Wheels Up
After years of development, OKC’s Wheeler District is ready to take flight
Depending on your definition, building a new neighborhood is the result of a fairly straightforward recipe: buy a chunk of land, run in utilities, pave some streets and culs-de-sac, build a bunch of houses, erect a plaque reading Stonewater Crossing or Valley Heights or Pine Eagle Bridge Estates and you’re done. The results are found in every corner of the metro, ranging from rows of tract houses to spacious gated enclaves. But neighborhood can be a loose term.
If you sharpen your syntax a bit, there’s a huge gulf between constructing a housing development and creating a community from scratch—the latter is much rarer and requires a lot more planning and time, but the results can be genuinely special. That’s the goal for OKC’s Wheeler District.
Of course, it’s a little bit easier to formulate a plan if you’re starting from a blank slate. Wheeler is just south of the Oklahoma River and I-40 along Western Avenue, growing out from a space that for decades had been home to the Downtown Airpark. That means there were no existing houses and residents to incorporate, no quirks of nature to design around—just acres and acres of potential.
It’s fair to call Wheeler a new development: The first residents moved into their homes in 2019. But that doesn’t mean it’s a new project, since a strategic plan developed by the city in 2004 recommended creating a mixed-use riverfront neighborhood in this space, and a group led by Grant Humphreys purchased the Airpark land for that purpose back in 2006. Amid all the preliminary studies and memos and drafts, Wheeler’s VP of development Ashley Terry believes the story began in earnest eight years ago at a series of public meetings.
“Wheeler District kicked off with a public charrette in 2014,” she says, “which was really the first of its kind in Oklahoma City, and was an opportunity for our development team to reach out to the broader community. When we went to people and said, ‘What’s your ideal community; what’s your ideal neighborhood?’ people said, ‘I want to be able to walk to grab a cup of coffee or to grab a beer; I want to know my neighbors’ names; I want my kids to be able to run and play and ride their scooters safely and things like that; I don’t want a huge back yard; I don’t want a ton of maintenance; I want to be able to park my car on Friday and not get in it until Monday if I don’t want to.’ Those are all things that we heard from people, and those were already things that we were thinking about within the community, but really just solidified that initial vision—and we’ve been working ever since then to fulfill it.”
Vision Quest
What does that entail? New housing, obviously; director of sales Lauren French said that as it moves into Phase II of construction, Wheeler contains about 110 occupied homes with 30 actively being built—20 of which are already sold. But Phase I also included 50,000 sq. ft. of commercial space, 30,000 of which is Class A office, retail and restaurant space within the hangar-inspired central building designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and built by Lingo Construction. A community park set to open this summer will include a pool, playground, walking paths and gathering spaces. It’s home to The Big Friendly brewery and taproom and Taco Nation, both former food trucks (well, food school buses) that have put down brick-and-mortar roots in Wheeler. And Terry said that in a broader sense, the plan involves both conceptual and literal connection.
“There’s definitely a context around the vacant property that we have to be thoroughly mindful of, but welcoming of,” French says, “and really our goal is to just knit into the broader OKC community, both from a perspective of the story and a perspective geographically by actually reconnecting the street grid network into the property.” Since the 1940s, east-west streets from SW 11th to SW 20th have understandably dead-ended at the edge of the Airpark space, but in Phase II and beyond, “all of those street connections are remade in some form, whether it’s vehicular or bike and pedestrian connections; all along the western edge, that street grid is reformed into the land.”
Gateway to the Future
Wheeler’s flashiest amenity is a tourist-y treat (see sidebar), but a project in the shadow of the Ferris wheel may prove to have the most lasting impact.
“We’re really excited about Western Gateway Elementary School, which opened in August of last year,” says Terry. “It’s a public charter school that’s authorized through OKCPS, so it feeds right into that OKC public school network. The kids are pre-K through 1st grade this year, and then they’ll add a grade a year up to 4th grade over the next few years.” If that sounds familiar to downtown residents, it’s because OKC’s John Rex Elementary served as a conceptual model, including the tiered admission system based on neighborhood residency. “Western Gateway’s neighborhood boundary encompasses five communities: Wheeler District, Jones-Grove neighborhood to the west, Will Rogers Court’s public housing project further to the west, and the College Hill and Higgins Heights neighborhoods to the south.”
Kids from different backgrounds learning together is good for the overall community—plus, as Terry says, “What’s really exciting about the school is its dual-language curriculum. The school is a two-way dual immersion school where students are learning in Spanish and in English throughout the day, and there are actually seats reserved within the school for students who speak Spanish as their primary language.”
Moving Forward
After all those years of planning, Wheeler’s rapid growth has been striking … but it is in a very real sense just the beginning. Eventual plans call for more than 600 homes, 1,500 condos and apartments and 300,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space.
“Wheeler District is 150 acres total—that includes land on both sides of Western Avenue—and what you see out there now represents about 36 of the 150 acres,” says Terry. “So it’s only a small fraction of the broader master plan. There’s so much more to come. We really see it as a decades-long project before it reaches its full completion.”
Round & Round
March 18, 2022
No discussion of the Wheeler District would be complete without its most visible element: the former Santa Monica Ferris Wheel purchased by Grant Humphreys on eBay in 2008, refurbished, relocated and opened to the public in 2016. After its seasonal hiatus, opening day is March 18 this year.
“We are actually installing a new lighting system on the Ferris Wheel this winter,” says Terry. “We’re very excited about that; it’ll be back and brighter than ever in March.”