Introducing The Wheelhouse

Bricktown Water Taxi launches new blog for visitors AND for locals

Since its opening day of service on the Bricktown Canal – July 2, 1999 – Bricktown Water Taxi has made a concerted effort to provide our passengers with entertaining, informative tours. We’ve also always felt an obligation to help our guests better understand Oklahoma City, a community with an unusual and interesting history.

We acknowledge that often we serve as the “front door” for visitors in our city; often we are one of the first – if not THE first – places OKC’s visitors stop when arriving here. Routinely listed among top things to do in Oklahoma City, we relish the chance to introduce our passengers to what we believe makes this place special. This includes telling them about other things to see and do while they are here.

Bricktown Water Taxi’s sense of responsibility

We also recognize that this involves a responsibility to our community to tell the story well. And we should be knowledgeable in the telling. This demands familiarity with the history of our city and state. It also requires extensive knowledge of places where visitors (and locals) can experience our unique local culture.

Over the past two decades we have worked hard to provide our team with extensive materials regarding the history and culture of our city and state. We also work to keep them updated on new developments as they come on line. This has become more and more challenging as our city benefits from exponential growth and improvements. These can be traced back to the passage of the first taxpayer-funded MAPS projects, which incidentally envisioned and paid for the construction of the canal on which we operate, in the heart of the historic Bricktown Entertainment District.

Our crew’s familiarity with the market

Several years ago we made a commitment to enroll our team in industry-wide hospitality training through our partners at the Oklahoma City Convention and Visitors Bureau. Certified Tourism Ambassador training (CTA) is designed to familiarize front-line hospitality professionals with all of the wide-ranging options in our city for places to eat, attractions to visit, and cultural offerings such as museums, live performances and other forms of entertainment.

Beginning in late 2019 we ALSO began taking our crew on regular structured outings to experience these offerings first-hand. This is really the only way a person can provide an honest recommendation or assessment. These outings of course took a hit during the early phases of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They have resumed, however, as our crew returned to full strength in 2021. We are excited to visit even more places in 2022, and to share those with our guests and also with you, the readers of this newly-launched blog.

Our blog – The Wheelhouse

Speaking of the blog, we have also committed to making VERY regular updates. To this end, we have created a detailed editorial schedule. We’ve also engaged one of our crewmembers – who’s by chance a working professional journalist – to keep quality blog entries rolling.

Pablo Angulo-Gonzalez joined Bricktown Water Taxi during the 2021 season. He is originally from South America – Colombia to be exact – and currently works with the Water Taxi team as an ambassador (tour guide). He will now be adding “correspondent” to the Water Taxi portion of his resume. Pablo is an OKC-based freelance journalist. He is a photojournalist and writer who earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma.

Pablo will be visiting (and visiting with) industry partners in Bricktown, throughout downtown OKC, and eventually the entire metro. We hope these visits inspire your own experiences in our community. He will also be sharing interesting stories about our community’s interesting and unusual history and culture. Though he’s called Oklahoma home for years, Pablo continues to be on a journey of discovery in our city and state. We believe he will add an interesting perspective through his lens, both figuratively and literally.

You can also expect to see occasional installments from our management team, potentially from other Water Taxi crew members, and perhaps even a few special guest contributors.

Our approach to telling Oklahoma’s story

The story of Oklahoma (and Oklahoma City) is complex, interesting, often humorous, and – like most places – occasionally troubling. We won’t apologize for routinely showing our city and state in a positive light. At the end of the day, that is the core job of Water Taxi.

But we also promise to tell our stories as truthfully as possible. We won’t shy away from acknowledging when stories are multi-faceted and complicated; sometimes even uncomfortable. We believe knowing the truth is the only way to truly understand a place or a topic.

We hope you enjoy our efforts here. We’d LOVE it if you’d take the trouble to subscribe to our updates. We hope they help you to see Oklahoma City (and Oklahoma) differently, more completely. We also hope that it also inspires you to experience the things that WE think make our land grand.

Chad Huntington
CEO/Managing Member
Bricktown Water Taxi