Parlor Game Time!
If you could go back in time and reconfigure the proposed downtown Galleria project in such a way that it incorporated the existing the John A. Brown’s Department Store as an anchor instead of destroying it and all of Main Street, thus getting it built … would you?
UPDATE: Here’s the reason I wrote this post.
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Comments
If we knew what we know today, then maybe. I think the momentum at the time to do something – anything – was a sign of the era. Without UR we would not have the plate to work with we do today. I think we would be so bound to memories good or bad – we would have a difficult time deciding on a move forward.
Our mistakes and our successes contribute so much to where we are and it is so easy to judge the past.
In my hindsight I am grateful for the path that was paved by those before us. They are helping us to do better this time.
No. Oklahoma City dodged a bullet by not placing an enclosed mall in the heart of Downtown. Today it would be a vacant eyesore. I guarantee the successors of John A. Brown would not have kept open such a store. Downtowns are not suburbs. Successful downtown retail is street-level and outdoors. We should have kept the most historically significant buildings and not engaged in the massive clear cutting. Yes, the vacant blocks gave us some of our present opportunities, but we lost so much in the process.
No. Oklahoma City dodged a bullet by not placing an enclosed mall in the heart of Downtown. Today it would be a vacant eyesore. With the Downtown of the 80s and 90s, I guarantee the successors of John A. Brown would not have kept open such a store. Downtowns are not suburbs, successful urban retail is street-level and outdoors. We should have kept our most historically significant buildings and not engaged in so much clear cutting. I’m by no means a “building hugger” but look how much “sense of place” we’ve lost. Of course hindsight is 20-20.
If I could go back in time I wouldn’t have done urban renewal, period. I would have tried to focus the tremendous resources behind urban renewal to a more productive means. No reasons OKC couldn’t have gone after an NBA team with an arena on the edge of downtown back in the 70s.