Bricktown and the Canal, How Oklahoma City Rebuilt Its Core
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
East of the Murrah Memorial site, past the railroad tracks that once carried cattle and cotton and oil-field equipment across the plains, is a warehouse district that the city nearly lost to inertia. The buildings along Sheridan Avenue and Mickey Mantle Drive were built between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen twenties to serve the railroad economy, loading docks, cold storage facilities, wholesale grocers, brick warehouses with thick walls and small windows designed to keep goods cool in the Oklahoma heat. By the nineteen seventies, most of them were vacant.
The district was called Bricktown, a name that described its architecture accurately enough. Its revival was neither spontaneous nor swift. The first wave of redevelopment in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties brought restaurants and bars into the old warehouse shells, but the area remained underused and underlit.
The transformation accelerated in the late nineteen nineties when the city funded the construction of the Bricktown Canal, a roughly one-mile navigable channel that runs through the district, fed by water from the Oklahoma River. The canal was a calculated bet. The city borrowed the model from San Antonio's River Walk, though Oklahoma City's version is more compressed and the water is frankly less romantic.
What it provided was pedestrian infrastructure, a reason to walk, a route through the district that was not organized around parking, and that turned out to be enough to anchor the pattern of investment. The Bricktown Ballpark, which opened in nineteen ninety-eight as the home of the Oklahoma RedHawks, anchored the district's eastern end and brought a regular crowd. The area around it filled in over the following decade with hotels, entertainment venues, and the kind of street-level retail that the Pei Plan era had demolished in the name of progress.
Bricktown is now the city's most-visited neighborhood. It is not the most historically rich or architecturally distinguished district in Oklahoma City. What it represents is something subtler: a city teaching itself, over the course of roughly twenty years, that the old buildings were worth keeping.
