The Pei Plan, The City That Tore Itself Apart to Save Itself
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
In the early nineteen sixties, Oklahoma City's downtown was beginning to empty out. The postwar suburban sprawl was doing what it did to American downtowns everywhere, pulling residents, retailers, and investment outward along the highway corridors, and the city's leadership decided the solution was a comprehensive redevelopment plan on a scale the city had never attempted. They hired I.
M. Pei, one of the most prominent urban planners and architects in the country, to design a new downtown. What Pei delivered in nineteen sixty-four became known simply as the Pei Plan.
The plan called for the demolition of more than a hundred and fifty blocks in the central business district, most of the city's historic commercial core, built in the decades after the Land Run. In their place, Pei envisioned a modernist landscape of wide plazas, pedestrian malls, parking structures, and new civic buildings arranged on a rationalized grid. The plan was animated by the assumptions of its era: that older, smaller-scale urban fabric was an obstacle rather than an asset, that the automobile required the city to reorganize itself around parking and access, and that a blank slate was preferable to an imperfect inheritance.
The demolition proceeded over roughly two decades. Whole streets of Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings came down. The Skirvin Hotel, which opened in nineteen eleven, survived, but much of what surrounded it did not.
The city that emerged from the Pei Plan was airier, newer, and significantly less interesting than the one it replaced. By the nineteen eighties, the new downtown was itself struggling, the plazas were windswept and empty, the pedestrian mall was a failure, and the city began the work of rebuilding the urban texture it had spent two decades erasing. The lesson was not unique to Oklahoma City.
Hundreds of American downtowns went through the same cycle. The difference here is that the Pei Plan is unusually well-documented, and the city has been unusually candid about what it cost.
