This town is not exactly world-famous for its “green” initiatives, but occasionally something happens here to gladden the hearts of treehuggers:

Bicycle lanes included in downtown Oklahoma City’s Project 180 could get a workout in short order by users of a shared-bike program called Spokies.

The program should launch this spring, Jennifer Gooden, the city’s sustainability director, told the Oklahoma City Council on Tuesday. Federal grant money paid for 95 bicycles to be placed at six stations downtown.

How much will it cost to borrow a bike? That hasn’t been decided yet:

People will be able to use automatic kiosks to check out bikes. The cost hasn’t been determined, but there will be plans to suit everyone from a one-time user who needs a bicycle for a half-hour to someone who lives downtown and rides the bikes often.

With downtown residency on the rise, this may actually be an idea whose time has come. (The one bicycle shop in Automobile Alley — once there were two — is actually flourishing these days.)

Does this sound at all familar?

Most streets were multilane one-way thoroughfares, and many curbs had sacrificed their parallel parking for additional travel lanes. Bicycle facilities were nonexistent, and traffic sped too fast for bikes to share the road — or for pedestrians to feel comfortable on sidewalks — as oversized lanes encouraged highway speeds. Street trees were in short supply, and most intersections had overlong turning lanes, further discomfiting pedestrians.

Yep. Downtown Oklahoma City, prior to Project 180, which is now being trimmed back a bit due to cost overruns. (For an overview, see Planning, the magazine of the American Planning Association, May/June ’11; the Jeff Speck article excerpted here is available as a PDF.)

The cost issues suggest that smaller-scale makeovers might be in order, and Nancy Friedman’s Word of the Week seems to have arrived at precisely the right time:

Parklet: A small city park created by replacing one or two parking spaces, or an unused bus stop, with a platform on which planters and other amenities are installed. The parklet is publicly sanctioned but constructed and maintained with private funds.

If your reaction is “What? Give up parking spaces?” you should know that the birthplace of the parklet, San Francisco, is legendarily short of parking, but they’re going ahead with the concept, with the proviso that these little intrusions into the asphalt are still considered experimental:

Technically temporary, they’re designed to slip through city bureaucracy. Permits last one year, at which point the parklet is reevaluated at a public hearing. “It’s representative of a new kind of city planning: full-scale prototypes and iterative, changeable design,” says Matthew Passmore of the firm Rebar, which has designed and built three parklets so far.

And if there’s one concept we’re trying to learn in downtown OKC, it’s how to work variations on the “standard” urban themes. A parklet or two will elicit smiles from our growing number of pedestrians, and will probably annoy a couple of people who have to walk another whole quarter of a block to park. Were I in the Urban Redevelopment division, I think I’d like those odds.

It was established long ago that Steve Lackmeyer’s favorite song is not Jimmy Webb’s Los Angeles epic “MacArthur Park,” as evidenced by this departure from his usual subject matter in order to bash one version thereof.

He was clearly not anticipating this response from the estimable GenghisKDuck on its applicability to Oklahoma City:

This would be an excellent name/theme song for the new park that’s going to be somewhere downtown there. I can see this all coming together. It’s like a subliminal park thing that was just kind of floating around that you probably weren’t aware of. A kind of visionary thing that hadn’t really gelled.

Think of it as a sideways method of honoring Jimmy Webb, who hails from these parts: he was born in Elk City. And while it’s not my favorite Webb song — for purely personal reasons, this is — the only real objection I can make to bestowing the MacArthur name on the new downtown park is to point out the fact that MacArthur Boulevard doesn’t come within six miles of it. Then again, anyone who’s figured out that Park Avenue and Park Place are a mile apart can presumably deal with that.

So far, Steve seems to be taking it well.

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula was first settled in 1781, and it’s pretty obvious what the primary language was.

When the Americans took over, they ordered a new map of the town, starting with Calle Principal — Main Street — and heading westward. (The east, located in a floodplain, was settled later.)

The next block is Calle Primavera/Spring Street, which is also still there. Which is not to say that all the names of downtown L.A. streets are translations from the original Spanish:

Going west to east were the three virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity. On the [1849] map, they are labeled Calle de las Flores (Faith had already morphed to Flower, supposedly due to the beautiful flowers on Elysian Hills visible from there), Calle de Esperanza (Hope Street) and Calle de Caridad. This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to “live on Charity,” so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.

Local OKC historians may remember that we used to have a Grand Avenue, the official dividing line between North and South. But before it was Grand Avenue, it was Clarke Street, and it was literally the dividing line between two distinct settlements, eventually merged. (For years and years, north-south streets had a “jog” at that point, because the two townships saw no reason to align their plats.) The Grand name eventually gave way to Sheridan, perhaps to avoid confusion with Grand Boulevard, which was supposed to circle the city well away from downtown.

(L. A. story via Nancy Friedman.)

After dawdling a bit, City Council this morning finally got around to Ed Shadid’s proposal to extend the city’s nondiscrimination protection to gay employees and applicants; it passed 7-2.

There being eight actual members of Council, this means that Mayor Cornett must have voted in favor of the measure. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting him to:

On page 4 of Hard News Online’s Pride Guide [2006], there are welcome letters from Jim Roth (District 1 County Commissioner), John Whetsel (County Sheriff), Sam Bowman (Council Ward 2) and Ann Simank (Council Ward 6). Conspicuously absent: Mayor Cornett. Says an Editor’s Note: “Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett did not respond to Hard News Online’s request for a welcome letter to be included in this Pride Guide.”

Then again, Cornett was running for Congress at that time (he lost), and it is apparently de rigueur for Republican candidates in this state to exhibit some sort of nose-upturned aversion to Teh Ghey. Oklahoma City Council, however, is “nonpartisan,” kinda sorta.

Among the citizens at Council this morning was Steve Vineyard, pastor of Windsor Hills Baptist Church, who is quoted as saying that half of all murders in large cities are committed by gay people. Um, Reverend Steve, I hate to break it to you, but you don’t acquire expertise on the subject of homosexuality by pulling statistics out of your ass.

User “Just the facts” at OKCTalk predicts that the Deep Deuce apartments will go condo within five years or so:

By then they will have made back most of the construction cost and by selling them they can escape the long-term maintenance costs. The buyers then pick up a unit with a great location at a reasonable price. This is how it works in an urban environment. The reason it doesn’t work out on Penn and 150th is because the location sucks. That is why apartments and subdivision built on the outer fringe look like bombs went off after 15 to 20 years. The whole concept of sprawl is nothing more than operation Rolling Ghetto. When you build towards the center you run out of expansion room so properties don’t fall into disrepair.

I’m not so sure about that last sentence, but nothing guarantees that a “good” neighborhood will stay that way: if you flee to Point B because Point A was going down the tubes, odds are you’ll be packing up and heading for Point C before too long. (In the context of Oklahoma City, Penn and 150th is about Point D-point-five.)

This is perhaps another manifestation of the Urban Donut Hypothesis, as discussed here a couple of years ago.

Oklahoma City wants a new police HQ/municipal court — no surprise there, the old one is way past its prime — and one proposed scheme to pay for it is to jack up the court costs for speeding tickets:

Speeding tickets have a lower court cost associated with them than other moving violations, and the cost hasn’t risen in eight years… The bump by $11 would bring in an extra $500,000 a year and save the city interest payments that would be associated with some of the other payment options.

Not that I have a problem with this, particularly, inasmuch as the amount they’ve made from my (lack of) moving violations in the past three decades is right at $0, but half a million dollars from an eleven-buck bump? Is it possible that the city hands out 45,000 speeding tickets a year?

Typically, the city calls a bond election every seven years or so; the last one was in 2007, authorizing $835.5 million in General Obligation Bonds, a portion of which go on sale each year.

This year, they didn’t move a lot of bonds: the sale on the 8th of March brought in only $43.5 million, and the official reason for the crummy-looking number is that property values are more or less stuck in a rut. Since the city’s cut of the local property tax, the only legally-permitted source of funding for debt service of this sort, is not going up any time soon — city policy is to keep it at 16 mills or less — it is considered Bad Form to borrow more than we can reasonably expect to pay back. Besides, it might jeopardize the city’s AAA rating from S&P if we started to go crazy with debt instruments, and if it did, we wouldn’t have time to whine about it on the evening news.

Oh, wait: we don’t have a Ward 9. However, Oklahoma City has redrawn the existing eight wards to correspond to population growth and shifts, and a public meeting was held yesterday to gauge input.

Ward 4′s Pete White, as always, thinks we should be going to a 10-ward system, and he brought it up at the meeting. Brittany Novotny sent up a snapshot of White’s current thinking on the matter, which actually doesn’t look that much unlike the actual eight-ward map being proposed. Then again, it really couldn’t, given the shape of the city’s corporate limits, which suggests the sort of creature that might pester Beowulf — once.

Me, I think we’d be better served by twelve wards. That’s still nearly 50,000 people per ward. (Tulsa, with two-thirds the population of Oklahoma City, has nine wards.) Then again, you may remember what happened when I tossed this topic to former Ward 2 councilman Sam Bowman, five years ago:

Bowman pointed out, as [Pete] White had, that the existing arrangement was perhaps insufficiently diverse, and suggested that it might be possible to redraw the lines to produce something resembling a majority-Hispanic ward and take some of the sheer vastness out of White’s Ward 4. There is, though, said Bowman, not much support for expanding the Council right now. If it’s going to happen, I suspect it will be in 2011, after the new Census figures come out and they have to redraw the boundaries anyway.

Would you believe 2021?

This has been on the bottom of OKC utility bills for several years, and it continues to strike me as funny. The bill always ends with the next couple of dates to set out bulk waste — in my neighborhood, it’s the first Wednesday of the month — and then this warning:

Bulk waste set out more than 3 days early may be fined up to $500.

Trust me on this: bulk waste isn’t listening and doesn’t respond well to threats.

Edmond and Oklahoma City, both born in the 1889 Land Run, have grown toward each other over the years, to the extent that some people can’t tell north Oklahoma City from south Edmond, and by “some people” I mean whoever wrote the caption for yesterday’s Oklahoman:

Although the real issue here is that the Oklahoma City post office doesn’t deliver to anywhere beyond 150th; the poor waterlogged fellow in the picture may have his mail delivered by the Edmond P.O., but he’s a resident of OKC.

Where the hell they came up with “Vermejo” as a street name, I’ll never know: there’s a geological formation by that name straddling the New Mexico-Colorado line, which this area in no way resembles. I note that this location is in the Palo Verde (“green stick”) subdivision, and before it was developed back in the Nineties, it was probably pretty green and out in the sticks, so at least that name works.

This neck of the woods once had an inferiority complex, and not just any inferiority complex either; by God, it was the biggest damn inferiority complex in the entire flyover zone. I was here for some of the making of that complex — the destruction of downtown, the oil bust of the early 1980s, the hiring of John Blake as OU football coach — and no one was happier than I to see it finally vaporize.

Except, of course, that it hasn’t. Not by a long shot.

David Roth (no connection to anyone named Van Halen) came up with a bit for GQ called “Profiles in NBA Obscurity,” the ostensible first edition of which was devoted to Thunder third-string point guard Royal Ivey. I normally don’t pay much attention to GQ, but Royce Young of Daily Thunder included it in one day’s Bolts, so I gave it a read. In the middle of the piece, Roth snarked:

Like Ivey, OKC is something of an afterthought — a city that was never supposed to have a NBA team, a city whose best restaurant is generally agreed to be a Golden Corral and whose zoo’s prime attraction, a chimp named Mwami, keeps escaping his enclosure, as if even he would rather be in Tulsa.

I grinned a bit. This town has always had the reputation of being more white-bread than Mrs Baird and decidedly lacking in ghetto fabulousness, something presumably desired by your average melanin-rich NBA team. “Golden Corral”? Well, at least he didn’t say it was the farging Olive Garden.

Then there surfaced this local message-board thread, in which several participants are having a fit hissier than the steam table at your favorite buffet over these “blatant lies.” Some of them even jumped down Roth’s throat on the Twitter. It’s like a whole platoon of “Psycho” Soyers needing to be told to lighten up.

Then again, Roth is from New Jersey, a place which even people from Oklahoma mock. At least he’s sporting admirable thickness of skin, something that too often seems lacking here in the City of Multicolored Buffalo.

The city has not issued a formal estimate of how much this double-play Snow Monster has drained its coffers, but I’m going ahead with a Scientific Wild-Assed Guess of $15 million, as follows:

• Overtime for sand truck and snowplow crews: $1,250,000.
• Sand: $1,362.
• Repairing 90 percent of the fresh potholes: $13,748,638.

I figure ten percent of the potholes will be missed entirely, or will have to be repaired yet again after a spring rain.

Speaking of snow, whoever first described something as “pure as the driven snow” had obviously never driven in any. Rather a lot of folks who found the stuff amazingly filthy were lined up at car washes today, which I didn’t find inexplicable, exactly, but it seemed like such a waste: you can’t go 500 yards without running into a puddle of something wet and splattery, and there goes the $2/$5/$40/whatever you paid for a few minutes of the pristine.

And then, having threaded my way through the running water at the supermarket parking lot, I began the day’s Shopping Adventure, which contained something perhaps a little more inexplicable: youngish couple (with smallish child) are positioned in the laundry-products aisle — no, not in the middle of it, thank heaven — and while she watches with what appears to be amused detachment, he opens up jugs of detergent at random and sniffs.

“There are times when I think they’re all pretty rancid,” I offered, to no discernible effect.

I didn’t hang around for an explanation — I grabbed a bottle of Era and moved on — but I’m guessing it’s something like this: family was visiting his mom and dad, they got stuck there when the snow came down, and now that they’re home, he wants that same smell he got when his mom did their wash for them.

This could easily be solved by a phone call (“Yeah, we were wondering what brand of detergent you use”), but guys don’t ask directions either.

About four years ago, I brought up the topic of expanding the City Council, on the basis that the eight individual wards were getting a bit unruly, what with ongoing population increases. One observation:

[D]o we need twelve wards? Will Council Member So-and-so be “more accessible” if he has 45,000 constituents instead of 67,500? And how much gerrymandering can we expect if new lines are to be drawn?

We still have eight wards, now averaging 70,000 population each.

Says the City Charter:

The wards shall be as compact in form as possible and ward lines shall not set up artificial corridors which in effect separate voters from the ward to which they most naturally belong.

In which case, the 1992 redistricting failed: the Capitol Hill area, south of the river, includes bits of Wards 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. (You can see the current ward map here.)

Nick Roberts, having noticed this anomaly, notes:

Some have suggested, as Pete White did when he called it ridiculous how Capitol Hill is split into 5 different wards, that we need to expand and add more councilors in order to expand representation. This seems like a no-brainer to me, but it’s not the only good argument. Then others such as Sam Bowman want to just see better-drawn wards without expanding the Horseshoe because there are advantages to having fewer councilors, that it’s easier to get everyone in a room and find compromise than have publicly-waged debates involving political capital and things you see in places like … Tulsa.

Given the fact that the population continues to expand with no particular regard for ward boundaries, I think we’re eventually going to add to the Horseshoe: ten wards, maybe even twelve, might be necessary. (The Mayor remains at the center, either way.) Pete White’s Ward 4 is going to look funny no matter what, I suspect; it stretches all the way to Pottawatomie County. And Sam Bowman is retiring from the nicely-compact Ward 2; his replacement may have different ideas. (No, I am not considering running for that Council seat.) Tulsa, you’ll note, has nine wards.

No, we’re not actually developing zombies here in the Big Breezy. (And if we are, I don’t know about it, okay?) But Steve Lackmeyer is classifying downtown projects as living, dead, or undead, the latter being defined as “seemingly not alive, but not willing to die.” An example of same:

Developer Chuck Wiggin’s proposal to build a [109-condo] complex valued at $62 million was chosen for the old Mercy Hospital site controlled by Urban Renewal. Wiggin said he hopes to see his development contract with Urban Renewal extended. JoeVan Bullard, director of the Urban Renewal Authority, says talks with Wiggin have indicated “it’s not realistic” to continue to have the project on hold another year.

Who would have thought that JoeVan Bullard would ever be in a hurry?

This is a prime zone, too: 12th to 13th, Walker to Dewey. You want to see something there, but not if it’s going to die a horrible death in the marketplace when the New Depression ghouls get their next ration of fanservice.

People who book conventions talk about first tier, second tier, down to nth tier; there’s presumably no point in going to some place designated as n + 1. Oklahoma City is somewhere around the third tier, and at least some folks around here aspire to climbing up to the second; the whole “Big League City” promotion, devised to sell a MAPS-y tax to improve the Ford Center to full NBA standards, was the poster child for those aspirations. The first tier, where you find places like New York and Los Angeles, is of course out of reach: these are our world-class cities, and they’re not looking for competition.

What world-class cities are looking for, apparently, is homogenization:

The joy of great cities lies in their differences. What’s special about Stockholm is different from what makes London or Vienna attractive. The “world class city”, and its gormless sibling, the “world class place”, is a political slogan, conjured by globally minded, air-travel addicted wonks, that has been adopted, sadly and dimly, by politicians, quangos and planners around the world. I’ve even heard, much to my disbelief, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson talking of London’s need to become a “world class city”. Blimey, mush, if London hasn’t been a top-drawer city for the past Gawd-knows-how-many centuries, I don’t know where between one and eight million Londoners have been living.

The dangers of the “world class” concept are particularly disturbing for cities smaller than London more readily harmed by globalised architecture and planning. The centre of Stockholm is under threat from a tide of thoughtless, shiny, air-conditioned architectural schlock, with politicians seduced by the idea that a “vibrant” city centre has to look like a computer-generated rendering of the most slickly dreadful and characterless place you can imagine, full of smiling people in casual clothes and with more witless shops dropped on them than the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on European cities a lifetime ago.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that what Bricktown needs most is more retail.

(Via Aaron Renn.)

Every year, the Central Oklahoma chapter of the American Institute of Architects celebrates Architecture Week, and it finishes off with a tour through a number of Notable Structures, one of the events I do my darnedest not to miss, and the more-or-less constant drizzle today managed not to cast a pallor over the proceedings. Mostly. The starting point was a tour stop last year in its larval stage, but now it’s a highly-contemporary butterfly.

1) 3940 East Wilshire Boulevard
What I said last year: “Worth Ross and Jim Roth are having their dream home built on the city’s heavily-forested northeast side, in an elevated location that provides for both excellent drainage (just in case) and a formidable view of the city. Roth, who served on the state Corporation Commission, called for maximum green wherever possible, and he got it: the walls are Insulating Concrete Forms — R-50, they estimated — the countertops are recycled glass, and the heating and air-conditioning are geothermal. The location allows for only minimal landscaping, which is just fine: what’s already there is lovely enough.”

Well, the bathroom countertops, anyway. The kitchen surfaces are done up in recycled concrete in an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Marble mode, and they’re impressive. And yes, so is the view from the far side of the pool.

2) 4224 North Lincoln Boulevard
The nonprofit Infant Crisis Services is a last resort for families with very young children “until they are back on their feet or until they become qualified for government programs.” The new facility was made possible by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. It’s lovely, but mostly it’s functional, and I admit I spent most of my time in the stockroom, surrounded by racks of clothing and diapers and formula and whatnot, where it dawned on me that I’d actually contributed to ICS before, in response to an emergency social-media campaign. (Imagine that.)

3) 1228 Northwest 36th Street
A 1916 modified-Craftsman house updated for the 21st century, this is the home of architect Kenneth Fitzsimmons. Perhaps surprisingly, little reconfiguration was required, though the kitchen was reoriented and the passage to the dining room was enlarged; to the maximum extent possible, the original woodwork and masonry has been preserved, so that there’s still a 100-year-old feel to the place, despite the presence of modern-day amenities. There’s a second building on the back of the lot, which is being converted into a work room/studio.

4) 1444 Northwest 28th Street
Originally built in 1911, this was a church for most of its existence, most recently the Temple of Faith; it’s now the home of United Way of Central Oklahoma, which has kept most of the exterior intact while dividing the sanctuary into office space and community rooms. Nothing fancy, but everything in its place, and a quiet place at that. Then again, you’d expect a moment of silence from a church, right?

6) 825 Northwest 7th Street
Last time I was here was mid-November, apparently before the house, designed by Brian Fitzsimmons, had been dubbed the Oklahoma Case Study Home, after the famed series of Case Study Houses built mostly in the Los Angeles area after World War II. “Modernism for the masses” was the idea, and this house, which scowls down over the rest of 7th — the lot slopes 16 feet back to front — is a high point (sorry) in the reclamation of this part of town. Since I took this shot last fall, progress has been made, and the channel that runs alongside that endless staircase is now packed with stones.

7) 125 Park Avenue #200
I remember that I was somewhat skeptical when this building opened as office condominiums a few years back; how many people will want to buy into a smallish (for downtown, anyway) five-story tower? Under the general heading of “Shows you how much I know” you’ll find Visual Image Advertising, which took two floors. Suite 200 actually is the Account Service area; the Creative Level is upstairs in 300, and it’s described as “a place of media consulting magic.” At the very least, it kicks the standard cubicle farm’s mass-produced behind.

You may have noticed the absence of 5), which was the center of the Wayne Coyne/Flaming Lips compound in the Classen-Ten-Penn area, but as Trini noted after about fifteen minutes of standing in the rain, the line just seemed to be getting longer, so with the expectation that Coyne’s not going anywhere and there’ll be another time eventually, we moved on to the next stop.

(Photographs by me except #4, from LoopNet, and #7, by Simon Hurst. Previous Tour reports: 2007, 2008, and 2009.)

Aaron Renn, in the process of explaining Richard Florida’s “creative class” shtick, finds some deeper truths:

Florida’s simplified thesis is that successful cities are about talent, technology, and tolerance. The last point is usually taken to mean a tolerance for gays and various “bohemian” types. But tolerance isn’t about non-discrimination ordinances and it isn’t about gays. Tolerance is a mindset.

The dictionary definition of tolerance is “sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own”. From this is clear that most advocates for “progressive” policies of the type advocated by Florida really aren’t tolerating anything. They might be about allowing differences, but it is seldom about allowing views or actions that are in actual conflict with their own values. Indeed, progressives can be as intolerant as anyone for beliefs or actions that differ from their orthodoxy.

We need tolerance properly so-called. We need an environment where we are willing to put up with things we don’t like in return for the same freedom for ourselves. We need cities where “live and let live” is the motto. Rules that stifle this in order to produce a perpetual suburban style family friendly or least common denominator view of what a city should be are ultimately counter-productive. They sap the city of its animating power.

This explains, among other things, why the contemporary/wacky/WTF (choose one) architecture going up west of MidTown is so important: they stand athwart the “A neighborhood should look like this” concept and shout, “Oh, yeah?” Anyone can build a startlingly-modern house way the hell out at 199th and Whatever, but putting it right smack dab in the middle of town is a serious statement.

Given the tendency to overplan occasionally exhibited in this town — nobody has any idea what Core to Shore will eventually look like, but every office in City Hall has some sort of model — I’m definitely up for some seemingly-wretched excess. Oh, and a few non-discrimination ordinances might be nice.

Now materializing: OKC’s Dine Out for Haiti campaign, running (mostly) Sunday through Tuesday, in which ten percent of sales from participating restaurants will be donated to the American Red Cross International Disaster Relief Fund for Haiti.

That’s what it says, anyway. Here’s the list of eateries; rather a lot of the Big Names are participating on one day, though none of them on all three.

Of course, if you prefer alternate channels for donations, by all means use them.

Andrew Littleton is moving to Nashville, but one thing he’ll never forget about Oklahoma City is the “authentic-ish” Mexican joints along SW 29th Street:

Ever since the day I had a $3 breakfast for lunch at Sydney’s and helped to unplug the fan so they could plug in the cash register to complete my purchase, I fell in love with this stretch of road. Sure, there have been moments of fear. Like the time the drug dealer dudes started ramming their $40,000 tricked-out Cadillacs like they were bumper cars. Or, the time the meth lady accused me of stealing her car (my custom Volkswagen Beetle) and then chased me back to my office. Or, of course, the time I ate at the Golden Touch Grill. But those moments are fleeting as I think of all the great food. Flautas and enchiladas at Los Desvelados, dollar tacos at Max Burger, the burger I got carded to eat at the place that turned out to be a shady beer bar, and the time my friend Dirk nearly died from the heat after shouting “muy caliente el diablo!” about how hot he wanted his pork chile verde from the place across the street from Los Desvelados.

Now that’s hot.

Disclosure: I (briefly) worked in fast food on 29th in the 1970s. Back then it was a burger joint; today it’s a pizza chain.