Further Adventures in Okie-Homa

As I've stated here before, I consider myself a native New Yorker who had the misfortune of being born in Oklahoma. While New York is always the city where I feel most at home and grounded, I spent most of my formative years in the Great Plains, primarily Oklahoma City, Kansas City and St. Louis. So spending time in Oklahoma is always a bit surreal.

Since my trips to Oklahoma City are usually brief and business or family related, I tend to be isolated in the leafy, northwest suburbs with all the familiarities of Best Buy, Cheesecake Factory and Macy's. It's a part of town that has all the generic familiarity of Royal Oak, Michigan; Thousand Oaks, California; or Danbury Connecticut.

Even its once boarded up, vacant downtown area has since been renovated with a veneer of the dreaded "new urbanism" akin to Santana Row or the area surrounding AT&T Park back home in the Bay Area. The centerpiece of downtown is Bricktown, a completely safe, generic, manufactured place that could be anyplace in the U.S. and is in no way organic or reflective of the city's history, culture or diversity. You'll find all the people from the suburbs sipping Skyy martinis on the edge of the water that could just as easily be in a similar spot in suburban Toronto or the waterfront in Baltimore.

So tonight I decided to take a tour of the rarely seen parts of town, especially the areas immediately west and south of downtown. I've not been there in years. There has been absolutely no development of these areas, and their deterioration rivals anything in West Oakland or the worst parts of Detroit. There were enough spooky things and people that I feared slowing down let alone taking pictures. But I did manage to snap a few shots in the less dangerous parts of the decaying wonderland.
Just south of the river is a forgotten neighborhood called Capitol Hill (that is not on a hill, just a slight rise in the prairie). Once a working class gringo neighborhood, it is now the heart of the Hispanic community. All the taquerias made me feel like I was back home in the Mission. I saw one pedestrian in six blocks.
Just west of downtown I passed a hug homeless encampment larger than most in San Francisco. Ever wonder where the homeless folks in Manhattan went after the mid-1990s? Out west in Oklahoma, apparently, and they are much spookier than the ones in San Francisco. Going further west, still within a few blocks of the glistening towers of downtown is the abandoned, enormous Spanish style farmers market building that later served as an antique mall before being emptied.
In addition to homeless people, I've never seen so many stray dogs. Easily 50 in a five block radius. This guy seemed almost friendly until I started to open the car door, and he was more intimidating than the homeless people. He almost looked rabid.
He was hanging out with his buddies at this place. There were blocks and blocks of this type of structure.
This is the view from Capitol Hill heading back north to downtown, a weird mix of grain mills, auto shops and urban decay. Sort of Children of the Corn meets Blade Runner.
Back in the homogenized northside 'burbs, I was pleased to see a few non-franchised landmarks are still in operation.
And who could say no to a Big Bevburger? Uh, me.So, I ended up eating here, Zorba's Mediterranean, that had just opened on Monday. It was actually not half bad.
I also passed on getting a drink at the famed Hi Lo Club but could not resist nabbing a shot of this landmark bar.
A number of its patrons likely live here on Carey Place, a pleasant three block stretch of Hollywood/Spanish style bungalows. Back when I was in grade school, my aunt lived two blocks over and would take me to parties where her bachelor friends served daiquiris and played Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield records. A decade or so later I went to bachelor parties there on my own.
Despite its super-white image, Oklahoma City has a large Vietnamese population evidenced by this huge Asian supermarket. I could pass for Bolsa Boulevard in Orange County's Westminster.
And it wouldn't be complete without a shot of the landmark milk bottle building, now a French Vietnamese bakery.

Finally a shot of a once threatened pair of landmarks, the gold dome bank that how serves as the home Sierra Club and other non-profits and the tower patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper, Price Tower (actually in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) is being converted into condos.

Okay, now you know more about this city than you ever wanted to know.