Today I have some random images from various training rides in the past week. First up is the backside of the OKANA Resort, showing the new pedestrian bridge almost finished. The bridge would have been there without the resort, but you can bet the First Nations folks will capitalize on anything that brings attention to their expensive facilities. The other day I encountered a fellow walking away from the facility asking me if I knew where there was a casino in the city; he was hoping OKANA included one (it doesn’t — yet). For someone who wasn’t from this area, it was a good guess, since the majority of all gaming facilities are owned by tribes in our state.
I went down to take a look at the state of construction on the new bridge across Crutcho Creek on Midwest Boulevard. It’s about half done. Odd thing: It was a weekday and no one was on the site, so I had the place to myself. I looked around at what they had done to modify the creek’s flow. They had smoothed the turns and added a lot of rip-rap to prevent erosion. They widened the channel because the state mandates that all bridges built after some date be built to much higher standards than in previous decades. Thus, instead of a simple reinforced span, it has pylons and the works.
Yesterday I visited another major project finished not so long ago. The interchange between Interstate 235 and our Northeast Expressway was a bottleneck and traffic had increased massively in a short time, so they rebuilt the whole thing and it took a couple of years. The thing that caught my eye was how they managed to preserve this catchment basin for storm drainage while increasing the road capacity. They cleaned it up a bit; previously it wasn’t so easy to see. Now it actually looks pretty nice. You wouldn’t want to wade in that water, but at least they spruced it up a bit.
One of the major “section lines” running through the OKC Metro is 23rd Street, both NE and NW. It slips under the State Capitol buildings, and here it slips under a railroad track and Interstate 235. All of this was part of a very long and substantial project to clean up the 23rd Street corridor. Just east of where this image was taken was once a high crime area. It’s also quite near our central hospital district, and when medical specialists began buying up housing between the hospitals and the Capitol buildings, there was a lot of pressure to beautify and pacify the area. This double overpass got some of that money; it used to be ugly and industrial looking.
From a quiet and little used park bench, I shot this image of the Oklahoma State Capitol Building. I can assure you that this thing is very high maintenance. Every few years we hear on the local news about some kind of repair or renovation to the stonework, because it wasn’t the smartest design or construction in the first place. A couple of times the government came close to taking off that fancy dome, but for now, it survives. If you look closely, you might just make out a symbolic oil derrick almost centered in front of the building.
