My First Full Day in Oklahoma

Yesterday was my first full day in Oklahoma. It was full of excitement and adventure. I began my cross-country road trip in Boston on Tuesday morning and made it as far as Cleveland, OH, where I picked up my dad, who had flown in from a business trip in New Jersey. We were on the road at 5:45 a.m. Wednesday, and fourteen hours later, we pulled into our lake house in Ketchum, OK. We slept late the next day and were back on the road by 9 a.m. We cruised into Oklahoma City at noon on Thursday, July 16. We had covered 1700 miles in two days and four hours.

Highlights from the road trip include: listening to Kerouac's On the Road while being, um, on the road (I had forgotten what Sal Paradise says about Dean Moriarty: "My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry-trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent-a sideburned hero of the snowy West"); picking up my dad in Cleveland; seeing the sunrise over Lake Erie; realizing that my Rand McNally Road Atlas says that my new neighborhood is the "Don't Miss Drive" for Oklahoma City; trying to guess the population, square mileage, and capitals of each state; forgetting that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota.

My first full day in Oklahoma consisted of the following: eating sushi with my sister and nephew; opening up a bank account in a bank that looks like a space ship; going on a final walk-through of the house that will soon be our first house to own; getting caught in a flash hail storm; having to wait out the storm under a gas station awning with 50 other cars; braving the suddenly flooded streets on the way back to the bank for a cashier's check; discovering that the bank's power had been knocked out by the storm; going to the bank branch inside the Super Wal-Mart; getting a very large cashier's check from a Wal-Mart bank branch; running into an old friend buying dry ice at the Wal-Mart; fried okra for dinner; checking my email after three days of being away; learning that Steve Lackmeyer had finally written a story about Jeff Bezdek's streetcar proposal for OKC; missing my wife and son, who fly out on Monday.

I retired to bed at 10 o'clock and found an old copy of E.M. Forster's Howards End on my old bookshelf. The first two sentences struck me as apropos of my new life here: "It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful."

Today we close on the house. Pictures forthcoming.

What to Put in Place of a Highway

Oklahoma City is moving the stretch of I-40 that runs downtown, dubbed the Crosstown Expressway, five blocks south of its current location. The new highway will be sunk below the roadway to allow for pedestrian bridges and roadways and the development of a large urban park. A boulevard will take the place of the current highway, one that Mayor Cornett hopes will be the gem of the City. The plan has garnered lots of national press, but as city planner Jeff Speck points out in his recently completed walkability report on Oklahoma City (skip to "Mistakes About To Be Made" starting on page 38), the boulevard as it's currently envisioned will accomodate far more car traffic than it needs to and will therefore inhibit pedestrian activity precisely in the area where the City wants to encourage it the most. Speck recommends that OKC use Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston's Back Bay as a model for how to build a boulevard. Will the City take Speck's advice? Or will they insist that it's disanalogous since Commonwealth Avenue wasn't originally a highway? (It was originally a marsh. Literally.)

Thank goodness for The Infrastructurist. Check out the post from Monday, July 6th, entitled "Huh?! 4 Cases of How Tearing Down A Highway Can Relieve Traffic Jams (And Save Your City)." The title kinda says it all. Kudos to Seoul, Portland, and San Francisco for replacing highways with structures that actually encourage people to experience their cities in some other way than from the dashboard of their cars.

Oklahoma City leaders, are you reading The Infrastructurist? Are you getting this?

Oh, and so we're true to our name here at Oklachusetts, I would be remiss not to mention the Rose Kennedy Greenway that replaced Boston's Central Artery after it became the Big Dig.

So, if Oklahoma City's goal is to move the cars someplace else and to encourage mixed-use development where pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, streetcars, and businesses can all coexist and commingle and connect (and any other co- word you can think of), then please don't replace a highway with a boulevard that is a highway in every way but its name.

UPDATE: Architects, urban planners, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative people everywhere: if you are wondering what we can do with the bones (the steel beams and concrete slabs) of I-40 once it's relocated, perhaps you should check out these worthy projects: the High Line Park in NYC and the Big Dig House in Lexington, MA.

A Bird's Eye View of Population Density and Sparsity

It's hard to see the forest for the trees. It's even harder to see the forest for the trees when the forest has been deforested. Translation: it's hard to see how dense or sparse a neighborhood is or has become when you are living in it. Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Or, in this case, you need to take a hundred steps up and look at the picture from above. This is where satellite imagery can help.

Inspired by Charles Benton's "kite aerial photography" (but not actually owning a kite), I explored Bing's maps page and discovered a cool feature: "Bird's Eye View" satellite imagery. Using this tool, I "Binged" nine of my previous addresses to see what they look like from the air. To me, the results reveal much about differing assumptions of how and where we ought to live, and how we ought to go about planning cities and neighborhoods.

Check them out. Two of these are in Cincinnati, three are in Oklahoma City, and four are in Boston. Can you tell which ones are which? The first reader to put all the right answers in a comment will win a free Oklachusetts sticker.

But also, I'm wondering if you agree with me that the most aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods from the air often have the sparsest populations on the ground (and if you read my last post, you'll remember how important I think it is to have densely populated neighborhoods). Some of these 'hoods look like they were designed mostly for the approval of plane passengers cruising overhead. One more thing: which of these places looks the most "family friendly"? What does this mean, anyway? Is it friendly to have to put your kid in a car seat whenever you want to go anywhere?

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