Now, for some perspective with the help of some photos. Remember, Deep Deuce development got started in 2000. MidTown development got started in 2006. Bricktown, by the way, was started way back in 1979.

Deep Deuce 1998.

Deep Deuce 1998.

Deep Deuce 1999.

Bricktown 1996.

Deep Deuce as I saw it in the early 1990s

When I first joined The Oklahoman in 1990, Deep Deuce was no-man’s land, a once proud black neighborhood that was letting out its last gasp. The drug dealers were pretty much gone already – and just a few vagrants remained. Buildings were burned out, boarded-up, and catching fire.

Yep, that was my introduction to Deep Deuce – covering fires.

But as Bricktown thrived throughout the 1990s, it wasn’t that difficult to see how a revival of the area and few remaining old buildings might occur. And indeed it has. First with the opening of the Deep Deuce Apartments about a decade ago, then followed by the openings of the Deep Deuce Grill, Sage and Wedge Pizzeria in the old boarded up buildings. Then came in the for-sale condominiums – Block 42, Central Avenue Villas, the Hill, 2nd Street Lofts and the Brownstones at Maywood Park. Say what you may about the mixed sales success of these properties, but they have added a diversity and stability to Deep Deuce. Now we have the next wave of development underway – the Level Apartments, an Aloft Hotel, and the announcement of a Native Roots Market set to open early next year in the Level development.

Expect a coffee shop and restaurant, meanwhile, to open on the first floor of the Aloft. And despite some questionable design of the first floor of the 2nd Street Lofts, life is beginning to emerge there as well with part of the space now home to  a salon.

More development is on the way – both announced (4th Street apartments by Ron Bradshaw), and unannounced (more housing, more mixed use commercial). What we end up with in the near future is perhaps the city’s first truly dense, mixed-use downtown neighborhood sandwiched between Bricktown and the central business district. (and keep in mind it ultimately extends to 4th street, so it also includes a gallery and mechanic’s garage).

All in all, not bad work. And no, I’m not aware of any plans for the streetcar system to go through Deep Deuce, nor have I heard much discussion of such.

Expect even more announcements in the next few months. Deep Deuce is emerging as downtown’s first fully-mixed neighborhood.

Aloft Hotel - NE 2 and Walnut, Deep Deuce

Aloft Hotel, NE 2 and Walnut, Deep Deuce

This old wooden building - once likely a grocery - has been boarded up and empty for decades.

But what if…..

It could look like this?

Good news, wheelchair users! Oklahoma City has provided you with a good, modern ramp onto the NE 2 sidewalk. But what's that up ahead?

Oklahoma City has been vigilant in recent months in constructing new sidewalk wheelchair ramps a street corners throughout the metro – even at intersections where there are no sidewalks.
The stretch of NE 2 between E.K. Gaylord and Walnut Avenue at least has sidewalks – and wheelchair ramps. This pedestrian corridor will be an increasingly important one in the future as the 2nd Street Lofts are joined by an Aloft Hotel and a large apartment complex to the immediate east Imagine all the people who will be able to walk from the hotel and their homes to the Central Business District and Automobile Alley.
Of course, when they use the sidewalk along NE 2, they’ll also have to walk around this big fenced in above-grade utility grate.
I’m stumped as to how this sidewalk meets ADA requirements.

Planners, developers, city officials – I know you’re out there reading this site – how in the world does this make any sense? Did someone at Public Works really look at these sidewalk plans and say, “oh yeah, this will work just fine?” Is this not an embarrassment to someone?

Hard as might be to believe, but just a decade ago Deep Deuce was a no-man’s land where development seemed to be an odd and unlikely prospect. Of course we know today it’s downtown’s most vibrant mixed neighborhood, home to restaurants, offices, a market and plenty of housing. Penny Owen, once one of The Oklahoman’s best feature writers (she left the paper a few months ago), joined me in trying to capture the area’s past and future with this 1998 front page story:

Sentimental Journey Proposals Revive Deep Deuce Memories Deuce

By Steve Lackmeyer, Penny Owen

Staff Writers

Sunday, October 25, 1998

The good times still come easy for James “Doebelly” Brooks.

All the 78-year-old Deep Deuce diehard has to do is close his eyes, raise his face to the ceiling and turn his protruding bottom lip into a smile. The music, he says, flows into his ear, then stops at his heart, long enough to kick in a rhythmic ba-boom, ba-boom. Then his foot starts tapping. Then it all comes back.

Doebelly picked his dance spot from the sounds traveling down NE 2, in the once-flourishing black business district often just called the Deuce.

Doebelly in Deep Deuce, 1991

It just took an earful to know where Don Cherry was blowing his trumpet, where Charlie Christian was jamming or whether Count Basie was in town.

Dancing got Doebelly married once. He stole the show on another night when he urged a not-so-attractive dance partner on the floor.

“There was good times and bad times,” says Doebelly, eyes still shut tight. “The bad times was when I couldn’t get down there.”

Deep Deuce is just a memory now. Only a handful of buildings remain, and they are boarded up and desolate. But at least two competing developers envision a revived Deep Deuce where remaining buildings are restored and a place is created where hundreds of new downtown dwellers can live.

How serious is such interest? Urban Renewal officials have the task over the next few months of deciding who gets to invest at least $15 million to rebuild Deep Deuce. At the same time, some folks fear Deep Deuce will become a commercialized urban playground devoid of its rich past.

“It will come back, but it won’t be the same,” laments Charlie Nicholson, an organizer of Deep Deuce’s annual Charlie Christian Jazz Festival. “Too much of (commercialization) will kill it.”

According to the state Historical Society, Doebelly was the last resident to leave his beloved Deuce, where he propped up a hand-painted sign pointing folks into a chair for a good shoe shine. Doebelly called Deep Deuce home for 65 years before leaving for good in 1995.

Now, he opens his eyes to a cluttered living room several miles away. His shoe shining bench sits on his front porch, next to a Black Chronicle newspaper rack.

He misses the Deuce, where prominent black businessmen, rich in dreams, fought for justice and swapped stories on the sidewalks, in the barber shops and at Ruby’s Grill.

The Deuce was a small, spirited town, though a forced one, where segregation drew the lines where blacks could and could not live.

Doctors, lawyers, dentists and insurance agents mingled at the Slaughter Building at NE 2 and Stiles Avenue. The building’s third floor was an auditorium that featured the likes of Bill “Count” Basie, the Blue Devils, Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing.

Strolling the streets regularly was Judge A.B. McDonald, who smoked a fat cigar and carried an old suitcase stuffed with cash.

“He looked something like Howard Hughes, except he was black,” Doebelly said.

Locals would holler, “Hey Judge, whacha got in that case?”

“None o’ yer business,” he’d snap back.

Doebelly recalled how McDonald got the word “Negro” taken off the official ballot. He also used an entire block to grow vegetables along NE 7. Everything and everybody was within walking distance.

Earlyday Deep Deuce

Kids, too, hung around NE 2 – especially on Saturdays, when they’d take in a movie at the Aldridge, Oklahoma City’s first black theater. They might take in an ice cream cone as well at the old Bethel Drug Co. – a place straight out of Norman Rockwell, with glossy wooden floors, ice cream chairs and a soda jerk behind the stretched-out counter.

Even if developers succeed in bringing the neighborhood back to Deep Deuce, Doebelly doesn’t expect them to re-create the camaraderie he still can revive in his mind. “If you was sick, they come to see you. If you couldn’t do your house, they’d come and do it for you.”

Preachers sat around the kitchen tables and prayed with folks. Mostly, people just got together.

“If I came over to your house and I got outta line, I got a whuppin’ there,” Doebelly recalled fondly. “If I had my way, I’d go back down on Second Street.”

Deep Deuce, 1998

Why Did Deuce Die?

Not every building in Deep Deuce is boarded up. Good Baptists still attend church at Calvary Baptist Tabernacle on the corner of NE 2 and Walnut. Patients still visit Dr. G.E. Finley at his building across the street.

Three surviving buildings along NE 2 are listed on the National Historic Register. They’re not architecturally significant – but they’re historical, said Dr. Bob Blackburn, deputy director of the historical society.

Blackburn and others say there is more than one culprit responsible for the area’s demise.

“In the 1960s and even into the ’70s, there was still a thriving business district that had the area’s historic character.”

But like most inner cities, the Deuce fell victim to sprawl.

“The young generation, they went car crazy,” Doebelly said. “People stopped walkin’ the streets.”

Then came Urban Renewal.

Urban planners across the country launched a war against blight that called for demolition of old buildings, often without regard for historical significance. Urban Renewal in the 1970s often replaced old ornate structures in need of repair with lots that remain empty today.

The opening of Interstate 235 cured downtown of traffic snarls that resulted from Broadway Extension turning into a three-lane residential corridor south of NW 36. Highway builders, however, removed dozens of homes and businesses that kept Deep Deuce going.

“The life blood was gone, so the heart died,” Blackburn said.

Music and the Deuce

Deep Second was our fond nickname for the block in which Rushing worked and lived, and where most Negro business and entertainment were found, and before he went to cheer a whiter world, his voice evoked a festive spirit of the place.

Indeed, he was the natural essence of its joy. For Jimmy Rushing was not simply a local entertainer, he expressed a value, an attitude about the world for which our lives afforded no other definition.

We had a Negro church and a segregated school, a few lodges and fraternal organizations, and beyond these there was the great, white world. We were pushed off to what seemed to be the least desirable side of the city, and our system of justice was based upon Texas law, yet there was an optimism within the Negro community and a sense of possibility which, despite our awareness of limitation (dramatized so brutally in the Tulsa riot of 1921), transcended all of this; and it was this rock- bottom sense of reality, coupled with our sense of the possibility of rising above it, which sounded in Rushing’s voice….

We were still too young to attend night dances, but yet old enough to gather beneath the corner street lamp on summer evenings, anyone might halt the conversation to exclaim “Listen, they’re raising hell down at Slaughter’s Hall,” and we’d turn our heads westward to hear Jimmy’s voice soar up the hill and down, as pure and as miraculously unhindered by distance and earthbound things as is the body in youthful dreams of flying.

- Ralph Ellison, from “Shadow and Act,” 1964.

Opinions differ as to how NE 2 and the surrounding area became known as Deep Deuce. Some believe the term alludes to the wild times that could be found among the community’s jazz clubs and beer joints.

Blackburn offers a much more mundane explanation.

“If you travel along Second Street, and you go across the tracks, first you go along a little rise where the Calvary Baptist church is, and then you go down,” Blackburn said.

Despite such explanations, many will forever associate Deep Deuce with jazz, rhythm and blues.

Musicians who journeyed to the Deuce included Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Fats Domino, Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, James Brown, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Ike and Tina Turner.

Benny Goodman wooed hometown favorite Charlie Christian to New York City several times to perform.

Oklahoma City had its own sound.

While jazz in the eastern states sounded closer to New Orleans-style tunes, Oklahoma City jazz had more of a swing to it, said Nicholson, who collects and sells old records in his store along Classen.

“Individuals would come in and just cook it. Everything walked and talked and moved,” Nicholson said of days long gone. “They were on a magical journey.”

Along came Zelia Breaux, the so-called “godmother of music,” who taught jazz to the likes of Jimmy Rushing and Charlie Christian at Douglass High School.

“She was one of those gifted teachers who could motivate students,” Blackburn said. “She created this culture of music.”

Deuce nightclubs and beer joints vibrated with a creativity and wholesomeness that was a whole lot of fun – but not very lucrative.

Musicians who had any aspirations, or who simply needed to fill their wallets, were forced to leave Oklahoma City behind for their careers, Nicholson said. They headed for bands in other jazz-rich cities – like Memphis and Chicago.

A Future

Officials with the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority promise none of the remaining buildings will be destroyed to make room for the new Deuce. Development proposals pitched last week offer different visions for saving what’s left of the area.

Nicholson wonders if the original spirit of Deep Deuce jazz and the district’s character can survive such commercialization.

“How’re you gonna let ‘em vent if you got ‘em all stiffed up, charging $3 a head?” he wondered. To really bring jazz back will mean bringing the black people back into the district and all the emotion.

“You can’t go back and do what was done,” Nicholson said. “But if the jazz is good, people will come.”

Tyler and Lane Peyton during happier times at the Deep Deuce Grill

I finally reached Lane Peyton, who along with his brother Tyler operated the Deep Deuce Grill until midnight Wednesday. If there is one thing Peyton and building owner/landlord/restaurant founder Craig Brown agree on, it’s that there were “differences.”

“It was definitely not friendly,’ Peyton said. “There may be more to come.”

Peyton said he was negotiating in good faith to renew the lease for the restaurant and was surprised when Brown shut it down and locked the doors. Peyton said it took him five days to recover all of his assets.

One asset may yet to be disputed: the name.

I’m not sure how this all works, but apparently even though Brown named the restaurant and opened it before signing  a lease with the Peytons a few years later, Lane Peyton says he has a trademark on the name.

Will the restaurant reopen? Brown says yes, and with new operators. Peyton says there is “debate as to who has the right to do it.”

I don’t know what to make of all this other than to give you both sides, which I have done, and note that an overwelming majority of readers at www.okccentral.com and www.okctalk.com have indicated they were none too happy with the Peytons’ operation during the final year or so.

The Deep Deuce Grill - doors closed for now.

That’s a promise by Craig Brown, who started the restaurant seven years ago on what was really a pretty big leap of faith. For the past couple of years Brown has had an uneasy relationship with the operators of the restaurant and on Oct. 1, with him reporting their lease expiring, he shut the restaurant down. (*I have placed a call to the number I have for the operator, but have yet to hear back)

Craig Brown. back in control of the Deep Deuce Grill

Anyone who visits www.okctalk.com knows Craig isn’t alone in his dissatisfaction with the previous operators. Just days before the restaurant closed, the restaurant was getting hit with pretty harsh criticism:

Horrible experience.

Just walked out of Deep Deuce. I was with a group of 5 friends. We took a table on the patio – only one other table occupied. Sat there for 20 minutes and were never so much as greeted, much less given the opportunity to order. Server even came out and helped a table of ten right next to us (it took quite an effort to work that table without turning to see us). Another group of 6 came in behind us and was equally ignored. When we left, I made a point to walk in to the bar and told the staff we were leaving after having been sitting outside for 20 minutes with no service. The smartass said “you’re welcome.”

They weren’t busy at all – maybe one table inside, 4 to 6 people inside at the bar. Pathetic. We were probably good for a hundred dollar or better tab, and a healthy gratuity. Instead, none of us will be back, and I’ll go out of my way to share my experience.

Incidentally, when I first suggested my group go in to the Deuce, the first comment was “they have horrible service.” Should have listened.

And this:

I used to love Deep Deuce. But the last few times I’ve been there the service has been pretty slow. On one occasion a friend and I sat there for 10 or 15 minutes without ever being served, so we rolled out. It was a Sunday afternoon, not that busy either.

All of this is sad considering that the Deep Deuce Grill was, for years, the place for power players and also a great neighborhood hangout. And it was also an expression of Craig Brown’s own personality, who bought up the area back when no one cared. Craig initially got interested in the area when he was hired to tear down some of the more dillapidated structures. But once at work, it was Craig who decided to buy up what few old structures remained. And it was Craig who toiled away at renovating his first building on NE 1 (now home to a law firm, and then moved on to doing a deal with First Worthing to build the Deep Deuce Apartments. Craig meanwhile put his heart into renovating the one-time home of Charlie Christian and turning it into an idealized neighborhood bar and grill. To understand what sort of a risk Craig was taking, one must remember what Deep Deuce looked like just a decade ago….

Deep Deuce, 1998.

The Deuce, like the neighborhood a decade ago, ain’t dead yet. Craig is doing a major overhaul that includes repaving of the crumbling parking lot, a top to bottom cleaning of the entire restaurant, an overhaul of the menu, re-introduction of the restaurant as a neighborhood hang-out and as a venue for jazz.

During a visit Friday, I saw evidence that this isn’t just talk – that Craig is dedicated to bringing the Deuce back to life, better than ever. The clean-up is underway, and it looks like Craig may have some impressive candidates to take over the restaurant operation and make it the place, once again, for downtown residents and the city’s power crowd.