The election of county commissioners — there are three in each of Oklahoma's 77 counties — would seem to be No Big Deal. Then again, about twenty years ago it was discovered that more than half of the state's 231 commissioners had gotten their fingers into some very rich pies. The Legislature responded by requiring independent boards to oversee county budgets. Still, the position of commissioner carries considerable clout, and apparently Shirley Darrell, who used to be in charge of District 1 in Oklahoma County, would like to have her job back.

To do that, Darrell will have to beat former OKC council member Beverly Hodges, who defeated Darrell four years ago. But there's a primary next Tuesday, and Darrell is being challenged by one of her former deputies, Jim Roth, who has mounted a fairly high-dollar direct-mail campaign. How high? He's sent me seven postcards, roughly 7.5 by 10 inches, each with two-color art and a different pitch. It was the seventh of those cards in which Roth came out swinging against his old boss, complete with what purported to be a copy of a warrant for Darrell's arrest on charges of racketeering, bribery, perjury, and other Bad Things. And indeed, Darrell was charged with all these at one time or another, but as anyone this side of Bill Clinton can tell you, a charge does not equal a conviction.

Roth describes himself as a "penny-pinching Democrat", which may even be true: Oklahoma officials of both parties are renowned for parsimony, although it's seldom reflected in the local tax rates. But there's still the thought in the back of my mind that the struggling remains of the local Democratic organization is pushing Roth mainly because he doesn't have Shirley Darrell's legal baggage. And there are other suspicious types out there; last year, when the arrival of the new census figures required that the district lines be redrawn, members of the African-American community protested that the new lines were cunningly designed to put the screws to Darrell because four mostly-black precincts were reassigned from District 1 to the comparatively-whiter District 2, which doesn't hold an election for commissioner until 2004.

And it gets better. Roth, should he prevail in both the primary and the general election, would be the first openly gay officeholder in the state's history. The state GOP, which is somewhere to the right of Fred Phelps, will not take this lying down. And Beverly Hodges, the Republican incumbent, who's been known to pinch a few pennies in her time — she voted to defund Oklahoma City's Human Rights Commission back in 1995, and she turned down a statutory raise last year — doesn't have a free ride through the primary either; she's drawn three opponents, including Courtenay Caudill, daughter of Oklahoma County Clerk Carolyn Caudill, who is — get this — Jim Roth's current boss. The Executive Committee of the Oklahoma County GOP took considerable umbrage that the County Clerk, one of their own, would dare to encourage a Democrat, especially a gay Democrat.

If it sounds like an awfully big tempest for what is, after all, a fairly small teapot, remember: This is Oklahoma, where politics is a blood sport. Almost.

Something called APAC Customer Services Inc. is seeking to fill 500 call-center positions in metro Oklahoma City. If you're interested in being emotionally drained by a soul-sucking job (don't even think of calling it a career) and you think 42nd and Treadmill pays too much, this may be just the spot you've been looking for, and may God have pity on your soul.

Microsoft has given the Oklahoma City Public Schools until 14 October to rid themselves of software not complying with Microsoft license agreements, and the district has launched a major software-license audit.

In the first pass, the district found 1700 PCs with questionable licensing, each of which could theoretically generate a $500 fine from Redmond; a second pass is scheduled to begin today. "I think we're in pretty good shape," said Jerry Dimmitt, team leader for the audit, "but we have so many computers it will be difficult to catch everything." The district has a site license from Microsoft for volume purchases, but it doesn't cover software acquired before the license, and most of the offending stuff, as it happens, is installed on PCs donated to the district, many of which will have to be weeded out to pass the audit.

The district is also putting out a list of minimum standards for donated machines, which reads as follows:

So don't even think about bringing over that old 286.

Paul McCartney showed up last night at the Ford Center, the first-ever appearance of any Beatle in the Sooner State. I didn't go, reasoning that I had probably better things to do with $250 — or perhaps rationalizing my failure to pay attention to the ticket-sale schedule — but by all accounts a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

And a tip of the fedora to Gene Triplett (and if it wasn't Gene, it was Sandi Davis — gad, how I hate shared bylines) of The Daily Oklahoman, who quipped: "If they love him this much at 60, he has nothing to worry about four years down the road." Vera, Chuck and Dave are no doubt very much relieved.

I mentioned this race way back in August and apparently never followed up on it. Anyway, in case anyone was asking, Jim Roth has defeated Beverly Hodges, 55 to 45 percent, to win the Oklahoma County District 1 Commissioner position.

Kambers has sold gifts and luggage in Oklahoma City since 1922, and for half of those eighty years, their TV spots were done by Eleanor Kamber, daughter-in-law of the founding family. It's a small sort of celebrityhood, to be sure, but I suspect anyone who spent more than a few months in this part of the world would have recognized her on sight. The store has moved several times — from downtown to Penn Square to Northpark to its current location on the eastern edge of Nichols Hills — but the one thing you could always count on was Mrs. Kamber.

That is, until this week, when health problems finally caught up to her; she died late Thursday night, at the age of 92. The store will remain closed through Monday noon, following services at Temple B'nai Israel. (Yes, Virginia, there are Jews in Oklahoma.) Her advertising tag — "You'll always find the unusual at Kambers" — is a local cultural icon, alongside "Boomer Sooner" and the B. C. Clark jingle.

We used to have a Federal building in Oklahoma City, named for Alfred P. Murrah, judge of the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit from 1940 to 1970.

After everything came crashing down in 1995, plans were drawn up for a new facility. The new building, as yet unnamed, will open next fall, and already it's full; ten Federal agencies are slated to move in.

So far, so good. But there's one minor hitch.

The new building is located at NW 6th and Hudson (400 block west).

The Oklahoma City National Memorial, erected on the site of the Murrah, is located between NW 4th and NW 6th west of Harvey (300 block west).

A lot of people with windows facing east or south are going to be able to see the memorial. And not everyone, I imagine, will be able to shrug it off.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools have been pondering moving John Marshall High School about two miles northwest of its current location. Under the current MAPS for Kids initiative, money is available for renovation and improvements, but the present school sits on a 24-acre site, about half what the state specifies for a high school. Rather than buy up nearby properties, the district proposed to move the school to a larger tract, but residents near those tracts took exception.

Later this week, a feasibility study will point the district towards its next move. The negative response to moving the school, it is believed, will make the prospect of staying put and buying adjoining property more likely. A similar study earlier this year made basically the same recommendation for U. S. Grant High School, on the other side of town. If the Marshall plan follows the Grant example, the new school will occupy the far end of the school property; once it's built, the old school will be torn down.

This sounds excessively complicated, but both the Marshall and Grant facilities are really old and fairly decrepit and bringing the existing buildings up to spec will likely cost even more.

Downtown Oklahoma City, once the sun set, used to do a passable impression of a mausoleum: the offices would empty out, and nothing remained but concrete.

The redevelopment in Bricktown, across the Santa Fe tracks just east of downtown, has brought actual nightlife to the area. And the new Oklahoma City Museum of Art, about a mile west of Bricktown, is anchoring a nascent downtown arts district. However, almost everyone coming to Bricktown or the OCMA has come from a fair distance across town: there are private residences on the edge of downtown, but not many.

In an effort to reduce that "fair distance", the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority is planning 300 residential and retail units in something called "Legacy Summit at Arts Center", a few blocks north of the Museum. It's not quite as close to Bricktown as the row of renovated lofts on Broadway, but the city fathers have an abiding faith in "If you build it, they will come." Only recently has that faith begun to pay off; still, as the success of Bricktown attests, it is paying off.

America Online announced that about 300 jobs would be cut, and locally, where AOL operates a call center, everyone was sweating bullets (and, of course, offering bullet de-sweating devices at 40 percent off). It appears, though, that only a dozen or so will be laid off from the AOL facility in the north end of Shepherd Mall, leaving more than 1300 folks to talk you out of canceling your service after the 1025-hour free trial.

After briefly flirting with the notion of expanding John Marshall High School, the board of the Oklahoma City Public Schools has decided to relocate the school to a site on the southwest corner of NW 122nd Street and Portland Avenue. The move will cost upward of $25 million.

There are still objections being raised by nearby residents, though there's always the question of whether they'd raise the same objections were it a school from, say, the adjacent Putnam City district being moved into their neighborhood.

It's called the Metro Conncourse, and no, that's not a typo: it's named for Jack Conn, chairman of the old Fidelity Bank downtown, who with Dean A. McGee led development of Oklahoma City's pedestrian tunnels. The first link, under Broadway at Park Avenue, opened in 1931; over the years, the network of tunnels has expanded to most of downtown. Recently, Bricktown, east of downtown and off the Conncourse, has gotten most of the attention, and the tunnels have been mostly neglected.

Until now. A $3 million master plan for renovation of the tunnels will attempt to make them hip once again, with improvements to both the tunnels and the sidewalk entrances, and the addition of historical galleries to brighten up the rather bland interior. With the new plan comes a new name: "The Underground". Maybe too hip for this crowd, but I've always thought that the tunnels were one of the niftier aspects of downtown, and perking them up is something that's long overdue, especially if downtown promoters expect to pick up on any of the Bricktown frenzy. It's probably not possible to extend The Underground to Bricktown — the canal might get in the way — but right now, it's more important to remind people that it exists at all.

Rep. Leonard Sullivan (R-Planet Delusional) thinks the North Canadian River, which snakes its way through the middle of Oklahoma City, should be renamed the Oklahoma River. "I can't see any good reason for Canada to get all of that publicity," says Sullivan, perhaps hoping to set off a firestorm of protest in Ottawa.

But of course. And what better name for a stream which needs mowing twice a year, whose banks overflow at the slightest provocation, than "Oklahoma"?

Why, the Beaver River, which is what the North Canadian is called above the confluence with Wolf Creek. Of course, not everyone will be happy with a name like Beaver, either.

Yeah, and a Porsche is only a car.

The Rolling Stones are here. They'll play tonight at the Ford Center in downtown Oklahoma City.

No, I'm not going. In my present emotional state, which may be best described as "insufficiently repressed", I don't believe I could handle it.

And the Stones on the same night as the State of the Union address? Obviously this isn't the situation for which they wrote "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" — but it seems to fit just the same.

About 520,000 people live in the city, about as many in the suburbs, and you could probably get close to a million different answers to the question "Why do you live here?" But surely some of them will point out that on a comparative basis, it's cheap.

The most recent cost-of-living survey by ACCRA puts Oklahoma City at 9 percent below the national average, with housing costs a startling 21 percent below the national average. In all the areas covered by the survey, only transportation carried an above-average price tag, perhaps due to the spread-out nature of the place and the limited availability of public transportation.

Those who argue that you get what you pay for — well, we'll get to that some other time.

Monday night, the Oklahoma City Public Schools board is expected to approve a plan to close seven facilities at the end of this school year. Six of the seven schools would have been closed by 2006 under the city's MAPS for Kids master plan, but closing them early is expected to save $1.9 million for the beleaguered district.

State Representative Opio Toure, complaining that the closures unfairly target poor and minority students, has suggested that parents keep their children home one day in protest. Toure's Coalition for Educational Progress and Equity will meet today to discuss possible options.

In the Oklahoma City Public Schools generally, it seems to me, almost any school closing will impact minority students: more than a third of the district's students are black, another quarter are Latino, and there are substantial Asian and Amerindian contingents as well. Still, under the MAPS for Kids plan, new schools would be in place at approximately the same time the old ones were to be closed; under this accelerated consolidation, there will be a handful of schools temporarily operating with twice as many students.

Opened in 1911, four years after statehood, Bill Skirvin's hotel in downtown Oklahoma City was the unquestioned social center of town. By 1930, with an oil boom underway, the Skirvin had grown to 14 stories and 525 rooms. Bill Skirvin died in 1944, his children decided to sell the property, and while the hotel did well for the next two decades, an ill-advised search-and-destroy urban-renewal program in the Sixties caused everything downtown to suffer, and by 1969 the Skirvin could keep only a third of its rooms filled.

Things picked up in the 1980s, as urban renewal took a new form: restoration and preservation of the remaining historic structures downtown. The Skirvin was now on the National Register of Historic Places. Still, a succession of managements could not make it profitable, and after Oklahoma City government decided that it was worth saving, the city last year acquired the property from its most recent owners for just under $3 million.

Tomorrow, the city will receive proposals for redevelopment of the Skirvin. And they're plenty serious: as the committee report says, "Saving the Skirvin is not about saving a bad real estate deal; it is about investing in the future and supporting continuing economic growth in the downtown district." With Bricktown, just to the east of downtown, still growing, those extra hotel rooms will definitely come in handy. The city is willing to entertain the idea of letting the Skirvin go condo, but will draw the line at converting it to office space: there's too much of that going begging already.

As projected here last weekend, the board of the Oklahoma City Public Schools will shut down seven schools after the completion of the school year in an attempt to save some money. Chairman Cliff Hudson said he'd rather close some buildings than lay off teachers.

It's going to be tight at some of the surviving facilities for the next couple of years.

Actually, I worked diligently at not having any thoughts on the 19th, but thunderstorms this morning immediately prompted "Geez, I wonder if this is going to affect the memorial service downtown?" and that was the end of that.

And yes, the ceremony to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was affected — it had to be moved indoors because of the weather — but there was no way it was going to be stopped.

The tradition of 168 seconds of silence at 9:02 am was observed. General Rita Aragon of the state's Air National Guard received two flags from the memorial, one of which will be delivered to General Tommy Franks at Central Command. (General Franks, you'll remember, got his commission in 1967 at Fort Sill, just down the road.)

Venomous Kate weighed in today with the thought that Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the bombing and subsequently executed, got off easy:

I'm not so sure I want capital punishment to be particularly gruesome — there have been moments when I wasn't entirely sure I wanted capital punishment at all — but were it possible to bring him back to life and execute him again, again, and yet again, once for each of his 168 victims...no, that's not enough either.

It's going to rain — if not tonight, then tomorrow, and certainly by Sunday.

It has to. This is the week of the downtown Festival of the Arts, and the Fates would like nothing better than to see 150,000 people (a reasonable daily attendance figure) soaked to the gills.

The same rule applies, incidentally, to the State Fair of Oklahoma in the fall.

On the 13th of May, Oklahoma County residents (including yours truly) will vote on a proposed 0.4 percent sales tax increase, the estimated $30-35 million proceeds to be earmarked for the office of Sheriff John Whetsel.

Among other things, the sheriff wants to hire 145 new employees (including 100 for the county jail), expand existing programs and upgrade equipment.

Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys shot the sheriff down: "It's too large," he said, "it's too loose, and it goes on for too long." The mayor also announced he would head up a campaign to defeat the measure. Should the tax pass, the combined state/county/city sales tax in OKC would rise to 8.775 percent.

So far, this morning has been notable mostly for a string of minor surprises.

I turned in early last night, so I had no idea how badly the 0.4-cent county sales tax proposal was being beaten. On the way outside, I noted that however much rain fell amid the endless rumblings last night, it still wasn't enough to get the dirt off my car. And the bottom half of my doorknob was covered with some dark, gunky substance, like a partially-chewed Tar-Bar™ (money back if you get a stone).

Oh, and more rain is on the way some time in the next half hour. Let's see how it rearranges the dirt.

As American traditions go, the Sunday drive is definitely on the wane, shunted aside by our longer workweeks — gotta husband that leisure time carefully, doncha know — and sporadic haranguing by green types in blue states (or is that blue types in green states?) who object to any use of fuel that isn't on their Approved List. All the more reason, I figure, to take one when the schedule permits, and having gotten today's chores done early for once (clean up the bathrooms, do two loads of wash, defrag four drive partitions), I packed up some suitable tunes and hit the road. (Fred will be happy to hear that today's selections were chosen from the 1963 archives.)

Central Oklahoma, laid out mostly like a waffle iron, doesn't have anything quite like L.A.'s Mullholland Drive, but getting off the beaten path doesn't require an hour down the Interstate, either. I set the northern boundary at Wilshire, which in the city proper is noted for being halfway between 63rd and Britton Road, but which offers a quirk throughout its entire discontinuous thirty-mile length: it is at Wilshire where the section lines, and therefore the major roads which follow them, are supposedly adjusted slightly to allow for the curvature of the earth. Intersections at Wilshire are therefore decidedly non-standard, though seldom as perverse as, say, New Jersey jughandles.

I picked up Wilshire on the east side at the 9000 block, on the far side of one of those discontinuities, mainly because Douglas, which was a perfectly respectable suburban boulevard a few miles ago, shrinks as it goes; at this point, it's down to 1.4 lanes and won't go any further. It wasn't entirely clear whether I was within the city limits or not, since the intersection isn't marked. Heading eastward, I set a 40-mph pace, subject to road conditions, and observed.

Oklahoma City, for reasons having to do with ancient history — "ancient" in this part of the world meaning "before 1907" — is centered, not in the middle of the county, but towards its southwest corner. So this area, which starts maybe four miles from the county center, is almost entirely rural. The roads range from not bad to fairly grungy to downright awful, and they seem to change from one category to another just about every mile. Actual farming still goes on here, though it's sort of offputting to see a farm with a street address (911 insists); I saw three tractors in use, and two of them were apparently being operated by women. There were big houses and small houses, presumably designed for form rather than function; the overdesigned monstrosities in the newer developments simply don't exist out here. Someone who lives out this way who isn't farming, I have to assume, is here to get away from the rest of the world; it's hard to happen upon this neck of the woods by accident.

Somewhere around the 19300 block, there's a four-way intersection with three dead ends. Rather than back up, I chose the right turn, and found myself on a winding (well, sort of) two-lane that, surprisingly, had two houses for sale, one of which was open for inspection. And apparently I'd misjudged my location somewhat, because the open house was on a lakefront — which explains the multiple dead ends, anyway. I wheeled around in a hurry and got out of there, lest I be smitten by the place.

Rethreading myself, I headed south on Luther Road and noticed that all of a sudden I was getting seriously strong cell signals. A couple miles later, I spied the tower, which happened to be a few yards from an electrical power plant. Probably the same one that supplies my juice, even. I've lived in the eastern half of the county for most of the last twenty years, and I had no idea it was even there. "I really must get out more," I decided.

And eventually I turned back westward, following Reno Avenue, the main drag through the east end, wondering what Serious Urban Planners would think of it, what with little crapbox country houses cheek by jowl with overwrought suburban McMansions, and, this being Oklahoma, a church every mile. I suspect they'd be appalled at the lack of stylistic unity, the mailboxes that haven't seen a coat of paint since the Korean War, the little gas stations where you can get your fishing and hunting licenses, and the mere fact that people are living way the hell out here a good fifteen miles from downtown and twenty miles from major shopping areas, thereby wasting precious fuelstuffs on the way. Why, I must have wasted a good two bucks' worth just looking at these things. (Which was still cheaper than dinner: $5.77 at Braum's.)

And, yes, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Almost a full house — and no protests — greeted the Dixie Chicks last night at the Ford Center.

Pertinent Natalie Maines quotes:

This could be just playing to the crowd — I mean, "the incident" itself involved playing to the crowd — but I'd like to think she means it.

The OkiePundit (23 May) gives his endorsement to the County Line, fabled barbecue joint half a mile west of the National Cowboy Museum, which reminds me that it's been too long since I've been up there. (And if you've driven past the back of it on Interstate 44, you realize that "up there" is exactly the correct description.)

Occasionally, someone in state government issues a whine about how life expectancy out here is lower than it is in, say, central Norway. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but dammit, we do know how to eat.

This has not been a great month for Sheriff John Whetsel. First his requested sales-tax increase is voted down by three-quarters of the county electorate, and now the Justice Department is investigating his jail.

Four issues are under investigation: alleged violations of inmate civil rights, jail staffing and operations, staff safety, and inmate medical attention. The investigation should take no more than four weeks, and a report is expected before the end of the year.

The sheriff has yet to say "I told you we needed more money," but give him time.

On the upside, no new snow is being reported, surely a comfort to us all.

The shuttered Skirvin Hotel, once the showplace of downtown Oklahoma City, is one step closer to becoming a working inn again. After soliciting proposals for redevelopment of the Skirvin this spring, the city, which owns the facility, has selected three finalists.

The apparent favorite, receiving the largest number of votes from the city's evaluation committee, was a proposal by former Hilton development officer John Weeman to reopen the Skirvin as a Hilton-branded hotel and conference center with 238 rooms. Weeman's track record includes the renovation of the Hilton Milwaukee City Center.

Wichita developer Jack DeBoer's proposal for an independent full-service hotel similar to his Hotel at Old Town in downtown Wichita also won support from the committee, as did the Historic Restoration Inc. offer to convert the hotel into upscale apartments.

Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys says he expects the final decision to be made within six months, and that the Skirvin, in whatever form, will be open by the time his term ends in 2006.

Two of the largest furniture retailers in Oklahoma City will be brought together under a single corporate roof.

Mathis Brothers (3434 West Reno), which already owns four stores (with four different names) in the area, is acquiring majority control of Evans (SW 3 and Portland, three blocks away) for an undisclosed sum.

No substantive changes are planned at Evans, which will retain its separate identity; for the TV viewer, this means that every ten minutes or so, if you're not seeing a commercial for one, you're seeing a commercial for the other.

The Mathises, even with this acquisition, are a long way from controlling the local furniture market, however, and the merger will not have any problems sailing through the FCC (Federal Chair Commission).

In the spring, I wrote about Atkinson Plaza, the shopping center along Southeast 29th Street in Midwest City that used to dominate commerce in this part of the county until newer and spiffier facilities started showing up.

At the time, I said this:

Well, it's doomed. The city of Midwest City will demolish Atkinson Plaza and replace it with, of course, a newer and spiffier facility. The last of the tenants has cleared out, so it's just a matter of scheduling the dozers; the proposed 800,000-square-foot complex should be completed by the beginning of 2005.

The General Motors assembly plant in Oklahoma City, severely damaged by May tornadoes, will reopen on the last day of June. GM's in a hurry, since this plant builds some high-markup vehicles: the GMC Envoy and Chevrolet TrailBlazer twins and their Isuzu Ascender cousin.

GM predicts repair costs and lost time at the plant will knock down quarterly profits by 25 to 35 cents per share, around $150 million. A crew has already come in to finish the trucks that were being built when the storms hit, and the usual two-week summer shutdown will be canceled.

Nice piece in The Daily Oklahoman today about new American citizens. The story focuses on one person — Valeria Barrett, born in Argentina, now teaching Spanish in an Oklahoma City school — but to me, the most inspiring part of the article is the last paragraph, which lists all the participants in this week's naturalization ceremony. In addition to Mrs Barrett, we welcome:

You can't get a whole lot more diverse than that.

Oklahoma City's grandest hotel, closed in the Eighties after the oil boom went bust, is now officially on the way back.

After a brief evaluation period, a city advisory committee has designated a Dallas-based group as the official developer for the remaking of the Skirvin Hotel. The group's plans include affiliation with the Hilton chain and the appointment of Marcus Hotels and Resorts as the operator of the 238-room hotel.

For years, the city's convention business has been stymied by the lack of downtown hotel space, and continued growth in the Bricktown district east of downtown has only exacerbated matters. The two major hotels downtown are booming; with the Skirvin coming back and two more hotels in the works, the Okay City may be able to compete for bigger events than ever before.

Once upon a time, an ill-fated Oklahoma City urban-renewal plan put downtown on two shifts — twelve hours business district, twelve hours mausoleum — and people wondered why. It's no secret, says Linda Stinnett of Oklahoma Main Street Center:

Simple as that. And in Oklahoma City, it's actually starting to happen; lofts have been carved out of buildings in Bricktown and along the downtown Automobile Alley, and more are coming. Lofts are in place in Norman and Cordell, and planned for other cities. The supply is coming because the demand is there, and because people have been willing to pay above-average rents for desirable locations. Were I twentysomething and on the party circuit, I probably wouldn't be able to resist the temptation myself.

The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America has issued its list of Allergy Capitals, the places among the top-50 metropolitan areas where persons with "seasonal allergies" are likely to suffer the worst, and the Oklahoma City metro ranks seventh for fall sneezing and wheezing: we're up to here in ragweed and various pollens, and will be until the first fall freeze.

It's slightly better in the spring, when we check in at number 21. The worst of all? Louisville, Kentucky, which is #1 in the spring and #3 in the fall.

Today I went to the Fence.

The Fence defines a boundary of the Oklahoma City National Memorial; if you're eastbound on Northwest 5th Street going downtown, you head right toward it. Which I was, and which I did.

The Fence was installed as a routine security item. But its appearance is anything but routine: threaded through its metal links, you'll find the stuff of memories, items left by mourners, something personal to offset the starkness of the empty chairs.

The Fence is familiar to us all; we've seen it a thousand times, reduced to the size of our living rooms. But that familiarity still doesn't prepare us for the sight of the real thing.

Tomorrow there will be an observance at Ground Zero. I'm afraid that were I there, I would find the experience completely overwhelming; even now, after eight years, I find I am still affected by the Fence.

Lockdown at the Oklahoma County Jail, but it's not because of the possibility of escaping inmates; it's the annoying certainty of escaping sewage, which flooded the basement and the ground floor yesterday.

The plumbing was fixed quickly enough, but it will take time to clean up the mess. And apparently it's the fault of the inmates, says Major Russell Dear:

Sheriff John Whetsel may get his new jail yet.

Oklahoma City's downtown movie houses closed years ago; with the exception of an occasional screening at the new Oklahoma City Museum of Art, films have migrated to the suburbs.

Now the Arizona-based Harkins Theatres chain has received a permit to build a 16-screen movie house on the south edge of Bricktown, adding yet another venue to the city's entertainment district. I hope they have room for an occasional non-blockbuster.

Fox Lake covers about ten acres on Edmond's east side, and about two hundred upscale homes have been built in its general vicinity. The area is near Interstate 35, and a ridge separates the highway from the home sites.

In late July, homeowners were alarmed when a part of that ridge was cleared off to make room for a new neighbor: a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Not that anyone objects to Wal-Mart in principle, of course; they just don't want it so close at hand. Clearing off the rest of the site, they fear, will cause erosion and the eventual destruction of the lake.

Edmond's rules for development are among the toughest in the state, but Fox Lake residents fear that the city is ignoring those rules in pursuit of sales-tax revenue.

Wal-Mart's proposal includes a heavily-wooded 100-foot-wide buffer to insulate the site from the Fox Lake development and substantial measures to preserve the lake. But ultimately this isn't about Wal-Mart, but about the likelihood that other commercial properties will follow them into the I-35 corridor, increasing traffic and stretching the perceived sprawl of Oklahoma City miles to the north.

The cop in the donut shop is perhaps as indelible an image of America as exists today.

But how about a cop on a donut shop?

Friday morning, 17 October, an Oklahoma City policeman will park himself on the roof of the Krispy Kreme shop at Pennsylvania and Memorial, and will remain there three days. Meanwhile, other members of the force will be on the grounds, collecting money for the state's Special Olympics. The scene will be duplicated at other Krispy Kreme locations in Oklahoma.

Hey, whatever works.

Some lowlife shot up a convenience store on a strip of US 62 just outside the city limits, wounding the owner and killing his wife.

I don't think I'm going to miss this neighborhood at all.

With Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys on the brink of running for Don Nickles' Senate seat, candidates are positioning themselves for the top spot at City Hall.

Ward 1 Councilman and erstwhile media guy Mick Cornett is already in the ring with his own hat, and present-day media guy Cam Edwards says Cornett's a cinch to win a special election. (As noted yesterday, unless a city charter change is approved by voters, the position will be filled by the City Council upon Humphreys' resignation.)

Meanwhile, Senator Jim Inhofe announced that he would be more than happy to have Kirk Humphreys serve beside him in the Senate.

Can Hizzoner win it? I think he can, though there are plenty of people — plenty of Republicans, even — who can't stand him. The biggest problem, of course, is that he has no base outside the central part of the state, which the Inhofe endorsement presumably can help. But it's not going to be a walk, since the Democrats actually have candidates this time.

(Update, 15 October, 8 am: The charter change passed.)

For some months now, St Anthony Hospital has been making noises about moving away from its near-downtown location and relocating in the 'burbs. The city was appalled at the prospect, and started working up incentives to keep the hospital and its 4000 employees close at hand.

It appears that now they've come up with a package acceptable to both sides; among other things, the city will create a medical corridor district from St Anthony to the existing medical complex east of downtown along 10th Street, a distance of about a mile and a half, which will link all the major downtown hospitals and contribute to the city's efforts to rehabilitate the near-northwest area.

Assuming no snags, the agreement could be signed as early as tomorrow.

I've passed by the building before, but I didn't know for sure what it was.

Now I do. Premium Beers, the local Anheuser-Busch distributor, has a new facility near I-240 and Eastern, a location chosen for optimum transportation availability. I-35 is a mile away; the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe railroad is running a spur line right into the Premium warehouse.

Not that I'm a major Budweiser fiend or anything, but some of the smaller, snootier brands are either brewed or marketed by A-B, and besides, I like the idea that Premium consolidated three facilities into one and actually added a handful of jobs in the process.

It may seem crass to say so, but there it is: attendance at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, where the bombed-out Murrah Federal Building used to be, is down 22 percent since the 11th of September 2001.

The state's Congressional delegation, notably outgoing Senator Don Nickles, has responded by tucking $1.6 million in funding for the Memorial into the federal Interior Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2004. Nickles has stated that one goal for his final year in office will be to stabilize the Memorial's financial structure so it can stand on its own.

I've mentioned before that I'm moving into one of Oklahoma City's Urban Conservation Districts, and that while some of the zoning restrictions therein might seem daunting, they were enacted at the request of a majority of the property owners therein, and, well, if I found them particularly onerous, perhaps I should have bought somewhere else.

Do districts of this sort, which in effect empower individual neighborhoods, threaten the status quo? Michael Bates certainly thinks so:

There are, of course, numerous examples where individual property owners have been given the back of the municipal hand, often to expedite the plans of politically-connected developers; the right of "eminent domain" is often abused. I don't know how well our little strip of the city will serve as any sort of bulwark, but it's a good thing that Oklahoma City is, at least for now, on our side — and it's not so good that Tulsa's movers and shakers think so little of their residents.

Reprinted from Usenet's ok.general newsgroup:

Background: The city of Oklahoma City spent around $17 million to build the Bass Pro Shops facility on the fringe of Bricktown, for which Bass will be paying an annual rent of $600,000. There was some rumbling in the community when the deal was planned, but consultants to the city contented that sales at Bass would reach upward of $30 million per year, which would generate enough sales-tax revenue to cover the cost of the building and then some. A group called Citizens Against Taxpayer Abuse, in which rival Academy Sports was a participant, led the opposition; with Mayor Kirk Humphreys pushing hard, City Council eventually approved the package.

Moshe Tal, first-listed in the speakers list, is the Oklahoma City businessman who sued the city in May 2003 to quash the Bass deal; a hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Bad Eagle.com discusses this matter in greater depth.

A not-entirely-random collection of observations from behind the wheel, nothing more.

• There's a narrow strip of park along the east side of the avenue as you head north toward my new digs, and piles of pipes are arranged parallel to the pavement. Looks like the city's planning to update the water and/or sewer lines, which is probably a good thing once the traffic headaches (I'm guessing my street will be closed at this end) subside. Oddly enough, new utility work is making it tricky to negotiate the way to my old digs.

• When I was a teenager back in the Jurassic period, I bicycled to work, and that work was on a southside street that at the time was a major thoroughfare for an area largely populated by working-class whites. Thirtysomething years later, it's still a major thoroughfare, and some of the businesses (not the one for which I worked) are still there, but the area is now largely populated by working-class Latinos. Memory, especially my memory, is incredibly fallible, but apart from the occasional sign in Spanish and a paint job here and there, to me things look just about the same now as they did then. Frozen in time? Not really; it's more likely that nobody has ever had the bucks to give any of the buildings more than a perfunctory facelift. This is not one of those "gentrified" areas by any means, and it probably won't be one anytime soon.

• The local United Way is running billboards with stark black-and-white photography of the presumably needy. One such ad shows an elderly gentleman with his brow permanently furrowed, saying "My phone never rings." For some reason, this bothered me, perhaps because there's a very real fear of being old and forgotten lurking in the back of my head. Probably why I keep blogging: my phone may not ring, but I get 3500 visitors a week, a handful of which actually say something now and then.

• The chap in the checkout line ahead of me explained: "We're having house guests, and they will not drink tap water under any conditions." Which is why he had purchased every last bottle of Fiji Water in the store, a cart and a half, about two hundred dollars' worth. Either these guests are going to be in town for an extended stay, or they sure are thirsty. (Oh, and he bought a 12-pack of Barq's Root Beer for himself.)

The respected Aaron Tatum Custom Homes is building in the ultraswank Rivendell community on the south side, and one of Tatum's offerings, on 128th west of Doriath Way, is described in an ad piece this way:

All very nice, and yours for only $359,900, though one thing gives me pause: when I hear the word "cottage," I somehow don't think of a structure enclosing 3700 (more or less) square feet.

Four Oklahoma City policemen are on administrative leave after catching a burglary suspect more or less in the act and giving him a case of taser burn.

The perp died shortly thereafter, prompting his ex-wife to observe that while he wasn't the most, um, upright of individuals, "he didn't deserve to die."

Some of us, on the other hand, are persuaded that the only good burglar is a dead burglar.

The Oklahoma RedHawks, Triple A farm club of the Texas Rangers, have been sold.

The Oklahoma Baseball Club LLC acquired the team from Gaylord Entertainment, the Oklahoma Publishing Company spinoff that operates the Opryland complex in Nashville. Majority owner is Bob Funk, who also owns the Oklahoma City Blazers of the Central Hockey League; the managing partner is E. Scott Pruitt, who represents District 54 in the Oklahoma House.

Gaylord has owned the team for ten years, during which time it changed names (from the Oklahoma City 89ers), league (from the American Association, since disbanded, to the Pacific Coast League), and home park (from All Sports Stadium at State Fair Park to the downtown SBC Bricktown Ballpark). Former owner Jeffrey Loria went on to buy the Montreal Expos of the National League and presently owns the Florida Marlins.

Last year the 'Hawks were 70-72, finishing third in the PCL East, 10½ games behind Nashville.

Scripture isn't entirely clear on that question, though I think we can safely eliminate Cinemark's Tinseltown moviehouse in Oklahoma City.

And even if the Son of Man were to grace us with an appearance, I doubt seriously that driving right into the box office would be part of the agenda.

In an effort to discourage people from leaving the car running at curbside, Will Rogers World Airport charges zero for the first hour in the Hourly Parking Lot. Which is fine unless you arrive early and the person you're supposed to pick up is late, late, LATE.

Actually, I slid by at the 60-minute mark. Sometimes the Fates (Bob and Wendy Fate of Great Neck, New York) are almost kind.

The Albertson's supermarket chain has relocated one of its stores by a whole couple of blocks, and inasmuch as I used to shop at one of their eastside stores out by the Ghastly Hovel, I figured I might as well take a peek at this new location.

Of course, the layout is utterly unfamiliar, so it took an inordinate amount of time to locate the usual items on my list, even on the second visit, and there is the requisite number of contemporary improvements — wheelchair accessibility in most aisles, an optional Self-Check which ostensibly will get you out of the store faster, and actual rest rooms labeled as such — but two things struck me as really, really different from what I'm used to.

The first is the vastly-expanded selection of kosher foods, including kosher frozen foods. (Yes, there are Jews in Oklahoma City.) I'm thinking that perhaps all their stores carry a small, corporate-mandated selection of Standard Ethnic Items, and local managers may expand this if the demand in their area warrants; there are probably a lot more Jewish customers on this side of town than where I used to dwell.

The second is what appears to be a much higher degree of personal interaction among shoppers. Back at the old eastside store, most people trudged down the aisles, dropped items into the basket, and moved on, scarcely saying a word. Now I'm seeing (and occasionally hearing, acoustics being what they are) conversations on seemingly every corner. Do all these people know each other? Or are these presumably more upscale suburbanites simply more inclined to talk to one another? I haven't figured this one out yet. Maybe I'll explore further, should it ever happen that I have something to say. (Or blurt out, inasmuch as one shopper I spotted yesterday was almost a dead ringer for She Who Is Not To Be Named.)

Prices, incidentally, are identical to those on the, um, poor side of town, though the city sales-tax rate is a fraction of a point higher, so mingling with the owners of Benzes and Lexi and 'Slades isn't adding substantially to my grocery bill.

The new Federal Building in Oklahoma City opens today, eight years after the last one was reduced to rubble by a truck bomb, one city block from where it happened.

The Small Business Administration has already started moving in. Some staff from the Department of Housing and Urban Development say they want nothing to do with the new building, claiming its proximity to the National Memorial (on the site of the old building) will bring back all the pain and sorrow from that horrible day in 1995; Washington has yet to decide what to do about them.

I admit to some puzzlement here. Surely someone must have invoked the "out of sight, out of mind" principle during the planning stages. Downtown space is admittedly limited and becoming more so; still, I think it might have been kinder, even if more expensive, to put this facility somewhere else.

HUD has informed nineteen of its Oklahoma City staffers that they will not be forced to work in the new downtown Federal Building, a block from the Oklahoma City National Memorial that stands on the site of the old downtown Federal Building, destroyed by bombers in 1995. Thirty-five people working for HUD were among the 169 killed.

The HUD staff will telecommute two days a week, and an alternative office location to be determined will be open three days a week. HUD facilities that had not been housed in the Murrah Building will presumably not be affected.

There's a place called North Pole City on Oklahoma City's south side, and while they do sell some non-Christmas stuff, I suspect passersby might be taken aback by the sight of the place as they zip down I-44 in the middle of June.

It's a sort of low-level cognitive dissonance that Patti, for instance, has noted:

I have to admit, I have enough trouble getting into Holiday Mode in December; I'd hate to have to try to do it in the spring.

The Uptowne (yeah, right) Square apartments, north of the Oklahoma City University campus, have been spammed in a low-tech sort of way: some weasels planted imitation parking tickets on every open windshield, advertising a firm which supposedly would cover real parking tickets, and asking for $3.95 for information about said firm.

The Square is occupied mostly by foreign-born students, and many of them were quite perplexed, wondering how they'd managed to violate some arcane city parking policy all of a sudden.

I don't believe the city has a rule about fake parking tickets — the ordinance about impersonating a police officer wouldn't seem to apply — but it would be nice to be able to hang these weasels for something, even if it's only littering.

Folks from 'round here will tell you that it always rains on the State Fair, and that something unpleasant will happen on Opening Night.

There's at least some truth to the former — the State Fair is scheduled in early fall, one of the wetter periods of the year — and maybe there's some to the latter as well, since Opening Night in Oklahoma City is 31 December, about the time Old Man Winter starts catching on to the fact that he's in charge again.

The rain doesn't keep people away from the Fair, though, and the downtown party that is Opening Night goes on even when the temperature is in single digits and the wind is howling from Hudson Bay and there's more ice on the sidewalks than in the drinks.

As a concept, Opening Night dates back to the Eighties, when the city and its culturemeisters observed that downtown tends to run down at sundown, and figured a New Year's Eve bash might draw some people out of the 'burbs for a change. Events were scheduled all over the place — you buy a button, you get admission to almost all of them at no extra charge — and eateries that normally closed when their business clientele went home stayed open late.

Despite spectacularly crappy weather in the early years, Opening Night did well, and when the Bricktown entertainment district began taking shape, Opening Night did even better. Forty thousand folks turned up last night and bought their buttons (six bucks); many more just came to party along the canal or in the streets. Times Square it ain't, but then we don't have to wonder if there's a picture of Dick Clark moldering away in a closet somewhere either.

Me? I came down with a bad case of the green-apple quick-step and retreated quickly. But thank you for asking.

Every year, Men's Fitness magazine rates the Top 25 Fit Cities and the Top 25 Fat Cities. Given our predilections here in the Okay City — cheap smokes, rib joints, a general dislike for the Nanny State — you'd probably expect us to be in the chub group, and you'd be right.

In fact, we're movin' on up; after the ignominy of finishing 23rd last year, we've made it up to 13th this time around. What's changed in the last twelve months? Well, I moved into the city, and...um...well, I suppose I can always question the methodology.

And after Detroit, which claims Numero Uno, four of the next five are in Texas, which surely is a sign of something.

There's a new weekly newspaper in town, and "in town" is the operative phrase.

The MidCity Advocate, published Thursdays, is your standard suburban community news/shopper with a twist: it's aimed, not at the suburbs, but at those of us who live in the 25 square miles of the central city. (Their coverage area runs from Portland to Kelley, Reno to 63rd.) This makes a certain amount of sense, since almost every other part of town is covered by a similar publication.

One pitch made by the Advocate is the diversity of its readership: "The MidCity area has over 65,000 residents that span the socio-economic spectrum. There is a broad mix of income levels, ethnic diversity and education." No doubt about that. The National Register of Historic Places records fifteen districts in the county, and twelve of them are in this area; there are also, alas, some neighborhoods which can charitably be described as "rough". Still, what's true of the 'burbs is also true here in the city: most of us are here because this is where we want to be.

I don't recognize any of the names on the masthead; evidently this is an entirely new bunch of folks. Sports Editor Jerry Spaeder admits to having roots in some place like Erie, Pennsylvania. I'm sort of hoping that the Advocate staff is here because this is where they want to be.

There is a fair amount of dissatisfaction with the proposal for the World Trade Center Memorial, and Michele points to an example of How To Do It Right.

In my back yard, more or less.

Last year, the day before 9/11, I found myself at the Fence, where hundreds of small items left by visitors pay silent tribute to the victims of April 19. It is a genuinely moving place, perhaps the most heartbreaking (because it's the simplest) part of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and if it should inspire someone working on the WTC project, so much the better.

But I remember when I heard the bomb go off at 9:02, and while I'm always pleased to see my hometown recognized for providing a good example, I feel compelled to point out that the Fence, like the rest of the Memorial, is not for us; it's for the 168 friends and neighbors who were taken away in that frightening collision of madness and evil. The WTC planners would do well to remember that their first job is to honor the victims of 9/11, not to produce, as Michele says, "a piece of concept art."

Four men will be on next month's ballot to select a Mayor for Oklahoma City, to fill the last two years of the term vacated by Kirk Humphreys.

The presumed front-runner, at least for now, is Ward 1 Councilman Mick Cornett ("one of the rich Cornetts," Susanna might say); challenging are former Ward 1 Councilman F. O. "Frosty" Peak, bookstore owner Jim Tolbert, and Marcus Hayes, director of social services of a local senior center.

The ballot is nonpartisan; a runoff if needed will be held in April.

Bruce and I don't agree on too many things, but I definitely buy this observation:

Right. One of my justifications for moving into the city was to have fewer excuses to pass up an event because it was "too far to drive." And while my after-hours life isn't exactly scintillating these days, it's no longer nonexistent, which surely is worth something.

(There are only four Borders stores in the whole state, and it probably would have taken just as long to get to 81st and Yale; the Oklahoma City store is only about 1.4 miles from me, but Full Circle is closer, and it's locally owned, which I tend to view as a plus.)

In 1925, a 748-foot steel bridge was constructed on a road north of Oklahoma City's Lake Overholser, just in time for the official designation of US Route 66 the following year.

Old 66, while not exactly gone, isn't what it used to be; the bridge remains, carrying traffic between the two sides of the Overholser recreation area, now dubbed "Route 66 Park". And the state's Historical Preservation Office has now nominated the bridge for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, citing its unusual construction — there are only three other bridges of this design in the state — and its association with Route 66.

I think there's at least a reasonable chance the nomination will win approval; the Register already includes one section of Route 66 at the opposite end of the county (near Arcadia), and there's a lot to be said for symmetry.

The life of the Redskin Theater on Oklahoma City's south side was neither remarkably long nor especially happy. Shortly after it opened in 1941, there were fights in the parking lot, reputedly instigated by union men from downtown movie houses who objected to competition in the suburbs. Things picked up after World War II, and the Redskin did a fairly steady business for the next couple of decades, fading as attention shifted to the suburban multiplexes. The theater was sold in 1978, and sustained itself for a while by catering to the soiled-raincoat crowd, but by the early 90s it was dead.

And now it's gone; while the Redskin likely did meet the general specifications for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, it was in a neighborhood which the city tends to ignore, so no one paid a whole lot of attention when the building was razed this week to make room for yet another used-car lot. Of half a dozen old southside theaters, only the Knob Hill, later the home of the Oklahoma Opry, and the Winchester Drive-In remain.

Well, it hasn't gotten to that yet, but Oklahoma City's Metro Transit is getting ready to spend a million bucks or so on a feasibility study for a light-rail system.

This, mind you, while the city (connected to the usual conduit for federal funds) is getting ready to spend $350 million or so on a rerouting of Interstate 40 south of downtown which will trash five rail lines already in place.

I have my doubts about light rail in places as spread out as this — Oklahoma City covers over 600 square miles all by itself, and the suburbs will presumably want a piece of the action — but if we're seriously going to consider it as an option, ripping up rail lines for the sake of I-40 is utterly insane; not even Phil Hartman could sell a bill of goods that preposterous.

A few things I spotted today while wandering about town:

At 50 Penn Place, I found myself parked next to a Volkswagen Cabrio with a "Re-elect Gore 2004" sticker. Did I miss something?

Jim Tolbert, who owns, among other things, the Full Circle Bookstore at 50 Penn Place, is running for mayor of Oklahoma City — the election will be 24 February — and inasmuch as he lives around here, most of the yard signs that have sprung up in lieu of spring foliage are Tolbert signs. Curiously, he even has yard signs in Nichols Hills, which is outside the city limits; Tolbert may have friends in this old-money enclave, but he won't get any votes there.

Sign at a jewelry store on May Avenue: Valentine's Day Nomination Bracelets. Admittedly, I don't have an actual Valentine, and I have no reasonable expectation of ever getting one, but it bothered me no end that I had no idea what a Nomination Bracelet was. (Now I know.)

And for some reason, almost all the copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in the rack at Albertson's were turned upside down.

One of Bigwig's research projects turned up this list of Barbie dolls custom-crafted for the Oklahoma City area.

For those keeping score, I live about halfway between Nichols Hills and the Paseo. There being no specific doll for this neighborhood, I have to play with myself do without.

Rep. Ernest Istook on the condition of Oklahoma City's Northeast 23rd Street:

And those signs start at Kelley Avenue, a couple hundred yards from the entrance to the Governor's Mansion. So it's a Good Thing that our share of the federal pork distro this year will include $500,000 to help defray the expenses of cleaning up the busiest street on the east side.

The effect on Oklahoma City's African-American community, for whom 23rd is arguably the primary business thoroughfare, is less clear. On the downside, some marginal firms may be forced to move, especially if the street, as I expect, is widened. But what remains, based on what the city was able to do on Northwest 23rd, will probably look a whole lot nicer, which may spur new development in the area.

The first rule of ticket quotas is: you do not talk about ticket quotas.

The second rule — but never mind, you can see where this is going.

An Oklahoma City police officer is claiming that he has been harrassed for failure to enforce those, um, nonexistent quotas, and his attorney claims there are actual OCPD internal memos which state the precise numbers for one particular division.

The OCPD Public Information Officer issued the following statement:

This could get complicated very quickly.

(Update, 27 February, 4:45 pm: The police chief explains why it's not a quota: officers aren't told they must reach a certain level of points and aren't punished or rewarded by their point totals.)

The ubiquitous Jersey barrier does a good job of preventing crossover accidents — it's pretty darn difficult to get into the opposite set of lanes — but it's expensive to install and not exactly lovely to look at.

Enter the Brits, with a system called the Brifen Wire Rope Safety Fence, an unobtrusive four-cable guardrail system developed in the late 80s that's designed to be inexpensive to install and maintain: a Brifen installation costs roughly $200,000 per mile, less than half the price of concrete, and a post or cable damaged by impact can usually be replaced by a single worker with no heavy equipment.

The Brifen debuted in the US on a short (0.2 mile) stretch of the Lake Hefner Parkway in Oklahoma City in 2000, extended to the entire seven miles the following year. The Parkway, which runs from I-44 north to the Kilpatrick Turnpike, saw six fatalities due to crossover accidents in the three years prior to the installation of the Brifen; there have been none since. Encouraged, Brifen set up a US manufacturing facility on Oklahoma City's south side, and the system has been installed on highways in Colorado and Ohio.

The Oklahoma Gazette is reporting that the Oklahoma Department of Transportation has ordered the Brifen for 6.3 miles of I-35 through Norman. Construction will be mostly at night and on Sunday morning, and will be finished, says ODOT, by May.

Oklahoma City elects a Mayor today, and turnout seems to be heavier than I had anticipated: at 4:50 pm I was the 534th voter in the precinct. (By contrast, I was #346 at about the same time for the Presidential primary three weeks ago.)

Conventional wisdom says they'll finish in this order: Tolbert, Cornett, Peak, Hayes. I'd like to buck said wisdom, but I suspect it might actually be right this time.

(Update, 9 pm: Not this time. Mick Cornett is on top — perhaps aptly, inasmuch as his watch party is at the city's one and only revolving restaurant, on top of the United Founders Tower — and from the looks of things, he'll get enough votes to avoid a runoff with Jim Tolbert. Now comes the next question: who will fill Cornett's Ward 1 Council seat?)

If there's a lesson in yesterday's election, it's this: money doesn't buy seats anymore. Jim Tolbert spent roughly three times as much as any other candidate and pulled less than 30 percent of the vote. And on the other side of the equation, political novice Marcus Hayes spent something like twelve dollars and pulled more than seven percent, finishing above one of the old-pro pols.

More than anything else, I think, this was a contest to see who could rock the boat the least. By general agreement, the MAPS projects have awakened what had been for too long a sleepy city, and no one made any suggestions about screwing around with the process. A little fine-tuning, yes; a firm hand on the finances, certainly; but we're not going to mess with what's working for us. Mayor-elect Mick Cornett should have no problems maintaining continuity during his two-year term, and we wish him well.

The Oklahoman has an interesting exhibit this week: photos of five Oklahoma City segregation ordinances, enacted from 1916 through 1934. From the vantage point of the 21st century, these seem downright medieval, but while all of them have been stricken from the books, there are reminders of their existence in the distribution of the city's population even today.

From Ordinance Number 1824, March 1916:

Sure enough, a later paragraph defines "block," just in case there might be any doubts.

This ordinance was modified by the next ordinance, to make allowance for servants and such, and to define "white" and "colored" blocks more specifically. By the Thirties, the arbitrary 75-percent figure had been modified to an arbitrary 51-percent figure; eventually, all the rules were thrown out. Still, as late as 1970, Oklahoma City was considered 90 percent segregated — the Bureau of the Census compiles a Housing Segregation Index — improving to 68 percent in 2000. Zero is probably unattainable, given human nature; still, progress is being made. And as a practical matter, most present-day segregation tends to be economic rather than racial; someone making $12,000 a year would find it difficult to buy into my neighborhood, simply because of the prevailing prices, and I certainly can't afford something in the higher-lux areas a mile and a half from me.

I don't pretend for a moment that people in Oklahoma City, or in the United States in general, live in perfect racial harmony. But the stark reminders of what used to be should make us feel slightly better about what is.

Before the actual balloting for the election of the Mayor last Tuesday, I'd made a rough guess of how the votes would fall, and I'd decided that Jim Tolbert would rule in midtown, that Mick Cornett would sweep the newer developments farther from downtown, and that Marcus Hayes would run strongest near the Capitol and points east.

Now that the votes by precinct have been released, I see that by and large I had the right idea, but I underestimated Cornett's strength in midtown. My edge-of-midtown precinct, which I figured would be evenly split between Tolbert and Cornett, went for Cornett 54 to 38 percent. Tolbert did rule in the Historic Districts — Heritage Hills, Crown Heights, and such — but that was the extent of his dominance; he wasn't even close on the southside. Hayes did best where I thought he'd do best, but he picked up more votes on the periphery than I expected. Almost certainly he'll be back in some fashion.

Things happen in elections that aren't always predictable except in retrospect — see Mike Donovan's comments to this post for an example — but they don't seem to keep us keyboard-strained wretches from trying.

As far back as I can remember, the lot on the northeast corner of NW 59th Street and May Avenue has contained a Long John Silver's Seafood Shoppe of the old school, a little mock-clapboard building with a simulated boat hull seemingly aground on the roof, as though the flood waters had only just receded.

A couple of weeks ago, they posted a CLOSED FOR REMODELING sign. Today I watched some of that remodeling, which involved three bulldozers.

Truth be told, I have no idea what's going to happen with the now-vacant lot. Did LJS decide it was too small? Negotiating the parking area was tricky, more so when they added the drive-through.

Actually, that's not quite true. I know one thing that's going to happen: semi-severe stormage tonight and tomorrow, which should produce some nifty red mudslides. If they get past Monterey Jack's, they'll ease down the hill right into Barnes & Noble. And anyway, should I feel the need for sort-of-fast seafood, I'd just as soon drive the five miles to the nearest Captain D's.

Oklahoman columnist Don Gammill covers transportation issues, and this week he passed this reader question to the city traffic engineer:

May runs north and south; Northwest Distressway runs more or less west-by-northwest to east-by-southeast. There is no intersection: the May lanes are elevated, and there is no ramp for the narrowest turn, eastbound NWD to northbound May. (In practice, you follow NWD for one more block, take the turnaround, and catch the northbound ramp from westbound NWD.)

This is of course a pain in the neck, but as a practical matter, all the ramps are inadequate; the city engineer says basically that they'd have to redo the entire interchange, and that's probably true, but for the moment, I'm planning my trips with an eye toward never having to take any of those turns. Since I live less than a mile away, that's a lot of planning.

If you buy lots of General Electric light bulbs, be advised that GE's Home Electric Products division in Cleveland is getting out of the business.

Oh, you'll still be able to buy GE bulbs, but they'll be made in Oklahoma City by Jasco Products Co. under license. Jasco, which has been making electronic accessories for GE for the last four or five years, is adding about 120 jobs and 400,000 square feet of plant space.

What, you were expecting maybe China?

At least for now, the top-of-page photo at JMBzine.com is a spectacular shot of Oklahoma City's Overholser Mansion, on NW 15th between Hudson and Harvey, a home which dates to before statehood and which qualifies as a tourist attraction all by itself.

And you thought we all lived in little boxes made of ticky-tacky.

Rural Oklahoma changes slowly, when it changes at all; the machinery may be newer, the buildings are generally older, but the pace of life is distinctly different from what you'd experience in the city.

And you don't even need to leave the city to see this. Oklahoma City covers over 600 square miles, but barely a third of that area qualifies as urban; the city limits extend well into the country, and city services follow slowly, if at all.

I was in Canadian County yesterday, in an area the city annexed many years ago. There is a city fire station in the 11600 block of SW 15th Street (at eight blocks per mile, this is way out), and occasional fresh green city street signs can be seen, but for the most part this is an area of small farms and ranches, separated by old and indifferently-maintained roads. (I caught one of Frosty Peak's campaign signs over on Piedmont/Czech Hall Road, which promises "I will fix this road.") The sections that are within the limits of Yukon or Mustang, both of which were established long before Oklahoma City pushed into these areas, look decidedly more suburban, more contemporary.

Still, there are changes. People wanting to get away from the concrete jungle are building houses out here, and not just in Mustang or Yukon. Twenty or thirty years from now, this part of Canadian County may look just like any other suburb — but I can't imagine it happening any sooner.

Heritage Hills East is unusual among Oklahoma City Historic Districts: while it was developed at the same time as the ritzier Heritage Hills area to its west, it was platted for smaller lots and a mixture of single-family, multi-family, and commercial buildings, no doubt because it's the first block west of Broadway, a major commercial thoroughfare. And while Heritage Hills itself was given Historic District status way back in 1969, the East was not accorded this designation until 1999.

One other difference comes to mind: it's impossible to imagine Habitat for Humanity building in Heritage Hills, but they're putting up two houses in the East. These structures are so new they haven't yet been listed on the Web site of the local Habitat branch, but I took a peek at the area this morning to get a feel for what's going on.

Last year, Habitat acquired via donation two vacant lots in the 100 block of Northwest 16th Street, and applied for Certificates of Compliance with the city's preservation guidelines. Approval was granted in January, though the standard boxlike Habitat home will have to be modified somewhat to meet the guidelines. Drawings released by Habitat indicate that the new homes will look very much like the traditional Craftsman-style bungalow that dominated the lower end of the housing market in Western states in the early 20th century, a style that appears in many neighborhoods developed in the city through about 1920.

Residents of East Heritage Hills might be forgiven for asking "What will this do to our property values?" I might ask what those vacant lots had done to those values. Meanwhile, the president of the neighborhood association, interviewed by the MidCity Advocate (4 March), seems to be keeping an open mind:

In the past, Habitat for Humanity has built homes in nondescript — sometimes badly descript — neighborhoods, because that's where they could acquire low-cost sites. While the Heritage Hills East sites will cost about twenty percent more than usual to develop, mostly due to the cost of compliance with the city's preservation guidelines, a positive experience here should open up new areas for Habitat, and it might even reassure uneasy neighbors-to-be.

I'd been half-asleep for half an hour when the lights began to play high on the walls. I ignored them and rolled over; it's not like nobody ever got a traffic ticket on this street before.

A few minutes later, I looked up again, and still they were there. World's slowest cop? Maybe, but I didn't think so. And as the pattern started to seem less random, I figured it out: two light bars, minimum.

Something was going on.

I pulled myself up out of bed, fumbled for some semblance of clothing, and ambled outside, trying to look like I did this sort of thing every night about this time. Two ambulances: paramedics from the fire station around the corner in front, the usual emergency-services vehicle behind. No police; no fire engine. I thought I saw some activity behind some living-room windows. Gawkers, I thought, then realized I'd come out to do exactly that.

Four emergency personnel brought the gurney from the house. Its occupant wasn't moving, so far as I could tell, but did seem to be sitting up; I couldn't determine much of anything else. They loaded the gurney into the truck, and I started back inside, satisfied that I'd seen nothing more than some poor soul taken very, very ill.

And as I got to my door, the helicopter passed overhead, a beam of light scanning the ground below it.

Something had been going on.

But with midnight approaching, I decided that maybe I didn't want to know.

This year's Oklahoma City Orchestral League Designer Show House is one of the most distinctive homes in the entire area; I've passed it by many times and wondered what it might be like. (It's hard not to, especially now that I'm living within a couple of miles of it.)

Anyway, it looks like I may get my chance to get a peek at the inside when the Show House opens next month. And if someone hands me a winning Powerball ticket between now and the end of May — well, I can't see spending $1.4 million on a home, but truth be told, I'm thinking it's a bargain at that price.

The Oklahoma City Zoo is one of only fifteen zoos in North America with babirusa in residence, and now they have a piglet, which, given the scarcity of the species, must be considered good news; there have been only six births this century in the North American population.

This is the 100th anniversary of the Zoo, which was established in Wheeler Park in 1904 and moved to its present location in 1923 when the North Canadian River, way above flood stage, overrode the dam at Lake Overholser and cut the park literally in two.

Saturday I described a rather unusual development around town: the construction of two houses by Habitat for Humanity in a local Historic District. I suggested at the time that present residents might not be enthusiastic at the prospect, though I did predict that things would work out in the long run.

MidCity Advocate columnist Jennifer Gaines, who lives about two blocks from the new homes, sees things this way:

Only time will tell, and time has this irritating tendency to give up no secrets until the last possible minute.

There was a sign posted today at the vacant lot at NW 59th and May, once a Long John Silver's Seafood Shoppe, which explains what's going on, and as Terkish Payne suggested, it's Combination FastJunk — it's going to be an LJS/KFC hybrid.

There's a freestanding KFC eight blocks south of that location, which I assume will be closed. I'm not sure what will happen after that; the Target store just to its north could probably use that lot for extra parking, especially after its rumored upgrading to quasi-Super status, but it will take some major landscaping, since the KFC store is slightly elevated and the Target is down in the valley. More likely, some indie restaurant with modest aspirations will take over the property.

Oklahoma County's Metropolitan Library System has announced some new privacy measures.

Beginning immediately, applications for library cards will not ask for the patron's Social Security Number. (This is in keeping with state policy, which has barred the SSN from driver's licenses.) The eight-digit card number will no longer be printed on the checkout receipt, and transaction records will be deleted once the transaction is completed (material returned and any fines paid). And the library's customer list is not available for sale or rent.

I'm wondering if the deletion of transaction records isn't intended as a foil for the USA Patriot Act, Section 215 of which is supposed to override state confidentiality rules for libraries. The pertinent Oklahoma statute reads as follows:

Assuming the Department of Homeland Security isn't going after sixth-graders — pre-teen terrorists seem to be purely a Palestinian phenomenon — it looks like they're going to be requesting records that will not exist.

Unless, of course, they're tracking some indolent suspects who can't return books on time.

Along Southeast 29th Street, north of Tinker Air Force Base, there's a stretch where it looks like something used to be there, but isn't anymore. No mystery, really: development in this area was halted, and existing development actually removed, in an effort to reduce encroachment on Tinker, and to deprive the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) folks of an excuse to close the base. ("You've got houses right along the flight path, fercryingoutloud.")

Apparently even more area is going to be cleared: the Powers Nissan dealership at 8021 SE 29th has been condemned by County Commissioners after Mr Powers balked at their $2.5-million dollar offer for the property. District 1 Commissioner Jim Roth suggests that Powers, who originally had been leasing the property, timed his acquisition to maximize the possible take; he bought the tract two years ago for $2.15 million on the same day as the bond election held to raise money to acquire properties for an expanded clearance zone.

Powers says he'd take the offer right now if he had a place to go, but he's having problems finding a suitable new location. The commissioners want the space cleared off by summer.

Disclosure: I bought a car from Powers' dealership some years ago. Nothing in the transaction suggested to me that there might be weasels in the boardroom; I've always considered them straight shooters.

In my neighborhood and a few others, the first Wednesday of the month means Big Junk: this is the day the city makes a separate run to scoop up stuff that won't fit in the standard carts. You're allowed four cubic yards of Big Junk per month; anything over that, they'll pick up, but you'll be billed for the overage.

It's always interesting to see what's been tossed out. In the two blocks east of Surlywood this morning, I spotted flattened cardboard boxes, old furniture, a dishwasher, and about three-quarters of a lawn mower. Some of this stuff may never make it into the truck: scavengers, in between raiding Dumpsters, often make the rounds a few minutes before the city crew. Somehow, though, I doubt any of these, um, informal recyclers would be interested in the tree and a half I dragged out to the curb last night.

Normally traffic accidents, even fatal traffic accidents, fall outside the purview of this site.

But this one, well, it bothered me, mostly because 26 years ago, I actually lived at SE 29th and Vickie Drive, and that intersection was Crash City even then: there's an elevation difference between the two roadways that makes blind spots almost inevitable, and traffic on 29th is always trying to make all the lights, of which there are an abundance. If you're crossing 29th on Vickie, you basically have to climb out of a hole and hope nothing hits you as you crawl across five lanes.

Come to think of it, all the major intersections on Vickie are hazardous. At SE 15th, you must turn: you have to duck under the I-40 overpass for about 800 feet, and wait out at least one, maybe two lights, before you can continue. At Reno, you have a one-way stop sign and a blind spot, and the northbound extension is barely even visible. And at NE 10th, you're fair game for petroleum tankers. (I got crushed by one once, albeit two miles away.)

Back in October, when I was looking to get out of my old apartment, I actually drove the entire length of this street sizing up possible locations. What was I thinking?

This print ad caught my eye:

There was a price — $72,500 — and an address, and I knew I had to see this place.

This is, after all, a neighborhood I tend to think of as capital-S Scary, and while it's just off a major thoroughfare, it's cut off from most of the rest of the city — the river and a railroad slice through the terrain nearby — and while being somewhat insular in character is probably good for gated communities where houses sell routinely in six figures, it strikes me as less good in a place where six figures could buy five or six houses. (I checked realtor.com; the going rate for the smaller boxes in this neighborhood is a startling $14,000.)

So what do you get for five times as much? The lot is indeed on a corner, though its hugeness is arguable; the house itself is at the point where the exterior is complete and the interior is being finished, and I have no doubt that, given some proper care, this place can live up to its description. Still, I suspect that finding someone willing to spend this much money to live here will be difficult until a lot more new homes are built — or a lot more old ones are torn down. And I have serious qualms about expropriating an entire neighborhood on the off-chance that it can be gentrified.

I mean, this is not much less than I spent for my own "adorable doll house," roughly the same size, in a neighborhood that presumably doesn't strike fear into anyone's heart. And on the way back to my side of town, I sliced through the western edge of Heritage Hills and caught a glimpse of a standard real-estate agent sign with an attached tag: "Just Beautiful." Same tag you could have seen in my yard, in fact, for the brief period between offering and closing. After what I'd seen earlier, though, I wasn't particularly inclined to be smug.

I did, however, manage a sneer while passing a salon which noted on its sign that "sandel season" had arrived, and they were offering a "foot facial." Now I appreciate sandal season more than most, and indeed I've seen some remarkably nice feet this spring, but I don't think there's any way you can stretch any definition of "facial" to cover the services they offer. Not that I'm going to spend the $45 to find out.

The Festival of the Arts in downtown Oklahoma City, which runs Tuesday through Sunday, is, well, pretty darn festive, what with scores of artists (figure 150 or so) plying their wares and four stages for live events.

It is literally in the street: specifically, Hudson Avenue south of Sheridan, between Stage Center and the Crystal Bridge. And there will be dancers, singers, actors, musicians, and every sort of nosh from pork-chop sandwiches to cedar-plank grilled salmon to, um, tequila bread pudding.

About the only question is when (not if) it will rain. This is spring in Oklahoma, after all. But the Festival, even dripping wet, draws around 700,000 people over its five-and-a-half-day run. In recent years there has been some rumbling to the effect that it may have gotten too big, that it draws big-name artists from elsewhere in the country at the expense of the locals, but I suspect the buyers are less concerned with where a given piece comes from than with how it will look in the living room.

I've missed the last couple of Festivals. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

I may have moved across town, but I still have my hair done (to the extent that you can call it "hair", and to the extent that what happens to it qualifies as "done") at the same old eastside location, so today I had to plunge into the Land of What Used To Be.

And indeed, a lot has changed over there in a matter of weeks: a flea market has moved into the shell of a K mart; the hardware store formerly next to Target has relocated one mile west, perhaps hinting at an expansion of Target itself; the most recent grocer to try to make a go of it at 15th and Vickie has given up; and the parking lot at the mall was 80 percent empty. I am reasonably certain that my absence has affected mall traffic not a whit, but still it's sort of dispiriting, and I dawdled over there as little as possible. (I did, however, gas up, since the Evil Orange Pump indicator was starting to flicker and the price was a penny less than my usual station, saving me one bit.)

On the return trip — different route, as per my usual habit — I saw this sign posted at a software store offering a seminar on virus infections: "In God We Trust. All Others We Scan."

Say it again: Murrah.

It's a mere slip of a word, a syllable and a half, barely enough for a murmur.

And on an April morning in 1995, its innocuousness was forever laced with toxins: number-two diesel fuel, ammonium nitrate, shrapnel, the very smell of death.

It is still not entirely certain whether the Oklahoma City bombing was a purely domestic operation, or if there might have been a foreign component to the conspiracy. But either way, the results were the same, and a hundred sixty-eight empty chairs stand downtown to give mute testimony to those results.

Spring in Oklahoma often brings us disasters. On this very date in 1970, the Chikaskia River, after three days of rain, rose three to six feet from its banks and washed away much of the town of Jefferson. In May 1999, tornadoes pushing the limits of the Fujita scale rolled through the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. The response is always the same: we take care of business, we mourn, we clean up, and we go on, because — well, because that's what we do.

I don't know if this is the stuff of which movies are made, but inevitably someone will try, and chances are there will be a title like Terror in the Heartland attached to it, a title that might attract attention on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster but which ultimately says nothing at all. Besides, if you were here on the 19th of April, 1995, as I was, as Jan was, you already have a name for it.

Murrah.

Now playing in the hearts and minds of a community that will always remember, and will always go on.

Because that's what we do.

(Update, 1:30 pm: Lynn S. and Michele have thoughts on the events of this day.)

"Art for art's sake," argued W. Somerset Maugham, "makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake." Which is true as far as it goes, but until they decide to have a Gin Festival downtown, there's always a good reason to go to the Festival of the Arts, especially since the clouds that had been dampening things all week unexpectedly lifted late this afternoon.

It doesn't cost anything to get into the Festival, though you'll be hard-pressed to find a place to park your car for under five bucks. (I opted for the usual parking garage on the edge of the Arts District, which cost exactly five bucks, though the poor anxious fellow at the gate gave me back $15 in change for my ten-spot, presumably thinking it was a twenty. He was most happy to be corrected.)

And once within the periphery, it's wall-to-wall people, or would be were there any walls: take these photos at Awe Contraire, shot Thursday, and double the number of bodies. Saturdays, especially suddenly sunny Saturdays, are like that. And it's sort of democratic, in a way: you can't immediately distinguish the people who always show up for these things from the people who popped in on a day trip from Wichita. Some find it stale; I find it stirring.

Knowing my propensity for sampling every last food vendor, I figured it would be safer for both my metabolism and my wallet to have dinner before going. A wise move, generally, though a lighter meal probably would have translated to more energetic movement; by the time I got back to my car, I was pretty well shot for the day.

I really hadn't been expecting any individual artwork to call out my name, but a monotype by Gillian Kemper caught my eye; we conversed on some level, I put it back down, walked around for ten more minutes, sang two verses of "Some Kind of Wonderful" (the Drifters hit, not the one by the Soul Brothers Six) along with one of the performers, walked back to Kemper's tent, resumed the conversation with the piece, and finally bought it.

I also had an extended chat with an Arts Council volunteer who was happy to tell me how much the Festival had changed in the last twenty or so years, which presumably was learned from a script since she couldn't have been much over twenty herself, and if she was, I want some of whatever — probably not gin — she was drinking.

It was good to be back.

Lileks is talking about Minneapolis, of course, but some of this I'm seeing at my end of I-35:

I. M. Pei's urban-renewal plan for Oklahoma City, hatched back in the go-go Sixties, had much the same effect, and there was never enough money to follow through on the more grandiose plans: the end result was rows of empty buildings occasionally broken up by vacant lots. The downtown core has recovered, for the most part, and Bricktown, on the other side of the tracks, is booming, but west of the Arts District is still pretty much a ghost town, and residential and industrial areas between Reno and the river are about to be liquidated in the name of I-40 expansion.

On the other hand, the Skirvin Hotel isn't going condo. Assuming the financing gaps can be filled, the city, which presently owns the structure, expects the hotel to reopen in a couple of years with Hilton branding. But with the marginal stuff swept away, housing close to downtown is about to get very expensive indeed.

The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce likes to refer to this place as "a shining urban jewel", a claim which might carry more weight if there weren't so many rough edges.

One example of roughness is the generally crummy condition of local roads; the Road Information Program research group has figured that Oklahoma City has the 11th worst roads in the country among metropolitan areas of half a million population or more, with fully 40 percent of the thoroughfares rated "poor," even worse than "mediocre." Tulsa came in 9th from the bottom; Los Angeles, with two-thirds of its roads in the "poor" category, was the worst.

Residents of central Oklahoma are likely to greet this news with a resounding "Well, duh!"

The list [requires Adobe Reader] is here. If you're wondering who fared best in the survey, it's Atlanta: 84 percent of their roads are rated "good" and none of them "poor"; if there's a downside, it's that 23 percent of them are named "Peachtree."

Here in Tornado Alley, there's a tendency to become complacent: we see the warnings on TV and we think, "Oh, well, it's another one." If it's coming our way, we fumble to remember our safety precautions; if it's not, we shrug.

Five years ago today, no one shrugged. No one had time to shrug. It was the first F5-level tornado ever seen in the city, the very top of the Fujita scale, and the damage started at unimaginable and worked its way up from there.

From my notes at the time:

By the time the storm had passed my area, it had dropped below F5 level, so I managed to avoid seeing the worst of it. South and west of me, though, it was a war zone: nearly two thousand homes destroyed, six thousand more damaged. There was speculation that the storm had actually reached F6 levels; subsequent research seemed to establish that it hadn't, but at this point, it was like wondering, after your car had been totaled, if the turn-signal lever still worked.

For the most part, rebuilding has been completed; the former Tanger Outlet Center in Stroud, still in ruins, will be rebuilt as a medical center starting later this year.

Today will be placid, this morning chilly, this afternoon sunny, winds on the light side. Fortunately.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, at the dedication of the new Federal Building:

The new structure is one block from the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

The new fiscal year starts 1 July, and Jim Couch, who twiddles the purse strings down at City Hall, is in a glum mood. In the news flyer that comes with the utility bill, he spells it out in no uncertain terms:

On the upside, this doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as last year's budget.

The City Council will hold two public hearings on the budget before it comes up for a vote.

The bill for restoration of the downtown Skirvin Hotel is now calculated at $46.4 million.

The City Council will consider the package next week. Under the final agreement, the city will lend the Skirvin Partners development team $18.4 million; should the reborn Skirvin Hilton be staggeringly successful, the city stands to turn a tidy profit, and if the hotel is a total flop, the city will be on the hook for only about $4 million.

I doubt seriously it will flop. During the somnolent years, we got by with one downtown hotel; new development is now supporting three, and the two new arrivals in 2006 — not only the Skirvin, but also an Embassy Suites on the eastern edge of Bricktown — fit into the dreams of downtown planners with surprising precision.

The Convention and Visitors Bureau has projected that for Oklahoma City to compete for major regional conventions — and for sporting events like the Big 12 basketball tournament or the NCAA regionals — there should be 1250 to 1500 hotel rooms available near downtown. Right now, there are 931: 395 at the Westin, 311 at the Renaissance, 225 at the Courtyard by Marriott. There will be 245 suites at the Embassy, and the plan for the Skirvin calls for 238 rooms, bringing the total as of mid-2006 to 1414.

You know, this could work.

The central city — by the Mid-City Advocate's reckoning, the 25 square miles bounded by Reno, Portland, 63rd and Kelley — is a hodgepodge of architectural styles, reflecting both the diversity of individual tastes and the wide variance in personal income that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century.

One of the quirkier areas is the Paseo, which is highlighted by a Spanish Revival shopping center built by G. A. Nichols in 1928-1929 as "Spanish Village." Not only did it contrast with nearby neighborhoods in Prairie or Craftsman styles, but it wasn't even on the city grid; the street designated "Paseo" wanders more or less down a hill southeastward from 30th and Dewey to 28th and Walker, and a couple of cross streets hit it at angles you don't want to negotiate at high speeds. When people and money moved out to the 'burbs, the Paseo remained in something of a time warp; eventually it became, due to relatively low rents and lots of small spaces suitable for studios, a hub for local artists. In the middle Seventies, those artists put together a street festival, which was successful enough to run for a second year, and a third.

And now a twenty-eighth. Cam Edwards, who used to live just off the Paseo, once described the event this way:

I should fit right in when I wander down there this afternoon.

As planned, I slid over to the Paseo today for the opening day of the Arts Festival, and it was a fairly complex compound of both familiar and surprising elements.

Of course, parking was going to be a chore; I wound up at a convenience store on the southern periphery, which was selling spaces (they had three or four) at three bucks a car, about the going rate. I pulled in next to a fiftyish woman in the shortest possible skirt and black tights, which is of course always a delight; turned out she was one of a couple dozen tap dancers who were scheduled on stage in a few minutes.

The wind was its usual intractable self — staff at the Paseo Café found themselves chasing after an umbrella which had reached escape velocity — but considering the ghastly levels of humidity today, every breeze was welcomed, even the ones that threatened to tear your precious parcel out of your very hands.

The crowd, as anticipated, was closer to boho than to boardroom, but not that much closer; I didn't see more than a handful of potential contestants for a Willie Nelson lookalike contest. And suddenly an old friend popped out of nowhere. It is a measure of the level of seclusion I'd maintained in years past that among the first ten words she spoke were "What are you doing here?" And it is a measure of how much things have changed that I had an actual answer.

What? Oh, yes, the art. Lots of stuff on display; I wound up with a print from an artist who's already represented on my walls. I didn't hit up any of the food vendors this time, fearing that the combination of unfamiliar victuals and unfriendly humidity would knock me for a loop. But as street scenes go, I figure I'm ahead of the game if I can fit into one for a few hours.

For its first three-quarters of a century, the City of Oklahoma City managed to get by without an official seal. In 1965, Mayor George Shirk announced a competition to design a city seal; this is the prize winner, designed by Larry Thompson, who got $500 (a fair chunk of change in '65) for his efforts.

Now how long will it take the American Civil Liberties Union to decide that the white perpendicular bars in the center constitute a cross?

After ten years, the Metropolitan Area Projects Citizens Oversight Board is ready to close the books. The once-fractious board voted to put itself out to pasture this week.

MAPS itself was remarkable: a single, massive upgrade of public facilities, financed by a one-cent sales tax for 5½ years. When MAPS was put to the voters in 1993, the city suggested that the projects would spur some $150 million in private investment; during the period the tax was collected, revenues and accrued interest totaled over $350 million, and the private sector so far has kicked in around $1.5 billion. In a city previously considered somewhere between sleepy and moribund, this is a turnaround on par with the '69 Mets.

One worry I had was that things were going to cost even more than the city had projected and the entire scheme was going to wind up in the hole. The final financial report shows about $450,000 still in the kitty, which will be devoted to project upkeep. And that penny sales tax expired in 1999; voters were sufficiently impressed with the results it got to reinstate it in 2001 for "MAPS for Kids", a scheme to upgrade public school facilities in the city, which is projected to cost some $620 million, 70 percent of which will go to schools within the Oklahoma City school district and the balance to schools in suburban districts which serve outlying parts of the city.

I could be cynical and ask what they're going to do in 2008 when the MAPS for Kids tax expires — surely they'll think of something, right? — but for now, I'm waiting to see whether the improvement in facilities is enough to jump-start the process of improving the quality of education.

About 3,000 Oklahoma City utility customers got an unpleasant surprise this month in their water/sewer/garbage bills: $581.84 listed as "Balance In Dispute." I got the impression, talking to the harried but sort-of-smiling clerk, that 2,900 or so of them had called in today to complain.

She did say that it was safe to ignore it, but if I went ahead and paid it, they wouldn't complain a whole lot. I suppose they wouldn't, inasmuch as $581.84 (it's the same amount on all the affected bills) is about a year's worth of service at this address.

(Update, 8 June, 4:50 pm: The City is now claiming 10,000 bills were so affected.)

Apparently the question of whether Oklahoma City has enough downtown hotel rooms has been settled: the Big 12 Conference announced today that the 2007 basketball tournaments will be held in OKC, the women's in the Cox Convention Center, the men's in the Ford Center.

Apparently my haphazard attempts at lawn care are at least slightly appreciated; a neighbor informed me that the yard "looks nice," which is far more kindly an evaluation than I'd give to it.

(Mental note: There is a GFCI-type circuit breaker installed in each of the outside electrical outlets. It's much easier to check it, and quite a bit faster, than it is to go poking around the breaker box.)

Seen a couple of blocks away: an Oldsmobile in Classic GM Vanilla, inscribed with the words "VOTE KHOURY," presumably a reference to Karen Khoury, one of the four Republicans seeking the state House seat for this area, which is being vacated this year. I didn't get a look at the driver, inasmuch as I was trying to avoid running over things at the time.

Sign at a restaurant a couple miles north: "BUY DAD SOMETHING HE NEEDS THIS YEAR — A DRINK."

Sometimes it's the items I glance at and don't seem to notice that come back to bother me later.

This paragraph from Triticale is a case in point:

It was about a minute past the time I'd read this when I thought: "Wait a minute. I've heard of this guy." So I ran back through browser history — this is, incidentally, the one meaningful argument against "open links in new window" — and refreshed my memory. As in Milwaukee, Catholics in Charleston played a substantial role in the civil-rights movement of the Sixties, and as a student at a Catholic high school, I got a view of the scene that was no worse than second-hand. And while the diocese of Charleston didn't produce any figures as iconic as Fr. Groppi, we had no shortage of clergy doing the grunt work to help bring Dr. King's dream to life.

While Fr. Groppi is remembered only in some circles, pretty much everyone has heard of Dr. King. In fact, as noted by Andrew at Pathetic Earthlings, his name is everywhere, which inevitably dilutes his memory in ways not anticipated by those who wished to honor him:

I don't think it's quite as bad as Andrew suggests: I pass through Oklahoma City's Martin Luther King Avenue five or six times a week, and it does give me a brief reminder of the man and his mission, though there's always the question of why this particular stretch of road was renamed for Dr. King, as opposed to, say, Northeast 23rd Street east of Kelley, which is the primary business thoroughfare through the city's largely-black east side. (Short answer: MLK is relatively well-kept, while 23rd is a mess.)

The most telling thing about MLK, though, indeed about the MLK in your town as well, is that it's always, in full, Martin Luther King Street / Avenue / Boulevard / Road. And quite unwittingly, Dr. King seems to have started another trend: streets renamed for dignitaries are now always given the full John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt treatment. Downtown Oklahoma City boasts streets named for E. K. Gaylord, Robert S. Kerr and Dean A. McGee; just east in Bricktown is Mickey Mantle Drive (which, nicely enough, runs past the ballpark). All of these people, even Mantle, contributed substantially to the modest greatness that is OKC, but with their full names in white on green on every street corner, it seems to me that their contributions might appear to outshine those of, say, Paul Braniff, Anton Classen, Charles Colcord, William Couch, Robert A. Hefner, G. A. Nichols, or John Shartel, all of whom played major roles in the city's first century and all of whom are remembered on street signs — without their first names.

And I expect I'll continue to argue this point when Oklahoma City, as it must, inevitably renames a street for Cesar Chavez. (There's already a Cesar Chavez Alternative [Middle] School, on Southwest 10th east of Walker; Walker, incidentally, is named for Dr. Delos Walker, who was the first president of the Oklahoma City school board.)

Some of the things I saw around town today:

Bill Graves, one of the looser doorknobs in the Oklahoma House, is being term-limited out of a job, and Mrs Graves isn't going to be handed the District 84 seat on the proverbial silver platter: one Democrat and a fistful of Republicans are chasing this position. One of the GOP chasers is evident Greg Kihn fan Sally Kern, whose campaign signs bear the nonce word "KERNservative."

Also on the campaign trail is District 2 Commissioner Jack Cornett, no relation to OKC Mayor Mick Cornett or to your blogging Cornetts, whose reelection signs this year contain an actual line-drawing of a cornet. Let us hope this mnemonic notion does not occur to, say, Senate District 25 candidate Dennis Loudermilk.

At a stand inside the supermarket, a woman was handing out cans of C2, the new Coke that they hope won't be another New Coke. After twelve ounces of the stuff, I am prepared to say that it's okay as a diet Coke, but no match for the Real Thing™.

(Update, 4:30 pm, 20 June: Chris Lawrence, whom I trust implicitly in such matters, says that C2 probably makes a better mixer with vodka.)

For years, they sat by side by side, the Dome and the Tower, on the southeast corner of 23rd and Classen. The Dome, designed by Robert Roloff on a theme articulated by R. Buckminster Fuller, was completed in 1958, and was threatened with demolition a couple of years ago. Now owned by a local optometrist, the Dome is being refurbished, though its characteristic gold tint, weathered with age, will not be restored due to difficulty and expense.

But what of the Tower next door? Built in 1966, Roloff once again at the helm, it's a pretty fair knockoff of Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville; it's in decent shape but is mostly empty, and a local developer picked it up this spring at a fire-sale price, suggesting that part or all of it may go condo.

This fits in with my ongoing notion that people will live downtown or close to it if you give them something distinctive, something secure, and something convenient. There aren't many high-rise residences in this area anyway, so "distinctive" is a given. The major disadvantage for downtown living has been the lack of grocers: the nearest supermarket to downtown is the Homeland adjacent to Mesta Park, at 18th and Classen. But it's only three blocks from the Tower, and three blocks farther north is Kamp's, eliminating this particular problem.

Security is another matter. This isn't a high-crime area, exactly, but it's a high-traffic area, which introduces issues of its own. And given the Tower's positioning on the edge of the Asian district, there's the question of whether its appeal will be limited to young Asian professionals, though there are easily enough such to fill up the Tower's twenty stories. (Each floor, reports the leasing agent, could accommodate three residences, roughly 1500 to 1900 square feet.)

I'm not looking to move there myself; I'm rather attached to my little patch of ground. But I tend to look favorably on plans to improve the general state of city dwellings, on the not-exactly-altruistic basis that if the quality of life in the central city as a whole goes up, so does mine; after all, I live around here too.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will open Thursday in Oklahoma City at the Cinemark Tinseltown. You can't get in, though: all the seats for the premiere were sold at $25 each, and proceeds will go to the Progressive Alliance Foundation, which in turn will donate half the take to the families of Oklahomans killed in Iraq. Friday and subsequent showings will be open to the general public.

The community of Warr Acres, an enclave within Oklahoma City's northwest quadrant, has one claim to fame: its 6.5-percent sales tax rate (2 for Warr Acres, 4.5 for the state of Oklahoma), the lowest in the metro area. (Neighboring Bethany collects 8.5 percent; Oklahoma City, 8.375 percent.) Signs posted on the way out of town contain the ominous message "Warning: Higher Taxes Ahead."

Unfortunately, there may be higher taxes ahead for shoppers in Warr Acres. With the closing of the Wal-Mart store along the community's section of Northwest Distressway — Sam's myrmidons relocated to a larger box farther up the road, within Oklahoma City limits — tax collections are way down, and Warr Acres' share of a widening project for MacArthur Boulevard, its main north-south thoroughfare, is coming due. Mayor Marietta Tardibono is considering raising the sales tax, which will require a vote by residents, probably early next year.

This isn't the first time that a suburb has lost a retailer to the city, either; Albertson's closed its store on the northwest corner of Britton and May, in The Village, and moved across the street to the southwest corner, which is in Oklahoma City. A Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market at the opposite end of The Village is presumably taking up some of the slack, but nothing so far has replaced the town's two auto dealerships, both of which have moved to areas with large clusters of dealers.

Still, this is very much the opposite of the situation in many other metro areas, where retailers are bailing out of the city and moving to the 'burbs. Oklahoma City no doubt is congratulating itself on its foresight in annexing everything within arm's reach in the 1960s.

The Weather Guys predict a 30-percent chance — "it probably won't, but if it does, we told you it would" — that it will rain on the city's seventeenth annual Gay Pride parade, or, to give it its full name, OKLAHOMA CITY GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDERED & INTERSEX PRIDE PARADE AND FESTIVAL. It's enough to make you feel like the token straight.

The actual parade starts Sunday at five at Memorial Park, 35th and Classen, after a couple of days of festivities. Last year's event (let's not call it a "bash") drew about 20,000 spectators, a fair number of which did not actually qualify as G, L, B, T or I. My brother will happily point out that Surlywood is not adjacent to, but is in close proximity to, the zone known as "Homo Heights," and indeed my ZIP code contains more same-sex couples than any other in the state, but what the hell? On the nose of life's complexion, this, to me anyway, is not even so much as a freckle. Your mileage may vary.

(Update, 27 June, 9:30 pm: No rain. I wandered down the parade route earlier today to gauge the crowd and to get a look at some of the floats. If nothing else, the experience demonstrated the truth of my assertion that Oklahoma City is a darn good town for theatre.)

Just driving around town doesn't mean anything unless you see something, after all.

Last Monday, IBC Bank completed its acquisition of what used to be Local Oklahoma Bank, and they wasted no time pinning up temporary signage at the local facilities. This was the first time that I'd noticed the IBC logo, which contains the usual outline of the 48 states — and right below it, an outline of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. So far as I can tell, IBC doesn't actually have any branches in Mexico, but the location of its headquarters — Laredo, Texas is not only right on the border, but it's the southern terminus of Interstate 35, known informally as the NAFTA Highway — hints that they'd love to tap into the burgeoning Latino market. And by no coincidence, that's what we have here.

Habitat for Humanity has completed and sold the two houses they built in East Heritage Hills, and I wandered by today to see the results. I was properly impressed: it will be a while before these structures start to appear weathered, but stylewise, they fit in nicely with the smaller Craftsman homes that dominate that strip between Broadway and Robinson.

Conventional wisdom, seldom all that wise these days, holds that women pick out their vehicles on the basis of space and reliability; men have the need for speed. Anyone who's ever seen She Who Is Not To Be Named pushing a sandal to the floorboard should know better than that, but the stereotype somehow persists. As has been my wont of late, I struck up a conversation with a woman at the supermarket; she drives a '99 Mazda Millenia, and yes, it has the brand's traditional aversion to repair shops, but what she most appreciated about it, she said, was the little supercharged V-6's ability to put her in front of anything that wouldn't move out of the way while she was trying to merge onto the freeway. And until such time as ODOT rids us of the last of these two-car-length on-ramps, there's absolutely no substitute for good old Zoom Zoom.

Around the corner from me is a Talking House.

No, really. I pulled in closer to see what was going on, and there was a sign directing me to tune the AM radio to 1610 kHz. And in one of those digitally-recorded voices that sounds just as garbled over the phone, up pops a loop explaining the virtues of this house, why you should drop everything and buy it now, and the person you should call should you want to do so.

It's a nice place, and I'm sure the eventual buyer will enjoy having bought into this neighborhood for a price in the low, low six figures, but for some reason this technique put me off, perhaps because the infinitesimal power output of the tiny transmitter virtually guarantees that you'll miss part of the pitch before you get out of range, which means that if you're at all curious you'll have to double back toward the house, which strikes me as less intrusive than having a lasso catch you as you walk away, but not much.

This neighborhood looks different, but don't think it's subversive; a real-estate guy crept out in the dead of night — and very likely in the middle of a thunderstorm — to plant a small US flag near the curb at every household on the block, and they're still flying happily this afternoon. (In fact, there's probably greater exuberance, since the winds have picked up a bit.)

I'll leave mine up through Saturday, then replace it on the Fourth with a larger flag (obtained, ironically, from a rival real-estate guy), and reinstate the smaller one, probably not so close to the curb, on Monday morning.

Richard Tanenbaum wants you to live downtown.

Seriously. A year ago, he bought the mostly-vacant Montgomery Ward building at Main and Walker, a classic Art Deco structure on the National Register of Historic Places, and started the process of turning it into "The Montgomery," featuring about five dozen upscale apartments with a restaurant and a gallery downstairs.

This spring, Tanenbaum bought the former Citizens Tower at 21st and Classen; this week, the Oklahoma City Council approved rezoning the Tower, which will be renamed "The Classen" and divided into about 100 condos in the $130k range. It's not actually downtown, but it's very close — two miles to the business district, two and a half to Bricktown — and the view, says Tanenbaum, should be spectacular.

The plan for The Classen varies somewhat from initial speculation, which called for fewer but larger residences. Tanenbaum expects to have units for sale by next spring.

There's a nifty new stone marker at the northwest entrance to my neighborhood, at the northern end of the narrow park that separates it from five lanes of May Avenue. I don't know whether this little bit of braggadocio will bring any additional visibility to our little strip of the city, but it definitely does look cool.

And speaking of additional visibility, the Asian district is about to get some identifying signage of its own: street signs along Classen from 24th to 35th will add references to the district, and the overhead signs at 23rd, 30th and 36th will add a yet-to-be-designed district logo.

What these two installations have in common is the amount of city funding involved: zero. Over on my street, the Neighborhood Association paid for the new marker; residents and merchants in the Asian District are covering the costs of the street signs.

This may seem like a trivial sort of thing, but I'm persuaded that getting people to live and shop in the central city is easier if you're willing to brag about it a little.

It's no secret that many Oklahoma bridges are in wretched condition. And there's one particular bridge that, as far back as I can remember, has always been in wretched condition: the Walnut Avenue overpass, which connects the Deep Deuce and Bricktown areas. (Walnut, south of Main, becomes Mickey Mantle Drive.)

Three years ago, a move to tear down the bridge entirely was foiled when then-Mayor Kirk Humphreys discovered that under state law, the Union Pacific railroad, whose tracks run under the bridge, could be billed up to half the cost of repairs.

The city has the money to fix the bridge — the Walnut Avenue project was funded in a 1989 bond issue — but the railroad has yet to consent to the repairs. In the meantime, Paul Brum, the city engineer, says that beams under the bridge are deteriorating, and therefore the bridge is closed until further notice; repairs should take about a year.

I was threading my way back from Sears' repair location, which is tucked away southwest of the Capitol complex, and eventually I found myself at 23rd and Classen, where Beverly's Restaurant had been bulldozed into oblivion to make way for the city's 726th Walgreens store.

Beverly's, of course, was an Oklahoma City staple for years, and their Chicken in the Rough was briefly franchised to other eateries. And while this location had been closed for some time, Beverly's Pancake Corner, west of Penn Square, still serves breakfast and lunch, so it's not the end of an era. Yet.

Besides, it could have been worse. Walgreens at first tried to get a different corner of this intersection: the one occupied by the Gold Dome.

North of 23rd, the new Asian District signage is in place, white on red in the sort of font one expects to find in ads for Chinese restaurants. A letter to The Oklahoman last week complained about the whole idea:

Which is a reasonable point, but identifying a mile of Classen Boulevard as an Asian District hardly constitutes segregation. For one thing, it's not a reflection of housing patterns; Americans of Asian descent live all over the city and in the suburbs, not just around this area. For another — well, Tom Waken, who owns property on Classen and elsewhere, and who sits on the Asian District Commission, sent this to the Mid-City Advocate:

And that initial arrival of Asian-owned businesses got this area, and the strip of 23rd just to its east, known informally as "Little Saigon," a name which has persisted all these years; it's not like anyone should be at all surprised by this.

Will we eventually see Latino (around, say, SW 29th and Western), African-American (NE 23rd and Martin Luther King), even gay (NW 39th and Pennsylvania) districts? I'm thinking we will, and I'm thinking it's just fine with me.

MAPS for Kids is the successor to the original Metropolitan Area Projects plan that renovated so much of downtown Oklahoma City. The plan, funded by a temporary sales tax (seven years), will take ten years to implement completely. Half a billion dollars will be pumped into Oklahoma City Public Schools, and $150 million more into suburban districts that overlay parts of the city. The Chamber of Commerce has begun sending out a quarterly newsletter called Transformations, to advise us taxpayers where the money is being spent. From the looks of this sidebar on page seven, apparently none of the $650 million went to proofreading.

The transformation of the Samurai Club on May south of Grand into — well, I have no idea what's going to replace it — continues apace: the new architecture is Standard Suburban Medical Office, minus the bogus roof extensions over the doorways, which could mean almost anything. No signage yet; in fact, the old Samurai marquee is still in place, with only a few missing characters here and there.

Tuesday marks the opening of the Ronald J. Norick Downtown Library, the last of the MAPS projects, at 300 Park Avenue. And "300" seems to be something of an understatement: the facility stretches across the entire 300 block, from Harvey to Hudson. It's an imposing structure; the only trick is actually getting there, since Harvey terminates at Park and it's one-way north, meaning you have to take either Hudson or Robinson south, meaning quite a roundabout if you're coming from the downtown Business District where all the signs are. Still, accessibility wasn't a problem Friday for the book-passing ceremony, in which books were literally handed down, one person to the next in an enormous chain, from the old library at 131 (not 301) Dean A. McGee to the new one.

A nearby salon is pitching "pedicures for men and women," which at least seems nicely nondiscriminatory, and to tell you the truth, I was at least slightly tempted: while my instincts tend toward the retrosexual, I am also sufficiently self-indulgent to be able to come up with a justification for it. Besides, I'm somewhat curious as to whether they'd charge me extra for these size-14 clodhoppers.

According to the flyer in this month's utility bill, the city of Oklahoma City is setting up a drop on Saturday, 11 September, at the Fairgrounds, for the following sorta-hazardous wastes:

• Used tires;
  
• Used computer equipment;
  
• Presumably unused ammunition.
  

I've got to wonder how they decided on that particular grouping. They won't take tires at the Household Hazardous Waste facility.

The Montgomery, Richard Tanenbaum's transformation of the old Montgomery Ward store downtown into upscale corporate apartments, continues; I have no idea what he's done to the interior yet, but an enormous amount of accumulated crud has been scraped off the art-deco exterior at 500 West Main, and I can only wish he could work similar magic on the former Holiday Inn next door, newer yet somehow grubbier. The Montgomery, we are assured, will open in October.

Also being spruced up are some long-abandoned buildings along Walker, including a couple of former car dealerships, which are being converted into fresh office space. When the 65-foot clock tower on the northeast corner of 4th and Walker was built this past spring, it looked ever-so-slightly silly, but now that work has progressed, it fits nicely into developer Rick Dowell's design scheme. Eventually Dowell wants to build a high-rise residential tower, assuming the market for downtown housing isn't saturated any time soon.

Then there's the headquarters of Oklahoma City Beautiful, which has moved a mile up Classen without actually leaving its building: the original structure, near the now-departed Beverly's on the corner of 23rd, was picked up, driven up the street, and deposited near Memorial Park at 36th.

Of course, not everything I saw today was a sign of Better Times Coming. Up on the Lake Hefner Parkway I caught sight of a Scion xA with the vanity tag BRITFAN. Britain? Britney Spears? Brittany spaniels? Who knows?

I usually don't read the real-estate section of the Sunday paper. For one thing, most of the actual for-sale ads run in Saturday's edition; for another, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. For some reason, though, I took a peek at today's selections.

Traditionally, ads of this sort are believed to require multiple grains of salt to counteract the evasions, misdirections, and outright fibs that are supposed to be inherent in the selling process. I didn't find a lot of those, though I was amused by one little place pitching itself as being in the "Crown Heights area," which is true if your definition of "area" is sufficiently broad. (Douglas Place sits north of Crown Heights; this house is on the opposite side of the street from the northern boundary of Douglas Place.) It's probably just as "absolutely darling" as the ad claims — I think that's a reasonably spiffy neighborhood — but Crown Heights it ain't.

On the other hand, some ads score for Brutal Truth. On this presumed handyman's special on the southside: "Not scared of repairs?" And one rental ad, for a westside apartment, cuts to what's really important: "No One Upstairs."

What caught my eye fastest, though, was a feature article on this. Yes, it's just slightly ostentatious, and yes, it's expensive — $1800 was the quoted price — but damn, it put a wobble in my Thou Shalt Not Covet stance.

In 1962, the shiny new All Sports Stadium opened at the Fairgrounds, a home for the city's brand new minor-league baseball club, the 89ers.

In 2004, the Niners are now the RedHawks and play in Bricktown; All Sports Stadium has sat vacant for four years, below contemporary minor-league standards and nowhere near "accessible" in the ADA sense.

The Fairgrounds Trust has now declared the stadium "surplus property," the first step towards demolition.

I spent quite a few evenings in the old ballpark way back when; it was pretty decent for its time, but its time is long gone. Still, it's going to be odd driving I-44 past 10th Street and seeing nothing on the corner.

We're at the copier station: Valerie is making copies because sometimes that's what she does, and I'm there because Valerie is there and she's awfully pretty. For some reason we got onto the subject of real estate, and I mentioned that my house was built back in 1948. "I don't know when mine was built," she said, at which point I darted back to my cave and called up the County Assessor's database.

I returned and announced: "Nineteen fifty."

"How did you find that out?" Valerie asked.

And she followed me back to the cave, where on the screen was a description of her house, its current market value, and every ownership change on it since, well, 1950.

Most people who have seen this database in action have been impressed that something like this was available in this putatively hick burg. Not Valerie. She was utterly horrified that any bozo from off the street could call up intensely-personal information like this. I pointed out that in years past, any bozo from off the street could walk into county offices and request exactly the same data: real-estate transactions are a matter of public record, after all.

She was not mollified. And she was even more upset when she caught sight of the name of her ex-spouse, who at one time was a co-owner of the house: presumably she got it in the divorce settlement. "They had to execute a transfer to put it in your name. He's a former owner. Of course his name will be on there." I can certainly see why she wouldn't want to be reminded of the guy — and what kind of guy lets someone like Valerie get away, anyway? — but divorce proceedings, too, are a matter of public record.

I don't think she was about to cry, but I've misread her before. Still, she seems to have a point: is it now too easy to access public records? It's not like J. Random Stalker is going to have a much better shot at her; he's got to know how to work the database, which has its quirks, and none of its contents are indexed by search engines, so merely Googling her won't produce any of this information.

I suppose it's a good thing I didn't bring up the GIS mapper, which presumably has an aerial view of her property.

Actually, none of these were spotted today, but I forgot to do a "Saturday spottings" this week, and anyway a couple of those would actually turn out to have been detected on Friday, fercryingoutloud.

One of them involved Major Tom, wherever he may be: parked in front of one of those Nichols Hills demimansions, I saw two huge (given the width of NH streets, which isn't much) trailers identified as coming from "Ground Control," which turns out to be a landscaping/yard-maintenance operation way out in the northeast quadrant. Small thing, perhaps, but I assure you, had Timi Yuro not been on the stereo at that moment ("What's a matter, baby, is it hurting you?"), I'd have burst into a couple of stanzas of "Space Oddity." I have no shame.

A few blocks south of there, the building which houses a well-established cosmetic-surgery practice is getting, um, a facelift.

And seen in the parking lot at Albertson's, this bumper sticker: "John Kerry for President — of France."

So I got home around 5 pm, wheeled out the mower, wrestled the front yard into submission, and by 5:25 I was crawling into the shower.

Which turned out to be a bad idea; those wonderful folks at the gas company had sliced through the water line, and even my Super-Velocity Ultimate Vortex shower head was unable to spit up more than a few bits of drizzle.

Full service was restored somewhere around 9:30 pm. The break occurred on the other side of 50 Penn Place; I wonder if they had to put up with it.

Well, I'll tell you: we are so diverse that... but never mind. Nobody is buying. Oklahoma City, though many paths intersect here, is still widely perceived as being all of a piece, and it's a piece of white bread with the crusts cut off.

Four months ago, I came up with this:

There are now signs that the power structure is actually starting to pay attention to this sort of thing. The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce has begun Project NEXT, which seeks to "make Central Oklahoma attractive to educated and talented individuals and the most successful businesses," a task which they admit will require seeking "input from the entire community, including people that may or may not be [our] traditional partners."

I'm not quite sure the Chamber really has a handle on this yet. "We've got all the main minority groups — American Indians, Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays," says Chamber spokesperson Drew Dugan in apparent "See how hard we're trying!" mode. Still, they are trying, and that's something they wouldn't have done forty, or even four, years ago.

Next Thursday, representatives from "all the main minority groups" will descend upon the Cox Convention Center to tell the Chamber what they think needs to be done. It should be interesting, to say the least.

The goal, said City Manager Jim Couch, was to finish MAPS right and without debt.

By any reasonable reckoning, they did the job right; the nine original Metropolitan Area Projects were massive undertakings, and the results are breathtaking.

But did they go over budget? Here are the individual projects:

• SBC Bricktown Ballpark ($34 million)
  
• Bricktown Canal ($23 million)
  
• Oklahoma Spirit Trolleys ($5 million)
  
• Cox Convention Center renovation/expansion ($60 million)
  
• Civic Center Music Hall renovation ($53 million)
  
• State Fairgrounds improvements ($14 million)
  
• Ford Center ($89 million)
  
• North Canadian Oklahoma River development ($53.5 million)
  
• Ronald J. Norick Library ($21.5 million)
  

Which comes to $353 million, a fair chunk of change by any measure. However, the city claims to have collected only $309 million from the temporary sales tax (since expired) that funded the projects.

Of course: government projects result in cost overruns. Nature of the beast. No doubt some of the difference was made up by the sale of naming rights. And I've had years (don't even ask) when I overspent my income by 14 percent. So I'm not as cranky about this as I could be, I suppose, especially since the City isn't actually running a deficit, unlike some governments I could name.

Someone once asked why I would go to the trouble of visiting parts of town that are generally considered, um, less desirable. It's simple: I don't want to get into the habit of thinking about a 600-square-mile city in terms of the few blocks that surround my house. Things happen all over town, and given the priorities of the press, which enjoys harping on tragedies even more than boasting about some dubious manifestation of "progress," I'd just as soon see for myself.

So I was near Linwood and Blackwelder today, where small firms under the general heading of "light industrial" vie for curb space with homes built around the time of World War I. And every other block, there's a church, and this being Sunday, those churches were busy. (I caught sight of an old-fashioned revival tent on a double lot.) A few black faces, but mostly brown; kids on bicycles, men unloading trucks, women in their Sunday best.

Now the roads through there aren't great, and I suspect the rest of the city's infrastructure is probably an upgrade or two behind schedule, but this struck me as a relatively nice, if obviously not at all upscale, neighborhood. (I spot-checked a couple of houses for sale, and you can still buy in around here for thirty-five to fifty-five thousand.) Professional worriers, faced with a few blocks like this, would undoubtedly start screaming "Blight!" and calling for intervention. And indeed, there's room for improvement, starting with what appears to be, at first glance, a higher-than-average crime rate. But I am becoming persuaded that the kiss of death for any neighborhood comes at the exact moment when the studies and the surveys and the recommendations start coming out and the focus shifts from "How can we make this area better?" to "How can we get these people out of here?" I, for my part, am loath to tear up an area of affordable housing just because it's not pretty.

Well, it will probably be slightly restrained: this enclave within Oklahoma City's north side is not known for being loud and boisterous.

Still, a seventy-fifth anniversary is something to celebrate, and the founding of Nichols Hills in 1929 was fairly remarkable, if only because the motivations for its founding were such a departure from the norm for Oklahoma City over the preceding forty years.

Mrs George R. Bixler, who was town clerk in Nichols Hills for many years, described it this way:

And indeed, if you drive on the grid in north Oklahoma City, things change radically once you cross 63rd; even Pennsylvania Avenue, a busy city thoroughfare, becomes a winding residential street with a 25-mph speed limit.

It's still a lovely place, though its lack of room for expansion — it's surrounded on three sides by Oklahoma City, and the city of The Village, incorporated in 1950, lies directly to the north — has resulted in the occasionally-unlovely prospect of fine period homes being torn down and replaced with contemporary faux châteaux. There haven't been that many demolitions yet, though, and I suspect the city strictly limits the number of permits it grants for such things, so I rather think Dr. Nichols' countryside will look about the same (give or take a few sport-utility vehicles) over the next seventy-five years.

I have no idea whether they checked all of Macaulay Culkin's major crevices when they booked him into the Oklahoma County Jail yesterday on charges of possession of what the government persists in calling "substances," including six-tenths of an ounce of marijuana. On the other hand, they did let him go once he'd posted $4000 bond.

One thing bothers me: at 4 pm, the time of the initial bust, 70 mph on I-44 would normally put one at the back of the traffic pack — even at 5 pm, traffic is often moving at close to 75 mph — so I have to assume that the improper lane change was what drew the attention of the gendarmes.

Which, for that stretch of 44, surely must be a first.

Construction has begun, it appears — I saw no signage, but the location and the size match up — on the Embassy Suites hotel on the eastern edge of Bricktown, which is supposed to open in January 2006, and which will give owner John Q. Hammons three of the five major hotels in downtown Oklahoma City. (Hammons also owns the Renaissance and the Courtyard by Marriott; the other two are the Westin — scheduled to morph into a Sheraton — and the not-yet-reborn Hilton Skirvin.)

Meanwhile, Harkins Theatres says its new 16-screen motion-picture showplace will open on the first of October. I've got my doubts, but I figure they'll do their darnedest, especially since the Centennial Fountain near the entrance is now up and running.

I saw quite a few new Bush/Cheney yard signs today, though no new signs for Kerry/Edwards. On the other hand, Kerry stickers seem to outnumber Bush stickers, at least on the cars that were in front of me. Whether this reflects anything other than what the local parties were able to hand out this past week remains to be seen.

A billboard on the south side: YES ON 712 / Education and Jobs. State Question 712 [link requires Adobe Reader] is the State-Tribal Gaming Act, which provides the following:

Pitching this as an "education and jobs" measure, I believe, is highly dubious.

And just a little bit of Mitsubitching to the fellow in the dingy white Diamante: if you're going to have dual fart-can exhausts, you might consider actually fastening them to the car rather than have them dangling a few inches above the pavement.

Macaulay Culkin, last seen getting busted in Oklahoma City, was read the charges yesterday: two misdemeanors, one for possession of marijuana, one for possession of a prescription drug (Xanax) without a prescription.

The Oklahoman reports from police records that Culkin and his traveling companion, pulled over for minor traffic violations, would probably have gotten off with a warning had they not been so obviously "nervous."

DA Wes Lane will perforce suggest Culkin enter a drug-treatment program.

Tropos Networks has built a number of Wi-Fi systems for public-safety use, but they've never tried anything this big: a wireless network for the city of Oklahoma City, 600-plus square miles of spectacularly-irregular polygon.

The new network, which should be fully operational by the end of next year, will cost around $5 million. And no, there will be no public-access hot spots, at least at first.

My first thought, of course, was this: "OCU has varsity rowing?"

Which they do. And on the third of October, Oklahoma City University hosts the Head of the Oklahoma Centennial Regatta, over two and a half miles of the no-longer-ludicrous North Canadian Oklahoma River.

Even Harvard is sending a team.

It's not a jump to the left and then a step to the right; this time we're going backward and forward.

Back in August I noted the demolition of the building at 23rd and Classen that once housed a Beverly's Restaurant, and it occurred to me this morning that it had been far too long since I'd sampled any of the wares therein.

Beverly Osborne's first restaurant, dating to 1921, was just north of the State Capitol on Lincoln Boulevard; eventually there were half a dozen across town, the last to be built being the Pancake Corner at Northwest Expressway west of Pennsylvania, which sports red floor tile almost identical to the tile on my bathroom floor. Time, attrition and urban renewal took their usual toll, and now the Pancake Corner is the only Beverly's remaining. Still, it's hard to imagine that it was much different in the Good Old Days than it is now: it's a classic diner of the old school, everything happens right up front so you can see the level of chaos for yourself, and while prices are inevitably higher, the menu and the recipes are largely unchanged. I should be in such good shape when I'm eighty-three years old.

The Harkins Theatres in Bricktown aren't even eighty-three hours old yet, but they were doing a semi-brisk business for a Saturday afternoon, perhaps because four screens (including the monster Cine Capri) were devoted to the weekend's big debut, Shark Tale. Being the sensible soul I am, I went after lunch, reasoning that the Big Bevburger ($4.95 with fries) was likely to be more substantial a meal than the $5.50 Giant Popcorn at the concession stand. (I did, however, fork over three and a quarter for a box of Raisinets, because — well, just because, okay?)

Two weeks ago I said something to the effect that I'd be surprised if they made their first-of-October opening on time, and indeed they did, but there's a reason I trust my gut: about two-thirds of the way through Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a section of ceiling molding and the backing material came crashing to the floor. (I suspect it says something about Sky Captain that hardly anyone noticed the crash, what with all the crashing and whatnot on screen, duly reproduced in Dolby® Digital.) The offending section was directly above an aisle, and no one in the auditorium was even close to being affected by it, but Harkins management was properly appalled, and everyone at that showing was comped with a free pass for the inconvenience suffered, while staff hurried in halfway through the credits to make the repairs.

We jump now into the realm of the timeless. A chap from a local Baptist church rang my bell this morning and handed me a package of light bulbs. (Good ones, too: GE Soft White Longlife 60-watt.) No catch: it's just part of their outreach. And, well, why not promote Eternal Light with something good for 1500 hours or so?

Sign at a Kelly-Moore paint store: 100% CARB FREE PAINT. I should certainly hope so.

And to the long cool woman in a black dress who was posing for photographs in front of, and darn near on top of, the Centennial Fountain around three o'clock: thank you, thank you, thank you. (Words fail me otherwise.)

The word hasn't made it to the city Web site yet, but they're putting it out in the City News utility-bill insert: you can now pay Oklahoma City utility bills at the zoo.

Really. Seven days a week, 9 to 5, the Oklahoma City Zoo's Guest Services Counter will take your check or money order in payment of your utility bill, assuming it's current. What's more, they're reserving a couple of parking spaces near the zoo entrance for utility customers.

In another development, the Municipal Court will now take plastic for city fines, in person or over the phone during business hours, and won't even charge you a service fee.

Eventually, they really need to unite all these functions and make them payable at okc.gov. (Right now, only traffic tickets can be paid over the Web.) But I can wait.

On the south side of the campus of St. Gregory's University, a small (850 students) Benedictine school in Shawnee, Oklahoma, is the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art, founded in 1914 by Father Gregory Gerrer, a Benedictine monk and an artist in his own right.

It's always worth the half-hour trip (35 miles, but traffic on I-40 tends to move at close to 80 mph once you're past Tinker Air Force Base) from the city to Mabee-Gerrer, but this year they have something literally unique: Unveiling Ancient Mystery: Etruscan Treasures, the first-ever showing of 225 pieces of jewelry from the collection of Count Vittorio Cini (1885-1977), passed down to his daughter Yana and made available by her husband, Prince Fabrizio Alliata di Montereale.

In addition to the Alliata-Cini collection, Etruscan Treasures features items that were imported to Etruria from other Mediterranean venues — Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia — that inspired the Etruscans' own artifacts. (For instance, to supplement an image of an Etruscan sarcophagus, there's an actual Egyptian sarcophagus from the museum's permanent collection.) There are workaday items and luxuries, reproductions of typical clothing based upon statuary, everything you'd want from a serious archaeological dig.

But the exhibition inevitably is dominated by the jewelry: small, intricately detailed, constructed with incredible precision using highly-sophisticated techniques. (A local jewelrymaker who contributes to the Antenna Audio tour program has actually duplicated some of the pieces; the reproductions can be bought at the museum at prices which reflect the difficulty of the task.) I quote from the catalog ($27.50) description of one piece in the collection:

And they were doing this around 350 BC, mind you.

Of course, the greatest Etruscan mystery is "Where did they go?" We know that Etruria, whose borders correspond roughly with those of present-day Tuscany, eventually became part of the Roman Empire, and we are learning that some vaunted Roman innovations were derived (or blatantly copied) from Etruscan work. The exhibit is a celebration of Etruscan culture at its best, but it's also a grim reminder that no civilization, however sophisticated, lasts forever.

Unveiling Ancient Mystery: Etruscan Treasures runs through the end of October at Mabee-Gerrer. It's a national exclusive: this is the only place in the entire country to see this exhibit. And unsurprisingly, the museum register records visitors from all 50 states. (New Hampshire, says the front desk, was the last.) If you're anywhere in the vicinity, or even if you're not, it's worth the trip.

This series has gotten to the point where it's almost not unpopular, which suggests that I maybe should give it its own category. Which I did, at least for a while.

Heritage Park Mall, on the west side of Midwest City (which is on the east side of the county), has been a rather gloomy place for years now. Built for three and a half anchor tenants, they've had to make do with two: Service Merchandise, in the "half" spot, has now closed all its retail stores, and Montgomery Ward is history. And while everything in the mall isn't suffering — Dave will be happy to know that El Chico still dishes up the Tex-Mex to good crowds — the general atmosphere has been one of "So when are they going to put this place out of its misery already?"

Not so fast, Bucky. The buzz was positive today, and while no one is saying for sure until the contracts are signed, the word is that a big-box appliance store, most likely Best Buy, is going to take over the Wards spot. (Circuit City once had a store across the street, but it died quickly, and its space is now occupied by a Goodwill store.) To me it seems like an odd place for a Best Buy, which normally shuns malls, but it's a fair distance from their other stores in the area, and with the local Sight 'N Sound chain having been sold off, this might be the time for Best Buy to make its move.

I go past it every weekday morning, but it's usually an hour or so before sunrise, so I didn't notice until today that the Guest House Inn, an old motel once a fixture of the no-longer-around Classen Circle, has been torn down. I have no idea what's in store for the lot; access from I-44 is not wonderful, and I suspect that antique dealers around this area have reached a saturation point. And somehow I doubt that people wanting to crash after a night at Edna's will crawl two whole blocks to the Courtyard by Marriott.

Coming back from the supermarket, I managed to get behind not one but two purveyors of pure pollution: a first-generation Dodge Intrepid and a going-on-fifteen Mazda 929, both of whom were spewing roiling plumes of noxious white smoke into the air and into the ventilation systems of everyone who wasn't fast enough to switch to Recirculate. I don't want to hear anything more about greenhouse gases and other dubious bugaboos until somebody does something about these easily visible and highly verifiable mobile smog machines.

The abandoned Wal-Mart on I-240 east of Pennsylvania Avenue will be torn down, as will a currently-operating Mardel store: in their place will be a semi-upscale strip vaguely similar to Belle Isle Station on the northside, including new quarters for Mardel and the city's first Marshalls store.

This makes a certain amount of sense, since I-240 just about bisects the southside; it's halfway between Reno and SW 149th. Admittedly, most of the growth in this area is south of 82nd Street, half a mile south of I-240, which is the border of the Moore school district, but there isn't a retail corridor in the area that in any way rivals I-240.

I did find this comment by Ward 5 Councilman Jerry Foshee interesting:

It's very uncommon, though, to remove one of their abandoned boxes completely; usually someone will try to renovate it into smaller spaces. The developers evidently felt that this old box was unsuitable for their tenants. Of course, this leads to the next question: What happens when Wal-Mart, which is now west of Penn, decides to pack up and go somewhere else? I guess we'll worry about that when it happens.

By any reasonable standards of size, Juneau, Alaska is huge: in 1970, the city and the surrounding borough were consolidated and the city of Douglas was annexed, and now Juneau covers 3200 square miles, half of which is water — some liquid, some actual ice.

Apart from the ice, this happens in the Lower 48 as well. Jacksonville, Florida covers all of Duval County that isn't otherwise incorporated, over 750 square miles of land area (and a fair amount of water as well). Former Jacksonville Mayor Hans Tanzler explains the rationale for merging the city and the county back in 1968:

And Jacksonville was hardly alone in its woes, which explains much about Oklahoma City's annexation efforts after World War II and into the 1960s, in which the city ballooned to 640 square miles, then the largest in the nation. (About 20 square miles were subsequently detached.) Bethany and Warr Acres, adjacent to one another, are completely surrounded by Oklahoma City; ditto for Nichols Hills and The Village. Municipalities farther out began to expand: Edmond now covers 85 square miles, and Norman sprawls over 177.

Things reached a peak of sorts in 1999, when the city of Seminole annexed a strip of land about ten miles long and three feet wide, along the west side of Oklahoma 99 from the existing city limits to Interstate 40. Property owners objected, suits were filed, and eventually the state Supreme Court ruled against the city. The state has since acted to make annexation somewhat more difficult. In 2004, two bills were passed to provide some protection to owners in unincorporated areas: Senate Bill 851 exempts land used for agricultural purposes from municipal ordinances when it's annexed, and Senate Bill 905 changes the rules for so-called "fenceline" annexations.

But SB 905 doesn't officially go into effect until the first of November. The city of Harrah, on the eastern edge of Oklahoma County, has a 50-foot-wide fenceline which encloses an unincorporated area and which borders other municipalities in the county. Harrah would like to extend this 50-foot strip to 300 feet, presumably because under SB 905, they will have to have a minimum of 300 feet on at least three sides to be able to annex the interior of the rectangle without having to seek the consent of a majority of property owners.

There's just one problem: property owners tend to take a dim view of being annexed. There's a section of Oklahoma City that extends all the way to the Pottawatomie County line, and about five years ago some residents petitioned to be deannexed, on the basis that the city was never going to get around to providing city services that far out. (Fire Station #36 has since been opened at 17700 SE 104th Street.) Harrah is holding public hearings before the expansion of their fenceline, but I wouldn't expect their proposal to be welcomed with open arms.

The intersection of NW 10th, Classen Drive and Walker Avenue has been a mess for a long time, simply because it's a five-way intersection (though Walker is one-way north) and the lights are synchronized with the price of beets in Tegucigalpa or something equally implausible. As part of the 10th Street Beautification Project, aka "How do we keep St. Anthony Hospital from moving out of midtown?", the city has begun replacing the intersection with, heaven help us all, a rotary. (Readers from northeastern states may snicker now.) Detours are set to one block beyond, and are actually fairly clearly marked, which didn't stop some ditz in a powder-blue Ford pickup from wending southbound on Walker from 10th as I passed through on 9th.

A bit farther west, the Linwood Place neighborhood, towards the far end of the old westbound trolley line, is in spruce-up mode for the annual Home Tour tomorrow. Before I got married, I lived about two and a half miles west, and I used to take 19th Street to work, simply because the houses, especially through this area, were so darn gorgeous; almost thirty years later, they still are.

Closer to home, they've scraped off the southeast corner of NW 39th and May, which old-timers will remember as the onetime home of Shotgun Sam's Pizza Palace. None of Sam's successors did really great business, and the now-vacant lot will shortly become home for David Stanley Ford, which is moving across May. Stanley's place will be taken over by Lowe's, which is putting in one of their home-improvement stores. (Yes, there was a Builders Square at 36th and May, and yes, it's vacant, and no, Lowe's didn't want it: too small.)

Finally, a note from the back yard. Most of the trees around here in autumn end up with yellow or brown foliage, and not especially wondrous shades of either. However, my two sweetgum trees, a species with which I was not familiar before moving here, shed leaves just this side of stop-sign red, making for an interesting color display — and, unfortunately, making the need to rake more obvious.

Dell is hiring in Oklahoma City.

Next month, the computer manufacturer will start construction on a new facility for its Oklahoma City sales center to replace the space they currently borrow from Hertz; the workforce will grow from 250 to 700 and could eventually reach as high as 3,000.

I misheard the location on the announcement and for a moment thought that they were going to locate in suburban Del City, prompting a brief reverie about the possibility of adding a letter to the town's name. ("Del" was Delaphene Campbell, daughter of city founder George Epperly.) As it happens, the new facility will be located off SW 15th Street at I-44, in an abandoned park once set aside for river development that never happened.

And now that I think about it, I'm due for a new computer.

A map [link requires Adobe Reader] of Oklahoma's House District 87 vaguely resembles a map of Minnesota, and judging solely by yard signs and bumper stickers, it's seriously Democratic down around Albert Lea and Rochester and gets more Republican the closer you get to International Falls or Moorhead, though registrations are more or less evenly split. (Stretching this map metaphor to its maximum, I live around Hibbing.) Operatives from both parties were busy today: I spied a woman bearing KerryOkies indicia on her minivan a couple blocks southeast of me, and later I caught two presumably younger women wearing Tom Coburn T-shirts canvassing along 36th Street (call it US 10).

Speaking of yard signs, I lost mine last night: the Oklahoma wind ripped the plastic right off the wire frame. It held up for more than three months, which is probably well beyond its expected lifetime; I'm not planning to request a replacement because, well, the election is Tuesday fercryingoutloud. (No, it wasn't stolen; a thief wouldn't have left the wire in place, and around the neighborhood, other signs for the same candidate were still up.)

I've seen a few pro-SQ 712 signs, but this was the first day I saw any significant number of anti-SQ 711 signs, with the tag "Don't Legalize Discrimination." Of course, I'd expect these close to home: ZIP code 73112, per Census Bureau guesstimates, has more same-sex couples than any other ZIP code in the entire state, though this is due partly to its sheer size (7.5 square miles).

Seen on a vanity plate: EDITUR. I don't know whether this was a Spanish translation or just someone in need of a kopy editur.

And finally, on the marquee at Whataburger: IT TASTES LIKE CHICKEN 'CAUSE IT IS CHICKEN. I assume they're trying to slam some competing product, but I don't want to know what that product is.

It was a nice day to stay inside and take a nap, but having been here and done that, I decided I'd just as soon venture out, and it's not like it was a particularly arduous task to do so.

Near NW 5th and Walker, an ancient motel, once a TraveLodge (which I, for some reason, have always read as "TREYV lodge," as though it might not be kosher or something), has been gutted and is being restored. It's about time; there ought to be some lodging around downtown that doesn't cost a hundred bucks a night.

A church on Meridian mentions SQ 711 on its marquee and trots out that well-worn business about Adam and Steve; while Googling about for an original quotation, I turned up an actual gay dating service called Adam and Steve. This particular A&S is located in Los Angeles, a place where off-center business names have long flourished; I remember a specialized sports shop there called The Merchant of Tennis. But we don't do so badly here in Soonerland: one of my current favorites, nomenclaturally speaking, is local florist Floral and Hardy.

The little westside Mexican restaurant called Zacatecas has been replaced by a little westside Mexican restaurant called Red Onion, whose owners are very likely unaware of a highly-dissimilar establishment with the same name that existed here in the 90s. The 1890s, that is; the Red Onion of the Oklahoma Territory days was a notorious "disorderly house," if you will, that was a primary target for the admininstration of Mayor Charles G. "Gristmill" Jones, who took office in 1896 pledging to clean up this wild and woolly town. (Among other things, Jones, who really did own a mill, was the president of the Oklahoma Territorial Fair Association, predecessor to the present-day Oklahoma State Fair; the city of Jones, northeast of town, is named for him.)

About a mile south of the Red Onion — the new one — is a night-spot called the Dirty Hoe. It sports a, um, gardening motif.

The new Mosher-Adams Street Atlas for Oklahoma City is out, and it shows seven hundred new streets since last year's edition, the biggest increase ever. A few of these, I suspect, come from outlying towns which, due to suburban expansion, are now practically suburban themselves, but the city itself is growing at a steady pace; the 2003 population estimate is 523,303, up 3.4 percent from the 2000 Census figure of 506,132. The metropolitan area, at 1,085,282 in 2000, reached 1,126,709 in 2003, up 3.8 percent, and projections [link requires Adobe Reader] by the Center for Economic and Business Development at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford anticipate 1,221,552 by 2010.

It's too early to proclaim the death of the classic boom/bust economic cycle that has dictated Oklahoma's destiny for a hundred years, and indeed many of the state's rural areas are still largely in decline, but for one of the few times since the Land Run, Oklahoma City has turned into something of a destination for migrants, not just from poorer parts of the state, but from out of state as well. Maybe the ghost of Tom Joad will be getting some well-deserved rest.

This being possibly the last really warm (middle 70s) Saturday until spring, I loaded up the CD player with Carolina beach music and hit the streets with the windows down.

Signs all over town are showing name changes. The Hilton Inn Northwest is mutating into a Crowne Plaza; Eckerd's drug stores have dropped their old logos, though relatively few have any CVS signage up.

And sometimes there are signs in response to signs. Back in June, Texas-based IBC Bank completed its acquisition of what used to be Local Oklahoma Bank, and this fall they had rented billboards around town saying "IBC is LOCAL", a reference to the name change. Little Advantage Bank, based in Spencer, put up some billboards of its own on the east side saying "We Really Are Local."

Advantage Bank, I note, used to be Spencer State Bank, back when you'd think that a state-chartered bank in Spencer would almost have to be named that. Steve Martin once observed that banks have to be named something like "Security National Trust and Federal Reserve," because "nobody's gonna put their money in 'Fred's Bank'," and I once faked up a radio ad for "State City National Bank and Truss Company" for reasons which are mercifully lost to history. Fred may have failed to get his name on the sign, but bank names have definitely taken a turn for the weird: the new bank in the tower at 1601 Northwest Distressway, a building named with brazen simplicity "The Tower," is called "Valliance Bank," which to me sounds like a fatal collision of "valley" and "dalliance." Not that I'd ever engage in such a thing, though Ondrya Wolfson might:

Okay, fine, for sure, for sure. Sheesh. Meanwhile, in a less-than-really-good part of Oklahoma City, the Riverfront Skatepark is nearing completion: most of the concrete is in place. And regardless of what you may think of sk8terbois, this is a Good Thing: cleaning up the banks of the newly-christened Oklahoma River is essential to making it a serious destination for travelers and bored-out-of-their-skulls locals.

Finally, one last sign: Hyroop's, styled "The Big and Tall Place," probably should have thought twice before proclaiming a "Store Wide Sale," and definitely shouldn't have proclaimed it on the side of a big fat balloon.

The hotel-room tax in Oklahoma City was fixed at 2 percent in 1972, and has been there ever since. On the 14th of December, the city will hold an election to increase it to 5.5 percent, largely to pay for improvements to livestock and horse facilities at State Fair Park.

In announcing the election in the CityNews flyer in November utility bills, the city introduces this array of numbers:

A bikini of a paragraph, this is: what it reveals is interesting, but what it conceals is vital. What you're not being told here is that in addition to that measly two percent, travelers are being hit with the full sales-tax package, state, county where applicable, and city; lodging in Oklahoma City is ultimately taxed at a rate of 10.375 percent. I grabbed my handy Choice Hotels Directory, which got some heavy use this summer, and sure enough, most of the inns in the city are listed at that tax rate, give or take some rounding somewhere.

So if this measure passes, tourists will be forking over 13.875 cents in tax for every dollar of room rate. This is still lower than Fort Worth or San Antonio, but the city is making it seem like visitors have been getting the screaming deal of the century here, which of course they haven't. Meanwhile, the City of New York makes do on a mere 13.625% plus two bucks a day.

I'll still probably vote for the increase — we really do need to spruce up the horse facilities around here — but somebody at City Hall should have taken the time to give that tax comparison some actual legitimacy.

The clouds hung overhead all day, and by sunset they were ready to drizzle, so I didn't get to see a whole lot outside today. I must, however, note a correction to a previous edition: whatever that is at the east end of Bricktown, it's not the Embassy Suites hotel, which is apparently awaiting negotiations with adjoining properties to make sure everyone has enough parking spaces. The Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority is reportedly considering granting hotel operator John Q. Hammons an extension of six months before he starts construction.

Meanwhile, I was inside at the west end of Bricktown, watching The Incredibles at the Harkins. And while there's a certain amusement value in noting that this is the second film in a row I've seen which features nasty robots with tentacles, what matters here, as is always the case with a Pixar film, is the story. And I don't care if it is animated; you will not see a better action-adventure film this year — or next. The internal geekboy, of course, sprung from my head at the end of the credits to bounce Fantastic Four comparisons off the remaining handful of stragglers, and yes, there are some marked similarities, superpower-wise, but Fox's upcoming FF movie, ostensibly due on the Fourth of July, has its work cut out for it if it hopes to come even close to this league, and that's quite 'nuff said.

Just when I was getting used to credit cards that are credit-card-sized, a bank which shall remain nameless sent me a teensy 2.5-by-1.5-inch cardlet with a hole punched in the corner, presumably for use on a keychain. I don't think so. ("Hello, Mr. Hill? We found your keys, and oh, by the way, you're $10,000 in debt.")

And thanks be to Mac Gayden and Buzz Cason, who wrote "Everlasting Love," to Robert Knight, who recorded it in 1967, and to those drivers around Penn Square who didn't take umbrage while I was singing along with it at damn near the top of my lungs this evening. Probably to Elastigirl.

Back in April, Powers Nissan in Midwest City was being handed a condemnation order by Oklahoma County commissioners, hoping to clear away areas near flight paths at Tinker Air Force Base and thereby give the Base Realignment and Closure folks one less reason to put Tinker on their lists of bases to close.

Powers sold the property at 8029 SE 29th Street to the county, which leased it back to the dealership for six months so a new location could be sought. The lease is now up, and the county has now given Powers until the end of the month to vacate.

David Stanley Dodge, one block to the west (Midwest City numbering being what it is, they're at 7609), isn't going anywhere.

The stretch of Broadway from 4th to 10th is known as Automobile Alley; at one time it was the home of more than half the car dealerships in Oklahoma City. After World War II dealers began relocating to the suburbs, and today only two auto dealers operate downtown, neither on the Alley (though Mercedes-Benz of Oklahoma City, at 12th and Broadway, is close). Like many near-downtown districts, the Alley has been getting a facelift lately, and while there are still lots of empty vintage buildings, there are signs of serious commerce: a couple of branch banks, an architect, even a CD store.

I was down the Alley today to drop in at Individual Artists of Oklahoma, which has a gallery between 7th and 8th in what used to be the city's Packard dealership. The main exhibit at IAO this month is "Muse America" by Steve Cluck, a collection of paintings and screenprints that celebrate American womanhood at its brightest, or at least its most brightly-colored. Interesting stuff, and there's a ballot box to vote for the Muse you find most inspiring.

And I should point out that the "Alley" name, while it undoubtedly was chosen for the purpose of alliteration, is a prime example of Oklahoma understatement: this section of Broadway is one of the widest streets in town. Its 100-foot width, according to legend, was chosen because it was wide enough to do a 180 in a horse-drawn wagon.

North of the Capitol, construction continues on the Oklahoma History Center, a new home for the state Historical Society and some spiffy new exhibits. And it's about time they did something north of the Capitol; they've cleaned up Lincoln Boulevard's streetscape, but there's scarcely anything left between 23rd and 36th. While I don't particularly miss the rundown commercial district that used to be there, I'd like to see something on Lincoln that doesn't reflect the state government's ongoing edifice complex.

With the ongoing success of the New Year's Eve bash known as Opening Night, going downtown during the holidays is no longer considered weird, and each year a few more stops are pulled out to lure folks into the middle of things.

One of the newer, and neater, of the attractions is Braum's Ice Rink, 9300 square feet of ice-skating space in front of the Music Hall. This is the third year for the rink, and it always draws a good crowd; in fact, the city's cable channel trains a camera on the rink to fill the space between programs, and being the clumsy oaf that I am, I marvel at the sheer beauty of it all. People who hate disco should probably avoid it on Friday nights, but otherwise it's a genuine winter wonderland. A semi-complete list of things going on downtown this year can be seen at DowntownInDecember.com.

Meanwhile, out in the jewelry jungle, something of a shakeout is going on. The Berkey Brothers store on the Northwest Distressway reports in its recent advertising that a competitor bought the building and is not renewing the lease, presumably putting Berkey out of business.

In this little part of the jewelry universe, though, you have Gordons, and you have Non-Gordons. The Gordon's Jewelers chain, which goes back to 1905, is these days a corporate sister to Zales. Outside the chain, there is the Samuel Gordon operation, apparently not related to those Texas-based Gordons, which started in 1904; there is also Alan Gordon, a smaller firm that traces its history back to 1878.

The new guy on the Gordon block is Arthur Gordon, who set up his shop in the late 1970s. I remember it being simply Arthur's Fine Jewelry, suggesting that he didn't want to trade on the surname or be confused with those other Gordons, though eventually Art decided to hang his full name out on the shingle. It apparently didn't help, as he's now got going-out-of-business signs hanging up at his store at NW 70th and May — half a mile north of Alan's place.

Still, the jewelry market in Oklahoma City isn't exactly owned by people named Gordon, as anyone who recalls the B. C. Clark jingle will readily testify.

What I know about this neighborhood is not much, really. I know that C. B. Warr, after whom the enclave of Warr Acres is named, developed this subdivision right after World War II; my house, like most of the others close by, was built in 1948. (Other noteworthy happenings in this year: the founding of Israel, the beginning of the Berlin Airlift, the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and a Triple Crown win by Citation.)

Which leads to the question: what happened to the original settlers? A 1907 township map shows everything owned, if not necessarily platted, as far north as Wilshire Boulevard. (Townships were six miles square; the boundaries were Wilshire and Reno on the north and south, and May and Bryant on the west and east.) This quarter-section was owned, says the map, by one Halvor Steanson, for whom Steanson Drive (2800 block West, through this neighborhood only) is presumably named; in 1925, Steanson was still listed in the city directory as a farmer, located around NW 45th and May.

Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas reports the birth of Kirk Halvor Steanson in July 1955. Grandson, I'm guessing. Did the Steansons sell out to Warr and move to Texas? One of next year's projects will be to find out for sure.

The nascent Asian District is getting a bank at 2523 Classen, across the street from, and slightly north of, the fabled Milk Bottle. It's a branch of Edmond-based First Commercial Bank, which recently expanded into Oklahoma City with the acquisition of Rockwell Bank.

In other bank news, Americrest Bank, previously known as Guaranty Bank, is rebranding itself again, this time as Coppermark Bank. The "Americrest" name was coined when Guaranty planned to move into the Dallas-Fort Worth market, where a Guaranty Bank already existed; however, they ran afoul of trademark issues, and had to come up with yet another name. The name change was announced in November, but permanent signage is just now going up.

The Happy Homemaker reports on the impending construction of a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market in her neck of the woods, near NW 23rd and Pennsylvania. Typically for Wal-Mart, they're not filling the extant vacant space in Penn Crossing; I recall that when they took over an empty Homeland store in The Village, they razed the building and rebuilt. Still, the arrival was arguably good for Casady Square across the street, and The Village needed the sales-tax revenue, especially with Albertson's moving across Britton Road into Oklahoma City territory. Those who hate all things Wal-Mart will undoubtedly head for the Buy 4 Less across Penn, or drive elsewhere, but I've learned not to bet against Sam Walton's retail machine.

And there are still some small signs of life at Bradford Commons, apartments located south of the Oklahoma Health Center between NE 7th and NE 8th. The 247-unit complex was sold in 2001 for a startling $3.5 million dollars to 2012 LLC. This year, TV news has been coming up with regular stories about how the place has gone to hell: the water was supposed to have been turned off around Thanksgiving, and all the tenants are presumably going to have to be gone by the end of the month, when the complex shuts down. Rumors that the Commons would be sold have persisted, and KGOU radio reported this week that the University of Oklahoma, one rumored buyer, isn't interested. I haven't heard that the Commons are going to be Cabrini-Greened out of existence, but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised to see bulldozers heading down 8th Street.

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and almost immediately became a segregated state: Senate Bill One was the first of many Jim Crow laws which took entirely too long to repeal.

One of the tactics used to undermine Jim Crow was the sit-in, and one of the first places it was used effectively was Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City. It was 1958, and teacher Clara Luper brought her students into Katz' soda fountain for soft drinks: when said drinks were not forthcoming, Luper and the kids resolved to stay put. They got their drinks, but the aftermath wasn't pretty, and it took five or six years before every lunch counter in town, every restaurant, got the message.

The Freedom Center on Oklahoma City's Eastern Avenue, now Martin Luther King Avenue, will be presenting a play written by Luper: The Dred Scott Story, about the slave whose suit for freedom was eventually denied by the US Supreme Court.

The International House of Pancakes is coming to Bricktown, and The Downtown Guy considers the ramifications thereof:

If you think of Bass Pro as the easternmost outpost of Bricktown, the Central Plaza Inn is a mile and a half farther away. Still, this is a logical progression, with Martin Luther King Avenue the probable limit of expansion; farther south on Eastern will be the Native American Cultural Center and Museum, which likely will define the eastern boundary of the New Downtown.

For no particularly good reason today, I found myself traipsing around Newcastle, a McClain County town just down I-44/US 62 from southwest Oklahoma City, which, although it certainly doesn't look like it now, might be the next big Suburban Destination. At least some of the pieces are in place: it's a local call from anywhere in the city, it's relatively easy to get to, and both southwest Oklahoma City and west Norman, on the opposite side of the Canadian River, are experiencing something of a boom. What's more, perhaps in anticipation of their coming status, the city fathers have annexed basically everything in the county north of Highway 9 and west of I-35 that wasn't already incorporated into, or surrounded by, the city of Blanchard: they have almost 50 square miles to work with. Wal-Mart has put in a Supercenter on NW 32nd Street (SW 179th Street/Indian Hills Road if Oklahoma City or Norman extended this far), and a couple of housing developments are underway. And since the north Newcastle exit from I-44 (US 62/277, which is Main Street) is the last free exit before the road turns into the H. E. Bailey Turnpike — but you can see the pattern here. The population is a modest 6,000 or so right now; I wouldn't be surprised if it hit 20,000 by 2020.

Meanwhile, things are still happening in the middle of town. Oklahoma City's Neighborhood Services department is putting in half a dozen new houses along NE 5th Terrace, between the Oklahoma Health Center and Washington Park, and I took a look this afternoon. They're quite nice, and the neighborhood itself I would characterize as "on the upswing": some of the older homes in the area are a bit on the ramshackle side, but they haven't been allowed to become seriously dilapidated, and the newer buildings are kept up well. For a "brownfield" — an area whose proximity to industrial use may have resulted in ground or groundwater contamination — it looks pretty good. One visual disappointment in the area is the boarded-up Page Woodson School, which served as the "Negro high school" in the early days of Jim Crow. However, the majestic old 1910 building may be getting a new lease on life: Oklahoma City Northeast Inc., with some serious backing from the local community, wants to reopen the school as an African-American cultural center, and has asked the city to include it in their project list for the local Empowerment Zone.

Marquee on a westside church: WHAT DID NOAH DO WITH THE WOODPECKERS? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.

And apparently Bricktown, as a trademark, is far more extensible than previously imagined; there's an inn called "Bricktown Guest Suites" going in on SE Grand Blvd. at I-35, a good four miles from the downtown district whose name it borrows.

Anyone who's bought a house lately (which, I suppose, includes yours truly) has browsed real-estate Web sites of one sort or another, usually operated by Realtors® or other brokers and their respective companies. Homes offered For Sale By Owner generally don't have much of a Web presence.

Then there's this: 12608ArrowheadDrive.com, dedicated to the selling, by owner, of a home at, well, yeah, it's obvious.

(If you see this and subsequently buy the house, let me know. No, I don't want a finder's fee or anything like that.)

(Update, 19 December, 10:20 am: Dave finds a spiffy twenty-acre spread in, you guessed it, Montana.)

The Oklahoman reports that the new Dell facility on the North Canadian Oklahoma River at I-44 will have an entryway designed to look like a Dell computer.

"This," says Mayor Cornett, "will send a progressive message, a message that we have a presence of high tech industry."

Um, Your Honor, sir, we're not trying to lure American Standard here, are we?

There is, or was, a Braum's Ice Cream store off I-40 at Villa/Agnew; it's now shut down, acquired by the state as part of the process of laying down the new hyperexpensive alternate alignment to Interstate 40.

But when a door closes, they say, another opens, and The Downtown Guy sees an opening:

The only supermarket close to downtown, you'll remember, is a Homeland on 18th between Classen and Western adjacent to Mesta Park.

The Braum's nearest to me, at 39th and Pennsylvania, has made this conversion, and it's very handy; the selection is somewhat limited, but one could argue that the selection at one of the monster markets in the 'burbs might be too large, and what Braum's does carry in the way of actual groceries is well beyond what you'll find in most convenience stores.

(Aside: This store is careful to identify itself on the phone as "39th and North Penn," because, as they explained, there is also a store at 39th and South Penn.)

And this may be an answer, if not necessarily the answer, for the New Downtowners:

Which leads to a question: do you park the store along the new I-40 alignment, which is half a mile south of downtown at its closest approach, or do you locate it along the "parkway" they're supposed to make out of the old I-40?

I'd be really surprised if Bill Braum's kids weren't thinking this over already.

Tom Lindley's column in The Oklahoman today touches on a phenomenon I've noticed myself: while Bricktown is now firmly established as a tourist destination, a surprising number of people who live here have never ventured into the district.

The powers that be at 42nd and Treadmill decreed that this year's Christmas party would be held at the Bricktown Brewery, at twelve years old one of the more established, um, establishments in the area, and I spent something like half a day explaining to coworkers where it was, how to get there, where to park, and other logistical details which I tend to take for granted. And it occurred to me after about the seventh or eighth iteration of these details that had someone asked me about them a couple of years ago, when I was living out in the 'burbs, I probably would have drawn a blank myself.

Our newbies, once arrived in Bricktown, all responded with variations on the same theme: "I had no idea we had something like this here." Oklahoma City has a forty-year history of people avoiding downtown, which, I suggest, began when the old Shepherd homestead west of Pennsylvania on NW 23rd was developed for retail in the early 1960s, with Sears, Roebuck moving out of downtown altogether to anchor the east end of the development.

By now, there's enough critical mass of activity in Bricktown to insure things will keep growing, at least for a while. And people will come downtown for some things — the Festival of the Arts, say, or Opening Night — which was one of the motivations for this year's Downtown in December promotion, which had events scheduled all through the month. I'm thinking, though, that while restaurants and watering holes are wonderful things, Bricktown — indeed, all of the downtown area — needs some form of retail beyond Bass Pro: not necessarily big box stores, not necessarily the return of Sears or its K mart overlords, but the kind of funky little shops that have started to take hold in some of the spiffier strip centers. Something like Two Sisters, over by my place, might do well in a Bricktown storefront, or along Automobile Alley. Events are events, and they are glorious to behold, but shopping is part of everyday life.

(Update, 9 pm: The Downtown Guy suggests: "At the very least, maybe we need to encourage more office Christmas parties in Bricktown." Maybe next year.)

Our man at the Red Dirt Blog is soliciting examples of Oklahoma kitsch, demonstrations of this state's long tradition of "creative freedumb."

And really, you can't get much kitschier than the Braum's (previously Townley's) Milk Bottle standing on top of that tiny storefront (lately, Saigon Baguette) at 24th and Classen; there's an Andy Warhol-on-Route 66 vibe to it that tickles me every time I see it, and its proximity to the Bucky Fuller geodesic dome across 23rd — well, can you imagine the reaction of someone new to the city southbound on Classen for the first time? First the bottle, then the dome, then that missile gantry of a tower at 22nd, and by 21st he's thinking "Were these people out of their minds?"

Well, of course we were. Sheesh.

I have yet to wash my car in the driveway at Surlywood, partially out of some vague concern for the environment, but mostly because I am lazy and would rather have the machine at the Shell station do it for six bucks. But poor Sandy, having carried around the traces of last Wednesday's snow for half a week, was looking a lot older than her (just under) 40,000 miles, and this being still technically the holiday season, I was in the mood to indulge both myself and the car, so off we went to the Red Carpet Car Wash at 50th and Pennsylvania, an idea which apparently occurred to about a hundred other people today.

The amazing thing about this place is that it works despite its atmosphere of utter chaos, from the fellow who soaped something that looked like "GAS F 87 WAX CH" on the glass — "fill up, 87 octane, wash and wax, cherry-scented air freshener" would accurately describe what I ordered — to the person who found two quarters under the seat and left them on the console (I promptly lost one of them again), to the chap who wielded his blue towels like a toreador in a hurricane. And those are just the people I was watching when I wasn't trying to strike up a conversation with the gorgeous blonde with the gold Oldsmobile. I can remember times when I spent a lot more than $33 for a lot less entertainment.

I've seen this twice now: a Chrysler PT Cruiser with a Continental kit. I suppose it says something about Bryan Nesbitt's original retro design that this car doesn't actually look ridiculous with a fake spare tire sticking out of its rear bumper, though it may be a function of the original gunmetal-grey paint color; I don't want to see this in yellow or red.

The city's Thou Shalt Not Skate ordinance covers most of the downtown area, though it doesn't extend as far north as Winans Park (the circular park along Broadway south of 23rd), where I saw a few folks parked outside the old Borden plant packing up their boards. I did some temp work at Borden many years ago, and I seem to remember some strange stretches of concrete along there, which presumably explains the appeal.

And I hadn't thought about this before, but if I ran a moviehouse inside a mall with a marquee outside the mall, I'd surely place Meet the Fockers as high off the ground as I possibly could.

Lil'Red weighs in on the Red Dirt Kitsch meme (first promulgated here):

Sooner Federal Savings and Loan, which failed in the Great 1980s S&L Bust. Its remains were acquired by First Gibraltar Bank, an association set up specifically to buy up the residue of failed S&Ls in this part of the country; First Gibraltar subsequently sold off the Sooner Federal facilities, mostly to Bank of Oklahoma.

The new vaguely-shamrock-like logo fills the space, but does not truly replace the pig.

And on the old Belle Isle Power Plant, she says:

Remind me to buy her a drink — and not at the Sip, either.

The beehive is about to reopen for business.

The Golden Dome at 23rd and Classen has been undergoing refurbishment, and owner Irene Lam, whose optometry office will occupy part of the dome, is getting ready to start looking for tenants. Lam bought the building from Bank One in 2003 for $1.1 million, and estimates she's spent at least that much on the renovations; the city of Oklahoma City offered a loan guarantee to assist Lam.

Part of the structure will be reserved for a cultural center, but about 26,000 square feet will be available for office space. Construction work should be completed by early February.

The next step is to figure out some way to restore the gold-anodized finish of the dome without going totally broke.

The OKPartisan looks across the river, and she doesn't like what she sees:

Well, the last question is the one most easily answered: families with children are used to hearing that one must avoid Oklahoma City schools at all cost, and therefore they're fleeing to Putnam City or Edmond or Moore schools, all of which have substantial numbers of students actually in Oklahoma City limits. (I'd be very surprised if the majority of students in the Moore district didn't actually live in OKC.) How much effect MAPS for Kids will eventually have on this perception remains to be seen, but I do know that right now in my neighborhood, adjacent to one of the better OKCPS grade schools, you'll find young couples and empty nesters, and not a whole lot in between.

One other factor that should not be overlooked is the fact that neighborhoods on the northside are far better organized than neighborhoods to the south; it's no accident that all the Historic Districts and all the Urban Conservation Districts are north of the river, and the grease tends to follow the squeaky wheels. And I suspect that organizing a neighborhood in the inner areas of the southside might be trickier than usual, if only because the increasing Latino population in this area tends to suggest the possibility of, um, undocumented residents, who just might be resistant to the idea of mentioning their existence to city committees.

It might be true that the southside suffered even more than the rest of the city during the Great Eighties Bust; the house we (I was married then) owned circa 1980, in the Almonte neighborhood west of May and north of SW 59th, which we sold at the end of 1981 for $60,000, was resold seven years later for less than half that. Prices have since recovered somewhat. And areas in Cleveland County (south of SW 89th) are clearly thriving. But there's no easy fix, and I'm sticking by what I said a few months ago, when I visited a less-than-beautiful area just west of downtown:

The city can wave whatever magic wands are at its disposal, but change comes from the bottom up, one street, sometimes one building at a time.

(Update, 2 January, 9:15 am: Added a link to justify the claim of "one of the better OKCPS grade schools," and corrected a pronoun issue.)

Two thousand four must go by midnight tonight, and in Oklahoma City, the Opening Night celebration will bring about 40,000 people — maybe more, since it's fairly warm today — downtown to watch it go. Six bucks will get you into as many individual events as you can manage to squeeze in, and the trolleys will schlep you back and forth, no charge.

(Update, 1:30 pm: The Downtown Guy gives thanks to the Arts Council and one piece of advice to the general public: avoid the Robinson exit from I-40.)

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.

First, a housekeeping note: The Soonerland and Spottings categories were re-merged, and things that were deemed OKC-specific were then broken out into a new category called City Scene. If you were goofy enough to bookmark any of these, consider yourself warned.

The emphasis around here lately has been on the city's southside, so that's where I started today's jaunt. Along SW 15 east of Portland, the earthmovers have started clearing the way for the new Dell Business Services Center. The empty space, occasionally interrupted by mounds of dirt, looks a lot more impressive at street level than it does from the I-44 bridge over the Oklahoma River.

I took Portland south to SW 44th, which is one of the streets I used to hit regularly when I lived out that way but haven't seen much of in the past couple of decades. From the looks of things, I haven't missed much. I did perk up when I saw that Penn 44 Lanes, my bowling alley of choice in those days, was apparently still around. And I was slightly disturbed by the (probably accurate) signage at a body-piercing place identified as "House of Pain."

I swung down Western and headed west on 74th, where a large mound of broken concrete and bent steel sat in the parking lot of what once was a Wal-Mart. The upscale center planned for this area seems an awfully long way off.

Back up Pennsylvania, and then east on 59th, which I remembered as being a traffic nightmare, especially around Blackwelder. This memory, at least, was correct. And I detoured into the residential area to see if I could find the old rock house where my younger sister had lived circa 1978. It was still there, and it looked even smaller than I remembered it; the official documents report 785 square feet, a number rather higher than I expected to find, and a recent (August) sale for $20,000. It may be uninspiring, I reminded myself, but it's somebody's home.

I returned up Walker, where starting around SW 29th the most common phrase seems to be Nosotros financiamos — "We finance." Same signs that were there thirty years ago, just translated into Spanish.

And on the way home, I took Harvey through Heritage Hills, where I saw something I'd never seen before: a mother/daughter (I assume) team on a Segway, whirring along at a brisk 12 mph or so. It almost looked like fun. Not that you'll ever get me on one of those contraptions.

I've fretted before about the sad state of Heritage Park Mall, on East Reno west of Air Depot. The humongous Simon Property Group, which also owns Penn Square and two Tulsa malls, seemingly had lost interest in the place, and the number of tenants kept dwindling.

Simon has now officially bailed out. Dillard's and Sears will retain their equity in their respective stores, and the vacant Montgomery Ward store was spun off separately. I know nothing about Dan Dill's DDDD Corporation, which bought the mall for the fire-sale price of $4.1 million, except that it recently sold two Tuneup Masters locations in the city for $900,000, and that it's set up a limited-liability company to own the mall. Leasing will be handled by Sperry-Van Ness of Irvine, California, which opened an office in downtown Oklahoma City in 2004.

Logically, the first step will be a facelift, probably with a new logo. For the city of Midwest City, which has been spending big bucks to improve its facilities — about $20 million went into the Atkinson Plaza replacement project — this has to be some sort of good news.

It's a nice little page, this Driving Directions page for Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport, but what's with the photograph? So far as I can tell, it was taken on the south side of Somerset, Pennsylvania, which has no particular relevance to Will Rogers.

A closed Ramada Plaza Hotel east of downtown Edmond will be refurbished and leased to the University of Central Oklahoma, which is in dire need of additional student housing.

UCO will pay about $350,000 a year for the 148-room structure, which presumably will house 296 students. The University had sought to acquire the hotel on its own, but was unable to come to terms with the seller.

The facility at 930 East Second Street is a block east of the southeastern corner of the campus.

For the second day in a row, the promised sunshine failed to materialize, which was probably as good a reason as any for heading out to Heritage Park Mall in Midwest City, a shopping center that's had a Joe Btsfplk-ish cloud following it around for what seems like years now.

There's no sign of the regime change just yet: somewhere around a third of the spaces are vacant, and at the entrance to the old Wards store, the local blood bank was taking donations. The side of the mall facing Reno Avenue is not too badly deteriorated, but the back, having lain fallow for so long, is a couple of ticks beyond grungy. People I talked to seemed hopeful, but when your third largest retail store is a Hallmark shop, you've got a long way to go.

Then down Air Depot Boulevard, where a widening project between SE 15th and SE 29th is doing its part for auto-suspension shops. I suspect that the few remaining residences along Air Depot will eventually be removed; some are already gone, and what appears to be the new curb line is perilously close to the front doors of those which still remain. There was a scaffolding up at the old Sound Warehouse/Wherehouse Music store in the 2300 block, where it looked like new window treatments were being installed, so maybe someone's actually going to take over this building.

East on 29th, it's still a bit offputting to see nothing along the north side of the street: the steakhouse that was west of the old Atkinson Plaza remains, and the Firestone store that anchored Atkinson's east end is still in business, but everything in between is gone. Midwest City, understandably, would like to see some of this 90-acre patch of dirt filled up, and there are earth-movers on the scene near the eastern edge of it. And farther down, the old Powers Nissan lot is closed; there are cars parked in the old used-car lot in the back, but the place is otherwise shuttered. I assume they've shut down entirely, since the old Powers Web site now forwards to NissanUSA.com.

And yes, Dave, El Chico was serving, though they weren't too busy at 1:30 when I arrived.

When you're talking theme parks, the Six Flags chain occupies a level of awareness right up there beside Disney; it's a huge operation, justly famed.

Which makes it even odder that Six Flags, which is based in Oklahoma City (which is odd in itself), has done so little with its hometown park, says OKCPulse:

Despite fairly-indifferent financial performance [link requires Adobe Reader] last year, Six Flags is going ahead with some improvements to some of its parks, says Chairman Kieran E. Burke:

Emphasis added by me. "Average historic levels," generally, means "before 9/11." I suspect there will be a few more lean years before there are any substantial upgrades to Frontier City.

Still: twenty-eight bucks? Universal Studios Orlando (neither a Disney nor a Six Flags property) will set you back $59.75.

At last night's Neighborhood Association meeting, we discussed, among other things, the time frame during which Big Blue, the Oklahoma City trash cart, is allowed on the curb. For the record, there's a 25-hour window: 7 pm the night before pickup to 8 pm after pickup. On my block, the collectors usually arrive a few minutes before 7 am; separate runs are made for Big Blue and the teensy square recyclable-items bucket, which of course is called "Little Blue." I suppose theoretically one could be fined for exceeding the 25-hour period, but I've never seen it happen.

Meanwhile, in Reddish, Lancashire, England, there is a decidedly narrower window of opportunity: a woman was fined £50 for putting her trash out the night before.

A spokesperson for the council insisted that notice had been given to all area residents, and a copy was placed on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard," or something like that.

(Via Interested-Participant.)

File this under Things I Didn't Know Existed.

Vietnamese Public Radio, based in northern Virginia, beams shortwave programs across America, and Oklahoma City, with its substantial (somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent) Vietnamese population, provides a lot of listeners for VPR through a rebroadcast facility in Edmond.

What's more, there's a one-hour locally-originated news/talk program hosted by Mai Ly Do, which runs daily from 11 to noon and is rebroadcast at 5:30 pm. While no one is sure how many people are listening, the local station offers low-end shortwave receivers for $35, and they've sold 2200 of them so far.

Color me impressed.

(Updated broadcast time on 2 May; also, VPR's local office is moving about one mile south, to 21st and Classen.)

A pilot departing Oklahoma City's Wiley Post Airport on New Year's Eve has reported that someone shone a laser beam in his face immediately after takeoff. The pilot contacted the control tower, and police searched the area adjacent to the airport.

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who was in the city yesterday visiting the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, announced that beginning next Wednesday all laser incidents must be reported to air traffic controllers. I expect that in the interest of avoiding the appearance of profiling, all reported incidents will receive the same response, regardless of the color or angle of the laser involved.

CIBER Incorporated, a Colorado-based "application development center," has come to Oklahoma City, which means that some of the IT work you might have thought was going to Bangalore is coming here instead.

Why Oklahoma City? Says CIBER president/CEO Mac Slingerlend:

And give Slingerlend credit for quoting David Ricardo's Theory of Competitive Advantage in the news release. CIBER is counting on the presence of a low-priced yet high-quality labor force out here on the Lone Prairie, as CIBERsites head Tim Boehm explains:

About 200 underutilized IT professionals will be put to work at the Oklahoma City CIBERsite. I'm willing to bet they'll be happy to have the opportunity, even working for "less than the national average": hell, everyone here (except maybe the state legislature) makes less than the national average. The only thing that really bugs me is CIBER's corporate self-description:

A what? Now that's a "language gap."

Vonnie Boufford is retiring, and when she goes, a piece of Americana goes with her.

Boufford is apparently the last full-time elevator operator in the state; she's worked at the Hightower on Hudson for the past seventeen years, and before that she spent twenty-eight years running an elevator at the Cravens Building.

The building manager at Hightower says that parts for the old Dover manual elevator are impossible to find, so they're phasing in new automated elevators. One is already in place, which forced operator Bob Johnson to the sidelines — though Johnson will return as a greeter next month, after Boufford's retirement.

And if you're wondering where this "Cravens Building" is, it's presently called Robinson Renaissance.

The Downtown Guy has started a series about Capitol Hill, one part of the city that's seemingly never mentioned in all the recent flurry of expansion and restoration and renovation.

I wrote up a lot of pertinent stuff to serve as supplemental material, and it got so long — about 5.5k — that I reformatted it and posted it on the other side of the site as a Vent. I hope that the latter-day historians in our midst will find it useful, and that the born-and-bred southsiders will find it interesting.

Is Oklahoma City seeking to expand again? At the last meeting of the city's Planning Commission, one of the items on the agenda was an "Ordinance for Public Hearing annexing 160 acres at N.W. 206th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue."

Currently, the city's farthest northern reach is halfway between Danforth (192nd) and Covell (206th) between approximately the 500 and 3400 blocks; there is a housing development (Danforth Farms) that extends to the north side of NW 199th Street. Edmond has a one-mile segment along Pennsylvania from about 200th to 213th, the only part of Edmond that extends west of Western Avenue.

(Well, okay, on the city's far northeast side, there is a stretch that's just as far north — halfway between Danforth and Covell — from Choctaw Road to Peebly Road. This includes a bit over 3 miles of old 66 west of Luther.)

The 160-acre tract, presumably, is on the southwest corner of Penn and Covell. I have to assume this is simply a preemptive move, should Edmond decide to push farther west.

Oklahoma City continues to grow, and our friendly urbanite/suburbanite explains the dynamics thereof:

I'm not as impressed with the "transportation infrastructure" as he is, but otherwise this makes sense. Too many metropolitan areas are growing around the fringes and withering away at the center. It helps that Oklahoma City has filled up less than half of its available space; yes, extending city services halfway to Shawnee will run into some serious money, but most developers are working closer to the city center.

And there's one angle which is seldom discussed: school-district boundaries. Twenty-three different school districts cover the expanse of the city; this complicates figuring things like property taxes, but for those people who aren't waiting around for MAPS for Kids to transform Oklahoma City Public Schools into the promised "model urban district," it's possible to take advantage of whatever benefits are offered by suburban schools and still live in the city. (Nor are they paying the MAPS tax for nothing; 30 percent of the MAPS take goes to those suburban districts.)

Next census? Maybe 565,000, perhaps 1.25 million in the metro. Of course, nothing comes close to that first-day growth rate back in 1889: zero to ten thousand in twenty-four hours.

(Update, 12:30 pm: Dan Lovejoy talks about transportation issues.)

Well, Chicago has a loop; why can't we?

Which, I guess, is reasonably appropriate. I, of course, am out of the loop, albeit not by much; I-44's northern span is a bit on the irregular side, dropping from just north of 50th to down the middle of 39th, and as it drops, it passes me by.

Will this catch on as a local meme? It just might. One plausible rival is the Mid-City Advocate's circulation area, which is a square — Reno to 63rd, Kelley to Portland — but seldom (outside the pages of the Advocate, anyway) do you hear anyone talking about the Mid-City. And nobody ever describes an address as being inside or outside the Grand Boulevard circle.

And frankly, I'd prefer "The Loop" to "Near-Northwest," which is bandied about by some.

The Downtown Guy is setting up his excellent series on the history and future of the Capitol Hill section of the city on a separate blog.

The rise of "place blogging" in recent weeks is heartening, not just because there are people here who know more about the city's history than I do (and I'm no slouch at these things), but because it's a form of documentation that bypasses the Official Versions, that helps to complete the picture.

My friend Fred First lives, not in a city, but on an 80-acre spread in the Blue Ridge. (I've been there, briefly, and if heaven isn't like that, I've wasted my time being good.) "Sometimes the most difficult ground to see," he says, "is that which is under our own feet." The value of writing about "place," therefore, is obvious:

There are half a million stories in Oklahoma City. More of them will be told. I believe there's a place for all of them, if not in some building across town, then certainly in this virtual world of ours.

Oklahoma County Commissioner Stan Inman is pushing for a vote this week on his proposal to eliminate the county's Budget Board, which consists of the three commissioners and the county's five other elected officials.

In his proposal, Inman pointed out several instances where the Board, he said, either exceeded its authority or acted ineptly.

Commissioner Jim Roth has suggested a home-rule ballot as an alternative: "We're still operating with an 1890 model, and if we disband the budget board, we get even closer to 1890."

And Treasurer Butch Freeman pointed out that most property-tax payments are made in the middle of the county's fiscal year, which leaves the till comparatively empty in the spring. A county lacking a budget board, he says, would have to borrow from banks to cover any shortages.

Is Inman truly unhappy with the Board's performance? Maybe. I think, though, what really has his BVDs knotted is the Board's vote last Thursday to support the addition of sexual orientation to the county's official non-discrimination policy. Local real-estate broker Jim Nimmo, who attended the Thursday session, is a bit blunter:

As I understand things, dissolution of the Board would not invalidate the nondiscrimination policy, nor would a 2-1 Commissioner vote be sufficient to establish personnel policies under state law.

And Assessor Leonard Sullivan, hardly gay-friendly, still won't support Inman and Rinehart. He remembers the county-commissioner scandals of the 1980s:

Roth's home-rule proposal may look pretty good after all this blows over.

Last summer, I suggested that Warr Acres' days in the low-tax sunshine might be ending, what with revenues declining and expenses going up.

It hasn't happened yet, but Warr Acres City Council is contemplating the matter: a city committee is recommending that an election be held this spring to raise the city sales tax from 2 percent to 3 percent, in line with other municipalities in the area. (Oklahoma City charges 3.875 percent; the state sales tax is 4.5 percent.)

This being Warr Acres, though, only half the extra penny would be a permanent increase; the other half would be collected for five years and placed in a trust fund, where it would presumably be harder to spend.

The City Council in Warr Acres has not yet acted on the committee recommendations, but I think it's a fairly safe bet that they'll go along with the basics, if not necessarily the amount. (Prediction: 0.75 percent, two-thirds permanent, balance to the trust fund, which would still enable them to claim the low-tax high ground.)

One of the primary justifications for increasing the Oklahoma City room tax was to patch up the horse-show facilities at State Fair Park, lest horse shows decide to go elsewhere.

With the tax increase passed and $55 million worth of improvements scheduled, it appears the city knew what it was talking about: this week, the American Quarter Horse Association has agreed to continue staging its World Championship here for the next ten years.

The fifteen major horse shows annually in Oklahoma City are believed to add some $180 million to the local economy, rather a lot more than we can expect from convention business.

Professor Gary Hack of MIT has come up with Ten Commandments of Design Review, which, in a city like this with hopes of reinventing itself, probably should be heeded. And in Oklahoma City in particular, two or three should be emphasized:

You can't plan everything to the nth detail unless n is vanishingly small. There are going to be disagreements on just about everything. The phrase that pays is "We're going to do this," not "We're going to do this exactly this way."

Two words: Stage Center. Love it or hate it, you can't miss it.

You can have the nicest neo-Victorian mansion in the three-county area, but if it's on a block that's gone to seed, who's going to care? A desirable urban environment takes a lot more than just remarkable architecture.

(Via The Downtown Guy.)

In November I noted that the new skate park was nearing completion, and expressed support for its mission.

It's done. The park will open Friday, 3 February at 5 pm, and thereafter hours will be sunrise to 11 pm, seven days a week, all year. I still think this is a great idea: obviously I'm not going to be dropping into the bowl any time soon, but it's about time Oklahoma City put a different spin on the "recreation" part of "parks and recreation".

Michael Bates, on the sort of urban-design review that exists in Oklahoma City:

The destination, of course, is a lot more attractive than the journey. Two of four front-page stories in last week's Mid-City Advocate dealt with urban design, upside and downside. The city's Urban Design Commission turned down a plan for a new home on a vacant lot in Midtown because it was too much out of character with the rest of the street, what with the garage in front and all; the builders say that the lot is too small to construct a driveway that extends to the back yard. And a chain of convenience stores will have to give up its trademark color scheme to operate in the streetscape along 23rd.

This is not to say that Oklahoma City is single-minded about design considerations. In 1999, city planners and developers were so much at odds that a committee was convened to review the entirety of the standards and practices in use, and their report [link requires Adobe Reader] explains what happened:

The Urban Conservation District rules also came in for some criticism:

In my district specifically, the architectural design standards are very loose, partly because there is such a wide variety of variations on the few basic themes that were used during its late-1940s construction. The neighborhood was conceived as slightly upscale, sort of entry-level junior executive, and the platting reflects that concept: the lots tend to be on the large side of average, and the houses range from contemporary for the period to downright eccentric. The primary focus is on retaining the relationship between house and street — setbacks must be preserved, and front-yard modifications are restricted — and on improving streetscapes themselves. (An ongoing lighting project will eventually install new mid-block lights to supplement the lights at intersections.)

The revised 2003 guidelines addressed most of the committee's concerns, though it's clear that there are always going to be some conflicts between property owners and the Planning Department. It's worth noting that while there is a single section in the Municipal Code which enables the Conservation Districts, each District has its own specific section that sets down its own particular rules: while there are similarities among them, there is no attempt to make one size fit all. If this approach smacks too much of "I know it when I see it," a more specific approach would probably be resisted as being too restrictive.

Still, the rules have been in place long enough — the first historic district was so designated in the late 1960s — that everyone has had time to get used to the idea. And for the most part, things work.

Last year, says the Oklahoma City Metro Association of Realtors, 19,284 homes were sold in the metro area, the highest number anyone can remember, and up about 10 percent from the previous year. The average price was $125,860, up 6.6 percent; the median price (half cost more, half cost less) was $106,383, up 6.8 percent.

Nationwide, sales of new homes set a record high.

I'm not sure how long this will last — sooner or later, rising interest rates will start to show up in mortgage rates — but for now, it's one heck of a ride, and homes in my neighborhood are approaching $75 a square foot, a figure which would have seemed utterly implausible two years ago.

Spottings took off the last two weekends so that I would have more time to fuss over, um, women younger than I; despite feeling like the plague warmed over in a low-powered microwave, I figured the least I could do was hit the streets once more.

Monday I wrote about a case before the Urban Design Commission about a builder who wanted to put a 1½-story home on a narrow lot in Midtown and was shot down because he wanted garage access from the front. The Commission told him it was out of character for the neighborhood; the builder contended that the lot was too narrow for a driveway to run all the way front to back. This is not a big lot — only 50 feet wide — and the alley in back, uneven and narrow, is surprisingly difficult to navigate, so I can see his point. (The larger question of why someone would want a 2500-square-foot home on a 7000-square-foot lot I leave for somebody with greater household demands than mine.)

High clouds and 60 degrees today, about ten warmer than spec for this date, so I reckoned there would be a good crowd at the new skate park, and indeed the place was crawling with sk8terbois and/or grrls. I watched just long enough to realize that were I in there and on wheels, I would kill myself in about ten seconds.

West of Capitol Hill and south of the Stockyards is a light-industrial area that's gone into seemingly terminal decline; it looked pretty dire 35 years ago, and it still does today. Still, I'm not prepared to write off any part of the city yet, and on SW 15th near I-44 I wondered if the massive Dell facility is going to make any meaningful difference on the near-southwest side, or if all its staff will come from way across town.

Finally, closer to home, an item of interest to one of those younger women (the one who is actually related to me): a house a few blocks over, it is reported by the Neighborhood Association, is getting the full HGTV treatment. There's no sign up, probably to deter gawking, but the location seems pretty obvious, and if it's on HGTV, it's a cinch my daughter will see it.

Fark had an item this morning about Tucson's Old Spanish Trail, which is apparently neither old nor Spanish. (There's also one in Houston, if I remember correctly; it should have similar credentials.)

Not that we can snicker here in Oklahoma City. In the 1970s a subdivision went in west of Ski Island called "Canyon North," and threading down the middle of it is something called Basswood Canyon Road. Quite apart from the fact that we're not exactly overrun (underrun?) with canyons in that part of town, basswood doesn't grow here: it tends to show up in the Midwest and points east, also places not known for canyons.

Then again, County Line Road does run more or less along the (Canadian/Oklahoma) county line. And I will entertain no complaints about the Rivendell area: that's supposed to be, um, fantastic.

I'm on the Northwest Distressway this afternoon, getting ready to do the turn onto Pennsylvania and then a quick duck down NW 50th, the light goes green, and one car gets through before the yellow pops up again. I hadn't floored it or anything, being as how I was the fourth in line, but I uttered a deep and dark curse against whatever Fates were responsible for this.

And then I saw it: the fire engine, in the oncoming lane, everyone else in the vicinity having been evacuated by that seemingly-random hardware malfunction.

Which answered two questions for me: "What are those traffic-signal override devices really like?" and "You think they have any of those here?"

The fire truck cleared the intersection, the green was restored, and I made my turn.

I'm not thinking these are the answers to everyone's prayers, though. Half a mile down 50th, an ambulance was oncoming, and if it was heading for that same emergency, it was going to be late; on 50th eastbound at Pennsylvania, there is no option but to turn right, unless you're prepared to jump a barrier. Now if those can be moved by remote control, I promise to be duly impressed.

The city council of Warr Acres, as predicted here last month, will consider calling an election for a 1-cent sales-tax increase at its meeting next Tuesday.

The council is considering basically the same package recommended to them by a city commission: 0.5 percent as a permanent increase, and 0.5 to expire after five years, to be routed to a trust fund for future improvements and/or emergencies. (I had predicted 0.75 percent total, two-thirds to the trust fund.)

It's not even listed yet on any of the other local versions, but yes, craigslist is now open in Oklahoma City.

Matt Deatherage noticed it before I did.

It's not every day a McDonald's is torn down, and it's a shock to see the vacant lot at NW 67th and May. A bigger and badder Mickey D's is promised for this space, but it's not so big a space to begin with, so something, either facilities or parking, is going to take a hit.

Speaking of shocks, they're taking a hit if you drive anywhere on May these days: the late-winter pothole season has produced some impressive blossoms, ready to take a chunk out of those overpriced rims you bought last year.

And still on May, doing the grocery-shopping thing this afternoon, I watched a puzzled woman scanning shelf after shelf for some arcane item or other. "They always hide the one you really want," I said.

"I know. And this has to be special. Valentine's Day, you know."

"I hope he appreciates all this," I said.

"He'd better," she replied. "Because he's getting dumped right after."

Nothing like, um, softening up the blow, so to speak.

Meanwhile, something unexpected (at least by me) is planned for the new Oklahoma History Center going in near the Capitol: a reconstruction of the lunch counter at the downtown Katz Drug Store, the site of Clara Luper's sit-in back in 1958, the first blow struck against segregated eateries in Oklahoma City. (The store itself is long gone, courtesy of urban renewal.) This is an important chapter in the national civil-rights story, and it's good to see it getting the attention it deserves.

Sign on a marquee near May and Grand: "SUNDAY SERVICES START AT 9." A church? Nope: a tire store.

Me, on the recent school-board election:

The Oklahoman, in an editorial last month, characterized this sort of thing as "improper etiquette," thereby condemning the practice while suggesting that its infringement is among the more minor of peccadillos.

This morning in an op-ed, five former Oklahoma City mayors expand on this premise:

And the bottom line, as they see it:

Signing off on the piece were Jim and Ron Norick, Patience Latting, Andy Coats and Kirk Humphreys. I think it would have carried more weight had current Mayor Mick Cornett added his name to the list; then again, Cornett, having been the beneficiary of exactly such actions to support his election, might not be in the best position to disavow them.

My opinion is as it was: if these are to be made partisan elections, it's fine with me, but if they're supposed to be nonpartisan, then the parties need to keep their noses out of the proceedings. Period.

Those who follow my World Tour reports will note that I do a fairly respectable job of avoiding the usual tourist destinations. (I mean, three days in South Dakota without either Rushmore or Sturgis? Heresy!) Matt Rosenberg would probably applaud:

Okay, I did schlep Dawn Eden through Bricktown that one time. But it was on the way, and it's not like the place was full of locals or anything.

Rose Union Elementary School will be the name of the new grade school in the Deer Creek district in far northwest Oklahoma County, and the board has already announced that it's going to be overcrowded the moment it's built.

The new school, to be located on NW 220th east of MacArthur, is well away from the two other grade schools in Deer Creek, but student population is growing at more than 10 percent a year. (Current student counts are here.)

As reported by KOKC radio, transcribed by The Downtown Guy:

The Heartland Flyer is the state's only railroad passenger service. And it's been getting more riders lately; during the fourth quarter of 2004, 14,062 riders took the train, up 27 percent from the fourth quarter of 2003. The track itself is getting some much-needed upgrades this spring.

Even with the additional riders, this route, like most Amtrak routes outside the BosWash corridor, is losing money, and there's always the question of whether the government should subsidize this sort of thing at all. Right now, though, I'm not going to gripe much if the state does kick in $3 million to support the train, which is admittedly a triumph of "Wow, cool" over cold sober reflection. Some days I do that.

A question I asked last fall about this corner of town:

One of my resolutions for the new year, so to speak, was to answer that question. Fortunately for me, someone else spotted it first. A Steanson, yet.

Steanson B. Parks reports from Dallas:

You gotta love this Internet stuff. And 1948, you'll remember, was right at the beginning of this neighborhood.

Thank you, SBP. We can always use a little more history.

John Hendrickson writes in with a tale from the southside:

My name is John D. Hendrickson and grew up as did my Mother in Capitol Hill. I spent ten years in Norman and then returned after my divorce. The Hendricksons, Guytons, Householders and Winkleman families have been in the Hill since the '20's and maybe even before. We are proud people who have been citizens of Capitol Hill first and foremost rather than Oklahoma City citizens. How the "Reno" split came about we will probably never know for sure. But it is still there for many of us. When I was growing up and even into my thirties we never went North of Reno, excluding downtown OKC unless it was a 'have to thing' and if you went at night it was to cause trouble and mayhem for the north side kids. A turf war it would be called now. Of course it was more of pranks and such and not the violence and harm as kids do to today.

Good old southside pride. Reno, of course, was the section-line road nearest the township boundary, and Capitol Hill, after all, had been a separate city for a few years before being absorbed into OKC.

I'm thinking maybe these bits of oral history are going to be of considerable value one of these years.

If you're twenty-five or younger, you've never known a time when the Oklahoma Publishing Company wasn't the only newspaper game in town: The Daily Oklahoman ruled the morning, the Oklahoma City Times had the afternoon to itself. (Now, of course, there's only The Oklahoman.) But for one brief shining moment — okay, it wasn't all that brief, and it didn't shine all that much either — there was actual newspaper competition in the Big Town.

W. P. Bill Atkinson was a bright fellow with one special gift: somehow he was a step ahead of the rest of the movers and shakers and developers. It was Atkinson in 1941 who snapped up the property north of what is now Tinker Air Force Base, before the power structure was even aware that the facility was going to be built. In the 1950s, while the rest of the Big Boys worked on acquiring land along SW 59th Street in anticipation of a new Southwest Expressway, Atkinson bought up plots along SW 74th — and guess where the road was built?

This sort of thing got under E. K. Gaylord's hide, and it festered. In 1958, Atkinson decided to run for governor on the Democratic ticket. Gaylord, incensed, refused to accept any advertising from the Atkinson campaign. With the state's largest paper officially ignoring his candidacy, Atkinson bought lots of TV time, but viewers found him less appealing than the telegenic J. Howard Edmondson, who swept to victory.

Atkinson was not in a forgiving mood five years later when he decided, once and for all, to get his revenge on Gaylord. The prevailing belief at the time was that the Oklahoman and Times were aimed at the plutocrats on the northwest side of town, and Atkinson's power base, the areas he had developed, were to the south and east. He had some background in journalism — he'd taught it, briefly, at Oklahoma City University — and he figured that ought to be enough to qualify him as a publisher.

In 1964, the first issue of The Oklahoma Journal rolled off Atkinson's shiny new offset press at SE 15th and Key in Midwest City, bearing the slogan "The Paper That Tells Both Sides." (Note to Fox News Channel: "Fair & Balanced" is nothing new.) The editor was Forrest J. "Frosty" Troy, lured away from The Tulsa Tribune's Capitol bureau with the promise of at least equal bucks and a substantial stock position. Troy was enthusiastic at first, but a chill set in when Atkinson suggested that local stories be vetted by a county commissioner (who happened to be his partner in various local businesses), and that stock position eventually proved to come with a stiff price tag. Troy departed, to be replaced by John Clabes.

The nascent Journal, technically competing with two papers, ran into difficulties rather quickly: top-drawer syndicated offerings were snapped up by OPUBCO, and rather a lot of its news was recycled UPI wire stuff. Still, there was enough local resentment of the Gaylord machine to keep the Journal subscriber lists from going dry, and while the front-page design was generally hideous — even the smallest stories had monstrously huge headlines — the paper's state-of-the-art press was producing high-quality ad inserts, good enough that even businesses who weren't advertising in the Journal would still have them print their material, which they would then truck over to the Oklahoman. E. K. Gaylord, once he got wind of this, refused to accept any ad inserts printed at the Journal; Atkinson sued and won.

Eventually, the Journal settled down into the same sort of comfortable mediocrity as the Oklahoman, albeit with a smaller subscriber base. E. K. Gaylord died in 1974; his son Edward L. proved to be just as intractable a foe, and the younger Gaylord's wheeling and dealing under the auspices of the Oklahoma Industries Authority, which you'd never see covered in the OPUBCO papers, would have been perfect fodder for the Journal — except that in the late Seventies, Atkinson wearied of the constant negative cash flow, and persuaded a faraway publisher of community shoppers and weekly papers to take the Journal off his hands.

The last issue of The Journal, having truncated its name and its slogan (now "Both sides of the news"), appeared in 1980. The Oklahoman reported its demise on the back page of the business section, with the single-column headline "Midwest City Paper Folds." In retrospect, the Journal might have done better had it tried to be a Midwest City paper rather than trying to take on the Oklahoman. Still, the Journal's 40,000 or so circulation had cost the Gaylords dearly — in an effort to swat the pesky competitor, OPUBCO had slashed some of its ad rates, and at one point cut its newsstand price from a quarter to a dime — and in 1981, a year after the Journal called it quits, the circulation at the Oklahoman had hardly budged at all, suggesting that there were forty thousand people in town who would rather read nothing than read the Oklahoman.

Newspaper competition was over in Oklahoma City; it continued in Tulsa until 1992, when the Tulsa World announced it would not renew its Joint Operating Agreement with the Tribune. The Tribune, perhaps remembering the untidy death of the Journal, opted to fade quietly away.

(Per assignment; my thanks to Frosty Troy, some of whose reminiscences are incorporated herein.)

Oklahoma City has new regulations for subdivisions, effective last Friday, and while some of the 110-page document [link requires Adobe Reader] is taken up with housekeeping and minor language changes, there are some new rules worth noting:

The city, in other words, is setting the baseline standards: you may exceed them, but don't even think about coming up with something more lax, no matter how many property owners you can get to sign the papers.

This is actually pretty much the current practice. I'm interpreting "continuance" in the most literal sense, that the new street actually connects to the existing one: it seems unreasonable to me that a street must be called, say, Brookline Avenue just because it's a block west of May. On the other hand, the city, perhaps with an eye towards making life easier for the fire department, has been insisting that east-west streets follow the number grid for years now, which is why down in Rivendell one gets from Lorien Way to Endor Drive by either (and equally prosaic) SW 121st Street or SW 123rd Street.

Translation: "You wanted this to be private, make sure you take care of it."

As a practical matter, I don't expect the new rules to have much of a negative effect on development: the demand for new homes in outlying areas of the city continues, and local businesses are already positioning themselves. (Who knew there was a Sonic way out at 18031 North Portland? I just saw it for the first time yesterday, and there's even a strip mall adjacent to it.) I do wonder if there's going to be an eventual ZIP code realignment up north, as more and more people discover that they live in Oklahoma City and their mail goes to Edmond. (This has happened to some extent on the west side: 73127 now extends all the way to Sara Road, though anything in Canadian County north of 36th Street still goes to Yukon, or Piedmont if you go far enough north.)

Were I a New Urbanist, I suppose I would be appalled that folks are moving way out to the fringes of the city. But I take comfort in the fact that they're still in the city, no matter what their return address may say: we're all in this together, whether we live on 9th Street, 99th Street, or 199th Street.

I live in Oklahoma City's Ward 2, represented by Sam Bowman, who isn't up for reelection this year, so I admittedly haven't paid that much attention to the new crop of City Council candidates. The Oklahoman had a piece this morning on candidates for Ward 7, including incumbent Willa Johnson, but what caught my eye was some chatter by Mayor Cornett that addresses some issues I've mentioned before. There are plans, said Cornett, to "spruce up" the NE 23rd Street corridor, about which I grumbled last year.

And in a June piece about residential development close to downtown, I said this:

It didn't occur to me then that there wasn't even one supermarket in the 100-square-mile expanse of Ward 7, which stretches from east of downtown to the edge of Luther. The Mayor says he's looking into the possibility of working with a "major grocer," perhaps in the Deep Deuce area, which could serve both downtown and the near-northeast side, although he cautioned, "It will happen when the market conditions are ready for it to happen," and not before. I'm thinking a block or two farther north, in the Flatirons district, which would make for easier access from I-235.

From the standpoint of geography, Ward 7 is perhaps the nicest part of Oklahoma City: it's more forest than grassland, and it generally lacks the city's trademark flatness. If we could bring its infrastructure and streetscapes up to spec, it would be, I suspect, a far more desirable place to live.

A consortium of developers has decided to brand an area near downtown and try to turn it into something different: "a vibrant mixed-use environment where people can 'live, work and play' in an upscale, fashionable urban community."

We've heard this before, but I no longer question the miraculous in this city; I've seen too many things that couldn't possibly work that somehow did. The Triangle district, which overlays part of Automobile Alley and includes the Flatirons area, is patterned after a rejuvenated warehouse district in Charlotte, North Carolina. The residential area is planned for near NE 3rd Street and Oklahoma Avenue, a block east of Broadway; there will be retail and entertainment facilities at its periphery.

The developers' next move is to descend upon the Oklahoma City Planning Commission, probably in April, with a sheaf full of plans. I note in passing that most of The Triangle lies within Ward 7. (Mr. Mayor, you knew about this, didn't you?)

This week, the Central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority is beginning something called the Oklahoma Fixed Guideway Study, including seven public meetings, which will focus on trying to anticipate traffic problems twenty-five or thirty years down the road and suggesting solutions.

Among the ideas being bounced around are HOV or bus lanes and commuter or light rail; the only options that have definitely been ruled out are a subway system (too expensive) and a monorail system (too expensive, and we couldn't get Lyle Lanley to sell it to us).

The current state of traffic in this town can be fairly described as "not as sucky as it could be," though obviously the level of suckage can be expected to rise as population and development increase. It's probably a good thing that they're trying to get the jump on these issues, but I hope they don't get the notion that there is some sort of magic bullet that will punch through all the potential problems at once.

(More thoughts along these lines in this week's Vent.)

Um, make that Crazy Freakin' Bikers™.

Mat Hoffman's CFB Series will descend upon Oklahoma City's Riverfront Skate Park in mid-May, bringing about 500 competitors, thousands of fans, and the cameras of FoxSportsNet.

Hoffman, a BMX legend who lives in Edmond, will oversee the presentation himself; a vertical ramp and a series of dirt jumps will be temporarily added to the park facilities. This CFB event is a qualifier for the 2005 X Games.

As the phrase goes, this oughta be good.

The city has concluded that people drive too fast on the Broadway Extension and will crack down on such antisocial behavior. In a survey conducted earlier this month, hardly anyone was hugging the 60-mph speed limit, and two or three percent of drivers were doing better than 90.

Of course, going 90 mph isn't necessarily a hazard in itself; it's the people around you crawling along at 67 for whom it becomes an issue. Still, 90 mph isn't a viable speed limit for a short stretch of road, although obviously drivers are convinced that 60 is too low. The Lake Hefner Parkway is 65 for most of its length; the Broadway Extension — north of 63rd, anyway — ought to be at least as high.

It's called "The Hill," and it's part of the area known as Deep Deuce; this week the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority heard three competing proposals for residential districts on The Hill.

All the proposals come from that mysterious land called Upscale; the big difference is whether the focus will be on individual ownership or on rentals. I'm thinking that since Deep Deuce already has a row of apartments, the city will prefer homes for sale. The real story, though, is that people are willing to spend some money on building in an area which for years and years was considered blighted or worse. It's technically not a case of gentrification: the dilapidated buildings were removed years ago, so no one is currently being displaced.

Those who worry about urban sprawl must be utterly mystified by Oklahoma City. There is serious development way out on the fringes, but there is just about as much serious development in the very center of town. In between, not much is happening. (My own neighborhood, closer to the center than the fringe, is stable in its sixth decade.) And I figure anything that perplexes the experts is probably a good thing in the long run.

The tone for the day was set at the Sears parts/repair depot, where I arrived at the counter right behind a woman with a broken chainsaw. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind not to try to find out how it was broken.

From there, I dropped into the area which last week was first described as The Triangle, and now there's a sign or two to indicate such. What's over there now, at least east of Oklahoma Avenue, is not much; it's hard to imagine this as a vibrant urban community, but then fifteen years ago it was hard to imagine the decrepit warehouse zone east of downtown as an entertainment district, either.

Southward, to visit Dear Old Dad, where I filled him in on some of what's going on downtown, since he hasn't been downtown in fifteen years. He did seem impressed, though he wondered just how much money the city was blowing on eye candy, and pointed toward "some damn lake at the Community College."

Well, it's not technically a lake: it's a retention pond, to address some of the drainage issues in that relatively low-lying area of town. They did put a fountain in one corner of it, though, so I guess that qualifies as eye candy.

And I slid across I-44 to take a look at South Lakes Park, a 160-acre tract being developed in the semi-far southwest corner of town, an area which is largely unpopulated for now but which very likely won't stay that way for long. For the past twenty or thirty years, parkland has been an afterthought; the landscape is scraped away, the roads are put in, the foundations are laid, and maybe someone thinks to save some green area at the last minute. It's probably a good thing that Oklahoma City is actually ahead of the game this time around.

And there will be development out there, apart from the extant town of Mustang. Count on it. I followed the new (and not quite complete) alignment of Oklahoma 152, which used to start at I-44 and SW 29th Street, then veered off down Newcastle Road parallel to a rail line, threaded through the hamlet of Wheatland, until it hit 74th and turned west. The new 152 follows Airport Road west of I-44, which eventually will be extended beyond its current terminus on SW 44th between MacArthur and Rockwell. And to my amazement, someone is clearing space for high-buck homes where the new 152 crosses 59th. This made more sense when I drove back north of Mustang on Morgan Road, which used to be just one more country road and is now starting to accumulate housing developments. (Incidentally, the junction of Morgan at I-40, which used to be barely adequate, is now arguably the worst intersection in Canadian County, and competitive with urban nail-biters like Pennsylvania at Memorial.)

Vast Right-Wing Conspirators may be interested to hear that this stretch of SW 44th goes past one of Halliburton's two city facilities, and that I came within half a mile of the other one (near Reno and Morgan).

A few days ago, I came up with this:

The Downtown Guy follows up:

I think it takes way more than thirty years for any particular architectural style to come back into vogue; no one these days is building, say, Tudor Revival houses of the sort that you see in areas like Gatewood, and I suspect the demand for simulated French châteaux will vanish shortly and not return until well beyond 2050. (Dallas-style homes are now being built in Ireland, of all places. Go figure.) The prevailing style in the 1960s and 1970s was a seeming lack of style, which can't be good for neighborhoods built during those decades, at least right away, but it should be remembered that Oklahoma City's historic districts sport lots of Craftsman-style homes, and that's "Craftsman" as in Sears; even if Sears, Roebuck and Co. didn't actually sell the kit, a lot of houses were built to look like Sears (or Montgomery Ward) designs. And even Levittown, the archetype for little boxes made of ticky-tacky, has evolved over the succeeding years.

The question of extending city services is more serious. The Fire Department has established stations in fringe areas — the farthest out include 11630 SW 15th, west of Mustang Road, and 17700 SE 104th, east of Triple XXX Road — but water and sewer lines take longer, and the police are still rather far away. Some argue for deannexation, noting that the urbanized part of the city is less than half of its total area; I'd point out that most of the cities in serious decline are those which have no place to expand. (St. Louis, which once was the fourth largest city in the nation, and had 800,000 people as late as 1940, is now down below 350,000, barely making it into the top 50; it's been stuck within its 61 square miles since about 1880.)

It's hard to argue, though, with this observation:

Well, it won't be because we bit off more than we could chew.

The merger of Federated Department Stores and May Department Stores Co. will affect Oklahoma City in one major way: the Foley's stores owned by May, once the deal goes through, will eventually be rebranded as Macy's, Federated's major regional brand.

Ironically, Federated used to own Foley's, based in Houston, and Dallas-based Sanger Harris; the two chains were merged in 1987 under the Foley's name and sold to May in 1988.

Federated will also acquire David's Bridal stores from May, but I expect no name changes at David's.

I get to sit today's election out: four of eight seats on the City Council are up for grabs, but the Ward 2 slot isn't among them. (Wards 1, 4, 7 and 8 have races.)

However, there is some serious stuff going on in the 'burbs. Mid-Del schools will be hoping for approval of the sale of $8 million worth of bonds to finance upgrades and repairs; Moore schools are seeking to issue bonds totaling $47 million, which would finance a new high school, new grade-school classrooms, plus computer and cafeteria upgrades.

Nichols Hills has some bonds to sell, too: $12.5 million to cover various city improvements. And Logan County wants to replace their ancient jail and seeks approval of a 0.75-cent sales-tax increase, to expire in 2015, to pay for the new lockup.

If you're affected by any of these, get ye to the polls.

(Note: This was written yesterday and set aside, and still had references to "tomorrow" therein; I have expunged same.)

The Junior League of Oklahoma City dates back to 1927; Mrs. Joseph Rumsey was its first president. Its purpose, then and now, is to promote volunteerism, develop opportunities for women, and provide support for local organizations. (The League's Remarkable Shop, a sort of upscale thrift shop, has been operating since 1930.)

The League's current headquarters is the Blinn House, the former Oklahoma County Home for Girls at 6300 North Western. Chesapeake Energy, whose campus is just to the south, has struck a deal with the League to buy the Blinn House, and Monday ground will be broken on a new Junior League office at Grand Park Center, just east of Western on Grand Boulevard. I expect that the Blinn House, which is on the National Register of Historical Places, will be changed little by its absorption into the corporate culture; you could show the Chesapeake facilities to a visitor and tell her it's a small private college, and she wouldn't question it for a moment. Not that I've ever done that sort of thing.

Incidentally, Pam Newby of the Junior League of Oklahoma City is the current President of the Association of Junior Leagues International.

Generally, southeast Oklahoma City comes to an end at Pottawatomie Road, the far side of the 21900 block east, the beginning of Pottawatomie County. But there's a half-section beyond this point, and that's where I was headed today.

When you're this far from the center of things, you don't expect to find much in the way of city services, although I did see an actual Oklahoma City police vehicle patrolling near SE 130th and Peebly Road, and a few driveways sported the standard city trash containers. Otherwise, it's your standard exurban/rural area, large lots with an incredible variety of houses, the trashiest of trailers to the niftiest new construction, interrupted here and there by convenience stores and churches. This is not the place to go looking for a Burger King. (Indeed, one shouldn't look for a Burger King anywhere in the city these days: every one I've seen lately has closed up shop.)

What makes this little 320-acre parcel beyond the county line unusual is that it's literally inaccessible from the rest of the city. Pottawatomie Road runs along the western edge of it, but there are no eastbound roads; to get there, you have to get onto Fishmarket Road, by taking either SE 89th (which becomes Memorial Road) or SE 119th (which becomes Homer Lane) and going a mile east. Lake Drive (SE 104th) is the northern boundary of the spread, which extends half a mile to the south between Pottawatomie and Fishmarket. This part of Pottawatomie County is unincorporated and apparently largely unserviced: the McLoud post office delivers the mail, and street signs are likely to be handmade. Lake Drive itself is maybe a lane and a third wide. One southbound road, called Eastway, shows up half a mile to the west, but that's it. I am normally not a big fan of deannexation, but I honestly can't think of any reason why Oklahoma City should hold onto this remote tract.

I pushed on northward and wound up in Green Pastures, east of Spencer, an area annexed to Oklahoma City during the late 1950s. Green Pastures is mostly rural, not unlike that remote corner of Pottawatomie County, but its population is largely black. (We forget sometimes that at statehood, about 8 percent of Oklahomans had African ancestry.) Parts of it are spellbindingly beautiful; parts of it are scary. Sometimes they're the same parts. I really need to go back through there again and get a better look. (Ironically, I used to live a lot closer to there, but never made the effort to see it.) To the east of Green Pastures is an area called Dunjee Park, named for Roscoe Dunjee, legendary editor of the Black Dispatch.

Most of my Spottings excursions don't run 100 miles. This one did. And frankly, I needed the reminder that there's a lot more to the city than downtown, Bricktown, and what's around the corner. Mayor Cornett said in his State of the City address: "For over 100 years, we've been a City that has grown and expanded on the edges." We pretty much had to: after all, we got our first ten thousand residents in the first 24 hours.

Last month I noted, somewhat belatedly, the lack of supermarkets on the city's northeast side, and it occurred to me afterwards that there wasn't an abundance of chain stores of any sort serving this largely-black quadrant: there's a CVS which used to be an Eckerd's (though, surprisingly, not a Walgreen's dogging its heels), one of Yum! Brands' KFC-plus-something-else stores, and a couple of Mickey D's around the edges, but chain retail is otherwise conspicuous by its absence. I wondered if this was an anomaly, but, says Karen DeCoster, it's worse in Detroit:

In some circles it is de rigueur to bash chain retail for its negative effects on local stores, an attitude which overlooks the possibility that some of those local stores might actually deserve it. And residents of northeast Oklahoma City who actually want to take advantage of the chains have had to venture into other parts of the city, or head east into the 'burbs. As close as Wal-Mart is likely to get is NE 23rd and Douglas Boulevard, in the north end of Midwest City, coming next year. Still, that's only six miles from MLK; imagine how far you'd have to drive — or ride the bus — to get out of Detroit.

Maestro Sergiu Comissiona died early Saturday morning here in the city, less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to conduct the Oklahoma City Philharmonic.

But before that final curtain, he taught a master class for conductors at Oklahoma City University, and Matt Deatherage was there:

Sometimes less is more.

And the concert did go on, with Philharmonic Music Director Joel Levine at the helm.

Oklahoma City's Devon Energy Corp. is terminating its operations in Syria, citing current political pressures. US sanctions against Syria do not block Devon's oil exploration, but the company is unable to import replacement parts for its equipment.

Devon had planned to invest approximately $17 million in the Syrian oil fields, and began operations, with the consent of Congress and the Department of State, in 2002.

When Bobby Troup was getting his kicks on Route 66, he noted that "Oklahoma City is mighty pretty."

He wouldn't have thought so if he'd had to take I-35 or 40.

Tom Lindley's column in this morning's Oklahoman is perhaps a trifle overexuberant about the prospects for riverfront development along The River Formerly Known As The North Canadian:

Quite a bill of goods. Then again:

And just think of the money we'll save by not having to mow it.

Then again, the hard part — turning a raggedy old ditch into a full-fledged river — is already done. From here on out, it's all downstream.

Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education, one of the more highly-regarded films of 2004, was apparently booked for the Noble Theatre at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but was scrapped at the last minute when someone noticed it bore an NC-17 rating.

The Literary Tech sends a missive to that someone:

This was going to be the month that I actually buckled down, ponied up the bucks, and became an OKCMOA member; I think now perhaps I shall wait a while and see what happens.

(Update, 13 March, 9 pm: OKCMOA film curator Brian Hearn says that it was his fault that Bad Education was dropped; the Museum has a policy that requires NC-17 films be submitted to the Museum Board for review, and, he told GayOKC.com, he neglected to do so.)

After last week's industrial-strength excursion, and what with the arrival of weather suitable for yard work, I didn't get around much today, but there were a few things worthy of note besides the wholesale destruction of weeds.

My big Midwestern bank has been absorbed into an even bigger East Coast bank, and they're saying they want all the signs changed over within the next six weeks. Given the amount of new signage I've seen at the local branches, which is to say none whatsoever, I'd say they have their work cut out for them.

About twenty-five years ago, I visited Memphis, and fortunately, it's easy to find Elvis Presley Boulevard on the maps; actual street signs are few and far between, and the only one I saw was mounted about two stories above the ground, presumably to discourage theft. (I'm sure this sort of thing didn't happen when it was merely Highway 51 South.) North of Britton Road in The Village is a noncontinuous residential street called Abbey Road. When I was househunting, one of the first notions I got was to go look on this street, for obvious Fab Four-related reasons, but houses on those few blocks seldom seemed to be for sale, and the neighborhood in question seemed to be out of what I thought to be my price range anyway, so I gave the matter no further thought — until today, when I was stuck in the usual May Avenue traffic, and ducked down a side road to evade it. A couple of turns, and there I was — except that, contrary to the standard prevailing on other Village street signs, the sign for Abbey Road (this one, anyway) merely says ABBEY, with no further designator; for all the casual visitor could tell, it could be Abbey Drive or Abbey Place or even Abbe Lane. Have people been stealing street signs from The Village? And should we blame Polythene Pam?

A couple of weekends ago I noted the general disappearance of Burger King in the metro area.

They're not all gone — Burger King HQ says there are thirty-five locations remaining in central Oklahoma, though their definition of "central" extends as far as McAlester — but local franchiser Ken Knight, who at one time owned fourteen Burger Kings in the area, has shuttered all fourteen, and he and Burger King are going their separate ways due to what Burger King calls a "history of ... failure to meet Burger King operating standards".

(Yes, Burger King has operating standards. Knock it off.)

At least two of the closed Burger Kings had been sharing space with gas stations: a Shell at NE 23rd and I-35, and a Conoco at Pennsylvania and I-44.

It's been gone for nine years now, and its owner died last month, but The Downtown Guy thinks it's time to resurrect Molly Murphy's — in Bricktown.

I'm thinking it's a hell of an idea. If they're going to pitch Bricktown as a place where Things Happen, well, things were always happening at Molly's. The Oklahoma Gazette once described it as "a mixture of 20s Art Deco and the Taj Mahal," and they weren't kidding. And if the environment was wacky, the staff was insane. The food was okay, maybe a little better than that, but you didn't go to Molly's because you were peckish; you went to Molly's because you wanted to see just what in the heck was going to happen next, and it didn't bother you that you had to wait an hour and twenty minutes to get in.

Yeah, I know: reviving the original Molly's would be right up there with building a shrine to That '70s Show. But everything old eventually is new again, and frankly, I think it's time I got a chance to embarrass my grandchildren, who sooner or later will have to go to the bathroom.

If you've always wanted to live in a loft in downtown Oklahoma City — and obviously some of you did, or there wouldn't be any efforts to increase the supply of same — The Downtown Guy has an overview of what's available and a hint of what's coming.

And surely it's coming. Mayor Cornett has claimed that there is a market for 6,000 housing units in the downtown area; fewer than 1,000 are currently available. There is construction in MidTown, just to the northwest; plans are being made for the east.

I tend to marvel at this sort of thing, but then I remember the mausoleum that was downtown Oklahoma City thirty years ago: maybe a few signs of life from 9 to 5, but forget anything after sunset. Now, with rental units in the 'burbs being old and decrepit and boring — the big apartment boom in the Seventies resulted in serious overbuilding, just in time for the energy industry to go bust — downtown is becoming the place to be, especially if you work in the business district and have no desire to burn up lots of increasingly-expensive gasoline to get there.

Back in January, two of the three Oklahoma County Commissioners voted to dissolve the county's Budget Board as of the first of July, putting the Commissioners themselves in charge of the General Fund. At the time, I suggested that this was payback to the Board for supporting a non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation as a criterion.

Four county officials have now asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to rule that the Commissioners are in violation of state law, that they cannot legally establish a budget agency of their own.

The lawsuit, filed by County Clerk Carolynn Caudill, Treasurer Butch Freeman, Court Clerk Patricia Presley and County Assessor Leonard Sullivan, asks that the Commissioners be barred from using public funds to set up budget oversight.

The plaintiffs are hoping for a decision on or before the 30th of June.

Predictions for available hotel rooms in downtown Oklahoma City:

Me, May '04: 1,414 by mid-2006.

The Downtown Guy, this week: At least 1,300 by 2007.

Given the subsequent delays on the Embassy Suites in Bricktown, I'm thinking TDG's time frame might be more reasonable than mine. Still, it should be remembered that during the grim post-oil bust days, we soldiered on with one major downtown hotel; the promise of half a dozen in the very near future constitutes some sort of vote of confidence in downtown Oklahoma City.

There are still a few spots that could use some burnishing, of course, and one of them is the old Braniff Building at 324 North Robinson, built in 1923 for Braniff Insurance, Tom Braniff's day job while brother Paul was learning to fly. In 1930, Braniff Airways moved into 324, and remained there until they relocated to Dallas in 1945. Kerr-McGee now owns the building, and gave it a facelift in the late 1960s. Most of the lower-story windows were broken in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and have since been replaced, but otherwise 324 (and the adjacent 310/316) are seemingly frozen in time, aging a little but otherwise showing no signs of life. The Braniff name, incidentally, was removed many years ago; the sign reads simply THREE TWENTY FOUR BUILDING.

Out in Midwest City, things are still in flux. The stretch of Douglas Boulevard from SE 15th to SE 29th, in the expectation of greater development, has been widened to five lanes (two each way and a center turn lane); Air Depot Boulevard is currently undergoing the same treatment. CiCi's Pizza has taken over the old Sound Warehouse building, once a moviehouse, in the 2300 block of Air Depot, and some of the strip centers near 15th have been freshened. At Heritage Park Mall, not much seems to have changed just yet — there's been some attention to the surrounding foliage, I noticed — but everyone I talked to who worked in the mall seemed happy, or at least hopeful, about the new ownership.

And I took a spin over to Union Station, 300 SW 7th, which isn't the easiest place to get to in this city. (Robinson south from downtown, then hang a right on 7th.) In the hands of the Central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority, the station is serving as, well, not much of anything these days. (Amtrak's Heartland Flyer stops at the old Santa Fe depot north of Reno on E. K. Gaylord.) Virtually all of the vintage rail infrastructure is still viable, were the city to pursue a light-rail transit system, although it's scheduled to be trashed once I-40's Crosstown route is rerouted literally through the old railyard. ODOT, of course, insists that "the integrity of [the station] will be maintained". I have my doubts that there ever will be a light-rail transit system in central Oklahoma, but I am quite sure that if there is, it will cost a lot more than it would had the Union Station railyard been left alone.

And as I passed by the National Memorial — but never mind, you can imagine what sort of slaughter-of-the-innocents thoughts I was having.

The American Podiatric Medical Association has issued its list of America's Best Walking Cities, and the only question I had when I started digging into the data was "How bad did we do?" Two hundred cities were surveyed (here are the criteria), so I figured we'd finish around, oh, 150th? 170th? 190th?

Well, it says here [link requires Adobe Reader] that the Okay City ranks 123rd, which is better than I'd anticipated. Then again, we're right behind Detroit, a place where I'd be disinclined to walk anywhere for reasons unrelated to mere foot issues.

Tulsa finished 78th.

(Suggested by this Gawker item complaining that the Big Apple had dropped to seventh.)

In 1931, the First National Center and the Ramsey Tower (now City Place) went up side by side (Park Avenue separates them) more or less simultaneously. The Ramsey was a general office building which occasionally housed a bank in subsequent years; however, the First National Center was built around what was at the time the largest bank in the state, and the Grand Banking Hall at its entrance was a spectacular Art Deco shrine to the American dollar, a lot of which were flowing into the state at the time. (Two words: oil boom.)

It's still spectacular, which is probably why The Downtown Guy thinks it would be perfect for the nascent state lottery. Certainly it would be a great backdrop. I just wonder what they're going to do with all those Enterprise Center people who some day are supposed to be hanging around all day.

(Revised with some minor changes, another link, and a reduced level of sarcasm.)

The house presently known as Surlywood went on sale on a Tuesday and sold that Saturday (contract was agreed to on Sunday), which wasn't a record for Oklahoma City real estate, but certainly delighted the seller's agent, who didn't have to put in a whole lot of work, and the seller herself, who got pretty much every cent she asked for it.

Not everyone has this good fortune. In December I wrote about a house in The Greens that the owner was advertising, among other places, on the Web. Way out of my price range, and I wasn't looking to trade up anyway, but I thought the seller's Web site was sorta neat, and I figured the place would sell in a big hurry.

A hundred days later and still it's for sale, and the owner has enlisted one of the brand-name agencies to assist in the matter. I'll keep an eye open for a few more weeks, just because.

Michael Bates, riffing on this item, passes on the ultimate test of whether a neighborhood has good "walkability":

The nearest place is a c-store at 5050 North May. It doesn't require any crossing of major thoroughfares, at least from the blocks adjacent to mine, but both the streets that intersect there (May and 50th) have their slightly-scary aspects.

And come to think of it, the only thing I've ever bought there is gas; I have no idea whether they stock quiescently frozen confections.

Local historian Pendleton Woods is doing a three-part series for the Mid-City Advocate (which, alas, won't be on their Web site) about Oklahoma City's original amusement park, the now-mostly-forgotten Delmar Garden, once characterized as "the most fabulous amusement area west of the Mississippi River."

The Garden, built in 1902, had carnival-type rides, a 3000-seat theatre (expanded from 1200), an outdoor amphitheatre, a dance hall, a swimming pool, a racetrack, a baseball park, and its own scenic railway. The 140-acre site southwest of downtown was right on the North Canadian River, which both added to its beauty and contributed to its demise: the river in those days tended to flood, and flood waters brought mosquitoes. Statehood in 1907 brought one other problem: Prohibition, which forced the closing of the Garden's tavern. The park shut down in 1910 — the railway continued for a couple more years — and the Farmers Market (now being renovated) was built on a section of the site in 1928. Today nothing remains of the original Garden except the name, which persists on a street leading from Reno into State Fair Park. But you can still see an image: the third-base entrance into SBC Bricktown Ballpark was, I am told, designed to resemble the old pavilion at Delmar. The Downtown Guy has posted some picture postcards to give you an idea of what it was like back then.

(St. Louis, you say? Well, yes, the principals in Delmar — John Sinopoulo and Joseph Marre — basically swiped the idea from what they'd seen in St Louis County, including the name. I'd like to think they improved on it.)

W. H. Dunn was a landscape architect in Kansas City in the early 1900s, eventually becoming the Superintendent of Parks. His duties in Kansas City, however, apparently didn't prevent him from helping out other cities in need: in 1909, he developed the first official parks plan for Oklahoma City. One of the features in Dunn's plan was a boulevard to encircle the city, connecting regional parks in each quadrant. Not much happened on that front until 1930, when the boulevard was incorporated into The City Plan for Oklahoma City, and the process of acquiring rights of way began.

Grand Boulevard, as it was called, was never finished: a lot of non-contiguous sections were built, but the circle was never completed, and some of the areas intended for the circle were ultimately usurped for freeway use. Still, there's enough of it to make a day trip of it, and that's what I did, starting the circle at 12:00 and heading clockwise.

Northeast: The road begins, so to speak, at about 1500 NE 63rd Street, west of the National Cowboy Museum, heading south under Interstate 44 and then turning southeastward. The east side is largely undeveloped; the west side is residential. Grand crosses Martin Luther King Avenue at the 5400 block, where the name disappears in favor of "Remington Place," after the racetrack. On the far side of the track, on the way to the Softball Hall of Fame, Remington Place becomes NE 50th Street, and Grand slices off to the right, splitting the Lincoln Park golf courses. Past 36th, on the way to the Railway Museum and the OKNG, the road deteriorates; the last turnoff is 29th, which crosses under Interstate 35, and south of 29th it dead-ends. Grand picks up again at 23rd as a mostly-residential street on both sides of I-35; the eastern leg runs past Edwards Park and becomes the I-35 service road, ending at 10th, while the western leg veers off slightly to the west and becomes a divided road with a grassy median, which feeds into 10th and which dead-ends south of 10th, just beyond the I-35 southbound onramp.

Southeast: Grand reappears at 2800 East Reno and curves along for a couple of miles through an area largely devoted to light industry. East of the roadway is the South Grand Trail, for pedestrian and bicycle use; it jumps across the street on the way into Trosper Park as the circle turns back westward. (The Grand entrance into Trosper is no longer open to motor vehicles, perhaps to benefit trail users; motorists must enter on SE 29th.) Across I-35, Grand heads straight west to play its secondary role as 36th Street; just beyond the I-35 service road, Grand becomes a divided road again, and the trail runs down the median, where it will remain until Stiles, where the road narrows and the trail becomes essentially a sidewalk on the south side. This is an old working-class residential neighborhood: the houses are small, but most of them seem to be kept up.

Southwest: Once west of Santa Fe and into the southwest quadrant, Grand opens up into a divided road once more, and the trail returns to the median. This was a spiffy street in its time, running past Capitol Hill High School and its stadium, and it still looks pretty good today, considering its advanced age. About thirty years ago some of the street signs indicated both "SW 36th St" and "Grand Blvd"; I didn't see any of those around, and there are a couple of signs that read simply "36th St", but all the new signage says simply "Grand Blvd". At May Avenue, Grand becomes an access road into Woodson Park, which terminates at SW 33rd; the trail continues on for another mile and a half or so. Grand reappears at SW 27th on the west side of I-44 and continues northward to SW 15th, just east of the Dell campus.

Northwest: The northbound road out of State Fair Park, just east of I-44, becomes the eastern leg of Grand as it passes NW 10th Street, and it's one-way north, ending at NW 23rd. The western leg runs from Liberty Street, between 11th and 12th, to just north of 36th; it's one-way south except through Will Rogers Park. Everything is interrupted for 39th Street/Route 66. There are discontinuous segments east of the Lake Hefner Parkway between 40th and 44th, and between 45th Terrace and 46th; the road resumes at 50th and continues into the Integris Baptist Medical Center, then picks up again for a couple of blocks south of 63rd. On the west side of the Parkway, there's a stretch from 50th to Northwest Expressway. Another break, and then a single segment west of the Parkway from 65th to South Lake Hefner Drive; hang a right, and in a couple of blocks you're back on Grand, four lanes with a median, heading east. (There's a Grand Drive on the east side of the Parkway, in case you weren't confused enough.) And half a mile east of May, the Nichols Hills city limits beckon. Up to this point, the numbering system has sort of made sense, but once you pass Pennsylvania (2301 is on the corner), you're in the 6900 block heading southeast. At Woods Park the road splits, with residential strips on either side, while the main road runs down the center of the park. Single lanes return south of Sherwood Lane, and at 63rd Grand returns to Oklahoma City, crossing Western at 57th and going back to east-west numbering (that first block is the 1000s). The rest of the way parallels I-44, finally ending at Robinson Avenue.

The real question, I suppose, is "How Grand is it?" The neighborhoods vary about as widely as possible; the southside stretch is probably the closest to what the 1930 Plan called for, but the Nichols Hills segment commands by far the biggest bucks. And I'd hate to be delivering pizza on this road, at least until I'd learned every last section of it in my part of town. Still, even in its unfinishable state, it's something sort of unique, the parks fall into place where they're supposed to, and I was happy to blow three hours and a quarter-tank of gas trying to get the feel of it — especially since during those three hours, the station where I filled up at the start of the trip raised its price by six cents a gallon.

A mere 1,543 people turned out for the runoff for the District 2 seat on the Oklahoma City school board yesterday, in which Gail Vines defeated Gary Walker. At my precinct, evidently they had side bets on how many bodies would show up at the polls; somebody was saying "Well, we got our sixty" as I was leaving. (I was #58.)

Meanwhile, 3,430 people (more than ever before) showed up at this Web site yesterday, the vast majority of which were reading this page from the fall of 2003, presumably because the story contained therein ended this week.

Because, you know, sometimes things happen in my neck of the woods.

One of those things is the upgrading of the Target store at May and Northwest Distressway to Super status, for which the entrance has been moved to the southern end of the store. (The Office Depot store that used to occupy the north end of the building has relocated around the corner.) Next time I'm due for some Targeting — and it has to be fairly soon, because I have a 10-percent-off coupon I have to use sometime this month — I'll see what the inside looks like.

Speaking of the Distressway, Dub Richardson seems to have moved his Toyota store out of the little patch of Warr Acres that sticks up that far north and into newer quarters west of Council Road, fairly far out but not so far as Steve Bailey's Honda dealership. Commercial development beyond County Line Road hasn't happened yet, but it's bound to sooner or later.

And much work is being done on the northernmost stretch of Western Avenue in the city (between Memorial and 199th), suggesting that this is going to be the Next Big Corridor, and further blurring the lines between Oklahoma City and Edmond. The right-of-way is lined with massive tubes for utility use, and the road itself is being made over and in some places widened. The stretch of Western that runs through Edmond (north to about 220th/Coffee Creek) is still fairly rural-ish, but on the OKC side there's lots of housing, including what looked like half a dozen gated communities.

Sign at a cigar store on May: NICE ASHTON, BABY. Is this going to sell any actual cigars?

John Hendrickson, last heard from here back in February, favors us with another tale from the south side of the city:

A very fond memory of growing up in Capitol Hill was the amount of places a 'kid' could go on Friday &/or Saturday to dance. Capitol Hill Jr. High would have sock-hops following a few basketball games which were held on the basketball court. No street shoes allowed! Socks only, thus sock-hops. Mt. Saint Mary's did not have its own gym so it played basketball and held dances in the Sacred Heart School Gym. I don't think I ever attended a dance at CHHS. I am sure dances were held there but I do not know where or when.

For a young person growing-up in the 1960's love was found and lost near Robinson St. Just south of Grand Ave (36th street) on Robinson is the Capitol Hill Lions Center. At 7:00 p.m. the weekly dance in the bldg began. Why 7:00? At that time families had meals together at or near the same time each day. Home cooked from scratch meals. The first dances were held using a record player to play records we kids brought from home. Later on a jukebox played most of the new stuff and some of the earlier music. Might I add that there was no cost, all you had to do was make a selection and it played. Boys scanned girls and girls scanned boys. The idea I think was to locate the person to dance with through the night. You knew whether or not the person felt the same during slow dances. When you are in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade to dance with a girl so close that a piece of paper could not come between you and her head is resting on your shoulder while your cheek lays across her open cheek it is love. The events ended I believe by 9:30 or 10:00. Often you and your "find" went to different schools and you may never meet again so you savor in the smell of her perfume on your hand and shirt. Her hairspray lingers. But next Friday a new love might just be waiting.

Saturday night was for the IOOF Hall west of Robinson and on the south side of Commerce Street. To me and my family and friends Commerce was just called 25th St. The Hall was much the same as the Lions Club dances. The difference was that the females were strangers and you would probably never see them again.

WKY Channel 4 carried a local program fashioned after American Bandstand. The show was called the "Scene" hosted by media personality Ronnie Kaye. An old movie theater at SW 28th and Agnew (Yes! That is part of Capitol Hill also) had the seats removed and on the stage local bands would play and with an admission charge you could go in and dance your butt off. On some nights there would be a battle of the bands. Groups set up some times in different areas and take turns playing sets. Of all the dance halls this one I think lasted the longest.

Another point I would like to make is that only the IOOF was near home. Yet we walked to and from these places 99% of the time. We only asked for a ride if there was a downpour.

The Oklahoman's self-described "Anti-News Editor" Sally Allen has had it up to here with the squabbling in Oklahoma County government:

Allen's proffered solution is also anatomically correct:

Bring a micrometer and a pair of Don Alverso's tweezers while you're at it.

Two new faces on the City Council starting today — well, actually, Pete White has been here once before, in the 1980s — and their constituencies couldn't be more different.

White's Ward 4 occupies the southeastern corner of the city. In the nearer areas, where industrial and residential development often took place side by side, an artifact of the old oil patch, neither the businesses nor the homes are doing particularly well. Farther east, you get into traditionally rural areas which are having to adjust, not always happily, to being inside city limits. And there's Lake Stanley Draper, which someday might be a destination but right now is mostly just a reservoir.

Way out northwest is Patrick Ryan's Ward 8, which includes some fairly upscale areas and some former farmland that's being converted into suburbia. The major problems out here are twofold: bad section-line roads in the outlying areas and horrendous traffic in the developed areas.

City Council of late has not had a reputation for internecine warfare, and I don't expect one to develop with the arrival of the new guys; I suspect the limiting factor in bringing improvements to these wards will be, not Council opposition, but budgetary constraints.

Water Taxi of Oklahoma will start its river-transit service in the summer of 2006 with four 50-foot catamarans, which will carry passengers between the Reno-Meridian area and downtown. Unlike the seasonal Bricktown Canal service, these boats are expected to run 12 months a year.

Longtime residents will remember when the most plausible vehicle for negotiating the river was a lawn tractor.

I'm westbound from what used to be the Classen Circle, and out of four cars in the left-turn lane, three of them are '32 Fords with paint deeper than the Marianas Trench.

Which can mean only one of one thing: it's a National Street Rod Association event, specifically the Southwest Street Rod Nationals, this weekend in the Okay City. And registration was at the Courtyard by Marriott, just west of the ex-Circle.

The rodders are invariably well-behaved, say local officials, but locals apparently use the arrival of the classic cars to engage in such antisocial activities as "cruising" and street racing.

What makes the street racing particularly heinous is that it's along Meridian between Reno and SW 29th, an extremely busy stretch of road. The police are increasing their presence in the area, just in case.

If I mention in passing that this neighborhood, like so many others, has a fair number of American elm trees, many people will ask right off: "How are they doing?"

"Not great, but well enough," is what I usually say, and then we remonstrate for a few moments about the miserable blight that so easily fells these magnificent trees.

Some of them, anyway.

The nineteenth of April, 1995, a few minutes past nine. What used to be the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, between NW 4th and NW 5th, is now two parts shell, one part rubble. At this point, nobody knows how many people were lost. And nobody notices the American elm tree across 5th, its bark blackened by the blast, its trunk full of glass shards and splashed with asphalt at its base, its branches weighed down by the flying chunks of metal they caught. Its few remaining leaves, though, are still green.

And they stayed that way through a hot Oklahoma summer. As plans for the National Memorial began to take shape, the tree still stood. People came to the bombing site with cans of water for the tree. The plans were redrawn to include the old elm. Someone — no one knows for sure who — named it the Survivor Tree.

Came the spring of 1996. A few green leaves, then a few more. Mark Bays, an urban forester from the state Department of Agriculture, came up with a plan to remove the concrete from the area around the tree's base. A tree service reconditioned the soil, pruned damaged limbs, collected seeds. Over the next four years, a support system for the tree was developed.

Nobody knows for sure how long the Survivor Tree will, well, survive. It's been given the best of care, including treatments to repel the blight, and it's an integral part of today's National Memorial, insuring that it won't be forgotten. But this mute witness to the terrible tragedy of the nineteenth of April has brothers and sisters and cousins all over the city, and I believe that the strength of one, by some genetic anomaly, by the grace of God, by something, somehow resides in them all.

Ten years have passed since the bombing.

For me, there was disbelief; then there was cynicism.

Perhaps now there is understanding. I hope.

On a less-somber note, the Festival of the Arts begins today in downtown Oklahoma City. Between now and Sunday, about 700,000 people will pour into the streets to see the sights, hear the sounds, and chow down on entirely too much food. Admission to the spectacle is free, though last year's excursion, including parking, noshing, and an actual art purchase, inflicted a $150 hit upon my wallet. Your mileage (and millage, I suppose) may vary.

Some of what's being said about today and what it meant to those who said it.

See-Dubya, Patterico's Pontifications:

Robyn, Shutterblog.com:

Frederick Ochsenhirt, A Bluegrass Blog:

Chase McInerney, Cutting to the Chase:

Don Danz, Danz Family:

Mike, Mike's Noise:

What I said last year:

If you have a blog post about the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath, feel free to TrackBack to this post.

A sampling of quotes from yesterday's memorial service downtown:

And the National Memorial presented its first Reflections of Hope Award to the Voice of Afghan Women radio station in Kabul. The awards were created to honor "a living person or group whose extraordinary work has significantly impacted a community, state or nation" and "exemplifies that hope not only survives but also thrives in the wake of political violence." The station (at 91.6 MHz) first signed on in March 2003. The award includes a cash prize of $10,000.

Dan Lovejoy has something to ask:

This question has been previously answered, by, of all people, me:

Satanic toothpaste, of course, is the AntiCrest. (Fedora reangling: Lileks.)

ODOT says the rerouted Crosstown Expressway section of I-40, assuming Congress passes the necessary funding, will open in the fall of 2008, and the movers and shakers are pondering what's going to happen when downtown is no longer bisected by the Interstate.

Which, if you ask me, is a little silly, since they're not removing the old road, only downgrading it to a boulevard. The things they could have done south of the Crosstown, they could have done earlier; the change in the freeway route merely makes them easier to contemplate.

And I'm still vexed about the destruction of the Union Station railyard, which insures that if they ever do decide to build a passenger-rail system in the city, it will cost a whole lot more, since they will have to recreate all that infrastructure from scratch. There are philosophical reasons to dismiss rail transit — mainly, almost all such systems built recently are heavily subsidized because they don't earn back their costs in fares — but you could scrap the bus system for the same reasons, and nobody (well, maybe your friendly neighborhood hard-core libertarian) is arguing for discontinuing the buses. (Chris? Jacqueline?)

On the upside, this further enhances the reputation of downtown Oklahoma City as a place where things are happening, which is a few steps up from its immediate post-Pei Plan status as the Land of the Living Dead.

How successful is the Festival of the Arts? People were willingly parking half a mile to the west, despite this area's reputation as Scary Person Central. (The $3 tab instead of the usual $5 didn't hurt either.) Brisk winds didn't discourage anyone either, from the looks of things.

I escaped from downtown up Broadway, mostly to see if they'd installed Chase signage at Bank One (they had) and if they'd started work on the restoration of the Skirvin (they had). Broadway was closed at NW 4th — I'd forgotten that this was the terminus for the Marathon — so I ducked back down Dean A. McGee, which between Broadway and Robinson now seems to be an empty concrete gulch, just about the last one remaining downtown.

Back up Walker to see the roundabout at Plaza Court, which is now open, and well, it seems awfully small. Then again, it's not supposed to have multiple lanes; you can't just barrel your way in if there's traffic. It was probably wise to put a stop sign at 9th and Walker, forcing drivers to slow down and look at the darn thing.

The First Commercial Bank building in the Asian District, with its vaguely pagoda-esque architecture, is just about finished, and it teeters right on the edge of self-parody. (And therefore it fits perfectly with the Milk Bottle, the Gold Dome, and other close-at-hand examples from the WTF? School.)

And I came home up May, where the Bank One branch just north of 36th was getting a fresh Chase sign. On a Saturday afternoon, yet. I get the distinct impression that the locals (so to speak) are looking forward to the imminent arrival of their New York overlords.

The Neighborhood Association at Gatewood has adopted a little wedge of frontage on Classen south of NW 18th, where they will build a small memorial to the Oklahoma City streetcar.

Before statehood, there was a trolley stop at this intersection; the new Interurban Park, named for the trolley line, will incorporate simulated tracks, a silhouette of a vintage streetcar, and a marker to explain the importance of all this to people who've never seen a trolley car before, or who think it's a retro-designed bus.

And who knows? This might conceivably be the first step toward the return of some sort of rail transit: reminding people that this city grew up with trolley lines.

The city is getting ready to open up the Crosstimbers Motorized Off-Road Vehicle Facility on a square-mile section west of Lake Stanley Draper.

The facility sits between SE 119th and SE 134th, east of Midwest Blvd. and west of Douglas Blvd. Draper Concessions (near the marina, 799-0870) will handle day permits. An area for non-motorized off-road vehicles has been set aside east of SE 89th and Post Road.

The Downtown Guy wonders if the new "aggressive panhandling" ordinance is making any difference:

What's "aggressive"? This is the legal definition (§30-430, Oklahoma City Municipal Code):

At least we're not proposing to license beggars.

Monday, the county's new Metro II parking garage opens at Hudson and Dean A. McGee. Eight stories tall, it holds about 1000 vehicles.

But not yours or mine. Every space in Metro II is reserved, either by local firms buying blocks, or by individuals paying $90 a month. (You can still park at the older garage, one block south; in fact, there's actually some space open now.)

It's rather a long distance — 22 miles — between the west end of the Turner Turnpike at I-35 in north Oklahoma City and the next gate, in Wellston.

Construction will begin next year on a new gate that splits the distance, to be built on Hogback Road, which passes under the Turner east of the Indian Meridian south of NE 164th Street.

Still undetermined is the amount of toll to be charged; for passenger cars, the 22-mile stretch to Wellston costs a buck, minus a nickel if you use PikePass.

Telephone numbers that ten years ago were rendered as something like 555-2368 are now occasionally appearing with a dot instead of the dash: 555.2368. (This is even weirder-looking when the area code is included: 405.555.2368.) It's not a problem, though, since you don't dial the punctuation anyway.

Now comes a new wrinkle. A local property-management company is rendering in-between addresses in decimal form: they have, for instance, a 1-bedroom apartment, not at 221½ NW 36th Street (not its real street), but at 221.5. This could be troublesome, especially since the Postal Service has what it calls a "standard format" for just about every address to which it delivers, and the standard for this isn't 221.5, or even 221½, but "221 1/2". (Most of your automation systems don't support the ½ character, and the Postal Service loves automation systems: they make junk mail third-class mail profitable.)

When I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a dealer in antiques at the east end of St. Michael's Alley, on the other side of 2. They duly reported their address as 0. The USPS can handle that, at least.

And some days, the bear eats you. From OKCBusiness:

So the Legionnaires will go to Milwaukee, because:

Hotels in the Reno/Meridian area were more competitive, but they're five to seven miles from the convention center.

We can argue that okay, we're new at competing for top-tier events, we haven't figured out the fine points yet. But we can only play that card once.

(Via The Downtown Guy.)

Over the weekend I mentioned the failure of the city to land the American Legion convention in 2010 at least partially because some people — specifically, the downtown hotel operators — refused to yield on their room rates.

If this Capital of the New Century stuff is going to catch on, the powers that be are going to have to realize that they're still babes in the woods at this level of competition. Mistakes will be made. There's one hard lesson to learn, and everyone who's in the business of promoting this city is going to have to learn it: you can't have everything your way.

A professional street-skating exhibition planned for the Mat Hoffman Action Sports Park down on the river may be moving to Edmond instead because Oklahoma City insists on enforcing a helmet rule on the pros, despite the markedly-lower risk presented by the style of skating involved.

Repeat after me, Parks Commission: you can't have everything your way. Nobody is going to believe that this town has anything to offer if everything that is offered comes with strings attached.

What will we miss out on next?

You don't remember Carlton Cole Magee, but you almost certainly have seen his invention (U.S. Patent #2,118,318, granted in May 1938).

Some years earlier, Carl Magee had wound up on the traffic committee of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, and one of the problems on his plate was the tendency of people who worked downtown to use up the available parking spaces, leaving few or none for retail customers.

Magee's solution was both elegantly simple and incredibly annoying, at least at first: the city would install meters of his design alongside the streets, which would collect a small fee in exchange for a short period of time. The very first parking meter went into service on 16 July 1935; Park-O-Meter, a firm partly owned by Magee, started up shortly thereafter.

There's no doubt that Magee understood the revenue potential of his little box on a pole: his patent application specifies that the device is for "measuring the ... use of parking or other space, for the use of which it is desirous an incidental charge be made upon a time basis."

Oklahoma City is currently upgrading its downtown parking meters, which gives The Downtown Guy an idea:

Works for me. I suspect that people's irritation with meters will subside, at least temporarily, when they see that very first meter in action.

Incidentally, POM Incorporated, descended from the original Park-O-Meter company, still makes parking meters — in Russellville, Arkansas.

(Ronald B. Luttrell II, who died in 2000, was working on a book about the history of the parking meter; I have borrowed liberally from his notes, some of which are collected at The Parking Meter Page. A few minor changes have been made since the original post.)

Saw this on the woefully-underused Oklahoma City craigslist:

I am somewhat surprised to hear that Sonic hasn't made it to Portland, Oregon yet. And no doubt some people are surprised that it's possible to miss a place like this, especially if you're twenty-four years old; their reaction is closer to this.

On the other hand, I expect some people to be surprised that Oklahoma City has a craigslist, even though I told you back in February, and I was hardly the first to notice it.

San Francisco, says Joel Kotkin, is an ephemeral place, a city devoted to "stylish living" above all else:

And its political climate, says Kotkin, runs "from left-liberal to left-lunatic," which would ordinarily suggest a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth over job losses — 13 percent in the last five years — and recent declines in "diversity," because urban ethnics can no longer afford to live there. Instead, San Francisco worries about shopping bags and the possibility that a person addressing the Board of Supervisors might commit a verbal faux pas.

For some inscrutable reason, this sort of circus is being held up as a role model for the rest of us. Kotkin reports:

You might think, or I might, that if Oklahoma City really wanted to attract gay people, the city would have mounted a campaign against State Question 711 last year. And besides, however popular Dr Florida's notions may be these days, they seldom translate into actual economic success.

Some of our "emerging professionals" bewail the fact that Oklahoma City doesn't seem to be transitioning into a vacationland for lawyers in love. Right now, I'm more interested in whether they can keep the sewer lines from backing up.

(Via Matt Rosenberg in not-always-delusional Seattle.)

A couple of weeks ago, a local auction house put up a banner at Harper's Sinclair station at NW 63rd and May, announcing that the property would be sold in June.

What I didn't notice was that Harper was no longer posting gasoline prices, which at the self-service pumps had been consistently one cent below those of the Shell station across the street. Turns out that Harper's was no longer selling gas; the service bays, which are still open five days a week, will close before Memorial Day.

Jim Harper has been running this station since 1957; once it's out of his hands, he and his wife are going to hit the road in an RV.

Two weeks from tomorrow, Oklahoma City will auction off the old Downtown Library building at 131 Dean A. McGee. The city has set a minimum bid of $950,000, and The Downtown Guy thinks they'll get it:

I think I'd miss the old Fidelity (now Bank of Oklahoma) drive-in: when it was built half a century ago, it was a model for the way these things ought to be done, and it still looks pretty good today. On the other hand, there's a real question of whether you can put up a big-enough structure on the existing library lots: the library itself was only about 64,000 square feet, which wouldn't allow for much in the way of residences (since you'd presumably need an adjacent parking facility), and while downtown retail is certainly something to be desired, the 100 block of Dean A. McGee (or the 400 block of Robinson) is not going to be the first place anyone looks for it.

One thing's for sure, though: we don't need any more office space downtown, at least right this minute.

Update: One bid received, below the reserve price: the city will now try to sell the building outright.

Tuesday night at the City Council meeting, City Manager Jim Couch will report on the Pothole Posse, which has been working overtime since spring to repair some of the more egregious gaps in local pavement.

This statement in the original press release perturbed me somewhat:

Four hundred potholes require forty tons of asphalt? It takes 200 pounds of I Can't Believe It's Not Tar!™ to fill just one of the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire along 50th between Penn and May?

Here's what the City Manager's report says:

Which is, by gum, 198 lb 5 oz per hole.

Evidently I don't know my asphalt from a hole in the road.

I haven't done a lot of Spottings lately, mostly due to the pressures of what we laughingly call Other Things, but there's still plenty going on. Bricktown traffic was unusually heinous for a hot Saturday afternoon; judging by the parking distribution, I'm guessing the major contributor was Sith happening at Harkins.

There was a blurb in the Mid-City Advocate this week about the new bank branch in the Asian District — yes, it does have a multilingual staff — which got me to thinking about the possibility of ghettoization: are we boxing our ethnic communities into neat little zones?

But perhaps I needn't have worried. A couple of weeks ago, the Walgreens at 50th and May put up some signage in Vietnamese; today I saw Spanish signs at a laundromat on NW 23rd in the south end of Bethany. Whatever boundaries we might imagine, they don't actually exist.

There was a little clothing store on 23rd east of May, which has recently relocated to a space just west of Portland. Their old marquee, however, remains, and it still asks: DO U LISTEN?

And while we're speaking of May, there's a new restaurant going in, replacing the short-lived Uschina buffet, to be named for its location at the light at 57th. Technically, this is half-true: it's at a light, and it's north of 56th, but the intersection is actually United Founders Boulevard. (And it's just as well; were it at 59th, a truly hellish crossover, nobody would ever get into the place.)

(Update, 1 am: At least part of the crunch in Bricktown was the Redhawks game, for which over 10,000 tickets were sold. The Birds lost to Salt Lake, 9-1.)

The schedule is up for this year's deadCENTER Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday, 9 June. It's the fifth year for deadCENTER, and over 100 films have been selected for inclusion.

What? You didn't know we had a film festival? Sheesh.

Urban thoroughfares in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area are the 10th worst in the nation, says The Road Information Program. Tulsa's are a smidgen less horrible, at 18th; the absolute worst, says TRIP, are in Kansas City.

The complete report is here [link requires Adobe Reader].

The rumblings began, I think, with Bass Pro.

The sweetheart deal that the city struck with Bass Pro Shops to locate a store on the edge of Lower Bricktown came in for some criticism, which largely subsided after a while and the store started producing revenue close to projections. Still, it's Bass Pro, which caters to guys in flannel shirts who might own rifles and think sitting in the middle of the lake with a line over the side is fun, and this just irks the sort of young trendy types who believe that Bricktown ought to be their own private preserve, a row of bars, upscale shops and more bars, who aspire to have Bricktown become the local equivalent of Dallas' West End or Deep Ellum and worry that any development of which they do not approve is a sign of creeping Lubbockization. The last, or at least next-to-last, straw was the hint that John Q. Hammons Hotels was contemplating dropping its plan for an Embassy Suites in Bricktown and replacing it with a presumably less-prestigious Residence Inn. Good God, this is the sort of thing they do in the (gasp!) suburbs!

Not that this mindset is limited to this part of the world, as Andrea Harris knows perfectly well:

I bring this up because this is the opening day of the Paseo Arts Festival, and while this is a quintessential "urban" event, it's worth remembering that the Paseo, now an established artists' district, started out as a shopping center back in 1929.

Cities don't always grow and develop in the directions we'd like. Stores close here and open there; neighborhoods rise and fall. Official proclamations have little or no effect: there's nothing to stop someone from opening a Mexican restaurant in the Asian District. If your biggest fear is that you'll take a date to an upscale club in Bricktown and you'll run into a bunch of tourists from Woodward on their way to Toby Keith's, perhaps you need to rethink your definition of fear.

(Update, 10:45 pm: The Downtown Guy reprints this screed, and notes: "Everything I've heard about the Embassy Suites ... that is being downsized to a Residence Inn [is] because John Q. Hammons couldn't get a deal to build a garage across the street." I can believe that.)

Well, this is depressing: the monorail at State Fair Park is being dismantled.

Apparently maintenance costs are soaring, ridership has been decreasing, and the train will just get in the way of the scheduled renovations of the park. The train itself is supposed to be auctioned off next week.

Then again, Matt Deatherage noted last year:

The monorail was built in 1964 for the city's 75th anniversary, more or less simultaneously with the development of Fourteen Flags Plaza.

Oklahoma City's Downtown Airpark, across the river from the west side of downtown, is apparently shutting down: the company's offices, on site and at the Clarence Page Airport on the city's far west side, have been closed after 58 years of boom and, more recently, bust.

For the time being, landings and takeoffs will continue, though neither maintenance nor fuel will be available on site.

This could be a blow to the ongoing development along the Oklahoma River, just to the north: access for general aviation could have been a major asset. On the other hand, the land itself might be worth more being used for something else.

Well, an answer, anyway. Developer Grant Humphreys has a plan for the eastern edge of the Flatirons District, east of downtown and north of the Deep Deuce area: Block 42 will incorporate about thirty upscale residences — 1560 to 2728 square feet — at prices averaging around $270,000.

This might well fit into the Master Plan for The Triangle, as proposed by a group of developers. And with the demand for downtown housing projected to grow substantially in the next decade, Block 42 is coming along at the right time; assuming final approval by the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority within 60 days, Humphreys says the first units could be ready next summer.

Still: two hundred seventy K? I know that they're wanting to attract the young urban professional type (I'm trying my best to avoid the Y word), but I suspect that these homes will likely go to more settled folk, possibly connected to the medical-research complexes on the other side of I-235. And anyone willing to trade off floor space for view can buy in at The Classen for $150-200K.

An anonymous observation from craiglist:

Must be Choctaw. Midwest City is even blacker than OKC (19.5 versus 15.4 percent, per city-data.com). I guess some people are, you should pardon the expression, easily spooked.

And anyway, there are plenty of streets I think are scarier than 23rd. NE 10th, before it peters out west of Martin Luther King, often gives me the creeps, but then the last near-death experience I had in a car was along 10th, so take this with large quantities of sodium chloride.

NE 4th, late at night — which was my commute back in the middle 80s when I lived in the northeast quadrant and worked swing shift downtown — has a sort of not-even-vultures-will-live-here quality to it, and it still has EPA Superfund sites on it, making it seem even worse than 10th, which used to have one (the old junkyard east of Bryant), which since has been capped and taken off the list.

You can hardly blame Dan Dill. At the end of 2004, he snapped up Heritage Park Mall for $4.1 million; a brace of California investors has now taken it off his hands and given him a tidy profit for the brief period he owned it.

The $7.8 million price is still below the appraised value of the mall; tenants are still waiting to see if anything improves. I'm starting to think it may be too late, myself: the focus of new activity in Midwest City is far to the south, with a not-quite-Super Target, a Lowe's, and a Kohl's all taking spots on the north side of SE 29th east of Air Depot, and a new Sheraton hotel near I-40 and Sooner Road. None of these is within two miles of the mall.

Well, there's the new Wal-Mart Supercenter at NE 23rd and Douglas, but that's even farther away.

Last week, I posted this business about one particular local mindset that perplexed me: the notion that the Bricktown entertainment district, rather than being allowed to evolve, should be given a sharp push — presumably according to some, um, "intelligent design" — in the direction of young and hip and "urban."

The Downtown Guy brought this notion in front of his readers, and the discussion there has gotten interesting. A few excerpts from his commenters, very slightly edited by me, and my responses thereto:

Nothing at all wrong with originality. But I'm not at all persuaded that originality, in and of itself, is necessarily an unalloyed boon; the farther out on the weirdness asymptote you go, the smaller an audience you can expect. While I'm not at all disinclined to see edgy and unorthodox developments in a town that has damned few of them, I believe that these things take root and grow on their own: you can't really direct the process from outside.

Apart from my gun-jumping, this neatly encapsulates the issue here: Bricktown's success is due to its ability to draw people who think of themselves as suburbanites in addition to those who consider themselves urban in orientation. It's an uneasy balance, and maintaining that balance is, I think, more important than trying to push the district a notch or two toward either side.

I've been to Waterloo Records in Austin; I spent rather a lot of money last time I was there, in fact. The closest music outlet to Bricktown is a CD Warehouse in Automobile Alley, and while I'm glad it's there, it's simply not in the same league. I don't see Neimans or Nordstrom making any moves in this direction, though Saks has a Tulsa store (in Utica Square). Some greater restaurant variety would indeed be welcomed; right now, if I'm thinking dinner date, I'm more likely to go for Western Avenue than Bricktown.

It has. (I started at UT Austin in 1969, and Sixth Street was already moving towards funkiness.) And time is always a factor: it took about thirty years to turn a decaying uptown corridor into the Asian District. Still, I think "upscale" is, well, "scalable," if only because having a great deal of disposable income is simplified by not having to spend an ungodly amount of money on housing, one of the major draws of this part of the country. (Yeah, you probably won't earn as much, either, but the Feds will be taking less away, which surely helps.)

No argument from me.

And, to close out, something I probably should have said, but didn't:

I'll drink to that. Even in a Bricktown sports bar.

The Oklahoma Gazette's OKG Free Classifieds, one has to assume, is an effort to fill a niche that in most metro areas is occupied by craigslist.

It might actually be working, too; last time I looked there were 200 postings to the OKC edition of craigslist, but 371 to OKG Free.

Still, there's plenty of room for both, I think.

Macaulay Culkin, busted last year on I-44 near the Kelley Avenue exit, entered a guilty plea today to misdemeanor charges of possession of controlled substances — Xanax and marijuana — and was given a one-year deferred sentence on each of the two charges. Culkin also paid $940 in court costs.

Culkin and friend Brent Tabisel were driving to Los Angeles from New York — Tabisel was at the wheel of their rental car — when they were pulled over for doing 70 mph in a 60-mph zone (yeah, right) and making an improper lane change.

There is no shortage of fire stations in the central part of Oklahoma City, but the growth of the Bricktown district and points to the north and east has suggested to City Council that maybe there ought to be one more; this week, the Council has decided to hire an architect and start the ball rolling for a Bricktown fire station.

Existing fire stations near downtown:
No. 1, 820 NW 5th
No. 4, 100 SW 4th
No. 5, north end of Winans Park (NW 22nd and Broadway)
No. 6, 620 NE 8th

A police substation is under development at 219 East Main (the old Rock Island depot), replacing the temporary location on Sheridan near the canal.

A chap named The Old Downtown Guy can be seen occasionally commenting on the blog of the presumably younger Downtown Guy, and TDG the Elder was accorded space to write a post of his own, which I excerpt here:

Links added by me. The marketplace does work: if there's enough of a demand, eventually there will be a supply. TDG the Elder understands: