Enid has done a great job of revitalizing its downtown after letting it decay in the ’90s. Various neighborhoods have always organized Xmas light shows. Now the downtown is bringing in fancy drone-based fireworks.
Nice use of modern tech. It still takes a lot of physical work to equip the drones with colored LEDs, lay out a thousand drones in a parking lot, and pick them up afterward. The programming would also need a fair amount of human creativity at the screen.
Older light shows, though firmly fixed on a complex multi-story structure, had similar layers of programming and mechanistic control.
Enid’s downtown, like many others, was destroyed by malls. Now that malls have destroyed themselves, SOME cities are recapturing downtown. Others, like Spokane, have declined to drug-infested hell.
The enclosed mall was always a dubious idea. Strip malls aren’t really an entity, just localized downtowns. There have always been local High Streets or shopping blocks. The original 1856 plat of Manhattan envisioned strip malls every few blocks with no central High Street.
Was the enclosed mall a deliberate downtown-killer? Most of them were planned and funded by the Private Equity monsters who specialized in destroying downtowns. After the first malls got going, other PE types immediately planted newer and bigger malls to kill the first ones. Amazon didn’t kill malls. They were wiping themselves out before 2000.
Unlike a local downtown, an enclosed mall depends heavily on its private management. If the management doesn’t maintain the right tone and security, all the stores fail.
Polistra's Mill 