Photography: Urban Parking Garages 2

We continue the parking garage saga. Today’s initial image was on the way to my first, and I decided to stop and capture that sculpture that shows up in a previous image. This open area is called Enterprise Square, but it’s all owned by Enable Midstream Partners, a gas pipeline partnership between two or more companies seeking to gain near monopoly control over the natural gas supply in Oklahoma. It’s a lovely building, though.

A couple of blocks from the sculpture is this fancy promenade entrance to Devon Energy tower. The parking garage on the right offers public access, so I slogged up the ten floors; it was a good workout.

However, even at that elevation, the location isn’t exactly the best. This is the view of most of the urban canyon skyscrapers, looking NE from the upper deck of Devon’s garage. There are a lot of buildings just about the same elevation as I’m standing.

The real gem of the day is this telephoto shot of Saint Anthony’s Hospital; I took advantage of the wide top of the concrete wall on the upper deck to stabilize the camera. It’s less than a mile away, but most cameras don’t pick up what your eyes see. This shot pulls the target just a little closer than what you would see yourself. I’ll be trying to use that parking garage in the foreground to shoot back this way next week.

The next garage was also ten floors, but there was not much point in trying to shoot any pictures with such a high mesh barrier around the whole thing. This is what you get when companies fear liability from lawsuits of surviving relatives of stupid people.

Two other parking garages next to that last one were not publicly accessible, so I headed back south of the river and found a high spot on the bank to grab this shot. It shows how small our skyscraper district is. It also shows that Devon Energy’s tower dominates by a huge margin. I tried to find out about permission to access the view, but they have a legal requirement that prevents me publishing any images I shoot from their their tower. (*sigh*)

On my way back home, I stopped to catch this shot of the lower dam on the OK River. They can’t just shut the water off, but they can keep it to a very low trickle during droughts. There were no water fowl near the dam this time.

This last shot is one of those things that called my name. There’s a spot on the bike trail back toward Eagle Lake with this winsome view of the river through tree branches. I always slow down to admire how it looks to me.