Checking out the Mayor’s state of the city address, it is exciting to see him talk about the need for public transit, stating that “the time has come.”  It looks like Maps 3 will focus on:

1. Public Transit
2. The Core to Shore Central Park
3. And a new convention center

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Mayor Cornett’s speech:

But today, I am here to tell you that there is much work to be done. And while our momentum is still moving, and our position relative to the rest of the United States is strong, now is not the time to slow down.

So now let us view the city with fresh eyes, concentrating not so much on what we have but what we don’t have. To begin with, look around the country. From a quality of life perspective, there are two high profile shortcomings, two areas that, if addressed, would dramatically further our ascension as a city where people want to live.

The first is public transportation. The second is a centrally located, large public park. Let me expand on these two topics.

Providing quality public transit in Oklahoma City is a difficult task. We were built around the automobile, and as a result, we are spread out. We don’t have the density to easily do it well. We don’t have the density to do it efficiently. So, we have built-in excuses. We have developed into a city where if you don’t own a car, you are out of luck.
But if we truly want to progress as a city, we have to do better.

I have told you that in these addresses before. During my five years in office, I have used this platform to push this conversation forward. Today, I am here to tell you that the time has arrived to take another step.

I urge each of you to check out the Fixed Guideway Study that provides our blueprint for a 21st Century transit system. It can be found at on the Internet at OKFGS.org.

Fully implemented, it calls for a greatly enhanced bus system, including Bus Rapid Transit, and there are also light rail and downtown streetcar components. This blueprint is complete. You may recall we spent a year and a half on the study.

We now know enough to get started, and there are a number of places we can start. But the key is that we need to get started. Not so much for today, because we are not in a public transit crisis. But transit programs take years, if not decades, to implement. Most cities wait until their highways are at gridlock before they begin taking action. Our city has a history of planning for the future, and now is the time to get started. It will take vision from each and every one of us. When gas if affordable and traffic runs smoothly, it can be difficult to gather support for public transit. I will need your help.

The large central park in the Core to Shore project is also critical to our city’s future, and necessary to our ability to adapt to the relocation of Interstate 40. A year ago, in this State of the City address, I showed you the first conceptual images of the Core to Shore project.

Since then you’ve seen them in many other places, and you’ve probably followed the announcement of the first signature project, the Oklahoma City SkyDance pedestrian bridge over the new I-40.

We have never built anything like this before in Oklahoma City, and this bridge will become an iconic image for the millions of motorists who pass through our city. Let this be the first signal that we are serious about Core to Shore, and it also serves notice that we are raising the standards for design in this city. But there is much more to Core to Shore.

The Core to Shore plan is the result of a large and inclusive civic planning process, and it illustrates the benefits of building a large central park that connects the core of downtown to the shore of the Oklahoma River. Also central to the project is the at-grade boulevard that will replace the current I-40. This boulevard won’t just be a street that gets you from point A to point B. With this boulevard, we have the opportunity to create one of the most special streets in the United States.

This opportunity comes upon us because of the relocation of I-40. That relocation will remove the physical barrier that has separated downtown from the River and everything in between. Now, we have the opportunity few cities ever get. We can create a new urban center, just blocks from our central business district. The park and the boulevard are the lynchpins, and they serve as the catalyst for future retail, housing, and a potential Convention Center, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

A fully programmed urban park that ties to the Myriad Gardens and retail development along the new boulevard will be yet another eye-popping signal that Oklahoma City is moving forward. Combined with a public transit system that we can be proud of, a citywide sidewalk program that is already under construction, and a growing trend toward density in the inner-city, the park can be another giant step towards creating the pedestrian-friendly community that we desire. The timeline is doable. Keep in mind, the interstate should be relocated in 2012. The resulting boulevard that will be built along the current interstate alignment should be in place by 2014. The park, ideally, needs to be ready at the same time, roughly five years from now. But like an expansion of public transit, the park is not currently funded.

Together, better public transit and the creation of the Core to Shore park are significant “quality of life” amenities. You have heard me say before that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. I suggest that for transit and the Core to Shore park, that time has come.

You have heard me say before that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. I suggest that for transit and the Core to Shore park, that time has come.

The only decisions left are how we proceed and how soon.

And while these two initiatives are focused directly on the quality of life for our residents, we have a third important opportunity that focuses directly on our economy and indirectly on job creation. And that is a resolution to our undersized, and thus underutilized, convention center. We are in it today. This building was constructed in 1972 and was last improved in 1999. In 1999, we had one downtown hotel and it wasn’t doing all that well. Now we are soon to have seven downtown hotels and counting. And it appears they are all healthy. But we are currently losing convention business we could otherwise obtain because of the size of this facility.

Kudos to the Mayor for taking a stand on public transit.  The time truly has come!  Designing the park and deciding on the details of the transit system will give us plenty to discuss in the coming months.  And I look forward also to arguing why the placement of a new convention center along the length of the eastern edge of the new park is nothing short of a terrible idea!  You would think one under utilized downtown park ruined by an adjacent convention center would be enough, but apparently we want another one.

Time is of the essence – if they are going to put this to a vote in the fall then the plans will have to be nearly complete sometime this summer.  But for now, Maps3 is on the horizon and public transit is coming with it – enjoy it.  It is a good day!

This just in…Oklahoma City has been ranked the #2 Fattest city in America by Men’s Fitness.  That means amidst all of the dieting we have been doing, we have still managed to slide six spots in the rankings and are just a few burgers away from becoming #1.  A couple of the magazine’s comments that hit closest to home:

Basketball courts are practically nonexistent here, among the fewest per capita in our survey. There’s just one court here for every 12,162 residents; the national average is one court per 6,909 people.

Even recreational walking – about the easiest fitness activity anywhere – can’t attract participants in Oklahoma City, where people are 14 percent less likely than average to go for a walk, the 4th lowest rate of any city in our survey.

Hmm…are planning and public health related?  It appears so.  This does remind me that I need to get back to finishing the series on parks and public-space.  But until then, here is more info on the rankings…

OKLAHOMA CITY’S FITNESS REPORT CARD

• Fitness Centers & Sport Stores: C+
• Nutrition: F
• Sports Participation: C+
• TV Viewing: F+
• Overweight/Sedentary: F
• Junk Food: C-
• Air Quality: B-
• Geography: F+
• Commute: A
• Parks & Open Space: F+
• City Rec Facilities: D-
• Access to Healthcare: A-
• Motivation: F+
• Mayor & City Initiatives: C-
• State Obesity Initiatives: D+

They add:

Oklahoma City lost points in our Motivation category for poor participation rates in running, biking and walking despite high air quality.

Ouch Charlie! That hurts! And a F+ in parks and open space!  That really hurts and its still hurting.

ALL THE FATTEST CITIES

So who was number one?  Miami, yeh, who would have thought.  We are fitter than Miami!  Hooray, this is great news! I mean Miami has the sun, the ocean, and salsa music…and we still dominated them.  But other than that, all of the news for OKC is pretty dismal.  Here is the complete list of fattest cities:

1. Miami, FL
2. Oklahoma City, OK
3. San Antonio, TX
4. Las Vegas, NV
5. New York, NY
6. Houston, TX
7. El Paso, TX
8. Jacksonville, FL
9. Charlotte, NC
10. Louisville-Jefferson, KY
11. Memphis, TN
12. Detroit, MI
13. Chicago, IL
14. Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
15. San Jose, CA
16. Tulsa, OK
17. Baltimore, MD
18. Columbus, OH
19. Raleigh, NC
20. Philadelphia, PA
21. L.A.-Long Beach, CA
22. Phoenix-Mesa, AZ
23. Indianapolis, IN
24. San Diego, CA
25. Kansas City, MO

Obviously, Dallas and Houston are expected.  Also interesting to see Charlotte and Indianapolis, two cities we seem to want to emulate.  But maybe it has something to do with being in this part of the country…?

Perhaps.  It does seem to have some correlation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t overcome it.

AMERICA’S FITTEST CITIES

1. Salt Lake City, UT
2. Colorado Springs, CO
3. Minneapolis, MN
4. Denver, CO
5. Albuquerque, NM
6. Portland, OR
7. Honolulu, HI
8. Seattle, WA
9. Omaha, NE
10. Virginia Beach, VA
11. Milwaukee, WI
12. San Francisco, CA
13. Tucson, AZ
14. Boston, MA
15. Cleveland, OH
16. St. Louis, MO
17. Austin, TX
18. Washington, DC
19. Sacramento, CA
20. Oakland, CA
21. Atlanta, GA
22. Fresno, CA
23. Tampa, FL
24. Nashville-Davidson, TN
25. Pittsburgh, PA

Wait, why is Omaha in the top ten?  Surely we can be as fit as the people in Omaha.  I mean, we beat them in football.  Seriously though, there seems overall to be a very strong correlation between the type of urban form a city has and the fitness of its people.  Obviously there are a few anomalies that give us pause – like why is NYC on the fattest and Atlanta on the fittest – but there are a host of other factors that likely account for these discrepancies.  Variables such as climate, geography, age of population, ethnicity, and policy might all impact the fitness of a city.

Some cities are regulating eateries to help citizens make more informed, healthier eating decisions (click to enlarge).

Unfortunately, I don’t see anywhere that we got bonus points for our city-wide diet campaign, apparently the people conducting the test don’t know the inherent health benefits of Taco Bell’s fresco crunchy tacos!  There seems to be a higher priority placed on policies that affect measurable change.  So give credit to NYC for helping consumers make more informed eating decisions and for using its street infrastructure to encourage health and activity.  And to Boston for its city-wide ban on trans fat. And to Portland for their focus on providing first-class bike lane infrastructure.

As for OKC, we are talking the talk, but we are simply not walking anywhere.

–

For more details on the rankings, click here.

Following yesterday’s post, I thought it would be best to give some examples of places that citizens get tied in and expand a bit on what the city can do to help. First place I went to get information was the OKC Planning Department’s website.  I had the privilege of working as an intern at the planning department prior to starting my graduate program and hold the people there in very high regard.  Checking out their website, I noticed that they do a good job of making the agendas for upcoming meeting readily available on the right side of the page, which I have made available for you below:

• Board of Adjustment
• Bricktown Urban Design Committee
• Downtown Design Review Committee
• Historic Preservation and Landmark Commission
• Planning Commission
• Stockyards Urban Design Committee
• Urban Design Commission

Having the agendas easy to find is great, but there are still some things that need to be addressed.  Here are some of my suggestions, and I encourage you to go through the motions and see if you have any suggestions of your own.  With a few small improvements we can make it much easier for the average citizen to get and stay meaningfully involved.


FIX THE LINKS

Not all of the agenda links are working correctly.  The links for the Board of Adjustements and Planning Commission take you to a page with meeting times, but no agenda.  And the Stockyard Urban Design Committee link hasn’t been updated since October.  This is basic and should be fixed quickly!


RELEASE AGENDA ITEMS EARLIER

State law requires that the agenda be made available at least 24 hours prior to the meeting, not including weekends or holidays.  But most of the time the agenda are already complete before this, with copies available to board members, and the individual items that are likely to appear on the agenda are known well in advance of the meeting as they often require that neighbors on adjacent properties be contacted.  The problem is, if you are simply an active citizen that cares about what is happening in an area in which you don’t own property and do not legally have to be contacted, you will usually only have around 24 hours to download the agenda, read the entire thing (goodluck – the most recent planning commission agenda was over 500 pages) and decide which items if any deserve your attention.  You probably don’t have enough time to contact anyone and certainly not enough time to fire off a formal letter, so you have to decide if you want to go to the meeting.  But even then, the item descriptions provided in the agenda are usually only detailed enough to arouse your interest or anger, but do not give you all of the information needed to keep you from looking like a completely uninformed idiot in front of the committee.  Making the agenda items available at least one week prior to the meeting would allow time to ask questions, hold discussions, organize, compromise, etc.


ADD THE DATE AND TIME TO FRONTPAGE

People should not have to download a .pdf agenda or scour google to find out the date and time of the next meeting; this information should be easy to find.  Along these lines, though requiring more effort, if we really want people to become involved then we shouldn’t require them to sit through an entire half-day long meeting only to speak to one item.  Either the agenda should be broken up to give shorter time slots in which people could attend and speak to the item of interest, or some other solution – such as allowing comments to be submitted via email and read at the meeting – should be sought out.


GOOGLE MAP THE AGENDA ITEMS

It is incredibly difficult to look through multiple agendas in search of things that may be of interest to you.  As mentioned, this weeks Planning Commission agenda is over 500 pages long, and over 100mb in download size.  As you scan through the agendas, you have to look for the address on each item and then figure out exactly where this is located relative to the areas with which you are concerned.  This is overly cumbersome and I doubt anyone does this on a regular basis.

Agenda items mapped by location allow users to quickly find the information that is most important to them.

It is not too much to ask to have the agendas for all meeting provided in the form of a google map.  It is very simple to input a spreadsheet of addresses and be left with a map that could include the agenda item name, type, and a link to the rest of the relevant information (like in the example shown above).  That is the basics and is very simple to do. In fact, with a little tweaking it could be dynamically setup to update automatically as the individual agenda items are cleared for the agenda.

Allowing users to define their areas of interests would allow people to stay connected with what is going on in the areas they care about.

Eventually, if we are really going to strive for excellence and not just for what is required.  Then the system should allow citizens to create boundaries of interest.  So say for instance that that I am interested in all of the planning and development taking place in and around Bricktown and also up on Western Avenue between 36th and 50th.  The system would allow you indicate this through a map interface and then send you a feed straight to your email inbox or feed service of your choice with the agenda items that fall within your specified boundaries.  You wouldn’t even have to navigate to a webpage to view the map, it would happen instantly, as soon as the agenda items are uploaded into the system.  AND, you wouldn’t have to scour multiple agenda from different branches of the planning department – or of the city for that matter – but would be notified of ALL agenda items from EVERY department that fall within the parameters you set forth.  Of course, even without the feed and with just the map, the information becomes much simpler to navigate:

With the Agenda Map, you just click on the item of interest and it gives a brief description with links to more information.

This can all be done today by every city department for relatively little in cost and just a small amount of know-how.  With such a system, I really think we would see tremendous breakthroughs in the level of civic participation and contribution by the citizens of the city.

What do you think?  Do you already attend these meetings on a regular basis?  Would you be more likely to if these changes were implemented?  Has anyone ever read an entire planning commission agenda…?

We are standing on the threshold of a new era. Statehood has come and the rapid growth attending the founding of a state government. The Indian Territory, so long held back, brings its share of wealth. Men are plowing in ten thousand fields; the treasures of the earth are being mined, and the wheels of industry have begun to revolve. A hundred cities are rising on our plains, and the highways of commerce are opened wide. Every year will bring greater wealth; and with every year will come added numbers of people, until our cities grow to proportions we scarcely dream of today. But let every year be a year of progress so that our cities may rank among the first, not only in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.

From an address given by Philip Kates, former Tulsa City Attorney, on January 5, 1911 at the at the First Annual Conference of the Oklahoma Municipal League held in Oklahoma City.

Have the people of Oklahoma City quit dreaming of making this city great?  Or have we begun to recapture some of the spirit that defined the pioneers who settled this land?  It is clear that early city and state leaders had huge aspirations for the future of their cities, but I fear that even with all of the great things that have happened in the last 15 years we are beginning to rest on our laurels.

But let every year be a year of progress so that our cities may rank among the first, not only in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.

This should be a motto we scream today, though I would amend it by excluding the word “only” so that it reads “first, NOT in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.”  The focus should not be on growth, but on the continuous improvement of quality of life for ALL current and future residents of our city.

These are my ideals, to create a city that enables all of us to live a fuller, richer life; not based on material economy alone, but on an amalgamation of the quality of life components valued by us all.  This might include any number of things, but it has no single focus.  Ultimately, we have to have a process that allows for and values the input of all individuals and doesn’t allow any single person or organization to control our destiny.  Further, we have to be willing to change and adapt as the social, racial, and economical makeup of our city shifts towards a new future and as the challenges we are faced with demand it.

I don’t see this happening now; I feel as though in recent years we have paused following an almost two decade rise.  So many opportunities presented over the past couple years have ended with settling.  Settling for more of the same.  Settling for good enough.  Settling for something less than what the citizens of other cities consistently demand.

So as we move forward into the future.  I ask that the city leaders and administrators allow for – make that encourage – the meaningful input and involvement of the citizens they claim to serve.  And of equal importance, we require a more active citizenry, with more persons making their voices heard at council and design commission meetings, participating on civic or neighborhood boards, or any number of other possible roles suited to the abilities and interest of the person.  No matter where we get involved, the goal should be to demand excellence from ourselves and our civil servants.

Right now it is not always easy to get involved: adequate information is difficult to find, formal channels of communication are not always effective, and many decisions are made without the benefit of an open-forum or healthy debate.  These are symptons of the same flawed way of doing things that led to some of the greatest tragedies in our City’s history of planning and development.  We need to develop a process that will ensure we avoid another Pei Plan, or the injustices of the clearance of Maywood, or more recently the continued controversy surrounding the new I-40 alignment.  With leadership that listens and a citizenry that pays attentions, we will avoid some of the mistakes that have hindered us in the past and can push forward towards the creation of a truly great city that we can all be proud of.

Greg Cerveny at urbanmonarch.com emailed today and had this to say:

I’m looking for the pedestrian friendly neighborhoods of OKC.  Something with grocery stores, entertainment, and dining within walking distance.  Any suggestions for places to start?

Initially, I though, “Dang, what am I supposed to tell this guy?.”  I mean, surely we have something to offer, but it is not immediately clear which neighborhood can really provide all of this within close walking distance.  But after thinking through it for a little while, I sent him back this list as my recommendations for the best pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in Oklahoma City.  It definitely not meant to be a comprehensive list (though sadly it might be), but the good news is that nearly every neighborhood I considered is trending towards a more pedestrian friendly future.


PEDESTRIAN FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOODS IN OKC

1. Mesta Park / Heritage Hills / Winans (between NW 13th on south and 23rd on north; Classen Blvd east to Robinson) – These are probably the most walkable neighborhoods.  Midtown is directly south across 13th street providing a growing selection of restaurants and bars.  There is a Homeland at Western and 18th that while not as yuppie-ready as a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, does handle most of your grocery needs.  Also, there is a solid group of restaurant and retail establishments along 23rd street to the north, including: a just opened market named Market C (owned by the Cheever’s restaurant group) with great take-home dinner options and Cuppie’s and Joe, a new cupcake and coffee shop with outstanding cupcakes.  Plus, I would say that the long-term prospects for both Midtown and 23rd Street are very good.
2. Jefferson Park / The Paseo / Sparrow Park (directly north of 23rd Street) – The restaurants and galleries of the Paseo along with the aforementioned energy of 23rd make a walkable lifestyle a real possibility here.  You will find smaller houses, better values, great parks, and still tons of untapped potential.  Most grocery runs will require a trip in the car, or at least a short bike ride; but the previously mentioned Market C and a few corner convenience stores may make the necessary trips few and far between.
3. Midtown – There lots of new energy and new restaurants, including: McNellie’s Irish Pub, Irma’s Burgers, 1492, Café de Brazil, and Prairie Thunder Bakery (which has wonderful breads).  Great potential and within walkable distance to the 18th street Homeland, but there are still so many gaps in the fabric and there are not enough residents for it to even be considered a neighborhood.  Still, if you want to be a pioneer give it a shot.  The Sieber Hotel redevelopment looks to be a nice place to call home.
4. Crown Heights – This is a wonderful neighborhood within close walking distance to the Western restaurant corridor with lots of great dining and bar options.  Not too many other neighborhood amenities are currently available along Western and the neighborhood DOES NOT have sidewalks of any kind.  I love this neighborhood and was happy to call it home for a couple of years.  You probably can’t practice a fully walkable lifestyle here, but it still has its moments and is a great place to live.  (I would probably put Edgemere Park in the same category.)
5. Downtown / Bricktown / The Triangle – Similar to Midtown, all of the “urban” neighborhoods have yet to really take hold.  Bricktown probably has the best breadth of services, but has only limited living options.  The Triangle is within walking distance to Bricktown, but not much else.  Downtown has some terrific amenities like: the OKC Museum of Art, Civic Center Performance Center, Downtown Library, Ford Center Arena, restaurants, etc; but virtually every housing unit – if not 100% – is sold with a parking spot, which should give you some idea.  In my opinion, these neighborhoods are wonderful options if you have the money, but better values can be found in all of the previously mentioned locations.  Still, I have heard that prices are dropping in at least one new downtown housing development – Maywood Park – so maybe it is worth investigating further.

RESPONSE

What do you think?  After reading it again I am thinking that I definitely should have put Crown Heights at the bottom of the list, but am still pretty confident with the idea that Downtown / Bricktown / The Triangle are not currently the best options – probably #4 – though hopefully they will be at the top of the list sometime soon.  Also, I would be interested to get your thoughts on the neighborhoods I missed.  Perhaps I should have mentioned the campus area of Norman – which is probably the most walkable neighborhood in all of central Oklahoma – but I was thinking only in OKC proper.

One note, I realize that almost all of these neighborhoods (with the exception of Bricktown and the Triangle) are in the northwest quadrant of the city.  This points to a limitation on my own perspective and experience, but also to the historic growth pattern of the city.  So if you have ideas about completely different parts of the city that you think offer something special, please let me know as I would love to check them out.

This is part 3/6 in a series overviewing The Normal Requirements of American Towns and Cities in Respect to Public Open Spaces, an article written by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and John Nolen that appeared in Charities and the Commons journal of social work in 1906.

III. PLAYGROUNDS

In Olmsted and Nolen’s third category of open space they stress the importance of playgrounds as part of the open space network and describe how different types of playgrounds are required to serve different age groups of users.

Small children

An Oklahoma City “tot-lot” operated by the Parks and Recreation Department in The Greens neighborhood

Whether in connection with school grounds or elsewhere, there should be in each neighborhood, a space not open to the hurly burly of the larger children. where mothers may take little tots, mostly under the school age, to get quiet, out-of-door pleasure and exercise.

Experts recommend that these small playgrounds – or “tot-lots” as they are commonly called – should be available within 800 feet of every home.  In Oklahoma City a number of tot-lots of this size are incorporated into the development of subdivisions and also you will find plenty of back yards with enough area and play equipment to qualify as a suitable tot-lot.  Still, in order to meet this guideline, the city would need thousands of new tot-lots spread through the city’s neighborhoods.


School-aged children

But perhaps the most important playgrounds are for the children of the school age and these can best be arranged and used in connection with the schools.

The purpose…is to give opportunity for exercise and active play near the children’s homes and preferably next to the school, so that it can be used during the recesses as well as after hours.

This seems to be the most typical way in which we think of playgrounds.  The equipment has advanced some over the years, going from a swingset and monkey bars to more elaborate play systems. Of Oklahoma City’s 114 public parks, listed on the Parks and Recreation Department’s website, 97 or approximately 85% have play equipment for school-aged children.   In Oklahoma City they are usually part of the programming offered at a larger neighborhood park, and as mentioned in the article can be found in on the site of a local school.  Unfortunately, newer schools tend to be on larger sites and less accessible to neighbor kids – this is just wasteful and unnecessary development.


Youths and young adults

Grounds of this class should include ball fields, running tracks, places for jumping, vaulting, throwing the hammer and quoits, bowling and the like, and convenient accommodations for bathing and dressing.

Unfortunately many of these sports require considerable area in proportion to the numbers engaged in them and for these the grounds must generally be at a greater distance from the people’s homes than is reasonable for the other playgrounds.

Obviously, the sports have changed some. I don’t many people throwing quoits these days (but I love washers and would like to see some places to play). Ballfields can be found throughout the city, though the majority are baseball fields which are often nothing more than a backstop.  There seems to be a real shortage of public soccer fields – only 15 OKC parks have soccer fields according to the OKC Parks Dept.

And I know that it is really hard to find a public park with a good pick-up basketball game; at least in the north inner-city area.  A couple of years ago I searched in vain for a free place to play, finding that all the public gyms were reserved for youth (which is great for them, but didn’t help me) and that there weren’t many good outdoor courts with lights to be found.  Eventually I ended up spending some money to join the OU Health Sciences Center gym which has great pickup games, but was pretty pricey if you are only using it for basketball.  I have to add, growing up around 50th and Portland I played year after year in a league at the Satellite gym founded by the late Carroll Cornett – Mayor Cornett’s father.  I have many fond memories of playing basketball there and really hope we can make sure kids in every part of the city have a place to be active through the winter.  So my thanks to Mr. Cornett for making this a part of my childhood.

Again, the trends seems to make these facilities more and more segregated from other uses in the city with large specialized facilities.  For instance, instead of creating a plan that would distribute baseball and softball facilities throughout the city – providing a local place to play that is quickly accessible – we have allowed them to be clustered into large facilities like Dolese, Boomtown, Wheeler Park, etc, which almost always require a car to access.

There are some positive trends as well, like the development of parks that support untraditional, yet popular sports – like the Matt Hoffman Skate Park (pictured above). Or the addition of frisbee golf courses within a few existing parks.  Also, the Parks Department has begun adding spray parks and aquatic centers to provide great fun during the hot summers.


Conclusions

On the whole I think this is one category of open space in which Oklahoma City is doing a pretty good job.  Like many other cities that struggle with sprawl, we could do a better job of distributing resources and developing in a manner that allows for facilities to be shared.  School campuses should definitely be more integrated into our playground planning efforts.

In Kansas City at the Hare & Hare archive at the Western Historical
Manuscript Collection for thesis research. More to post later, for
now check out this image of the original plan for Edgemere Park!

According to these OK Building and Construction Co. medallions, these sidewalks have been serving downtown residents for over 100 years.

This is part 2/6 in a series overviewing The Normal Requirements of American Towns and Cities in Respect to Public Open Spaces, an article written by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and John Nolen that appeared in Charities and the Commons journal of social work in 1906.

II. CITY SQUARES, COMMONS AND PUBLIC GARDENS

Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon is a great example of an urban city square.

An opinion prevails very generally that a city can not have too many “squares” or “breathing places”

On account of the almost constant passing through such squares the best arrangement is to provide for reasonably direct and convenient paths along the lines most used. Where this is not done many of those who use the square are likely to be so irritated by the indirectness as to miss much of the pleasure they might otherwise receive.

Shade trees, either as a complete grove or in rows along the paths or grouped in some more complex plan, are almost essential features of such squares.

City Squares are certainly prevalent in many older cities, though they seem to be noticeably absent in Oklahoma City; especially downtown.

The properties adjacent to Bicentennial Park have not attracted the development necessary to integrate this open space into the urban fabric of Oklahoma City.

There are a few that I can think of, most notably Bicentennial Park (or Civic Center Park) which is mostly underutilized, but has found footing as the site of the Downtown in December ice-skating rink. Still, its proximity to the county jail has stymied development in the area and prevented it from being integrated into the broader fabric of downtown. Also, the Myriad Gardens would qualify as a public garden, but the flawed design and poorly related adjacent uses have to this point prevented it from being a effectively utilized by the public. This may all change with the completion of Devon Tower and more development to the south of the park as Core to Shore begins to be developed out.

The Core to Shore plan will also contribute to the urban open space with the addition of a downtown park.  This will provide a much needed “central park”, but the city still needs a truly urban open space, such as that provided to Portland by Pioneer Square, which is referred to as the “City’s Living Room”.  In the end, even if all of the plans for Core to Shore are fully realized, Oklahoma City will continue to lack quality urban open spaces – like Pioneer Square – that are effectively integrated into the fabric of the city.