A Tale of Two Cities
In 1929 the factory output was 43 million dollars.
Wholesale trade proper amounted to
seventy-one million,
five hundred and ten thousand,
five hundred and seventy three dollars.
Retail trade: ninety-two million….
But as far as I’m concerned,
I don’t care if I ever set foot there again: in Salt Lake City.
That town is a nemesis to me.
Leon Rene and Johnny Lange, I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City
*
Downtown Oklahoma City was deserted, decrepit and dusty when I left in 1973, looking much as it must have during the first few months after its founding in 1889, only without the bustle. Lyndon Johnson’s Urban Renewal program had provided enough money to demolish a good part of the downtown buildings but not enough to replace them. What private money there was had all but abandoned downtown in favor of sparkling new developments to the north and northwest of town.
I next saw it in 1990. It was a little cleaner, but still as empty. The state’s second oil boom had come and gone almost overnight. Gone were the hordes of Houston oil boys in their fancy suits and ostrich boots who had flocked to Oklahoma City when OPEC lowered production and oil prices shot up.
The boom was all illusion, anyway. Mark Singer, in his book Funny Money, quotes an observer noting that “You’ve got thirteen thousand oil and gas companies in Oklahoma; maybe fifteen hundred are looking for oil and gas, the rest are looking for investors.”
Or as another resident told me in 2005, “The problem was that everybody was busy making deals and nobody was drilling or pumping any oil.”
“But oil is $65 a barrel now,” I protested. “That’s more than double what it was during the 80′s. Where’s your third oil boom?”
“You have to have oil to have a boom. We’re tapped out. Most of our wells are lucky to pump three to five barrels a day. There won’t be another oil boom.”
*
The meltdown of Penn Square Bank in 1986, the FDIC’s largest bank failure to date, with its massive ripple effect on major banks on both coasts, had devastated the city’s economy. There was still no activity, and certainly no building, in downtown.
The 25th reunion committee suggested that out-of-towners stay in one of the newer and cleaner hotels on the northwest side of Oklahoma City, dozens of miles away from Midwest City, which is to the southeast.
There was only one hotel left in all of downtown Oklahoma City and it was scheduled to close soon, but we elected to stay there after being disinvited to stay with Mil. Downtown hadn’t changed much since 1973, except that even more buildings were missing.
It had never been very big to begin with – maybe 20 or 30 square blocks – but Urban Renewal had left the downtown skyline looking like the smile of a snaggle-toothed nine year old.
We arrived at the hotel sometime around 6:00 p.m. After checking in, I asked the desk clerk if there was someplace I could have a couple of pairs of shoes shined.
“Boy, I just don’t know,” the desk man admitted. “No place downtown, that’s for sure. It’s after five o’clock, you know.”
*
I was back again ten years later, once for a visit and a scant two weeks later for my step-father’s funeral. Oklahoma City had begun to clean up its act. It had built a new civic complex downtown, the centerpiece of which was the Crystal Bridge, a seven-story glassed conservatory spanning a two-acre lake and almost rivaling the Victorian conservatory in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
But downtown was still deserted. We drove around looking for the Oklahoma City Memorial, the monument to the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in which 168 people were killed. When we found it, we were silenced by its simultaneous audacity and simplicity. But at two o’clock in the afternoon, the business district was eerily empty. The office buildings were there, but there were few cars on the street, fewer cars at the parking meters and no pedestrians on the sidewalks.
“Jesus, it looks like a ghost town,” I muttered. “Who works in all of these buildings?”
*
Separating northern from southern Oklahoma City is the South Canadian River, a river hardly worthy of the name anymore, and whose water flow most of the time barely reaches that of a large creek in other parts of the country. But it has wide banks and, about ten feet above them, the 100-year flood plain and then, about ten feet or so above that is ground level for Oklahoma City.
Back in the ‘70′s, the city administration first raised the idea of building a series of dams along the river to create a string of small lakes, dubbed the “string of pearls.” I applauded the idea in my weekly column in The Journal’s Sunday entertainment section, wondering in print why other large cities could have concrete or stone embankments for their rivers, with pedestrian walkways along them and, sometimes, shops or cafes. Why, I asked, if we wanted a vital downtown, could we not run with the “string of pearls” idea and build embankments and walkways along the river?
Nothing came of the administration’s idea or my suggestions, but twenty years later Oklahoma City voters approved probably the most ambitious civic project since shortly after statehood, the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) plan, a combination of public and private financing that has transformed downtown.
A large former railroad supply and warehouse district immediately east of downtown proper – renamed Bricktown for its typical Oklahoma brick buildings – has since been developed into the state’s largest tourist attraction, boasting nearly ten million visitors a year, and a bustle of activity day and night.
After a fitful start, Bricktown by 2005 boasted a AAA baseball park, shops, businesses, a trolley system, pedicabs, a multi-screen movie theater, a river canal system running through it with water taxis leaving from various taxi-stops every fifteen minutes, and a broad walkway along the canal, called Riverwalk. And just upstream, on the re-christened Oklahoma River, the city has built a series of dams forming a series of lakes through downtown. The river has water once again.
Downtown Oklahoma City went from four or five shopworn hotels in 1950 to one hotel in 1990 to four major hotels by 2005; from one convention center and almost no downtown restaurants (and none open for dinner) in 1990 to three convention centers and more than a dozen restaurants in 2005. Bricktown alone now boasts more than two dozen nightclubs and restaurants.
Not only can you finally get a meal after dark in the immediate downtown vicinity, but I suspect you can also find a place to get your shoes shined after five o’clock.
Oklahomans – and I include myself – tend to be slow learners and very single-minded. We don’t so much resist change as take arms against it. But when we decide change is inevitable, whether it be turning hard prairie sod into fertile wheat and cotton farms or resurrecting a dying downtown, that same single-mindedness serves us well.
*
A friend told me during my visit in 2005, to my great surprise, that Oklahoma City has a thriving gay community and even has its own Gay Pride Parade. He later sent me a clipping from The Oklahoman featuring a non-judgmental story about the June, 2006, parade.
“The festive atmosphere [at the 19th annual parade] was far different from the city’s first gay pride parade in 1988,” The Oklahoman reported, “when about 400 marchers expected to be attacked at any moment by Ku Klux Klansmen.”
But, just as in the city’s successful lunch-counter sit-ins in 1958, there was no violence and the parade has continued to grow until the 2006 event featured 58 different groups “queued up for an event that is equal parts celebration and civil rights march.”
**
The radio news says these are boom times again in Oklahoma, with unexpected tax revenues, huge state surpluses and a balanced budget – unlike California, which has been mostly awash in red ink since the dot-com bust in 2001 and where we passed a state budget on time in 2006 for the first time in human memory. Most years, there are threats of state employees going unpaid every July because the Democrats, the Republicans and the governor (be he either Democrat or Republican) can’t shed their posturing.
*
But if Oklahoma City looked booming in 2005, Midwest City looked distinctly shopworn.
I recognized almost none of the commercial buildings. Most of the ones I remembered from thirty years ago have since been torn down and replaced, only to be already showing signs of age.
If there was ever a center of town, it was Atkinson Plaza, gateway to the original tiny civic center complex and home to the Skytrain Theater, the town’s baby sitter. But Atkinson Plaza has been razed. In its place will be a Lowe’s and a Target – just the sort of stores any upscale downtown needs.
The rest of the town’s commercial development is spread along the section lines, and even they are full of vacant lots and vacant buildings. What there is in abundance are fast-food joints, pawn shops and instant loan businesses. Fast food and quickie loans seem to be directly connected to each other.
*
Midwest City is less than thirty square miles in area, with a population of about 55,000. More than a third of its total area is designated as an Oklahoma State Enterprise Zone, qualifying for tax incentives and low-interest loans because more than thirty percent of the zone’s residents are at or below the poverty level or the zone’s per capita income is fifteen percent or more below the state average.
Another (overlapping) one-third of the city qualifies for special federal contracts for small businesses because it has either a very high unemployment rate or a very low median household income. And nearly one-tenth of the city qualifies for yet another federal program to stimulate financial institutions which serve “distressed” communities.
Driving, shopping and eating in my hometown, I do take a bit of comfort at first from the unexpected diversity. There are lots of black and brown faces and I hear Spanish spoken everywhere. Unfortunately, these faces and voices nearly all belong to workers in the service industries, earning only minimum wages.
There do seem to be plenty of service jobs to go around, particularly in the fast-food business. Midwest Citians surely must like to eat. Although I could only find one actual restaurant in town (or, if I am generous, two), I counted 92 (or, if I am ungenerous, 93) cafes, diners and fast-food joints – one for every six hundred residents. One mile-long stretch alone has 22, and another has 20.
You have your Boomerang, your Chicago Grill, your Sonic Drive In, Taco Bell, Chiu Wu, Hunan Express, Fazzioli’s, Wendy’s, Appleby’s, Golden Corral, Cocina de Mino, King Wa, Chequers, Furrs, Something Barbeque Burgers, Deli & Dogs, Los Vaqueros, Little Caesar’s, Subway and yet another Chinese restaurant. Around the corner you have another Sonic, a McDonald’s and another and another, another Wendy’s and another, a Burger King or three, the House of This and the House of That and my mother’s favorite, the Del Rancho (Day-all Rain-cho.)
Doesn’t anybody cook anymore?
Why do I not doubt that it’s the employees from all these eateries who support the 24 pawn shops, EZ Loan and paycheck advance businesses in town? One single mile has eight of these.
Maybe the Chamber of Commerce has the answer. Midwest City’s C of C, like Chambers everywhere, loves statistics. Its published stats show that the city’s average household income is less than 84 percent of that of the Oklahoma City Metro area and barely 90 percent of the statewide average – which would include subsistence farmers and impoverished Indian tribes. I am left with no conclusion but that the distressed, poverty-level citizens of one-third of Midwest City’s residential neighborhoods are probably working full-time at minimum-wage jobs, yet are still under the poverty level.
*
There is an impressive new conference center, an expanded junior college, several newish office parks and a fair amount of building going on, although it isn’t immediately clear what the construction is for, except for the Chamber’s two proudest crowing points, a new strip mall and a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Some towns, protective of home-grown businesses, actually try to keep Wal-Mart out.
But, as always, and to the city’s credit, the schools look to be in good shape. Schools have always been Midwest City’s pride, which could explain why most of their graduates leave town.
*
Yet for all of the new construction, the town’s infrastructure is in sad shape. In the better neighborhoods, the streets look like they may have been resurfaced in the past ten to fifteen years, but in the older areas the streets are full of cracks and potholes sprouting Bermuda grass, and the concrete curbs are rotting and degrading, with large chunks falling into the gutters. When it rains, the red Oklahoma dirt washes into the streets from front lawns only partially maintained.
Midwest City seemed to have had a chance once, when it had a newspaper. Now, it has lost its voice and its center. Now, with freeways making for an easy commute to posher neighborhoods, it is no longer a necessary bedroom community for Tinker Air Force Base. While Oklahoma City seems to have found its new identity, Midwest City – with its nebulous slogan “East Is In” – is still searching.
**
There is still a street named after Bill Atkinson in Midwest City, and his house has been turned into a museum. But there are no parks, no schools and no public monuments bearing his name. The family members who inherited his fortune are mostly developing land elsewhere. But in Oklahoma City, a major thoroughfare separating downtown from Bricktown has been renamed “E.K. Gaylord Boulevard.”
Less than a mile north, at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center campus, is a new clock tower dedicated to Gaylord – a gift from E.K. and Eddie’s friend, University of Oklahoma president David L. Boren. And barely more than 20 miles south of Bricktown is the university’s main campus, where the Gaylord name has become omnipresent.
Gaylord Family Memorial Stadium, OU
Never as respected as his father, Edward L. Gaylord not only succeeded in making himself more feared, but in accumulating wealth far beyond anything E.K. could possibly have dreamed. Eddie first endowed a chair at the OU journalism school, the “Edward L. and Thelma Gaylord Chair in Journalism and Mass Communications,” and in early 2000 announced a gift of $22 million to the university to found a college in his father’s name.
The largest single gift in the university’s history, the money not only helped establish the E.K. Gaylord College of Mass Communication, but also built Gaylord Hall, a state-of-the-art facility emphasizing audio, video, multimedia and computer labs, and containing within it the Edith K. Gaylord Library and Resource Center.
Gaylord Hall sits directly across the campus’ South Oval from – and Gaylord College has absorbed – the H.H. Herbert School of Journalism, named after the university’s first journalism professor, and the school where I learned to be a reporter. Even a quick tour of both buildings makes it clear that none of the Gaylord money went into the J-School, and it looks as if not much money at all has been funneled in that direction since I left in 1969.
And football being the university’s most important product, just north of Gaylord Hall is the impressive new football stadium. For more than 75 years it was known as Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, honoring students, faculty and Oklahoma citizens who died in World War I. Today it is known as the Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, a gift from a grateful President Boren at a cost to students – in debt service alone – of more than five million dollars a year.
Now, how much would you pay?
*