The End of the Century and the Beginning of Legacy Trail

The End of the Century and the Beginning of Legacy Trail. The 2000s. A football championship can quickly alter the skyline of a university community. In 2000 under the direction of Coach Bob Stoops, the University of Oklahoma Sooners won their 7th national football title which then encouraged the expansion of the stadium seating capacity to more than 84,000 with luxury skyboxes and jumbo scoreboards. , The team also scored an indoor practice facility that towered over a nearby fire station. Parks, theaters, Norman Regional Hospital and downtown sidewalks also got upgraded in mid-decade. With the help of its neighbors, the historic Lions Park got a facelift. Skateboarders got their own space, too, across from City Hall at Abe Andrews Park. Norman native James garner fared just as well, earning his own statue across from the Sooner Theatre. , The Sooner Theatre also got some work of its own, too. Workers restored some glamour and luster to the 1929 Southwest show piece movie house. Nearby, Cleveland County Commissioners drew on their savings to add two floors to the county office building and remodel the existing courthouse. The growing county government had simply run out of room. , County officials joined with their state counterparts in opening a new health department on 12th Avenue Northeast, replacing one on Robinson Street. The new facility was named for longtime Cleveland County legislator Cal Hobson. Norman Regional Hospital expanded and updated its emergency room, opened a women's center and constructed a westside campus to accommodate needed specialties and serve a growing central Oklahoma patient base. , The city's sanitation system took a giant leap with the purchase and delivery of thousands of green polycarts. Residents learned to haul their garbage to the curb for automated pickup. A citizen referendum later established curbside recycling. The city purchased its newest regional park site, a 148-acre tract in northwest Norman named after Ruby Grant who lived her entire life on the property before gifting it to the University of Oklahoma Foundation. , Norman hired its first official forester. A “Neighborwoods” program was established to plant street trees in residential areas. The Fred Jones, Jr. Art Museum was expanded and remodeled to accommodate a collection of French impressionist paintings donated by the Weitzenhoffer family. , On the southern edge of the campus, the long-awaited National Weather Center opened, merging the talents of university research scientists and federal program that were once spread around the community. Investments of private weather and technology companies that wanted to capitalize on the research soon followed. , Such synergy spilled over to other disciplines. The arts, energy sciences and nanotechnology benefitted from new state laws allowing faculty members to also become entrepreneurs and share commercial applications of their research. , A public-private development of a large parcel of land on the city's north side between the Max Westheimer Airport and Interstate 35 promised a city convention center, upscale shopping and a 10-story hotel. Indian gaming casinos operated on the east and west sides of Norman offering 24-hour Las Vegas-style entertainment. , Back downtown, the Legacy Trail historical plazas told the story of Norman. It began from the time prior to the land run that opened the area for settlement in 1889, through statehood in 1907 then the war years, complete with a sculptured replica of a Stearman bi-plane that trained thousands of pilots through a century of flying development and evolution.