All around the town

The axes are Sheridan and Santa Fe. Neither of these is exactly a major thoroughfare — Sheridan runs only three and a half miles or so, and doesn't lie along a section line, while Santa Fe disappears entirely downtown — but these are the avenues that determine the quadrants of Oklahoma City and its nearer suburbs.

I've lived in all four of those quadrants, which is not especially unique an experience, nor does it confer any particular wisdom upon me. But it perhaps does give me some sympathy for LilRed's defense of the southside:

Since I never went to school here, I never got to see this particular phenomenon myself, but I suspect similar divisions exist in any town big enough to have two high schools. In fact, they can exist within the same school: I graduated from a, um, "faith-based" high school in Charleston, South Carolina, which drew most of its students from the prosperous areas east and west of downtown, while those of us who hailed from the comparatively-impoverished north side were few and far between and fairly defensive about it. (This is not, incidentally, why my romance with a westside girl was doomed, but that's yet another story.)

LilRed continues:

Not by me. I live here, and I have to drive through them on a regular basis. And it's been that way for some time: Roy P. Stewart, in his legendary city history Born Grown, published way back in 1974, complained that "May Avenue, especially from Northwest Thirtieth on north, is a glaring neon alley." The neon has largely given way to plastic signage, but the glare is still there. Lincoln north of the Capitol is a wasteland. And I travel NW 10th west of I-44 only at gunpoint.

What's going to be interesting is how the City Council ward alignments shuffle after the 2010 Census. The 2000 numbers put the old southside troika — Wards 3, 4, and 5 — essentially out of business: Ward 3 now extends as far north as NW 36th, and Wards 6 and 7 reach as far south as SW/SE 44th. Ward 6's Ann Simank is certainly aware of spreading blight: last spring, she called for a reexamination of the city's Master Plan, saying that blight, far from an inner-city issue, was creeping southward toward I-240 and northward toward NW 63rd.

As I suggested earlier, what the southside needs is the kind of clout that near-northwest neighborhoods have developed over the last decade or so. The South Oklahoma City Council of Neighborhoods should not be the red-headed stepchild to the Neighborhood Alliance. Capitol Hill may not be Crown Heights, but it's not Calcutta either.