Quote Originally Posted by Laramie View Post
Probably a combination of both.

If we had a situation where there was an amusement park operating year round during good weather seasons where they incorporated the Space Tower and Monorail, you would have seen a more vibrant State Fair of Oklahoma. The speedway was too noisy to keep on site. You could hear the stock cars within a 10-12 mile radius.

If Frontier City were to relocate to the Fairgrounds (IMO) they could reap the benefits. This would justify building a new 500' Space Tower and Monorail operating 9 months a year.

IMO, there's still time to do something to make upgrades and have an annual 10 day September Fair (Autumn) and smaller 5 day Fair in April (Spring) with something like an April Fools theme. The Fairgrounds IMO is underutilized for the amount of acreage OKC has available.

OKC wants to keep those Equine events & shows in our community; the economic impact is too great to let them go elsewhere. Guthrie's Lazy E took one of those events. The new 4,500 (hair back) seat coliseum provides just enough room to not feel the emptiness of a 14,000 seat FW Dickies Arena or an 8,500 seat OKC Fairgrounds Arena.

As for the return of Ice Hockey to Oklahoma City, let's see what's on the horizon.
Yeah, the track was loud. However I loved the sound. But if there was one icon that there was justification for tearing down because of waning interest it would be the track. I can't believe I said that!
I can probably count the number of Friday nights on my fingers and toes that I wasn't there in some capacity from the late 60s to when it closed. In the 60s to the 70s there were often car counts well over a hundred. The stands were usually pretty packed too. Then through the 80s car counts dropped because it just got more expensive to race. When the classes were Champ Dirt, Modified and Street Stock it wasn't uncommon to have 10 Champ cars, less than 20 Modifieds and maybe 30 Street Stock. Fewer cars made for fewer fans. Then the promoter started changing classes to attract cars from surrounding states like we had in the heyday. That failed. Car counts were the same or worse. One night I remember well we only had 1 Limited Sprint heat, 1 Late Model heat and 2 Street Stock heats. Then the A-Features. Almost empty stands. It was sad for me. My beloved and once extremely popular track was failing near the end. At least I got a brick when it came down.