Saturday spottings (early withdrawal)

Almost all ATMs around these parts are designed for auto, not foot, traffic, though I'm not above walking through a drive-through lane. The one I usually walk through, though, managed to escape my attention today at the supermarket — it's on a pad in the parking lot, and I didn't park particularly close by — which meant that I found myself down to $13 with raffle tickets to buy. 42nd and Treadmill, you see, is having a charity fundraiser, proceeds to go to a needy family, in which the one actual prize to be won is a paid vacation day. Dinner was likely to run $7 or $8 (wound up at $8.12), so padding out the wallet was something I had to do this weekend.

One reason I walk through those lanes is the placement of those ghastly yellow pillars that are supposed to keep you from driving into the machinery: if you clear them sufficiently to avoid shearing off your outside mirrors, you'd better have the reach of Yao Ming, or you're never going to reach the buttons. Most of my Evil Downtown Bank's machines are so designed, and I take a 34 sleeve, so I had to plan this trip carefully. Eventually it occurred to me that I'd never used one of the Evil Downtown Bank's machines located downtown, so off I went to the middle of things, where I discovered, to my delight, a nice, wide lane and easy access and no one in front of me making six futile efforts to talk the cruel, heartless bastard of a machine out of a lousy twenty bucks, fercrissake. I will have to use this machine more often, since I can almost always think up some excuse to go downtown.

Northeast 3rd Street is closed just east of E. K. Gaylord; you can get to Untitled (Artspace) and an auto-repair shop in the first block, but that's it. Beyond the barriers lies a construction zone, where the Brownstones at Maywood Park are going up. This is the first phase of development in the area unofficially known as the Triangle District; the Brownstones will fill in the space from NE 2nd to NE 4th, between the elevated BNSF tracks and Walnut. (The actual Maywood "Park" will be right in the middle, at NE 3rd and Oklahoma.) I noticed a sign promoting BuildBlock, which turns out to be an insulating concrete form, hollow foam blocks stacked up in the appropriate wall form, reinforced with steel rebar, and then filled with concrete. This system is being pitched as "earth-friendly", and it certainly looks impressive on paper.

The original Maywood addition dates back to the earliest days of Oklahoma City, and includes the little circle now known as Founders' Plaza at Stiles Park. Today's I-235 slashes diagonally through the middle of Maywood, which no doubt inspired the Triangle name. The Brownstones have three floor plans, each named for a city father: the, um, budget version is the Shartel, which is 2½ stories and covers just under 2400 square feet. This is way more room than I need, but it's about as small as you can get and still attract actual families (actual families who can afford a $600k home, anyway) these days.

More modest activity is going on in Midtown, where Greg Banta and company have started work on their newly-acquired properties on NW 10th. These should be pretty sharp when they're finished, and perhaps will be affordable by mere mortals.

I wondered, taking I-40 west out of downtown, if maybe, with the massive changes that have taken place in the city over the last decade or so, we're getting a trifle impatient: there's so much still to come. Perhaps we're forgetting how far we've come. (I was going to do a review of the new Steve Lackmeyer/Jack Money book, OKC Second Time Around, which remembers the Bad Old Days in great detail, but Doug Loudenback has already made a compelling case for it.) But I'm still persuaded that, with the possible exception of the actual 1889 Land Run itself, this is the most exciting time ever in Oklahoma City, and if a few things don't quite fall according to schedule, well, we'll get over it.

Posted at 6:30 PM to City Scene