Old Town Moore Gets Its First Murals This Month. Here's How to Catch Them Going Up
October 8, 2026
October 8, 2026
From Tuesday, October 27, through Saturday, October 31, artists will paint the first round of public murals in Old Town Moore, and the City is inviting anyone to stop by and watch. The program is called Moore Art Walls 2026. It starts with about 8 to 10 murals, chosen from more than 20 walls the City found suitable. It's part of a broader Old Town revitalization effort that an Oklahoma Department of Commerce grant helped launch.
Old Town has had a lot of construction fencing lately. SE 4th Street has been closed at the railroad tracks since April 2025. The Old School Building is being rebuilt from the ground up. Old Town Park is still on hold. The murals are the first piece of Old Town's makeover that will be finished in days, not years, and the City scheduled them to be done by the busiest evening on Old Town's fall calendar.
The City's Moore Art page lays out the schedule:
As of early October, the City hasn't announced any artist names or wall locations. The artist agreement posted online is still a blank template, so the line-up is not public yet. If you'd like to watch a particular wall come together, check the City of Moore's Moore Art page during the week of October 19. That's the one place the City has said it will publish the addresses.
The City has also posted a property owner agreement alongside the artist agreement. The page lists both as revised August 25, 2026. Each mural needs a wall owner who agreed to it, which helps explain why the City surveyed more than 20 candidate walls to land on 8 to 10.
Old Town has a space problem. Assistant City Manager Deidre Ebrey told Moore Monthly in August that the district is mostly churches, school property and municipal property, with little room for new commercial development. With few lots available for new buildings, the City is improving the walls that already stand.
The grant has the City working with a team of community marketing professionals on Old Town. Ebrey described what prompted the timing:
"There's a new level of energy in Old Town with businesses that have come online lately. We really have some synergy going on, and this is a great time to meet their energy with what the city can bring to the table."
Coffee Darling is one of those newer businesses. It's a coffee-and-tea shop that opened in Old Town Moore in April 2025 and serves specialty coffee and loose-leaf tea. It's also the closest thing to a front-row seat for mural week. A warm cup and a short walk to whichever walls the City names should make Tuesday through Friday easy to work into an ordinary afternoon. The Moore Chamber of Commerce, at 305 W. Main Street, is in the district as well.
Ebrey said the City's goal is to have the first murals done in time for its October 31 events, Haunt Old Town and the Red Ribbon Parade. So the paint will be fresh on the one night of the fall when the most people are walking Old Town's sidewalks.
The murals take five days. Old Town's other three projects have timelines measured in seasons, and each one depends on the one before it.
The SE 4th Street railroad underpass. SE 4th, also State Highway 37, closed on April 2, 2025, from the east side of Broadway to the west side of Turner Avenue. Over the summer, crews found that an Oklahoma Natural Gas line was still in the wrong place, even though it had already been moved once. Assistant City Manager Jerry Ihler called it "a 'relocation of a relocation.'" BNSF gave crews a 24-hour window with no trains parked along the 4th Street area, and 15 foundation shafts were drilled during it. A second window was expected in early August, with 14 more shafts to drill. The City's July 23, 2026, update puts completion at possibly late spring 2027. The finished project includes a new traffic signal at Broadway and SE 4th Street and ten-foot shared-use paths on both sides of the lowered roadway.
The Old School Building. Moore Public Schools changed course from restoring the building to rebuilding it entirely after the team found structural, foundation and basement problems. The community said goodbye at a farewell event on May 21, 2026, and MPS said then that demolition was expected to begin early that summer. Clay Griffin, principal architect with AGP, said the new building will copy the original's three-color brick and reuse salvaged cast-stone pieces, especially the main front entrance. Plans also call for displaying the "Washington Irving Camped Here" monument and portions of the old basketball court from the auditorium stage. Superintendent Dr. Robert Romines said the black metal staircases on either end will stay, because they're such a recognizable part of how the building looks from the street. MPS estimates 18 to 24 months of work once construction begins, with the building possibly ready between fall 2027 and spring 2028. Ebrey said she expects the new building to bring "a little more traffic in the evenings that could be helpful to businesses."
Old Town Park. This project waits on the other two. Ebrey said the City is "still waiting for clarity on the railroad right-of-way." She hopes that once the 4th Street project and its pedestrian bridge are done, the City's working relationship with BNSF will get the park moving again. The pedestrian bridge is designed as a north-south link between the trails at Central Park and the future Old Town Park.
Put those in order and Old Town's next chapter runs from spring 2027 into 2028, with the park coming after that. The murals are the piece of the plan that doesn't depend on a railroad window, a gas line or a foundation survey.
Haunt Old Town runs Saturday, October 31, from 4 to 7 p.m. Local businesses, organizations and churches set up trick-or-treating booths across the Old Town Moore district. There are also inflatables, music, games, face painting and several food trucks. This year, the mural artists' exhibition and meet-and-greet takes place before and during those same hours.
If the artists finish on schedule, families walking between booths will pass walls that were blank on Monday. It's also the best chance to talk with the artists about what they painted and why, because once the week is over the murals stay and the artists move on.
The Red Ribbon Parade is also an October 31 event in Old Town, according to the City. Its 2026 time and route hadn't been published in the sources we reviewed, so check with the City closer to the date if you're planning around it.
The pedestrian bridge will eventually connect Old Town to Moore Central Park at 700 S. Broadway, which hosts most of the City's fall and holiday events in the meantime.
For now, getting between Old Town and Central Park still means going around the closed stretch of SE 4th. The underpass schedule points to late spring 2027 as the earliest that changes.
If the changes in Old Town have you thinking about your own corner of Moore, whether that means staying put, moving up or listing next spring, Jennifer Elliston is glad to talk through what the underpass and Old School timelines could mean for your plans and help you lay out next steps. Let's Connect.
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