Aviare (formerly Avana)

[AnguisHerba]

They do look nice, inside the complex too.
That corner (nor the whole intersection) has no street lights, even after the P180 project. As much pedestrian traffic that area gets, with the Civic Center, MOA, etc. The city says the landlords overruled it, last time I asked.

There's streetlights along Walker, and there's lighting outside the Aviare building itself. It's not a terribly dark area with all that.

[Pete]

I'm sure what happened was the owners of this complex at the time of Project 180 took the same approach as Rick Dowell who owns all those renovated buildings just to the north (which he has tried to brand Midtown Plaza district): they had already done a bunch of work and didn't want it torn up and redone.

So, these areas were skipped over.

You can see in the photo I posted today, the pavers and street lighting are different from the Project 180 areas and all the newer construction downtown where design guidelines require choices to be made from a kit of parts that were designated as a part of P180. For example, the pavers, lighting, benches, trash cans at the convention center and Omni are directly from the P180 guidelines. Even the stuff along the street at BancFirst.

The streetlights in front of Aviare are the same black antique-ish model that Dowell used to the north. Apart from being a different design, they are probably spaced farther apart and probably not as bright.


Truthfully, the city knew early on they were not going to be able to redo all the streets they had promised at the outset due to massive cost overruns -- in the end, they did less than half. So they were probably happy to just leave those areas out.

[OKCbyTRANSFER]

Good to know, thanks Pete.

[riflesforwatie]

Speaking of streetscapes and Dowell's "Midtown Plaza", someone (I don't know if it's the City or Dowell) is doing some kind of work on the retaining wall that runs along the north side of NW 5 between N Walker Ave and N Dewey Ave. For years now, the wall has been literally crumbling onto a very narrow sidewalk. I don't know if this is an emergency repair to just fix the wall or if they'll actually move forward with a new streetscape à la P180 or Midtown Plaza.

[shawnw]

I was going to mention this as I saw them working on it yesterday. I would guess it's city because they have been doing sidewalk repair all over downtown and that area's sidewalks were atrocious, along with the retaining wall falling over almost onto the sidewalk in spots. I suspect they couldn't fix the sidewalks without also fixing the wall. I doubt it's anything grander than sidewalk repair, which is both fortunate and unfortunate.

[shawnw]

A reference to this work...

https://twitter.com/dtOKCbuilds/stat...84788423794693

[riflesforwatie]

A reference to this work...

https://twitter.com/dtOKCbuilds/stat...84788423794693

Couple of interesting things in that. 1) Project 180-style street sign on the SW corner of NW 5 and Walker. I can't remember if that was there before. 2) I haven't been over here in a couple of weeks but it will be interesting to see what they did with the sidewalk *behind* (i.e., west of) the point where that 2nd picture was taken. Hopefully this Google Street View link works, but that's the part with the sidewalk that's only a couple feet wide and that had broken pieces of retaining wall frequently falling out onto it. https://www.google.com/maps/@35.4731...7i16384!8i8192

[shawnw]

I don't believe that P180 style sign was there. I use that intersection frequently and would like to think I would have noticed. The sidewalk behind the second picture looks good.

[OKCbyTRANSFER]

The city also just repaved Walker Ave along this stretch. It actually was not too bad to begin with. I can't wait until they get 4th St done, it needs it bad.