OKLAHOMA CITY — Downtown Oklahoma City’s Bricktown District is preparing for some massive construction and development project disruptions by strengthening local promotion and community messaging.
The city is currently readying for several major simultaneous construction projects to get off the ground in 2025, including the mammoth Boardwalk at Bricktown project inside the district, the MAPS 4 stadium, and the new billion-dollar Thunder arena, both just outside the Bricktown perimeter.
For district leaders, that means considering now not only traffic congestion and safety during construction but also how the district’s perception and reputation can evolve once those projects are completed.
“I think the perception has been that Bricktown is just for tourists or people coming through,” Bricktown District Manager Patrick Sullivan told Free Press. “But we would honestly love to change that perception and increase the local focus, so we’re all really talking about how we can strategize to have the best version of Bricktown when that’s all here.”
Navigating the work
Any massive-scale construction project in the middle of the city means that residents will first be engaging with the disruption of traffic and street closures long before the completed developments can start pulling in new customers and foot traffic.
According to Sullivan, the Bricktown leadership is hoping to learn from similar city projects about how best to handle traffic and navigation during all the construction.
“If you’re familiar with all the recent work on Broadway, you kind of know what we’re looking at,” he said. “So we’re really looking ahead to a lot of community outreach and clear communication with businesses and visitors so that information is very forthcoming and easy to access and so you know what streets are going to be closed and when and for how long and what that disruption may look like.”
And that’s not just about Bricktown’s own messaging to city residents, but also about close communication with their neighboring city districts about major projects right now, even before any new construction has begun.
“A good example is actually preparing for the demolition of the Prairie Surf building,” Sullivan said. “We’ve been invited into the city conversation about that to see the timeline of what that’ll look like and how businesses can start preparing now for street closures. And that really gives us a look at how to prepare for a project of that scale in Bricktown.”
Local focus
One thing Sullivan and the Bricktown team are actively working toward is a greater focus on local businesses, local visitors, and more local residents living inside the district, especially as some of these incoming developments – like the Boardwalk at Bricktown – include new residential areas.
“Having more locals living in Bricktown would be great, especially as we have so many amenities and so many restaurants and music venues,” he said. “And a lot of that really is a marketing conversation where we’re looking to identify our audience better in the city and to reach them more effectively.”
Sullivan said one of the district’s primary goals right now is learning how to better promote the district to OKC locals in other areas of the city, rather than relying so heavily on tourism and visitors in the area for things like concerts and Thunder games.
A big part of that, he said, is reaching out to local businesses to also hopefully address some of Bricktown’s many currently empty buildings.
“Right now, like any part of the city, we have some unoccupied buildings that we’d love developed and filled,” he said. “From my position, that’s an opportunity to connect some local restaurant operators to those building owners and to initiate that conversation. So in a perfect world, we’d have locals wanting to come to the area and we’d have local businesses operating the spots that those visitors are coming to.”
Addressing safety
Looking ahead, plans need to be put in place now for the potential explosion of residents and foot traffic that’s expected to follow these massive new constructions and local expansions.
From the perspective of district management, that means first focusing on issues of safety and law enforcement response to better curb and prevent situations like the 2023 rash of shootings that resulted in a Bricktown curfew or the 2024 shooting that led to a running gunfight with police.
“We’ve been working closely with OKCPD and getting feedback from our local businesses to analyze things that are happening and how we can prevent them,” Sullivan told us. “We’re strategizing for how to be more proactive rather than just reacting when something bad happens.”
Sometimes that means simply working with city services to address things like streetlights.
“One thing I can say that’s both the most important thing and one of the easiest to address is lighting,” Sullivan said. “That’s a big one for safety, so we have to make sure the whole district is well-lit, which involves a number of different hands and city departments. And then that can lead into beautification, maintaining the historical standards of this beautiful brickwork and even our trees and foliage.”
‘An excited city’
Sullivan and the Bricktown team know how important the iconic district has become for Oklahoma City, and they want the area to be ready for when these new developments bring more national attention than possibly ever before.
“Right now, we have an excited city and an excited Bricktown, even just from talking to our business owners in the district,” he said. “We’re already looking ahead now at the Olympics coming in on top of a new soccer stadium and on top of the new Thunder arena. I mean, there are some big things happening.”
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
