STEVE LACKMEYER

Oklahoma City Boulevard's opening Monday follows years of debate, changing expectations

Steve Lackmeyer
This photo illustration shows Oklahoma City Boulevard looking east, with Western and Reno avenues in the foreground. [DAVID MORRIS, TODD PENDLETON/THE OKLAHOMAN GRAPHICS]

Oklahoma City Boulevard will open for traffic Monday afternoon, capping off 20 years of political conflict and debate on how best to design streets that accommodate not just drivers but pedestrians, bicyclists and other emerging means of travel.

The road, as with the highway it replaces, was conceived at a time when city leaders and state transportation officials were at odds on how best to rebuild the crumbling original Interstate 40 Crosstown Expressway while maintaining access to downtown.

The original 4½-mile Crosstown Expressway, opened in 1966, was an elevated structure between its junction with Interstate 35 and Western Avenue. Designed without redundant safety systems and with traffic volumes exceeding capacity, the need to replace the highway was without debate when state engineers started looking at the structure's future.

Downtown was still struggling to recover from the Urban Renewal era and the oil bust of the 1980s when state highway engineers started looking at options in 1996. The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber and then Mayor Ron Norick advocated rebuilding the highway in the same path.

To tear it down and build it five blocks south, as advocated by highway engineers, was seen uneasily as exposing a wide swath of blighted land to downtown visitors.

The battle continued when Kirk Humphreys succeeded Norick as mayor. The debate continued as chunks of concrete increasingly were falling from the elevated road. The highway was literally falling apart.

Then Secretary of Transportation Neal McCaleb convened a meeting of political, business and civic leaders to discuss the matter with hopes of moving forward. When two reporters from The Oklahoman crashed the meeting and declined to leave (myself and Jack Money), McCaleb cited their presence as cause to end debate and go with the design of building a highway farther south.

It was then that Humphreys pressed the question of delayed travel times into downtown due to the design having fewer ramps than the old structure.

McCaleb responded with a promise to build a boulevard along the same path of the old I-40. Land acquisition and clearance for the new highway started first, followed by planning for the boulevard in the early 2000s.

The Latino Riverside community, which saw some homes cleared for the new highway, was among entities signing a mitigation agreement that calls for an approximately 60-foot-wide pedestrian bridge linking the neighborhood with downtown, retaining walls designed to match the community's Little Flower Catholic Church, a large park and extensive landscaping.

During one project update in 2003, then project engineer John Bowman told city leaders of plans to create a boulevard following the path of the original I-40 that would include a landscaped median, vintage-style lighting and “perhaps” elaborate steel crossover structures spanning each intersection.

"We aren't trying to make it an I-40 business loop," Bowman promised.

The Skydance bridge was built and, opened along with the new I-40 in 2012, it took travelers past a transformed downtown, one vastly different from the one that existed when the boulevard was first envisioned. Oklahoma City residents passed MAPS 3 in 2009 that included funding for the park promised as part of the mitigation plan.

But state engineers were proceeding with plans for a boulevard that was designed for a downtown that existed in 1998. Despite saying they weren’t envisioning a “business loop,” critics saw the plans as just that as they included a new elevated bypass between Western and Walker Avenues.

A new barrier was to be built separating Farmers Public Market, the area now known as Strawberry Fields planned for mixed-use development, and other reviving areas from downtown. State highway engineers stubbornly stuck with their plans, stating to redesign would delay their desire to complete the boulevard by 2014.

Promises were made, they said, and promises had to be kept.

Then-City Manager Jim Couch and city engineers were initially united with the highway engineers. But members of the grassroots opposition were just as stubborn as they fought to eliminate the elevated structure and make the boulevard friendly for pedestrians and bicyclists. The debate attracted the attention of the Federal Highway Administration and, as some council members joined the public challenge to the boulevard design, state engineers agreed to look at alternative designs.

A compromise was reached. Some opponents wanted no boulevard at all and instead wanted restoration of the street grid that existed prior to the highway’s opening in 1966. State and city traffic engineers couldn’t imagine how traffic would flow through such a grid when the east half of that grid disappeared in the 1970s with construction of the Cox Convention Center and the Myriad Gardens.

The answer, it turned out, rested with an stretch of two parallel streets that involved the awkward termination of Classen Boulevard just south of California Avenue and the narrowing of Western Avenue north of Classen and its also awkward shift across Classen and NW 13.

Western Avenue was a major corridor south of downtown and again north of NW 23. Classen, meanwhile, was a major corridor from NW 63 to Sheridan Avenue. By merging Western with Classen under a boulevard bridge at Sheridan Avenue, engineers had the opportunity to eliminate the long elevated bypass from the design and also allow north-south travelers to avoid the confusing dead-ends and shifts of both corridors.

The new design allowed the boulevard to be built at grade for four blocks starting at Shartel Avenue that previously were to be part of the elevated structure.

With construction underway on the west and east stretches, highway engineers were free to proceed with the modified design. Over time they eliminated a lingering “slip lane” at Lee Avenue common with freeways and converted it into a regular intersection.

The boulevard opening Monday afternoon isn’t the completed vision. Landscaping still must be done along much of the corridor between Western Avenue and Bricktown. Bike lanes are not part of the project either, though Assistant City Manager Aubrey McDermid confirmed this week they are still planned to be added once the road is transferred from the state to the city.

How the boulevard will interact with an evolving Oklahoma City also remains to be seen.

Matthew Burch and others in the Farmers Market District at Klein Avenue see the bridge over the merger of Classen and Western as a potential gateway to the area with the right signage, landscaping and public art.

Aspiring developer Pat Salame has spent the past couple of years acquiring and clearing large swaths of property south of the boulevard between Shartel and Hudson. Developer Bob Howard, meanwhile, has yet to detail any plan for the former Fred Jones Ford dealership that stretches between Walker and Robinson Avenues directly adjacent to the north side of the boulevard.

With wide sidewalks, the promise of bike lanes in the future, lighting, access to the streetcar and extensive lighting, the boulevard yet to come may not be all envisioned by the city’s urban thinkers, but it’s a far cry from the utilitarian elevated bypass that almost became reality.