Central Spark
Published June 2021
By Ben Luschen | 13 min read
Maureen Heffernan enjoys cycling, but she used to pedal a bit harder as she rode through downtown Oklahoma City south of Reno Avenue, a street that once served as the unofficial southern boundary of the city center.
“The area was in rough shape,” she says. “There were junkyards, old abandoned buildings, weedy areas, overgrown lots. It wasn’t a place you wanted to walk or bike through. You wanted to get through it pretty quickly.”
To be sure, the swath of largely blighted land between downtown and the Oklahoma River was perhaps the biggest detractor from an area that otherwise was in a period of renewal over the past two decades. Now, however, in an area some people once feared and avoided, the sounds of an urban wasteland have been replaced by singing birds and laughing children with the September 2019 opening of the nearly forty-acre northern portion of Scissortail Park. Heffernan, the park’s president and CEO, believes the new green space—one of the multitude of projects made possible by the city’s 2009 MAPS 3 vote—serves as a precious piece of serenity amid the bustle of the nearby Chesapeake Energy Arena and the soon-to-come convention center and adjacent Omni Oklahoma City Hotel. It also is a testament to proactive city government.
After two years of construction, Scissortail Park’s first phase opened in September 2019. Among its amenities are a 3.7-acre lake, gardens, wetlands, event pavilions, and a central lawn with a stage perfect for large-scale performances. Photo by Lori Duckworth
“To see the transformation now is nothing short of astonishing,” Heffernan says. “To have a really quality city, you need really great parks.”
Oklahoma City already has one central park—the fifteen-acre Myriad Botanical Gardens two blocks north of Scissortail. With beautiful and exotic plant life; walking trails; a lush lawn for events; a children’s garden; and regular programming like concerts, movie nights, and exercise classes, it appears to have almost everything a centrally located city park needs.
The vision for a central public space in Oklahoma City dates to the 1960s, when renowned architect I.M. Pei included plans for what eventually would become Myriad Botanical Gardens in a commissioned downtown revitalization strategy. The Pei Plan, which saw the destruction of many landmark Oklahoma City buildings, has not withstood the judgment of local history, but the Myriad Gardens was its one unqualified success story. It was revitalized in the early 2010s, but as the city grew, the need for a more spacious park in the downtown area became apparent.
Spark Café will open this spring and will serve fare such as burgers, salads, and frozen custard. Photo by Alonzo Adams
In the 1990s, city and state leaders began the process of relocating Interstate 40, which ran immediately south of downtown. This promised to free space for potential development, and the city created a plan known as Core to Shore to decide how to approach that challenge. Members of the Core to Shore committee and former mayor Mick Cornett were among the first to seriously consider the idea of putting a large public park in the area.
“That idea proved so persistent,” says Oklahoma City mayor David F. Holt. “It kept surviving through all the different stages, and it had to to reach this point.”
But Scissortail always has belonged to the citizens. Funding was approved by city voters as part of MAPS 3 in November 2009, and the park’s name was selected through a citywide contest.
“We feel like we’ve waited ten years for this day,” Holt told business and civic leaders the day before the park’s opening. “But it’s really been a lot longer than that.”
The next evening, more than twenty-eight thousand people packed into Scissortail for its opening—a free public concert by Oklahoma-linked bands Steve (formerly known as Republican Hair), BRONCHO, and Kings of Leon. A victory lap seemed in order. Quality of life, after all, is more than a luxury for a city—it’s a necessary asset that makes it appealing.
“Everyone’s competing for talented workers,” says Heffernan, who also leads the Myriad Gardens Foundation. “So this is something to make the city competitive.”
Visitors can rent paddle boats at the boathouse. Photo by Doug Hoke
City leaders are confident Scissortail Park will become a must-stop destination for anyone visiting Oklahoma. The thirty-six-acre northern portion of the park, made up of ten former city blocks, has so many things to do and see, the experience could fill most of a day. On top of that, a thirty-acre southern portion—accessible via the pedestrian-only Skydance Bridge over Interstate 40—will open in 2021.
The first thing many visitors will notice is the nearly six-acre open lawn, which is crowned by a performance stage on the north end. A steep hill at the southern end of the lawn serves as the park’s best vantage point for concerts, views of the entire park, and skyline vistas. To the south, the 3.7-acre Scissortail Lake offers paddleboats that can be rented from the boathouse on the western shore. But in addition to its scenic boost and the chance for exercise, the lake is critical to the park’s water reuse strategy, acting as a reservoir and irrigator for the area’s abundant plant life.
Lance Swearengin joined the Scissortail team in June 2019 as director of horticulture and grounds. He says the greenery will need around three years to completely fill in, but once it does, the park’s plant life will be an attraction in its own right. Most plants and trees in the park are Oklahoma natives, a choice Swearengin says the team made to ensure the greenery survives the state’s drought, wind, and cold. More than a thousand trees from forty-three species have been planted in the upper park. Countless other species of grasses, perennials, and shrubs also are found here.
“We want the park to be a living laboratory for the community to come down and see plants that are native to Oklahoma,” Swearengin says.
And people are coming. Swearengin has seen how quickly the park has become a part of locals’ daily routine.
With trails and paths that wind throughout the park, cycling at Scissortail is a breeze. Photo by Alonzo Adams
“I come in pretty early in the morning, and there are already people riding their bikes, walking their dogs, and using the park,” he says. “Seeing it grow in the next three to five years and seeing the community grow with the park is going to be amazing for the city as a whole.”
Scissortail Park also has proven a favorite of local kids, who are drawn to the playground, an imaginatively designed space for active fun. Children can climb across Penny the Wolf Spider, slip down a three-story whirly slide, or scramble up a miniature climbing wall. On hot summer days, it likely will take every ounce of practiced Zen logic for parents to entice their children away from the water features jetting from the ground nearby. That is to say nothing of the adult fitness equipment, dog park, seasonal roller rink, 3.5 miles of trails, and café set to open in spring. When the sun is out, the people are out to play in Scissortail Park.
But human occupation in the area once known as Core to Shore is about more than play. To the east, the cranes over the new convention center and hotels tower imposingly. To the west, Social Capital is a new bar, restaurant, and rooftop patio and the first private development to pop up near the park. Co-owner Brad Mullenix, who also is a partner in Edmond bar The Patriarch, left church on a recent Sunday and headed to the restaurant, where park visitors were pouring in.
“It was crazy,” he says. “My wife and I were washing dishes—it was that busy.”
Open dawn to dusk, the Children’s Play Area includes a rock wall and ropes for climbing, a splash pad, various climbing structures, a large fort with slides, and a sand box. Photo by Doug Hoke
Two years ago, when Mullenix was looking to bring a concept inspired by The Patriarch to downtown Oklahoma City, he wasn’t specifically searching for property south of Reno Avenue. But an old service station across the street from the park’s future site became available, and the promise of future development nearby was too much to pass up. Social Capital, which opened in September, is banking on the area around Scissortail Park becoming a new hub of activity in Oklahoma City. Mullenix believes the park will act as a magnet, attracting not only visitors from across the state but businesses and young professionals looking for a scenic place to live.
“Most people I talk to, when they’re sitting on the rooftop looking at a view of the park and Chesapeake Arena and the view of the skyline, they go, ‘I didn’t even know this was here,’” he says. “They’re amazed that the park is what it is.”
Above everything else, Scissortail Park is an investment in the city’s future. A flourishing urban environment is about more than cars, commerce, and keeping up a hectic pace. People need a place to simply be—for professionals and businesspeople who already have enough frantic in their lives, Heffernan sees no greater selling point.
“We’re not building the park for today,” she says. “It’s for twenty-five years from now as the city continues to grow."
