Photography: Urban Parking Garages 3

This is the last post in the series. Yesterday’s adventure began not with a parking garage but the tall tower attached to our Children’s Hospital. I tried to capture a panorama, but I found the reflective coating on the windows interfered with that. What I ended up with was this shot of the state capitol area. You can see the scaffolding as the domed building is under renovation. There’s a long story about flawed construction and design not worth repeating here.

This is the atrium of the Children’s Hospital. This is their new building. In times past, this area was a complex of several major hospitals all in one quarter of a square mile, perched atop a hill. It’s now dozens of institutions and lots of new buildings. It includes Oklahoma University’s School of Medicine, something like 40 miles remote from their main campus down in Norman. OU Med owns about half of this hospital cluster, shared with the likes of the VA, McGee Eye Institute, Children’s, and some other stuff.

This is an exterior view of Children’s Hospital showing the tower; it was 14 stories of stairs. A great workout, but I was highly irritated by the complete lack of bicycle parking. I had to find a spot in their visitor parking where I could lock the bike to the railing out the way. There are doctors and other medical personal who ride bikes all over this place, but darned little bicycle parking. Even the VA has this figured out with ample locking space in a special courtyard.

Right on the edge of this hospital district is an old house my family occupied back when I was six years old. We rented the top floor; the topmost window on the left — now boarded over — was my room. Much of the neighborhood is gone, with houses removed to make way for newer structures, and of course, Interstate 235 cuts right through it now.

About a mile west of that hospital cluster is another, based on Saint Anthony’s hospital. Fewer major facilities, but still a lot of expensive medical real estate. I couldn’t access the parking garage mentioned previously in this series; it was for staff only. However, Saint’s has a huge visitor and lesser staff garage just across from their front entrance. I got this shot facing north toward a couple of other medical facilities and some new yuppie housing.

At various times in my youth, we have lived in places all around this part of OKC. Most of those houses are long gone. Right now I can count four different buildings of which only the one above still stands, and that one was old when we lived there 55 years ago. Things change. After the Murrah Building bombing, the Feds built themselves a new and horribly ugly building. I shot this from across a very strange oval that drops down toward the stairs to my right on the other side of a wall. This oval features gravel paths running straight downhill to nothing in particular. On the higher ground surrounding this oval is a bunch of cutesy short benches shaped like stars with seats on both sides. There is a plaza between this odd park-like thing and then the majestic hideous monstrosity for the offices itself. You can see this nasty thing on any of the mapping services online; it’s just north of the Downtown central district.

The bright spot of the day was visiting Brown’s Bakery. It’s high grade stuff. They don’t have their own website, but this Yelp page will do. They occupy what was once a grocery store; I can recall my Mom taking me there with her. Next to it was an attached TG&Y store (general merchandise department store), where I drooled over what was then a still newish trendy toy: Wham-O’s Frisbee. Ah, the memories of long lost childhood.