Out with the old, in with the new: Upgraded OKC dog park attracts canines, owners to Midtown
Many agree the grass is greener on the specially designed artificial turf of the new Midtown Mutts Dog Park at the corner of Harvey Avenue and NW 10, open to beagles, malamutes, pointers, bulldogs — and mutts.
Neighborhood resident Addie Smith's handsome purebred Labrador Retriever, Sage, seems to like the canine playground. So does she.
Addie, who mostly uses a wheelchair for mobility due to a connective tissue disorder, said the new park offers her a paved road to enter the metal fenced-in area with Sage, her service dog.
"I find a little bit of a benefit with [the new park], because I can even bring my wheelchair in safely," the 22-year-old Midtown resident said.
More: Four youth centers were recommended under MAPS 4. Where will they be built?
Smith's experience at the former dog park had been difficult because of the unkept, uneven and often muddy grounds.
Even stepping into the park posed a danger. With one entrance built upon several steps and a tin trailer on the other, Smith left her wheelchair behind and used a cane, leaving her more vulnerable to injury.
Smith's friend, 47-year-old JD Johnson, appreciates the new park's compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards for Accessible Design, which requires public buildings and facilities to meet certain criteria to ensure physical accessibility for people with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
"The amenities are awesome, because I'm big on being ADA compliant, and I love it," he said.
More: A new Midtown OKC HQ for Palomar faces budget issues. Here's how MAPS 4 will tackle it.
Nate Passanante, a 35-year-old who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, said the place has become a favorite for both him and his dog, Doc, allowing them a place to spend time outdoors with others.
"Having places like this are really important when you have PTSD," said Passanante. "There are days that I wouldn't even leave the house if it wasn't for him."
Patton Simpson, owner of Shaka inside The Collective Kitchens and Cocktails, expects the restaurant will likely see an uptick of customers who can walk across the street to eat outside on its dog-friendly patio. It's a better view, he added.
"It's attractive," said Simpson. "We have a patio. It's better than looking at a building. I'd rather look across the street and see a bunch of dogs playing around. For the most part, it's beneficial to get more people outdoors, and they'll get to be more involved with their community's surrounding."
Related: Developers pitch 309-space garage to provide secured parking for Palomar, Midtown visitors
The new dog park — roughly 22,500 square feet of space — features a variety of amenities, including bright red picnic tables under a covered gazebo, restrooms and a concrete walkway.
More amenities are coming to the area, which already features an adjacent pickleball court, including 61 new trees, a sand volleyball court, approximately 300-pound cornhole games, a grass area for leisurely activity and cleaned up nearby alleys, according to Chris Fleming, a partner of Midtown Renaissance. Costs have not been disclosed.
The previous Midtown dog park location at 407 W Park Place is still in use, but it's expected to shut down permanently by mid-April, Fleming said.
More: Developers pitch 309-space garage to provide secured parking for Palomar, Midtown visitors
However, Midtown residents don't seem to mind leaving the old park behind. Instead, more people are flocking to the new dog park, especially now that it has running water, and there's a bigger crowd.
Jay Roudybush, a 35-year-old who works in IT and moved to the area around six months ago, said he loves the park's design and hopes more dog-friendly events would result from the development.
"I love the park," he said. "I love the modern feel, the new location across from The Collective and its turf. It keeps my dog from getting gross."
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Upgraded Oklahoma City dog park attracts canines, owners to Midtown
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
New fully accessible playground opens in Scranton
SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) — A new place to play is now in Scranton. The city celebrated the grand opening of the Butterfly Playground, a fully accessible space inside Nay Aug Park designed for children and adults of all abilities. What used to be a parking lot is now a place where everyone can play. 'Oh, I've already seen the kids in here playing, and it makes you really happy. You put a smile on your face to see them enjoying it,' said volunteer Doris Koloski. The Butterfly Playground in Nay Aug Park is Scranton's newest inclusive play space, featuring accessible ramps and a merry-go-round built into the surface, so kids of all abilities can ride. 'This project has equipment that's totally handicap accessible, which we don't see enough of in our region,' said Thom Welby, vice chair of the Scranton Municipal Recreation Authority. 'I think the idea was that they could all intermingle and I'll enjoy the stuff together and not have them separated out, and just so the kids could socialize,' said Koloski. The nearly $400,000 project was funded through a state casino grant, administered by the city, with support from lawmakers and local volunteers. PHOTOS: Wilkes-Barre mural causes controversy 'The volunteers up here, they've been having donut sales, just basket raffles, bingos, anything to raise money,' explained Welby. That extra money added activity panels throughout the playground. This is just phase one. City leaders say future phases will include additional age-specific areas, all part of an all-inclusive discovery corridor. 'We added paved ADA parking spaces to the adjacent parking lot here and then added an ADA accessible route to the playground, and the pour and play system is actually a granular rubber that's bound,' said Mike Lachman, landscape architect at Barry Issett & Associates. Making it wheelchair accessible and cleaner. 'Playground projects are always the fun ones because you get to see the kids enjoy it after the fact, it's not so much the ribbon-cutting after all that's done. It's coming back out and seeing the kids run around and play on the playground,' explained Lachman. The Butterfly Playground is now open to the public at Nay Aug Park. With this ribbon cutting, Scranton sends a clear message: Play is for everyone. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Arkansas stuck among bottom five states for child well-being, report shows
(for Carter's Kids) Arkansas remains among the worst states for child well-being, ranking 45th nationwide for the second year in a row, according to the annual Annie E. Casey Foundation report released Monday. The group's 2025 KIDS COUNT Data Book measures 16 indicators of child well-being in four categories: education, health, economic well-being and family and community. The report ranked Arkansas: 36th in education 45th in economic well-being 46th in family and community 47th in child health Arkansas has consistently ranked in the bottom 10 states overall and in the specific categories. The state's statistics worsened for the majority of indicators in 2023, the year the data in Monday's report was collected. The report drew comparisons between 2023 and 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread socioeconomic impacts on families. In that time, Arkansas saw a decrease of children who live in poverty or whose parents lack secure employment, but the state's rates of children in those situations outpaces the national rates, according to the report. In 2023, 144,000, or 21%, of Arkansas children lived in poverty, only a 1% decrease since 2019. The state also had fewer children in high-poverty areas with 68,000 in 2023, a 2% decrease since 2019. Aecf-2025kidscountdatabook-embargoed Other indicators remained stagnant, such as 37% of children in single-parent households and 12% of high school students not graduating on time, according to the report. The state 'cannot become complacent as the result of modest improvements,' said Keesa Smith-Brantley, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in a press release. AACF is a member of the Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT network. 'We should be particularly alarmed by the outcomes for our teens,' Smith-Brantley said. 'We're trending in the wrong direction for teens not attending school and not working and teens who are overweight or obese. And while Arkansas's teen birth rate improves each year, we're stuck at or near the bottom because of the policy choices and investments we're not making.' In 2023, 17,000 Arkansas teens were neither working nor attending school, a 3% increase from 2019. Children and teens between the ages of 10 and 17 saw a 4% increase in obesity rates from 2019 to 2023 while the national rate remained stagnant, according to the report. Additionally, Arkansas had almost double the national rate of teen pregnancy in 2022, even after a 17% decrease since 2019. By 2023, the state's rate had dropped from 25 to 24 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19, according to the Casey Foundation report. The national rate is 13 births per 1,000 females. 'Those babies are more likely to be born in families with limited educational and economic resources, and if you have a baby as a teen, there are simply going to be more challenges with finishing high school, going on to college and working [up and] out of poverty,' AACF policy director Christin Harper told reporters in a Wednesday news conference about the report. President Donald Trump's administration has attempted to withhold Title X family planning grant funds, which include teen pregnancy prevention efforts. This is one of several recent federal actions that Harper and other AACF leaders said would put child well-being in Arkansas at risk. Nearly 3,400 Arkansas babies were born with low birth weights in 2023, a 0.4% increase since 2019. Being born at less than 5.5 pounds, often caused by premature birth, creates health risks for children not only in infancy but throughout childhood and even into adulthood, according to a 2024 Casey Foundation report that highlighted the racial disparities among children's health, particularly affecting Black Arkansans. 2025-KCDB-profile-embargoed-AR Arkansas also consistently has among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality nationwide, but it remains the only state that has taken no action to adopt the federal option of extending postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months after birth, according to KFF. More than half of births in Arkansas are covered by Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance system for low-income Americans. Additionally, Arkansas' rate of child and teen deaths worsened from 2019 to 2023, totaling 300 per 100,000. About half of the more than 800,000 Arkansans on Medicaid are children. An additional 50,000 children in Arkansas, or 7%, were uninsured in 2023, a 1% increase from 2019, according to the KIDS COUNT report. A federal budget bill moving through Congress would make deep cuts to Medicaid spending, reducing the program by $625 billion over 10 years, and shift some of the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps, to state governments. As of March, 235,927 people in Arkansas received SNAP benefits, the Advocate previously reported — approximately 7.6% of the state population. AACF leaders said last week that they are concerned the budget bill will worsen child well-being in Arkansas if it receives approval from Congress and Trump. Arkansas' SNAP program contains a work requirement, and the state has taken steps to impose a work requirement for recipients of the Medicaid expansion program. The federal budget bill would also add new Medicaid work requirements for some able-bodied adults. AACF has repeatedly denounced such requirements. U.S. House GOP mandates Medicaid work requirements in giant bill slashing spending Children who live in households at risk of poverty 'are especially likely to fall off of health care [coverage] because their parents can't meet the work requirements,' said Maricella Garcia, AACF's race equity director. The organization is also concerned about the 43,000 Arkansas children aged 3 and 4 who were not in early childhood education programs between 2019 and 2023, AACF education policy director Nicole Carey said. This number increased 6% between 2015 and 2018, according to the report. Fourth-graders in Arkansas were 3% less proficient in reading in 2024 than in 2019, according to the report, and state officials have made improving childhood literacy a priority in the past few years. The wide-ranging LEARNS Act of 2023 implemented literacy coaches in public schools graded 'D' and 'F' by the Department of Education. Under the new education law, students who don't meet the third-grade reading standard by the 2025-26 school year will not be promoted to 4th grade, but $500 tutoring grants will be available on a first-come, first-served basis with priority to those to be held back in third grade. Carey pointed out that the fourth-graders of the most recent school year were in kindergarten at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 'When they did their testing in the school year of 2023-24, that was when a couple of those literacy pieces [of LEARNS] were still being implemented, so we really can't say yet if the literacy coaches in the 'D' and 'F' schools or those literacy tutoring grants are going to impact this indicator,' Carey said. 'There's definitely hope that they will.' Nationwide in 2024, '70% of fourth graders were not reading proficiently, worsening from 66% in 2019 — essentially undoing a decade of progress,' the report states. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Savannah mom frustrated with lack of wheelchair accessibility
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) — One Savannah mom is speaking out after facing several challenges with navigating the city with her daughter who uses a wheelchair. Twenty-three-year-old Nykiah Connelly was born with cerebral palsy, a movement disorder caused by brain damage. Her mother, Paula, said navigating Savannah in a wheelchair has become a constant challenge. 'My accessible van is a side entry van. So, and we all know that when you go downtown to Savannah, you're parking on the street,' she said. 'They do have a handicap accessible spot on the side of the street. But, if I were to pop to release the ramp, it wouldn't.' She said it is not just the parking; it is shopping entrances and sidewalks pose risks. 'They had the little cut-ins, but they were out the road was all broken up,' Connelly said. 'And if I would have let Nykiah go over the broken road, her chair would have tilted over, and she would have fell. We had bystanders that was willing to lift a chair up to get her over to the other side, but we couldn't do that. so, we finally found a road that was smooth enough.' She told WSAV it was her recent visit at Savannah Technical College (STC) that pushed her over the edge. She said entrance near the handicap parking spaces did not have a ramp. 'So, on the side of the steps there, the grass with the slope,' Connelly said. 'So, we went up the grass and we were able to answer that way. But coming out of the building, we had to come out the same way, come down the grass, and it was a huge slope.' She continued, 'So, as I was taking her down the slope, her chair kind of leaned over to the bit and she was afraid that she was going to fall.' Connelly said she knows she is not alone in this fight. 'Get someone on the board, create a position for someone that's actually can go around to all these new businesses that are coming up and talk to the contractors, talk to the architects and basically give them someone who is actually living in my shoes,' she said. STC responded to her concerns with this statement: 'At Savannah Technical College, we are deeply committed to ensuring accessibility and are proud to maintain an ADA-compliant campus. We understand that parking and mobility can be areas of concern, and we take feedback like this very seriously. To better meet the needs of our growing community, we are currently undergoing a comprehensive campus master plan. This initiative is designed not only to accommodate our growth but also to enhance accessibility and foster an inclusive environment for everyone we serve. We genuinely appreciate the feedback shared in this instance, as it helps us identify areas where we can improve. Serving our students and community members in the best way possible remains at the heart of our mission.' We are still waiting on a response from the City of Savannah. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
