J Magazine Winter 2019
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“Downtown is dead and we helped kill it,” Councilman I.G.<br />
Purser declared. “There is no major retail, no major attraction and<br />
no place to eat.”<br />
Thirty years after that admission, downtown Oklahoma City is<br />
thriving, home to major retail, restaurants, live music, hotels, attractions,<br />
parks and a population of several thousand living in new<br />
homes and apartments.<br />
A series of initiatives called Metropolitan Area Projects, a payas-you-go<br />
penny sales tax, led to creation of an NBA-ready arena, a<br />
riverwalk, minor league ballpark, library and a massive overhaul of<br />
downtown’s performing arts hall.<br />
But it took a bombing to get rid of the one-way streets.<br />
Long before Interstate 40 cut an eastwest<br />
path through the southern fringe<br />
of downtown, a pair of east-west streets,<br />
NW 5 and NW 6, were turned into oneway<br />
corridors. And when the interstate<br />
opened, NW 5 and NW 6 remained lightly<br />
traveled six-lane-wide one-way corridors.<br />
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the<br />
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April<br />
19, 1995, he also left a huge crater in NW 5.<br />
Those wishing to build a memorial to the 168 killed and to those<br />
who survived proposed closing the street for good. City engineer<br />
Paul Brum, a powerful presence at City Hall, fought back, arguing<br />
maintaining the one-way corridor was a matter of public safety. He<br />
ended up being narrowly overruled by the city’s traffic commission.<br />
Brum’s next idea was to offset the loss of NW 5 as a one-way<br />
corridor by turning NW 4 into a one-way corridor. Brum correctly<br />
predicted downtown was about to go through a growth spurt, but he<br />
failed to understand such growth could occur without wide one-way<br />
corridors.<br />
“Anytime you have a two-way, you have people backed up making<br />
left turns,” Brum argued. “When you have a lot of traffic, then that<br />
creates problems.”<br />
The NW 4 conversion also went nowhere, and this second<br />
loss proved to be the beginning a long demise of one-way streets<br />
throughout downtown. The closed block of NW 5 was turned into a<br />
reflecting pool book-ended by the now iconic “Gates of Time” marking<br />
the time before and after the bombing.<br />
When NW 5 was turned into a two-way street, the city followed<br />
through with making NW 6 a two-way corridor as well. The predicted<br />
traffic jams did not follow.<br />
The Oklahoma City Council, no longer in lock step with the still<br />
powerful city engineer, requested city staff in 1999 to pursue conversion<br />
of more one-way streets to two-way traffic. That work did not<br />
proceed and wasn’t even started until a new public works director<br />
was hired in 2005.<br />
By this time, bond funding had been approved for the streetscaping<br />
of Walker Avenue, the same street targeted for a one-way conversion<br />
back in 1938. Designs, completed before Brum retired, called<br />
for the street to remain a one-way corridor.<br />
The street, Brum said, simply couldn’t function safely as a twoway<br />
street with one lane each way. Meanwhile, Cornett had begun<br />
looking at how to tackle one study after another that declared Oklahoma<br />
City was among the least fit in the country and most hostile<br />
for pedestrians.<br />
Cornett visited several times with Jeff Speck, a planner and author<br />
gaining acclaim for his book “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl<br />
and the Decline of the American Dream.” Those visits led to Cornett<br />
bringing Speck to Oklahoma City, where he was hired to compile an<br />
honest analysis of what ailed the city and how to fix it.<br />
Cornett brought Speck to Oklahoma City and in 2008 he was<br />
commissioned to do an analysis of the city’s streets and sidewalks<br />
and how to improve public health and walkability. The next Metropolitan<br />
Area Projects initiative passed by voters included funding to<br />
build up to 36 miles of sidewalks while also aggressively expanding<br />
the city’s trail system.<br />
Speck’s recommendations for downtown laid part of the premise<br />
for his next book, 2012’s “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save<br />
America, One Step at a Time.”<br />
Not only were the one-way streets too wide, the lane widths were<br />
more appropriate for cars traveling at highway speeds. Hudson Avenue<br />
was especially bewildering, ranging from five to six lanes wide, a<br />
design dating back to when a shopping mall was planned (but never<br />
built) at the corner of Hudson and Sheridan Avenues.<br />
Speck showed the downtown street configurations to traffic engineers<br />
outside the state and their first response was to guess the street<br />
grid was set up for a downtown density and traffic volume comparable<br />
to Chicago or Manhattan.<br />
“They said this is a street network that will support three to four<br />
times the density it is handling,” Speck told the mayor and council.<br />
“Then you look at the traffic counts, and only a few carrying 10,000<br />
a day. And 10,000 cars a day is easily handled by a two-lane road.”<br />
Speck’s report coincided with announcement by Devon Energy<br />
that it was preparing to build a 50-story headquarters where city<br />
leaders had spent 20 years trying to turn into a suburban style “Galleria”<br />
mall.<br />
In an unusual move, the company’s co-founder, Larry Nichols,<br />
requested a $115 million tax increment finance (TIF) district —<br />
not for the headquarters but instead to make streets and sidewalks<br />
friendlier and safer for pedestrians.<br />
A lack of funding could no longer be used as a reason not to convert<br />
all one-way downtown streets and reduce lane widths. City engineers,<br />
however, still resisted and planned to retain short one-way<br />
stretches of Walker and Hudson Avenues claiming they were short of<br />
needed traffic lights even with the TIF funding.<br />
After some digging and questioning by The Oklahoman, city engineers<br />
acknowledged they had older traffic lights removed from<br />
streets improved as part of the Devon TIF project and could use<br />
those to finish the two-way conversions.<br />
Downtown Oklahoma City in <strong>2019</strong> is home to a network of streets<br />
that are all two-way corridors. The traffic nightmares never materialized.<br />
One of the most dramatic transformations is seen along NW 6,<br />
which was only converted to two-way traffic due to the loss of NW<br />
5 after the 1995 bombing, is returning to its roots as a neighborhood<br />
street.<br />
The street, however, is still five lanes wide and property owners<br />
are asking that it be put on a road diet. Similar development is taking<br />
place along NW 4, which is due to be narrowed this next year to<br />
make way for the city’s protected bike lane. Walker Avenue, which<br />
Brum said could not be converted due to risks of it becoming a traffic<br />
nightmare, is lined with shops, apartments. A streetcar has been<br />
added to the mix, along with scooters and bicycles.<br />
Contrary to predictions made along by some powerful voices<br />
over the history of Oklahoma City, the demise of one-way streets<br />
has only boosted the revival of a downtown that was once declared<br />
dead.<br />
Steve Lackmeyer, an award-winning reporter, columnist and<br />
author for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper, has covered Oklahoma’s<br />
conversion of downtown streets from one-way to two-ways.<br />
58<br />
J MAGAZINE | WINTER <strong>2019</strong>