Walk from Sparrow Park to Goodholm Park and you'll notice the sidewalk doesn't go straight. It curves, drops slightly, curves again, in a way that feels less like city planning and more like something the land insisted on. That's because it is. And two blocks west on Walnut, a construction crew is currently making almost the same call all over again, just with concrete forms instead of a rose garden.

If you live in Jefferson Park, you've probably walked past both of these things without connecting them. They're separated by more than a century, but they're answers to the same question: what do you do with land that doesn't want to be a grid.

The Parks That Refused a Grid

Sparrow and Goodholm Parks sit between Robinson and Hudson, and their odd, bent shape isn't an accident of city planning. When developers Goodholm and Sparrow platted this section of the neighborhood, they built their streets and lots around a natural ravine that ran through the land rather than filling it in and forcing a standard grid. That decision is why the parks still look slightly off-kilter on a map, and why walking through them feels different from walking through the rectangular blocks around Wilson Elementary a few streets over.

The developers didn't just work around the ravine. They gave the land to the city outright in 1909, on one condition: the two parks had to carry their names permanently. It's a small piece of leverage that's still paying off for anyone doing laps around the neighborhood today.

The two parks originally had distinct personalities, not just distinct names:

• Goodholm Park was built as a "play" park, with a baseball diamond, tennis courts, and playground equipment.
• Sparrow Park was built as a "garden" park, covered in flower beds and a large rose garden.

That split, active park on one side, ornamental park on the other, was baked into the original 1909 gift. It's the reason the two parks still feel like a matched pair rather than one long green space.

Two Blocks West, the Same Instinct

Now walk to NE 26th and Walnut, where a very different kind of infill is underway. The property was almost lost to something far less interesting: the owners had a deal in place to sell it to a buyer who planned to level the existing house and put in mini storage. A Jefferson Park Neighbors Association board member spotted the listing before that deal closed, according to reporting in Oklahoma City Free Press, and that near miss is the reason the site is a pocket neighborhood today instead of a row of storage units.

What's being built there is called The Village on Walnut, and it's a genuinely unusual project for OKC's urban core. It's a joint effort between two of the city's Community Housing Development Organizations, the Jefferson Park Neighbors Association and Positively Paseo, and it's the first time two of these nonprofit CHDOs have partnered on a single project since the program came to Oklahoma City in 1993. The site itself is anchored by a historic home built around 1911, part of an original homestead that predates the State Capitol building a few blocks away.

Sheryl Lovelady, Positively Paseo's executive director, put the goal plainly:

"We wanted people to know their neighbors."

That's not incidental language. It's the design brief.

What Makes These 22 Houses Different

The Village on Walnut isn't a subdivision in the usual sense. It's a "pocket neighborhood," a layout where homes face a shared common green instead of each having a large, separated backyard. The project brought in Ross Chapin, the architect widely credited with popularizing the pocket neighborhood model nationally, to advise directly on the design.

A few details that separate this from standard infill:

• Construction method. Many of the 22 homes are being built with Insulated Concrete Forms rather than conventional wood framing, a technique more common in commercial construction than in single-family infill.
• Architect selection. The project ran a design challenge among twelve architectural firms before choosing Ken Fitzsimmons of OKC-based TASK Design as lead architect.
• Shared outdoor space. CLS & Associates Landscape Architects designed a common green intended to function as the neighborhood's actual gathering space, not a decorative buffer between houses.
• Income-qualified affordability. More than half the homes are reserved for buyers who income-qualify, with up to $23,000 in down payment assistance available through the project.

None of this is what you'd expect to find sandwiched between the State Capitol and midtown. It's closer to the ravine decision than to a standard OKC infill lot: someone looked at a piece of land and asked what it actually wanted to be, rather than what would fit fastest.

The First Neighbors Are Already Home

As of this year, the first phase is real and occupied, not just rendered. The first eight homes are under construction and nearing completion, and at least one has already closed. Positively Paseo's own updates note a sale to L'Hannah and Hayden Pedigo, the kind of small, specific milestone that tells you a project has moved from concept to community.

If you've been wondering what the activity at 26th and Walnut actually is, this is it: a pocket neighborhood built around a shared green and a century-old homestead house, going up one phase at a time, with buyers already moving in.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

Jefferson Park's most consistent trait isn't its bungalows or its proximity to the Capitol. It's a pattern of refusing to solve land problems the easy way. In 1909, that meant bending a plat around a ravine instead of grading it flat. In 2026, it means two neighborhood nonprofits partnering for the first time in three decades to build homes around a shared yard instead of twenty-two separate ones.

Both decisions made the neighborhood a little harder to build and a little more specific to walk through. If you've ever wondered why Jefferson Park doesn't feel like the rest of the grid around it, that's the answer, and it's still being written two blocks from Sparrow Park.

Curious how developments like this shape values and buyer interest across Jefferson Park and the surrounding historic core? Kaiser + Drake tracks these changes block by block. Work with Us when you're ready to talk about what's happening on your street.