OKC: Photos of Maywood Park and Deep Deuce

[Golden Eagle]

Here's some photos from a recent walk through the neighborhoods just northeast of the tracks from downtown-Maywood Park and Deep Deuce. Maywood Park is the area that is mostly under redevelopment right now, Deep Deuce is the area that looks more like a mix of new and old, and is mostly finished up.

[Greg S]

Very nice looking row houses.

Greg

[Golden Eagle]

Thanks. I should probably go through and take some new pics of the progress..would be interesting to get some opinions from other cities.

[thenewguy]

looks like good redevelopment.  Looking at those pictures, it reminds me very much of how Omaha is developing and progressing...  Row houses, condos, skyline...

[the1wags]

Nice looking infill projects. Looks like what I'd like to see on the empty lots in our Park East (west end of DT) neighborhood.

[Stargazer]

OKC reminds me a lot of Des Moines (on a larger scale of course)... urban core on an island.  What used to occupy these areas in the past?   Charlotte is another city where it looks like the surrounding area was obliterated... and a modern core was built within.

[Linkin5]

Thanks. I should probably go through and take some new pics of the progress..would be interesting to get some opinions from other cities.

Please keep updated pics coming, I love what OKC is doing right now.

[nativeomahan]

Good to see that urban infill projects are popular all over the country.

[Golden Eagle]

OKC reminds me a lot of Des Moines (on a larger scale of course)... urban core on an island.  What used to occupy these areas in the past?   Charlotte is another city where it looks like the surrounding area was obliterated... and a modern core was built within.

That's actually spot on. This is an aerial photo of OKC in 1930, where you can get a sense for how dense the midcity region used to be. In the 60s they razed all of about 500 acres in the center of downtown and spared only the most prominent buildings, with a few exceptions. Hundreds of buildings were razed, block after block. Most of the streets don't even exist anymore. They took out Main Street and Harvey, parts of Broadway, California was removed from the grid, and a few others..they just fashioned these huge superblock sites out of downtown. They also straightened Robinson and Hudson through downtown, so everything along those streets was knocked down, too.

Where there used to be dense, bustling, urban neighborhoods now sit the huge Cox Convention Center, the Myriad Gardens, and a few other sites. Two projects--hotels south of the Cox and an indoor galleria shopping mall died in the middle of the oil bust and never happened, so those sites sat vacant until NOW pretty much. Those are the sites we put the Ford on, and Devon Tower is going in on the old Galleria site. The little gremlin of architecture, I.M. Pei designed all of these damn superblock sites, and advocated for all of it..his vision was for OKC to be the biggest example of urban renewal in the nation, and it certainly was the most aggressive at it.

That was project "1-A" -- OKC Urban Renewal would have spread out and gotten all of the expansive historic districts OUTSIDE downtown as well if it hadn't been for the oil bust, so in a way, thank God for the oil bust. We still have Bricktown, parts of Deep Deuce, Automobile Alley, MidTown, Film Row, and the districts further out from downtown. So the midcity region is actually pretty much in tact with the one glaring exception of downtown, and a few smaller exceptions, such as parts of Deep Deuce which were razed for I-235 which connects downtown and the Edmond region.

The thing about Charlotte though is that it was never really a major city until 1970 and then it just started growing steam. What used to exist in Charlotte was nothing on a level of how urban OKC and Fort Worth were. They did do quite a bit of urban renewal, but what they tore down was probably more on a level of Wichita, which is not exactly the grandest downtown in the world. It's interesting though if you compare Charlotte at the time BOA was going up to OKC today at the time Devon is going up right now..BOA sure stuck out like a sore thumb on the Charlotte skyline, but it also prompted quite a boom in their downtown.

I'm not really a fan of Charlotte. I like my cities to have existing historic fabric, which Charlotte has absolutely none whatsoever. There just isn't a lot of history behind Charlotte. There is however a lot of history behind OKC. There is a ton of history behind Fort Worth and Dallas, even Little Rock..Birmingham especially, Nashville and Memphis..these great cities all have a great history behind their community. That goes for Omaha and even Des Moines to an extent. Denver absolutely. Charlotte? Not so much. Wichita? Not so much. Colorado Springs? Zip. I don't like those kinds of cities..

I think OKC is certainly one of the more heartbreaking example of these big, urban, historic cities that just obliterated themselves. The only other city I can think of that destroyed its downtown worse than we did is Norfolk, which actually used to be a major urban city at one point (obviously not anymore). They were the "pilot city" for urban renewal, actually. Some cities in my opinion are incredibly lucky that they were economically depressed during the 70s and 80s, especially Kansas City and Birmingham. A few other downtowns are very well preserved because the cities just didn't have the resources to do urban renewal back in the day, including some smaller cities like Guthrie, OK, the territorial capitol city (and today their downtown is the largest district on the National Register of Historic Places).

[Big E]

Got a "now" version of that "then" photo?

[Golden Eagle]

Here you go..

[thenewguy]

when i see those pictures, it reminds me a lot of Omaha.  In both cases, it's hard to think of what could have been, if only they'd have kept those wonderful old structures in tact.

[Golden Eagle]

On the plus side, at least all of Omaha's wide corporate plazas get featured in movies it seems lol..OKC's corporate plazas just take up space.

Here's a much more complimentary downtown aerial, but still..



Density around DT OKC is getting back to where it once was..but development and new proposals are definitely slowing down. We are in the first round of cities forecasted to make a full economic recovery, but the insulation from the recession is wearing thinner and thinner..it's affected development. Not that it should, it's just when developers aren't particularly motivated or creative in the first place, all they need is a great reason to just squat on the property, and the economy certainly gives them that reason, or rather, the excuse they want to not develop the property. It's much easier to not take a risk and not put in effort and just flip the property, esp if it's in an area like Bricktown where property values are on the up and up.