A New Headquarters Building

The expanding paper outgrew its previous building, and in 1909 began construction of a new 5-story headquarters at the corner of 4th and Broadway. Designed by Layton & Smith, the same firm credited with the design of the Oklahoma State Capitol building,  the Oklahoman Building offers a majestic neo-classical facade that’s beauty endures to the present day. The paper continued to thrive and by 1923 was considering its future facility needs, buying up a series of lots between the Oklahoman Building and the Santa Fe tracks. This is the land that would become Oklahoma City’s first great public space!

On March 18, 1923, Edward King Gaylord offered company land to serve as Oklahoma City’s first downtown park (click to read)

A CLOSE IN PARK

In the 1920s Oklahoma City’s population doubled from 91,295 to 185,389 – moving up from the 80th to the 43rd largest city in the United States.  Despite the addition of large parks on the edge of town constructed as part of the 1910 Parks and Boulevard Plan and the existence of other quality open spaces, such as Belle Isle Amusement Park north of the city and Wheeler Park on the banks of the North Canadian River, the city still failed to provide the adequate public space for people living and working downtown.  This fact was not lost on E.K. Gaylord.  On March 18, 1923 he made this announcement on the front page of his paper:

“One of Oklahoma City’s greatest needs is a close in park.”

A search of the files of The Daily Oklahoman disclosed the fact that that statement had been published editorially more than a score of times in the last ten years.

And in order to “practice what it preaches,” The Oklahoma Publishing company has decided to help establish teh first down town park immediately

The park was located on the half block behind the Oklahoman building, starting at the alley on the west and extending east 275 feet to the publisher’s warehouse along the Santa Fe tracks. The depth of the park, from 4th street on the south to what used to be an alley running east-west through the center of the block on the north, was 140 feet, resulting in a park just under one acre in size.

This rendering shows the location of Oklahoman Park and the surrounding development (based on 1922 Sanborn Map – PDF).

Over the next six years Oklahoman Park greatly enhanced the quality of life in downtown, serving residents as an everyday park, and also as a central meeting place that hosted numerous downtown events, such as: sports broadcast, concerts, memorial services, and more.  It was so popular in fact that it once attracted more than 15,000 people for a single event, with crowds overflowing into the streets and blocking traffic.

Oklahoman Park Time Line

To give you an idea of how this park space served Oklahoma City over the years, I have put together a time line of some notable events.

OPENING DAY / July 11, 1923

On Wednesday, July 11, 1923 at 4:00pm, Oklahoman Park officially opened and treated those in attendance to a play-by-play presentation of the Oklahoma City Indians game versus Wichita, on a large “magnetic baseball board” that relayed the movement of the game from information provided by direct wire service.  The park was an instant success, as demonstrated by this photo of the crowd that was published in the next days paper.

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MEMORIAL SERVICE / August 10, 1923

On this day Oklahoma Citians gathered in Oklahoman Park to pay tribute to President Warren G. Harding following his death.

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BEDLAM FOOTBALL BROADCAST / October 27, 1923

The introduction of a new Football Gridgraph, a magnetic football board that displayed the game between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the sound of the radio broadcast.  The Football Gridgraph (see below) was  used to display all of the college football games for the fans that couldn’t catch the train to Norman.

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DRAPED IN WINTER REMNANTS / January 11, 1925

Oklahoman Park covered in snow.  This is only the second picture I have found of the park and gives some sense of how it fit behind the OPUBCO headquarters.

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WORLD SERIES / October 6, 1926

Each year fans would gather to watch and listen to the broadcast of the World Series.  On this day they got a special treat as Babe Ruth set a World Series record by hitting three home runs in Game 4 of the series.

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THE BATTLE OF THE LONG COUNT / September 22, 1927

On this day, crowds of Oklahoma City residents – between fifteen and sixteen thousand – turned out to listen to a broadcast of what would be known as The Battle of the Long Count, a boxing rematch between Heavyweight champion Gene Tunney and former champion Jack Dempsey, that was broadcast live from Soldier Field in Chicago.  The crowd was so large in fact that “long before the gong sounded on the first round, the crowds had overflowed across the streets,” blocking traffic on surround streets.  “It was an outing for Oklahoma City.”

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THE END OF OKLAHOMAN PARK / July 7, 1929

From the start Mr. Gaylord knew that as some point the Oklahoman would need the land for the expansion of their facilities.  In 1929 that day finally came when the paper announced that construction of a new modern publishing plant was set to take place on the site of Oklahoman Park.  Oklahoman Park served the City’s residents for six years thanks to the generosity and vision of a great city leader.

A GREAT NEW PUBLIC SPACE

This great public space was a major amenity to downtown Oklahoma City.  It was more than just another park.   It helped meet the public space needs for surrounding residents and broader Oklahoma City community.  Just as E.K. Gaylord noted of the city in 1923, today Oklahoma City lacks high quality urban spaces like the Oklahoman Park. While we may no longer gather for radio broadcast or magnetic board displays, a small urban park at the corner of 4th and Broadway would be a welcome amenity to this area of downtown and would be utilized both on a daily basis and for numerous events and festivals.

Thankfully, the construction of the new Chamber Building provides the perfect opportunity to create a great new public space.  We can create a place that helps us meet our planning objectives and captures the essence of OKC’s first urban public space.  This public space will not compete with the planned Core 2 Shore park as it is quite some distance away and much, much smaller in scale.  What this place can do is improve pedestrian connectivity, provide a gathering place for festivals and events and offer a great place to eat lunch for CBD workers. This park would redefine this portion of downtown and enhance the potential for new development in all of the adjoining districts – especially Automobile Alley!

To get a better idea of how public spaces of this size can benefit urban communities today, we will next take a look at one of the United State’s great public spaces.

For more on the planning of the Chamber site:

1. Re-visioning the Chamber Proposal
2. Re-visioning the Chamber Proposal, part II
3. Re-visioning the Chamber: Defining Objectives
4. Oklahoman Park: OKC’s First Great Public Space

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Sources:

1. “Close In Park Offer of Paper to Citizens,” The Oklahoman, Mar 18, 1923, page 35
2. “Chance to See Ball Game Free is Offered in Daily Oklahoman Park,” The Oklahoman, Jul 11, 1923, page 1
3. “Crowd See Action of Game at Oklahoman Park,” The Oklahoman, Jul 12, 1923, page 1
4. “Heads to Bow for Memorial,” The Oklahoman, Aug 9, 1923, page 1
5. “Something New for Football Fans,” The Oklahoman, Oct 23, 1923, page 12
6. “Draped in Winter Raiments,” The Oklahoman, Jan 11, 1925, page 41
7. “Super-Service For Super-Series,” The Oklahoman, Oct 1, 1926, page 1
8. “Crowd in Park Cheers for Fight Winner,” The Oklahoman, Sep 23, 1927, page 1
9. “Modern Newspaper Home Soon to Rise in Oklahoman Park,” The Oklahoman, Jul 7, 1929, page 1

A while back I posted a sketch that I discovered on my recent thesis research trip, from an early plan for the Oklahoma City Civic Center.  Well Doug Loudenback’s curiosity was piqued and he has produced a wonderful new post that unravels the planning and development of Oklahoma City’s Civic Center built upon the land (pictured above) left vacant with the removal of the old Rock Island tracks.

It is a great post and I encourage anyone interested in the City’s history to check it out.  Doug is a master at pulling together pictures and resources, and culling articles from the Oklahoman archives – and here he delivers once again!

Click here to see Doug’s post

This actually represents one of the earliest and most complete maps of Oklahoma City.  I have tracked down a couple maps that predate this one, but this is definitely the most complete and absolutely beautifully done.  Keep in mind that this map is a combination of what existed and what was proposed – not all of the ideas came to fruition.

For a higher-resolution image of the map, download the .pdf at the bottom of the page.



GRAND BOULEVARD






















CLASSEN BOULEVARD










DETAILED PLANS FOR NEW PARKS














Northeast Park – what became Lincoln Park

Southeast Park – what became Trosper Park

Southwest Park – what became Woodson Park

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE PLAN

These resources are all made available in .pdf.  These files are quite large (please use right-click Save as…).

• Complete 1910 Dunn Report and Plan in b/w .pdf, 7.5mb – (click here)
• Large general plan color map, 8.9mb – (click here)

Also, I have full-size 300dpi scans of all images available and will consider sharing them – please email me if you are interested.



RELATED RESOURCES

These articles are from journals available for free through google books that reference this planning effort around the time it was carried out.  They are helpful in completing the picture, though you have to take it with a grain of salt as early Oklahoma Citians were always hard at work selling their beloved city. I downloaded each journals complete .pdf and saved only the portion that contains the relevant article.

• “The Park System of Oklahoma City“ by Glenn Marston, appeared in The American City in 1909
• “How Oklahoma City Secured Its Park and Boulevard System“ by Will H. Clark, President of the Oklahoma City Parks Commission, appeared in The American City in 1910
• “The Park and Boulevards of Oklahoma City“ by S.T. Bisbee, appeared in Municipal Engineering in 1911

MY THESIS TOPIC IDEAS

1. Distributed urban college education
Basically I am curious what opportunities there are for higher-education to be distributed across residual space in urban setting, utilizing the facilities and expertise of existing firms to enhance the education, while providing a cheap and enthusiastic labor force.  Still interested in this, but decided that it was not the best option.

2. Effects of 21st century retail on urban form
What is urban form affected by new types of retail (i.e. internet)?  This topic is already receiving quite a bit of attention and is difficult to study.

3. Examine impact of agricultural idling incentives on city form
So we pay the carrying costs on land even as it accrues value for later development?  Surely this policy has a dramatic impact on urban form, especially in cities like OKC – I will have to wait to find out, because this topic is a little too boring to study for an entire semester.

4. Analyze potential for handheld gps enabled phones to measure pedestrian movement in a city
New cell phones – like the GPS enabled 3G iPhone – provide a new opportunity to understand the ways pedestrians move through cities.  Obviously there are privacy issues, but certainly a system could be anonymized.  This is a relatively new area of research and something I think would be really cool to study. The SenseABLE City Lab here at MIT has done some similar work with cell phone data, but the new embedded GPS systems provide an extra level of detail that makes the system work at the pedestrian movement level.  I remain intrigued by this, but ended up deciding against it.

5. Power and politics of urban design in Oklahoma City
Hmm…this would be really interesting! BUT, I decided for various reasons (e.g. my future job prospects) to leave this one alone.

6. Assess public places not by design, but focus especially on the surrounding urban design that supports the public place (i.e. library, retail, density of residents, density of office, density of lunch places, etc)
I love public spaces and this seemed like an area that hadn’t been looked at.  Interesting questions like, what are the best uses to have around a park?  Is a library good, like Bryant Park?  What about office buildings?  Concrete convention centers?  Fun stuff, maybe later.

7. Value based property taxes – taxing a property based on the building allowed by zoning; should combat land speculators that blight urban landscape.
Do you ever get tired of seeing surface parking lots in the middle of downtown?  Part of the problem is that our tax system enables these lots to be profitable, even though they often do not provide the same level of benefit to society as a developed project.  There have been other tax systems utilized that tax property relative to the residual land value sans improvements.  So an office building and a parking lot taking up the same amount of land would be taxed the same.  This was an idea pushed by Henry George, an economist and NYC mayoral candidate in the late 1800s.  Ultimately, this idea was politically infeasible and probably still is…which is why I am not doing it.

[correction 11/6 - Joshua (see comments) enlightened me to the fact  that land value taxation, or LVT, is being successfully implemented in a number of communities throughout the United State; you can find out more at urbantools.org]

8.  City organizational structure and its impact on urban form – Vienna has a combined planning & public works department, whereas Oklahoma City has separated the planning and implementation functions.
I am curious what the pros/cons are to having planning & public works combined into a single department versus the system currently in place in Oklahoma City.  In reality, street projects have an as great or greater affect on the form of our city than planning.  Not sure what the benefits of the current configuration are, but I will have to wait to find out.

9. Studying the ideas of Hans Mondermann on naked streets
The late Hans Monderman has shown how streets with fewer signs, fewer road lines, etc are actually safer.  Seems unintuitive, but has been proven true under a variety of conditions.  Obviously, highways are not a good candidate for such a system – as Kramer showed us:

10. Assessing the environmental impact of transportation infrastructure in a world of cheap, pollution free cars!
Even if we get to pollution free cars, we still have to look at the sustainability of the built form we use to support an auto-dominated transportation system.  I think we can probably do a better job in planning for a future that continues to see cars as the predominate mode of transportation.

THE WINNING TOPIC

Ultimately I decided that I wanted to write a thesis on something I enjoy studying, and I really enjoy studying Oklahoma City.  Some of the possibilities above have to do with OKC either directly or indirectly, but with any OKC related question I always come back to my lack of understanding – and the lack of available research – on the history of planning and development that created the city we see today.  Steve and others have done some good stuff on the post 1960 period and on various isolated elements of the early 20th century, but this early period has not received much attention through a purely planning, urban design, and development related focus.   So my thesis topic is:

The early planning tradition and development forces that shaped Oklahoma City

I am starting pre-landrun and will study as far as I can, but probably won’t get past 1950 – which thankfully will allow me to avoid the Pei Plan and the gloominess it brings.

NEED YOUR HELP

Well, if you have anything that you think will give me some insight into the early planning history of Oklahoma City, please let me know.  I, in return, will try to post some of the resources I come across and share what I find out.  In fact, I have already found some cool stuff that I will try to get posted later this week.