Old Town Moore's Murals Are Almost Done. Its Park Is Still Waiting on a Railroad.

Drive the intersection of Main and Broadway on a Saturday morning and you will notice the blank walls before you notice anything else. Not empty in the sense of neglected, but empty in the specific way a canvas is empty right before someone picks up a brush. The city has already picked the walls. More than twenty of them, according to Moore's own economic development team, chosen from the storefronts and municipal buildings that make up the original town site. What happens on those walls between now and Halloween tells you something about how a small city actually rebuilds itself, and it is not the story most residents expect.

Old Town Moore sits east of I-35 at the crossing of Main and Broadway, the same ground where the town began during the 1889 Land Run, first known by the railroad stop name Verbeck before it was renamed for a railroad employee named Al Moore and incorporated in 1893. That history matters here for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia. The town was built around a railroad, and more than a century later, a railroad is still the thing holding one of its biggest projects in place.

Two Different Speeds

Here is the part that does not show up in a quick drive past the farmers market or a glance at the new mural sketches: Old Town Moore is changing on two completely different clocks right now, and the gap between them explains why the comeback feels partial if you have only seen pieces of it.

The fast clock belongs to anything the city can do without waiting on someone else. Assistant City Manager Deidre Ebrey has described a grant from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce that sparked the current push, and her read on the district is that there is already momentum to build on. She has pointed to businesses that have come online recently and a sense that the pieces are starting to work together rather than in isolation, a dynamic she called a good moment to meet that energy with what the city can offer. That is the mural program, the Old School building, and the calendar of events that already fills Old Town's weekends.

The slow clock belongs to Old Town Park, and it runs on a railroad's schedule, not the city's. Ebrey has been direct about the holdup: the project is waiting on clarity around a railroad right-of-way, and the city's hope is that finishing a nearby street project and pedestrian bridge will build enough of a working relationship with the railroad to get the park moving again. There is no date attached to that one, because the city does not control the calendar. The mural walls belong to the city. The park land runs through property the city has to negotiate for, one conversation at a time, with the same kind of railroad company that gave this town its name in the first place.

Twenty Walls, One Deadline

Move away from the philosophy for a second, because the mural program has an actual target date, and it is worth knowing. The city has identified more than twenty walls as candidates, with a first phase of eight to ten murals planned. The goal is to have that first batch finished in time for two events that already anchor the Old Town calendar each fall: Haunt Old Town and the Red Ribbon Parade, both set for October 31.

That is a tight, specific window, not a vague someday. If you walk Main Street in September and the walls are still bare, that is not a sign the program stalled. It means the completion date is still weeks out. If you walk it the last week of October and the walls are still bare, that is worth asking a city council member about.

The Building Coming Down, The Building Going Up

The other piece of the fast clock is a new construction project the city is calling the Old School building, replacing an older structure that longtime residents remember from a different era of Old Town. Ebrey has acknowledged the loss directly, calling it sad to see that piece of history go, while framing the new building as an anchor meant to bring fresh energy and, practically, more evening foot traffic to businesses that currently close when the workday ends.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with if you already live near Old Town. A district built around churches, school property, and municipal land has almost no room left for new commercial development, which is part of why the revitalization plan leans so heavily on murals and public space instead of new storefronts. The city cannot build its way into more retail square footage here. It is working with what is already standing, which is exactly why an evening-traffic anchor like the Old School building carries more weight than a project of its size would in a district with room to spare.

What's Already on the Calendar

None of this is theoretical or waiting on October. Old Town already runs on a rhythm, and most of it has nothing to do with the mural program at all.

• A farmers market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon through September 19, at the Central Park Multi-purpose Pavilion on South Broadway, the same street that anchors the historic Main-and-Broadway core. The City of Moore partnered with Cleveland County to bring in more than twenty farmers and ranchers.
• Haunt Old Town and the Red Ribbon Parade land on October 31, doubling as the finish line the city has set for its first round of murals.
• The Moore War Run, a road race that starts at Moore High School, finishes its route in Old Town Moore, using the district as the closing stretch of one of the city's larger annual community events.

Stack those against each other and a pattern shows up. Old Town is not waiting for a single grand reopening. It is accumulating small, recurring reasons to show up, the kind that build a habit rather than a headline.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you have watched Old Town Moore for a while and felt like the comeback was taking forever, the mismatch was never really about effort. It was about sequencing. The city moved first on everything it owns outright: the walls, the Old School building lot, the calendar of events it can schedule without anyone else's sign-off. The one piece that required a private railroad company to cooperate is the piece still sitting on the drawing board, and that is not a failure of planning so much as an honest accounting of which parts of a comeback a city actually controls.

So the next few months are worth watching in a specific order. Expect the walls to fill in first, likely close to that October 31 deadline. Expect the farmers market to run its final Saturdays before wrapping for the season. Expect the Old School building to keep climbing. And expect Old Town Park to stay a name on a plan for a while longer, not because anyone lost interest, but because it is the one piece of this comeback still waiting on a railroad to say yes.

If you are watching Old Town Moore for reasons that go beyond a Saturday morning market run, whether you are weighing a move within the area or just curious what a property near the district might be worth given how much is changing around it, Jill Stephens knows this part of Moore well enough to walk you through what these changes actually mean for a specific address. Let's Connect.