Streetcar boom
By: Bert Belanger//Guest Columnist//March 14, 2019
In mid-January, I bought myself a birthday present from Commonplace Books: (one of a batch of autographed copies of) Sam Anderson’s Boom Town. A couple of weeks later, I rode the newfangled Oklahoma City streetcar for the first time, giving a guest from Plano a quick tour of Bricktown on a brutally cold morning.
Although I am only halfway through this book, I am enthralled with Anderson’s irreverent writing style and his toggling back and forth between Land Run-era stories of OKC gunfights and “boomers,” juxtaposed with dramas played out by our modern-day Thunder NBA gunslingers. A few pages at a time, I am slowly savoring each literary nugget that Anderson serves up in his cynically entertaining portrait of OKC.
Some of my daily joy in reading Boom Town comes from familiar word pictures based on geography; I can literally see the locale of many scenes and incidents that Anderson describes, from the “jogs” in downtown streets where rival surveying companies clashed, to the dusty western edge of Sandtown and Mulligan Flats, near where OKC’s original mayor William Couch (no relation to newly retired City Manager Jim, also prominently profiled in the book) was gunned down by a claim jumper.
To me, the most striking descriptions relate to OKC’s original streetcar system, intertwined with horses, buggies and early motorcars (like the unrestored 1912 Buick Model 29 Touring Car at the OKC Auto Show) on Oklahoma City’s muddy streets. Anderson richly details that, by 1900, the city “spasmed and expanded … streetcar lines stretching to increasingly far-flung clusters of houses, and even to other cities.”
Today, I hopped on a new hot-pink streetcar near my office (next to the now-bulldozed Boulevard Cafeteria) and exited at the Adept offices in Bricktown exactly 18 minutes later. My first non-tourist voyage. I was encouraged that I was not alone, with several older couples departing at the Murrah Memorial stop, and a young millennial lady whom I chatted up about it being her first ride, too, although I didn’t pry as to why or where.
Overall, I was impressed; my Adept meeting over, I am heading to the platform on Sheridan Avenue for my ride back to Midtown, as soon as I hear the streetcar bell ring, or when I finish writing this, whichever comes first. Since it’s in my backpack, I’ll probably even get in a few pages of Boom Town.
Bert Belanger is a broker with Adept Commercial Real Estate and a real estate attorney with Riggs Abney (bbelanger@riggsabney.com).