I had a two hour layover in Oklahoma City (or OKC for those in the know). And while I should have been keeping an eye on Greyhound to see what they were doing with my bags, instead I let my curiosity get the better of me. Just down a block from the bus station was a dip in the ground, hiding a park the likes of which I have not seen.
It’s called Myriad Gardens, a public works and community beautification project from the 70s. But it looks like a forgotten world of tomorrow from the 50s. It’s as if someone built all the modernist golden-age dreams in the middle of Oklahoma and just let it rust.
The centerpiece of the gardens is the pond, a good twenty feet below the flat plain that OKC sits upon like saltshakers on a table.
There’s a rusting bridge crossing it, an enclosed space inside that is dusty and filled with trash. Within the pond swim dozens of coy as large as dogs. I saw one leap halfway out of the water, a shining marvel with a fleshy mouth that could swallow a child’s face.
No public works project is without a performance space. The stage is surrounded by a moat, patrolled by the golden coy.
Crystal Bridge seems like something out of a 70s science fiction movie. It looks like the utopia where the effete supermen plan how to use Zardoz.
A wall of glass filled with a bubble of tropical vegetation.
It was closed for renovation when I visited, but it looks derelict and overgrown. Every single window is dirty and dead leaves pile into the cracks.
There’s a lot of strange and derelict spaces in Myriad Gardens. There’s empty underground rooms with windows looking onto landscaped lagoons.
And pits with windows leading into uncharted catacombs.
What a brave new world has such architecture in it.
And directly across from the bus station is a self-consciously post-modern theater center.
If I had walked really, really fast, I could have made it to the Oklahoma City "riverwalk" and the Toby Keith-themed bar. But I don’t know if I could handle that much aesthetic excitement.
