Only one week after leaving for Vegas, I was off again to Norman, Oklahoma. Norman is just a few miles south of Oklahoma City. My boss and I flew into Oklahoma City and then drove down I-35 to Norman. The drive was very familiar since it was the same route my family took when traveling to South Padre Island last year.

We met with the client and the meeting went very quickly, so my boss and I headed up to Oklahoma City to kill some time before our flight. (I had called our travel department to find out if there were any earlier flights, but there were none.) We went to a place called Bricktown. It was a the old part of downtown that was being revitalized. They had added a river walk similar to KC’s, but it was surprisingly small. Bricktown was going to have an event that night, but the place looked deserted. My boss and I thought that maybe after 5pm a lot of urban workers might come over to Bricktown to catch a baseball game, movie or eat.

We then walked over to the newer part of downtown and went to the Myriad Botanical Garden. It is inside a large cylindrical building called the Crystal Bridge. Admissions was $6. While it was interesting, my boss and I agreed that it was not worth $6. $3 would have been more appropriate.

To get from Bricktown to the newer downtown, we had to cross under a series of railroad tracks. There are very few connections between Bricktown and downtown because of the railroad tracks and I thought about how many cities cut off neighborhoods from each other with railroads or large highways. The best thing Oklahoma City could do is to find a way to move the railroad tracks and reclaim the connections between their neighborhoods.

This idea had been on my mind lately because of an article about how razing highways can be good for a city. The Congress for New Urbanism has examples of how getting rid of highways can benefit a city and has a list of 10 highways that should be razed now. If Oklahoma City and Kansas City would look at this they would both find ways to help their downtown neighborhoods be less cut off from each other, reclaim valuable land and do a wonderful thing for their community.