"Big Transitions in Our Town" - Time Out #197

It certainly isn't a deep, dark secret today.

All you have to do is travel a little bit around this beloved community, Our Town. If you haven't been here in several years, or even several decades, you will be absolutely amazed just how much our small little piece of our north central Oklahoma heaven has physically changed. Growing up here in the 1950's, and even into most of the 1960's, 1970's, etc.,

Our Town wasn't really touched by much modern hustle and bustle. True, we would have our occasional frantic, 1-day activity, when a big athletic event was pending, and later happening, at Oklahoma State University (OSU). However, most of the time, our sleepy, Norman Rockwell-like community was a slow-paced town, full of wooden, single-family homes, and very few brick constructed high-rise structures, except for a few, scattered, OSU campus older buildings.

Throw Father Time into reverse to less than 10 calendar years ago, and the structural changes began coming-on like gang busters. For whatever reasons, the big "outside" investors, coupled with a few local developers, began purchasing multiple, old, single-family structures, either hauling them off to remote locations or, more often, bulldozed the old structures and collected some salvage. In a few cases, entire blocks of older structures were eliminated, to make way for multi-storied, huge, apartment compounds. During this entire residential expansion boom, most of our already worn inner city streets have taken a severe beating, and, thus, are in dire need of repair/replacement. A few of these streets have gone from traffic barricades to now passable, but beware of the additional added potholes! , Since America is the land of free enterprise, these construction projects, in many folks' opinion, are long-needed "progress improvements" for Our Town.

Now, let's switch focus to the largest employer by far in this area, OSU. Wow, their building efforts have taken off like a rocket ship over the same, brief, time span as the non-university construction has also accelerated.

Just about every direction around the beautiful Stillwater campus, HUGE, expensive structures are either recently completed, or are currently being built. Two of the most impressive OSU projects are the Performing Arts Center, on West University Avenue, and the baseball park, at the corner of West McElroy and North Washington Street. These 2 mega items both have price tags in the $70-million dollar range. Driving by each of them makes an old-timer like your faithful Sunday scribe think these structures certainly remind me of "big city" things.

Of course, OSU has also added lots of new, elaborate student housing the last few years. Because both established and prospective students have a plethora of housing choices, and many modern amenities that go along with the private sector's additions, OSU, to remain housing competitive, think they have to offer a broad range of excellent choices, too. Along that line of thinking, the Greek housing new and re-modeling situation has exploded, also. Many of these projects, on the south side of the OSU campus, are multi million dollar sites, money donated from each house's alums, along with obtaining financial institution loans. Stated again, to retain in-house members and to attract new pledges, these social organizations feel like they have to upgrade their physical structures to stay viable.

So, change is inevitable, as the old saying goes. Structurally, this eye-popping change has certainly arrived in Our Town. Here's to enjoying it.......