Top 10 Downtown Videos: 10-6
My rankings are purely subjective, based on search ease and memory. So feel free to debate and discuss:
No. 10: Beatnix Cafe:
There is no good reason why this should be in the top 10, other than I think Dave is a nice guy and runs a fun cafe and coffee shop:
No. 9: The new Ford Center:
No. 8: David Stern and the NBA Board of Governors visit OKC, talk about possible relocation of the Sonics (now the Thunder). I could load up this listing with Thunder videos. But I’ll leave that to Darnell Mayberry. In my book, this video captured the spirit of the progress made that one March day – the moment I think OKC’s future as an NBA city was pretty much sealed.
No. 7: Announcement of the School of Rock:
No. 6: Professor Wayne Coyne? Santa Claus and the Martians going guest lectures?
TOMORROW: THE TOP FIVE
Bricktown – The Book
Forgive me if this comes off as a bit self-promotional – but I’m pretty giddy today and I want to share the news that I’ve received my first advance copy of my second book, “Bricktown.” The book is being released on Jan. 19 by Arcadia Publishing and it features more than 180 images of Bricktown from territorial days to present. Many of the photos have never been published. I’ll let you know next week about signings.
Here’s a description from Arcadia’s website:
From the moment 10,000 settlers descended upon Oklahoma Station in 1889 and declared it Oklahoma City, the land surrounding the depot was destined to become the new community’s hub of commerce. The wholesale district was first home to massive cotton operations. Wholesale grocers, livery stables, and hardware and implement distributors followed, building up sturdy brick edifices in the years leading up to
Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907. Almost every major railroad line dissected the area, which was once bordered to the south and east by the
North Canadian River, and by World War I, oil derricks were popping up like trees. By the 1970s, the once proud wholesale district was a ghost town. But most of the old brick buildings and streets had survived the ravages of time. Developers just as ambitious as the city’s early settlers rechristened the area Bricktown, and a city seeking to reclaim its past spent millions adding a canal, ballpark, and other improvements that have made Bricktown a popular regional entertainment district.
Author Bio: Bricktown features never-before-published photographs of the district’s earliest years. In his 18 years as an Oklahoman reporter, Steve Lackmeyer has spent much of his career covering Bricktown’s revival. He is also the coauthor of OKC Second Time Around: A Renaissance Story and cohosts OKCHistory.com.
Follow Up on Misty from "Aunt Bee"
A few months back I paid tribute to Misty Kemp, a downtown resident and founding member of Urban Neighbors who tragically died way too young during a visit to Texas. Anyway, this comment was posted this week on that old post and deserves your attention:
I just stumbled across this site by accident and was so pleased. I am Misty’s aunt/foster mother. She came to live with us in Rouses Point, New York, in the summer before her senior year in High School. She spent the summer with us, but when she went back to her father’s home in Machias, Maine, she called me and asked if she could live with us. I talked him and he said that if I didn’t take her he was going to dump her on her mother’s doorstep. I talked to my husband and he said that every kid needs a home and to tell Misty he would come and pick her up. There is much more to the story but I want you all to know that the year or so that Misty lived with us before she married was one of the happiest of my life. I miss her with all my heart and soul. Thank you for keeping her memory out here for all who loved her.
B. Quint
Carolyn Hill: The Video
The Rest of the Story on Carolyn Hill
The story you’re reading this weekend in the Sunday Oklahoman is just a glimpse at the career of Carolyn Hill. What follows is my full story:
BY STEVE LACKMEYER
Business Writer
Hill, who retires as director this week, smiles as she explains the six-year-old carpeting was worn out by the thousands of visitors who have flocked to exhibits such as this year’s Roman Art from the Louve.
Frank Hill, the museum’s trustees chairman (and no relation to Carolyn Hill), isn’t surprised by the last minute flurry of activity.
“She wants that museum to be as beautiful as the first day it opened,” Hill said. “She’s very demanding, but she’s fair.”
Frank Hill is part of a chorus of admirers who credit the retiring director with turning a fractured, anemic community arts organization into a regional attraction that drew 70,000 just for the Roman art exhibition. And her admirers know that Carolyn Hill is loathe to accept such praise.
“There are a lot of people who deserve substantial credit — the Kirkpatrick family, we couldn’t have done it without them, the Meade family, Chuck Nelson, the Payne family, George Records, the Inasmuch Foundation … But she brought a lot of those people into the museum and developed those relationships. Without her, I really don’t think the museum would be what it is today,” Frank Hill said.
Boomeranger
As civic leaders attempt to woo back Oklahomans who have become success stories elsewhere, they might look at Carolyn Hill as the quintessential “boomeranger.”
Hill grew up in Oklahoma City, attending Culbertson grade school, Webster Junior High and the old
Central High School.She loved music and art — but she also took an interest in science, even winning the E.K. Gaylord Science Award in the ninth grade. At the University of Oklahoma she majored in zoology with the intent to enter the pre-med program. But it was there she was exposed to music majors practicing in her dormitory.
“I saw them writing harmony, practicing dictation,” Hill said. “Doing those things intrigued me.”
It didn’t take long for Hill to switch her focus to music and fine arts. Two weeks after obtaining her master’s degree, Hill headed off to an uncertain future in New York City. Her first tasks: finding a job, a place to live, seeing the Steinway Piano shop on West 57th and listening to a performance at the Met.
Hill continued her studies in New York City and then started teaching music at the Chapin School, where the city’s elite sent their daughters for an education that often led to admissions to Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
Music instruction continued at home, and Hill was spending time in homes adorned with priceless works of art. And like many teachers at Chapin, Hill also was being invited by students’ parents to openings at the Met and New York City’s most exclusive art exhibitions.
“I was like a dry sponge to water,” Hill said. “I couldn’t get enough.”
Working Overtime
Hill’s career continued upward with a stint teaching at the United Nations International School. She loved the diversity — but the work days were brutal. A typical day started with rehersals at 7 a.m. and ended with gigs as a choir minister and symphony conductor at night.
“I kept four brief cases in the car,” Hill said. “And they were packed for whichever job I was going to.”
In the early 1980s Hill embarked on an entirely new adventure and opened her own art gallery in the SoHo section of
New York City. Hill figured she could rely on the international artists she had met during her teaching years, pair up art showings with live classical music performances and also set her own hours.
“I was meeting accomplished artists from all over the world who were in my gallery,” Hill said. And I thrived in that environment.”
ABOVE: Rex Reed was one of the celebrity visitors at Carolyn Hill’s SoHo art gallery. Below: the gallery
But home was beckoning. Little did Hill know that she was about to take a failing, fractured art museum that was drawing a few hundred visitors a month, at best, and turn it into a regional destination with prestigious exhibits drawing 130,000 people a year.
Throughout her 30 years in New York City, Carolyn Hill maintained ties to home visiting Oklahoma City for the holidays once a year and through letters from her mother, Flora.Her parents were proud of their city, and on each visit they showed off the newest development — a new Oklahoma City Boat Club at Lake Hefner, the Omniplex (now Science Museum Oklahoma), Waterford, Remington Park.
Hill’s mother sent her numerous clippings from local news reports the Oklahoma City Times and The Oklahoman about the transformation of downtown. It was the death of Hill’s father and brother that convinced her to return home in 1993 to take care of her mother.
“I knew what I was leaving,” Hill said. “I didn’t know what I was coming to outside my mother and sister-in-law. When I got back here, I was lost. I was used to a much more rapid-paced life.”
Hill continued to work with artists she had represented in SoHo and even gave two showings at an empty gallery she rented at the Omniplex. And it was there she met John and Eleanor Kirkpatrick, who were founding supporters of the Omniplex and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
A friendship developed and Hill was offered the director’s job at the struggling museum. No promises were made; Hill was advised the museum had been dropped from the city’s $370 million Metropolitan Area Projects program. The museum was split into two homes and was running short on cash.
Hill took over in September 1994 and immediately packed her days visiting with every single museum trustee.
“I wanted to try to get my arms around what was going on here, what was the story,” Hill said. “And based on that, I made a report on what the story was.”
Hill told trustees she didn’t hear a single voice, she only heard noise. She saw confusion. She saw good and decent people “running in quicksand.”
“In the quest of just surviving the oil bust and inadequate funds, most everybody thought that money was the paramount issue,” Hill said. “It was a big issue. But I didn’t see it as the issue. To me the issue was ‘who is this museum for and why does it exist? What is its function? What is the mission?’”
Hill gave trustees and staff a choice: They could either “pull the plug” or “cease and desist and put our mission first and never, never again refer to any excuse,” she said.
“We needed to take command of our own destiny, tighten our belt and do whatever it takes,” Hill said. “We needed to turn this facility in service of the community. That’s what it was here for. The trustees deserved that. They love this place — they’ve been keeping it afloat.”
Trustees stood by Hill as she began a painful trimming of the budget. They closed the Buttram Mansion and downtown Artsplace locations and consolidated operations at the aging State Fair Park location. Trustees scoured financial records and created a reliable set of books. No debt would be incurred; the museum under Hill would operate under a strict budget. The museum was to be operated as a business and the community was its customer.
“We had so little money we could not afford a ream of paper,” Hill said. “We recycled letters and memos that came into us. We printed and photocopied on the reversed side. I’d get memos from staff and I had to look at both sides to be sure of what I was looking at.”
Hill believed that with trustees and staff at her side, sacrificing and rebuilding the museum’s reputation, they could earn some much needed credibility.
“It’s a business and we’ve got to run it like a business,” Hill said. “It cannot be a country club or a private club. It’s either in the service of the community or it is not. It’s a business and something was wrong with the product if the business is not showing evidence of its ability to serve and inspire.”
Carolyn Hill’s demand that the Oklahoma City Museum of Art be run like a business might have been painful, but it also gained the institution some much needed credibility.
During the planning in the early 1990s for the city’s Metropolitan Area Projects program, the museum had been cut from the list of final projects.
Years afterward, then-City Manager Don Bown confirmed the museum was deemed too fractious, too disorganized in those pre-Carolyn Hill years.
Hill stuck to her vows against deficits and debt and insisted on independent audits. Expenses dropped, finances stabilized and support grew for a new permanent home for the museum.
Hill saw downtown as a natural fit. She wanted the museum to be at the center of the city and liked the idea of pairing it with the Civic Center Music Hall and Stage Center and creating an arts district.
The old, dilapidated Centre Theater was deemed a perfect spot. Hill negotiated a purchase of the property from the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority just as it was preparing for the building’s demolition. Armed with a major grant for construction and endowment from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the museum’s trustees approved Hill’s plan to turn the downtown site into the museum’s new home.
The $40 million museum opened in 2002 with a theater for independent films, an upscale cafe and exhibit space that dwarfed the old digs. Long lines formed to get the first glimpse of the new Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Hill kept pushing trustees to go one step further, to bring in exhibitions they couldn’t have dreamed of attracting prior to her hiring.
“She has a vision on maximizing revenues,” Frank Hill said. “She has stepped up and inspired our board to go through with very special plans for exhibitions…. she inspired us to buy the Chihuly opening exhibit…. and we put ourselves on the map with all this.”
Looking back, Carolyn Hill admits her 30 years in New York City might have been preparatory for taking the reins at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
But she’s quick to add, “New York was a very selfish experience.”
”“It was a place that gave me an incredible quality of life,” Hill said. “But it was very self indulgent in that there was so much joy coming in for me, but what was I doing for New York City and what did New York City need me to do? New York was overrun with lots of Carolyn Hills.”
TOMORROW: THE POWER OF DREAMING AND THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO CAROLYN HILL
Spam, Spam, Spam
OK folks, I got hit with a major spam attack the last couple days. It’s all gone now, but if you had a comment caught up in the spam filter, I might have accidentally killed it.
Merry Christmas!
I wish I could have been around to enjoy downtown at Christmas when Main Street was still Main Street and merchants went all out to celebrate the holidays as shown in this 1968 Oklahoman photo.
Of course, it’s not that bad now either. The lighting of the tree in Bricktown in 1996 was a particularly fun event, complete with fireworks. I wasn’t there this time around (got sick) so I don’t know if we had fireworks this time around or not.
Anyway, Santa is on his way, the kids are asleep, and some cookies are out on the kitchen table. Good night everybody, and have a wonderful Christmas!
Getting to Know a Living Legend
When this job gets really tedious, when the grind threatens to burn me out, it’s then that I’m often reminded of how lucky I am – how blessed I’ve been to meet people of greatness.
One of the true legends in this town – a person I’d point my kids to and say “that’s a great person, consider her a role model in living life to its fullest” – is Carolyn Hill.
In relatively short period of time, she led the Oklahoma City Museum of Art from a floundering mess to a source of pride for the entire region. I have a story set for this Sunday about her retirement, and here is just one quote that reflects Carolyn’s brilliance:
“It takes a lot of energy to dream. You have to analyze it, you have to fall in love with it. And that takes a lot of energy and strength.”
Coffee Talk Yet Again
Let’s make this one simple: next week I’ll be doing a best of downtown posting and I want your nominations for the person who made the biggest impact on downtown Oklahoma City in 2008. I’ll follow up your nominations with an online poll.
Let the nominations begin!
Using the New Blog
Yes, the page looks different, but everything is still here. Couple of things to note: the comment field is now at the top of each post by the headline, WIMGO is built into the page and on this site it is all downtown oriented – hopefully a feature you might find helpful. You can still search by category – the listing drops when you hit the categories button by the search field in the right column. Soon, if not this afternoon, you will once again have a listing of my recent Main Street columns. And finally, the blog has an area for advertising for those who might be interested in communicating to a fairly robust audience of people truly interested in what’s going on downtown.
I hope this redesign is an improvement for you the readers. If you have concerns or questions, please don’t hesitate contacting me – our web staff is dedicated to making these blogs better and better.
