23rd Street revisited
Five years ago, I quoted then-Congressman Ernest Istook on the condition of Northeast 23rd Street: “When someone drives through, they think, ‘My goodness, this looks bad.’ When you walk along the street, it looks worse. You see close up the cracks, the crumbling, the signs of deterioration.”
Not a whole lot has been done since then: the streetscape has been improved a tad, but that’s about it.
Kurt Hochenauer, proprietor of Okie Funk and occasional op-ed columnist for the Gazette, uses that latter pulpit to stump for improvements to the corridor, citing the city’s nascent plan for the area, adopted in May 2008, and tosses in this idea at the bottom:
Some aspects of the plan cost money. MAPS 3 could provide a foundation for the area’s restoration, an important part of the metro that has been neglected for too long. It’s time to do something.
Nowhere in the city’s 128-page plan [pdf] is MAPS funding called for, but this could work — if the city were to frame the issue correctly on a MAPS ballot. Selling the northeast quadrant has always been difficult, at least partially because of the city’s baleful implementation of Jim Crow laws in years gone by. But now there’s Bricktown and the Health Center on one corner, and the Adventure District on the opposite corner. Now how do you get from Point A to Point B?
Right. And that’s how you sell this as part of MAPS 3: not as a restricted benefit for a small section of town, but as another ingredient in the restructuring of all the central city, starting with one of the zones that needs it the most.
Put me down as a Yes.
