Ride Photos 15

Out behind the main Midwest City shopping area, the municipal leadership decided to build this fancy park. It was previously the site of our city hall and a fire station, along with a water tower. All of that got moved to other locations. The site sat fallow for a long time until someone came up with this idea. I’m sure it will be nice, but I doubt it will see much foot traffic. It’s more of a monument than an actual park.

Meanwhile, the latest bikeway build for Oklahoma City Parks and Recreation is coming along nicely. This is where it runs parallel to NE 4th Street. It will connect the Boathouse District with the Katy Trail, via a long, as-yet-unfinished bikeway along the north bank of the North Canadian River. The whole thing is moving along slowly. Last year, I predicted it would not be finished before next month. So far, that’s turning out to be a good estimate.

Where NE 4th passes over Interstate 35, the bikeway means simply widening the pedestrian walkway and making the drive lanes a little tighter. The new wall has been poured and is standing solid, but the original wall had to be chipped away completely down to the deck. That’s why there’s a new concrete form running down the center of the bike lane. To be honest, it would have been okay to just carve down the old wall to level with the surface, as they had done originally, but I guess someone decided it looked tacky that way.

With the recent heavy rains, the water flow over the lower dam on the OK River Recreation Area (AKA, the Boathouse District) has drawn a lot of fish, and with them, the cranes. They were crowded thickly around the dam by the hundreds, and all along the outflow for several hundred yards downstream.

The other thing noticeable is that, with the temperatures a little lower than during the heat of the summer, we have a much larger homeless population camping along the river. There is always a few, all year round, but right now they are about as thick as the cranes.