in the "suburbs" near Chicago and that every time he "goes out there," he realizes that suburban life is not for him.

People in Chicago and people in its suburbs just don't seem to mix much. Chicago, an old city with lots of open land around it, may have the most meaningful divide between the city and the rail-road suburb of any city I've visited. In an old and compact city like Boston, you'd have to drive a long way before you're in a suburb that actually feels suburban. Many of Boston's suburbs still feel very urban, so the distinction between Boston and Belmont down't feel so extreme. Meanwhile,  Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city but a relative late bloomer built after the advent of the automobile, is itself almost entirely suburban, so the difference between city and suburbs there is a technicality. In Chicago, on the other hand, the city itself is classically urban, while the suburbs are definitively suburban.

The distance between the two is not a simple matter of heavy inbound traffic, but of the two different lifestyles that have come to define urban living versus suburban living. Chicago, then, is an interesting laboratory in what makes these lifestyles different and, perhaps, incompatible. It would have been interesting to have explores the suburbs and heard from people "out there." But, alas, the suburban transit lines cost extra.

Marathon Therapy--For Me, for the City

I am not the only person who runs as a form of therapy. In fact, it's a common enough motivation that it inspires t-shirts. I was always a runner as a kid, but I slowed down a lot after the police academy because, well, the police academy will make you sick to death of running. I would run two or three miles on a treadmill as a warm-up to weight training and because doctors say you should have 20-30 minutes of cardio a day (or has that gone up now?) but that was about it for ten years. Then, in October, we put our house on the market and I turned into a basket case. I wasn't sleeping, I had ridiculous anxiety, I was not eating well. I'm a bit high-strung anyway, and the stress of buying and selling houses, packing, and moving sent me over the edge, despite the fact that the whole process went remarkably smoothly. I was actually to the point where I thought it might be time to seek professional help. Instead, I went running. And I kept running.

As my distances began to get longer and my times faster, I began to think I might like to train for the half-marathon. After all, the twentieth anniversary of the Murrah Bombing would be coming, so the Memorial Marathon seemed like a natural fit for my first timed distance run. So I began to take it seriously. Until two months ago, I wasn't sure I'd make it. I kept getting sick over the winter with stuff my kids were bringing home, so my training was falling off. But when it warmed up and I got up to eleven miles, I signed up. A couple months later, the Half Marathon medal hangs in my closet, the 13.1 sticker is on my rear windshield, and  like many newly initiated distance runners, I'm hooked.

The Memorial Marathon was especially meaningful for me because the Memorial Half is a running tour of the neighborhoods where I've spent most of my career. I love these old neighborhoods: the tall buildings and shadowy streets of downtown, the stately approach toward the capital building, the handsome old houses of Mesta Park, Heritage Hills, and Crown Heights. Throughout the run, I got the sense that I was doing something I would never forget in places I love to remember. The whole run was very touching and meaningful for me.

I would be remiss to neglect the stated purpose of the Marathon itself: a fund raiser to support the OKC National Memorial, and an event explicitly dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Murrah Bombing. I have been reluctant to write about the events of April 19, 1995 for a number of reasons. For one thing, I am suspicious of the common "where were you when you found out," kinds of conversations. I understand the importance of public memory and take seriously the realness of public grief, but I also fear the temptation of making the event about myself, when so many, some that I know well, were effected much more personally than I. For another thing, with months of buildup by local media outlets, I fear exploitation of the event and its victims. I don't want to be simply adding to the noise, noise that a great many people, including some that I love very much, are trying as hard as they can to avoid. For some people, the notion that "We Will Never Forget" is not a well-meaning promise, but a horrifying curse.

Nevertheless, the event was a large part of my motivation to run. In 1995, my father was a crime scene detective on the Oklahoma City Police Department, and my step-father, who I lived with, was an Oklahoma City Firefighter. Both of them are strong, courageous, and empathic men, and both were caught up in the Hell of that month. My step-father spent nearly a month digging through the rubble of the bombed out building, and my father spent that same time assigned to the Medical Examiner's Office processing the bodies of the victims. Unsurprisingly, the event had a singular impact on them and on our family in ways that are, frankly, no one's business.

My dad's were and are exceptional men. They both went into their respective professions for all the right reasons. They are brave and caring, and what they experienced in that month hurt them, probably more deeply that I actually understand (they both hold their cards pretty close). I have always felt a debt to them for spending a month in a place they would not allow me to even go see. For this reason, I saw the run as a way to honor them. When training was tough, when my body was breaking down, or I felt sick, I pushed on by telling myself, "they spent a month in Hell; I can spend a few hours running." It's an empty ovation, I'm sure. A run that many people do for fun cannot really repay for the sacrifices made by any of those who were forced to sacrifice in 1995 and in the years since, but it's all I can really do: to endure in order to honor their endurance.

Beyond this, (and I didn't really think about this until during the run) it became a way to reclaim the month and the sight. April is no longer the month, and NW 5th and Harvey is no longer the place that tried to destroy my fathers and my family. It's the time and place where I accomplished something really difficult and important. In a way that is admittedly imperfect and which may or may not be lasting, at least in my own psyche, I've taken back my family. At the very least, I've reclaimed the month of April.

This notion occurred to me as a ran up Lincoln Blvd, with the field of flags in front of the capital on one side, and hand-written posters with the names of victims on the other. The Marathon itself hangs signs on light posts with the names on all 168 victims along the course, but far more touching are the hand-written signs that people along the course hold. Friends and family of victims participate as spectators, make home-made signs, hand out medals at the finish line, serve as board members, and run the race. In fact, the whole city is involved in the race. Spectators line the entire 26 mile course, stand in front of their houses handing out food and drinks to runners, and cheer for people they don't know. Neighborhood associations decorate their neighborhoods and line the streets in ridiculous costumes. Two local T.V. stations preempt programming to carry the race on live television. This communal effort speaks to the meaning of the Memorial Marathon for this city. The city was injured, horrified, and changed forever in April of 1995. But through the Marathon, we've taken back that time and place. We've reclaimed it for ourselves and for our community. Downtown in April is no longer a place of defeat, fear, and injury. Instead, it's a place of celebration, strength, endurance, and triumph.

Silent City

As an admitted OKC homer (that phrase is part of my Twitter profile description), I am proud of our city. I brag about how far it's come, how sneaky-cool it is, how it's headed in the right direction, and so on. But I'm also careful to remember that we have a long way to go, both in policy and in the culture of our city. I'm careful to accept our "city on the rise" rhetoric because I think that nothing will hinder our progress like buying too much into our own hype. There is a danger that we may become unreflective. It is in this spirit that I write this sort of "State of the Urban City."

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.

Territorial Homes for Regular People

When OKC residents think of historic houses, we think of the beautiful old mansions of Heritage Hills, or the only-slightly more modest homes in neighboring Mesta Park. We think of the Overholser Mansion, built in 1903 and regarded as Oklahoma's first mansion.

But this is a working-class town, built first as a railroad depot, then as an industrial and commercial center to support the people brought to the Territory by the Land-Run, and finally as an oil town with dozens of wells actually inside city limits (and, for that matter, on the grounds of our capitol building).

For most of us, the lifestyles of these working-class people is a bit of a mystery--not one many of us have even thought about. In fact, someone informed me the other day that the first settlers to OKC after the Land Run lived in "mud huts," by which he seemed to mean the sod houses of the homesteaders. A student of Oklahoma history, however, will know that people were building permanent wood and brick structures remarkably quickly, as this photo supposedly taken four days after the land run shows. After all, we were a rail yard, which means that we had easy access to the pre-cut wood that defined the National Folk Style home.

Most of these first houses, built very quickly, were intermingled with the businesses and industries along the railroad tracks, and are of course gone, long since replaced by skyscrapers and warehouses. But just southwest of downtown, a few very early, modest homes remain.

The largest concentration of these early homes is not in Heritage Hills, but in the neglected little neighborhood between the old I-40 and the river, and between Shields and Wheeler Park. The oldest I found on my own hunt through this neighborhood was this one on SW 5th street, built in 1901:

But when researching for this post, Kate Singleton's "Intensive Level Survey of Downtown," led me to this house on a different street which was built in 1900. This may well be the oldest extant home in Oklahoma City (if there's one older, I hope someone will let me know).

Photo: Oklahoma County Assessor

The intrepid OKC-phile who is not afraid to wonder into the 600-700 blocks of SW 5th through about SW 8th will find dozens of houses built between 1905 and 1910 (plus a few built as late at the 30's and 40's). These are the homes that saw Oklahoma Territory become the State of Oklahoma.

These houses aren't particularly dignified. Most of them are hopelessly run down, and none of them appear on the National Register of Historic places. According to Singleton's survey, few, if any of them would even be eligible. They are working-class homes and have been added on to or altered often, usually as cheaply as possible by residents who had neither the resources to nor the interest in preserving the historical value of these houses.

In fact, most people in general would not be particularly interested in preserving these houses. Tiny, wood-sided houses just don't feel very historic to us. Even Paul Revere's home in Boston became a tenement and a series of shops before a descendant of Revere bought it to save it from being demolished. Houses like these may be historical, but they are not valuable.

In fact, these houses survived this long probably through an accident of twentieth-century urban planning. Cheap houses were built in this area initially because, early in the city's history, the land along the river was prone to flooding. This meant that land value here was low, so small, affordable, working-class houses were built here. They remained here likely because of Old Interstate-40. Wedged between the Crosstown Bridge and the river, this area became no-man's land, at least for the kind of people who are able to tear down old things to build new ones. Nestled safely between the formidable (and ugly) boundaries of I-40 and the North Canadian, the city's periodic attempts at urban renewal always skipped over these blocks. Thus, the fact that this land had no value meant that it was left alone. Had these historic homes been worth anything, they would be gone.

Now, however, I-40 has moved, and has been set below grade with a handsome pedestrian bridge traversing it. Money is being spent on the Core to Shore projects and we're about to put in a really nice downtown park right next door to this neighborhood.

This means that the land where these old homes sit is about to become very valuable. Several houses have already been demolished to make way for the park, and once it is done, developers will rush to acquire the land that borders the park in order to build luxury apartments and condos. These modest nuggets of territorial history will be gone--gone the way of the real Deep Deuce. So go see these houses now while you still can. But take your safety precautions.

Street Ceiling: The Aesthetic of Overhead Cables

I'll open this post with this disclaimer: this is the second post in a row that I've written in response to articles by the Gazette's Ben Felder. I don't intend to let this become a Felder response blog, but he refuses to stop writing about things I care about, so I'll indulge this once more.

This week, it's the modern streetcar project, one of the two MAPS 3 projects I actually want. As the project begins to move into the more specific design phase, the city and streetcar subcommittee must now begin exploring and deciding between wired vs. wireless systems. A wireless system would be more expensive and may push back the completion date (which would add even more expense), but some business owners don't want overhead wires, presumedly because they find them unattractive. So the city must balance both economic and aesthetic concerns. Here, I will make my argument for a wired system which will rest, perhaps surprisingly, on the second concern rather than the first.

Perhaps I'm a but eccentric, but I happen to like the aesthetic of overhead wires. Maybe it's just that I associate streetcars and other wired rail systems with my favorite cities. In particular, I think of Boston's Back Bay, where the famous Green Line comes above ground to serve Northeastern University, the Boston MFA, and Fenway Park. North of Boston, in Cambridge, the busses have moved to hybrid electric motors and are served by overhead lines.  These are my family's old stomping grounds, where I spent many vacations visiting family. Lights rail systems and overhead lines are part of the fabric of a place that holds cherished memories for me.

Electric busses in Cambridge, MA. Photo: Wikipedia

So maybe my love of overhead lines is simple nostalgia. But I think there is a more academic explanation as well, one that I think people without my own summer vacation experiences can appreciate. Urbanist author James Howard Kuntsler explains the importance of good urban design in creating "outdoor rooms" to provide a sense of enclosure. For Kunstler, the appropriate height of buildings, the presence of mature street trees, and controlling the width of streets (to be in proper scale with the height of the buildings) are all important in creating this sense of a large outdoor room.

There are obvious physical reasons for this type of design. Good urban design provides shade and ready protection from the elements, not to mentions passing cars and the fear of street crime. But there are also important psychological qualities to good urban design. A well enclosed (but still porous) streetscape provides a sense of security in the same way that a familiar room or building might.

For Kuntsler, buildings built to the sidewalk, street trees, and narrow streets provide this sense of enclosure, of outdoor rooms, by surrounding a pedestrian with walls with the trees acting as a vaulted ceiling. For me, the overhead cables of a streetcar line provide another kind of ceiling, one less cathedral-like to be sure, but a comforting one nonetheless.

Perhaps this is part of why the spaces where I have the clearest memories of overhead cables are quieter urban neighborhoods like Boston's back bay, Cambridge MA, Midtown Memphis, and sections of San Francisco.

Overhead lines and row houses in San Francisco.

If the tall spaces of a downtown financial district are a city's cathedrals, these surrounding urban neighborhoods with their shorter rooflines and overhead cables are the city's living rooms, the cozy spaces where enculturated locals live.

These neighborhoods, because they have the feeling of a comfortable family room (as opposed to the towering intimidation of a business district full of skyscrapers, or the desert-like wide expanses of a suburban arterial street) provide a kind of stickiness. There is a reason transit stops attract urban housing and small business. Certainly, easy access to mass transit is part of it, but it is also the case that these places are usually the most pleasant to hang out in. I imagine how pleasant it would be to sit in front of Coffee Slingers, protected from traffic by the street parking, and comfortably enclosed by the walls of brick buildings built to the curb curbline and the ceiling of streetcar lines. It's easy to stick to a place like this. So bring on the cables. I, for one, look forward to having this OKC back:

Photo: ACOG Blog

Compulsive Progress and the Death of Stage Center

I remember passing by Stage Center when I was a kid and thinking that it was an industrial building with its suspended condenser units and grain elevator looking staircases.  When I got old enough to know what the building actually was, this knowledge made me feel like a real OKC insider. As I grew up, I began to think of the building as the centerpiece of the Arts Festival (the one time of year I was really around the building back then). I understood that the design of the building was meant to be artistic long before I knew that in fact all architecture was. I thought of Stage Center as a building that was also a sculpture--as art that housed art.

When Carpenter Square moved out of Stage Center after flooding a couple of years ago, I desperately hoped they would move back in. Even after the theatre moved into its new building, I held out hope that it would eventually return "home." I naively thought that some benefactor would eventually bankroll a project to renovate the building and move Carpenter Square back in. This hope faded as Stage Center began to deteriorate. The water features were drained, transient camps grew up in the center of the building only to be torn down by the city then rebuilt again, the walkways were boarded up, then boarded up again with taller boards.

Now the building is set to be demolished to make way for a new skyscraper. When the Stage Center comes down, it will be the newest victim of Oklahoma City's compulsive habit of tearing down its own history to make way for Progress. 

Any long time resident of OKC will be familiar with this habit. As David Pettyjohn told Ben Felder for in the Gazette, "there is this perception that preservation impedes progress."

In 2010, I wrote a short graduate paper (actually designed to be a sample paper for a freshman assignment) in which I performed a rhetorical analysis of this MAPS 3 advertisement:

I argued that the ad operates by exploiting what I called OKC's "fear of devolution," or a fear that any slowing of forward "momentum" amounted to going backward. In fact, the MAPS 3 ad above actually makes this claim when it shows us a dreary 1994 photo of California Ave as the narrator says that, "we can go back to the way things were, or we can build our city and create jobs without raising taxes" as if a failure to pass MAPS 3 would have meant draining the canal, replacing it with a pock marked street and vacant warehouses, and once again buying lawn mowers for the North Canadian.

When I was researching for that 2010 project, I was surprised to find that this rhetorical move has been a hallmark of political ads in OKC for many years. As far back as the "Yes 'Em All" ad campaign for a bond issue in 1968, ads in OKC have relied on this fear of devolution. The "Yes 'Em All" sold us on four lane roads (and the bond issue to build them) by claiming that "we're at a crossroads. We can stop, or we can go forward."

It's incredible how often this message reappears in OKC's discourse of growth. Since I wrote that paper, I've continued to see it in some form with surprising regularity. Even the fundraising ads for the still incomplete American Indian Cultural Center rely on this thread. 

There's an odd pathology in this discourse, one that has been present since at least 1968, and which has had extraordinary impact on the infrastructure and urban planning of Oklahoma City since the [failed] urban renewal projects of the 1970s.

Interestingly, despite the expensive and crippling failure of 1970s style urban renewal, both policy makers and voters in Oklahoma City continue to insist that the only route to progress (whatever that means) is through the continual construction of new things. It's as if we are so convinced that we, as I have often heard of our state, "have no history" that we believe our only option is to be the next up-and-coming city. If we can't attract people with our rich history, the way a city like Boston might, we'll have to attract them with our sparkling newness. In this pursuit, we have consistently denied our own very interesting and decidedly rich, albeit compact, history and subsequently torn it down.

We are, then, stuck in this odd recursive process: we fear that we have no "history" to rely on, so we must build new things to attract people. In building new things, we tear down all our old things. In tearing down our old things, we prevent anything from becoming storied. Because we have nothing storied, we fear that we have no history. Da Capo al infinitum.

Bizarre old Stage Center is the latest victim of this process which, by all signs, will likely continue. And so goodbye Stage Center. May you find architectural heaven and there be with the Biltmore Hotel,   the Criterion Theater, the Hales Building, and so many others.