Despite its abundance of brick warehouses and brick streets, the name Bricktown did not originate with any of the three partners. Instead, it was thought up by a potential San Francisco investor being solicited by Horton and Peterson. The oil boom in the early s was going in full swing and downtown office space was virtually full.
They dreamed up lists of potential tenants — a candy store, an antiques shop, clothing stores, a radio station, cleaners, music stores, restaurants, bars, delis and art galleries. Just as renovations were getting underway on the first pair of buildings, the boom turned to bust. Occupancy rates downtown plummeted as companies went bankrupt.
Horton, Peterson and Williams had gone too far to stop — they had to continue on and hope that the downturn would be temporary. The Warehouse Development Company was going broke. In addition to buying up properties, Horton had gone on trips across the country and throughout Europe buying up old furnishings and fixtures for the delis, shops and restaurants that did not yet exist.
Horton was mocked behind his back and city planners suggested he might have fared better by razing all the warehouses and starting from scratch with a new office park. The demise of the Warehouse Development Company, however, did not end Bricktown. They included Jim Tolbert and Don Karchmer, turn-around experts who bought the two nearly finished buildings along Sheridan Avenue. They completed the job and moved in, and thus maintained a stable presence in an area still avoided by the public.
Williams, meanwhile, recruited a fellow southsider, a gritty oilman who had survived the bust with his assets intact. Jim Brewer had pulled himself out of poverty by working his way up from operating a transmission shop to opening successful nightclubs to his luck in the oil patch. When touring the former wholesale district, Brewer brought along some acquaintances. They included Craig Brown, who previously had been involved in development of Crossroads Mall. After touring a similar operation in Kansas City, they did a deal with bankers to lease the Bricktown warehouse.
Barnum of Bricktown. Brewer had succeeded where Horton had failed — he had found a way to draw crowds to Bricktown. The final spark to set Bricktown in motion, however, would be the opening of Spaghetti Warehouse in Founder Robert Hawk followed a blueprint for choosing where to expand. Only an old building in a run-down urban setting would work, and the community had to have a population of at least , Bricktown fit the bill perfectly, and lines formed outside the restaurant nightly when it opened in the old Oklahoma Furniture Manufacturing factory.
Brewer kept the momentum going with festivals and promotions aimed at portraying the district as being busier than it really was. The re-establishment of the old minor league Blazers ice hockey team, and launching the minor league Calvary basketball team, provided a stream of sports fans to visit Bricktown before and after games at the Myriad Arena just west of the Santa Fe tracks.
Oklahoma City started the s with momentum, but was also still dogged with poor self-esteem. But despite the best of incentives packages, Oklahoma City was repeatedly rejected.
He visited Indianapolis after that city won the competition for a new airline maintenance plant. He saw a vibrant downtown and a city that took pride in itself. He returned home with renewed enthusiasm to get Oklahoma City to re-invest in itself. His timing was good — veteran advertising man Ray Ackerman was leading a similar discussion as chairman of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber.
The resulting vision was the Metropolitan Area Projects, which called for multiple projects downtown, including a RiverWalk-style canal and a vintage-style ballpark in Bricktown.
The proposition was passed, but not before Horton died from emphysema. Horton had never recovered from his failure in Bricktown, and in the months leading up to his death he was destitute and one point homeless.
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Settling the Land In the 's, the U.
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