On a whim one day this week, I stepped out of my car and shot a photo of the long-vacant Homeland store at NW 122nd and May Ave.
I was waiting for my daughter to come out of a haircare store in the strip center when the abandoned grocery store caught my attention.
I shopped there many times in the late 1980s, along with what appeared to be most of my fellow NW OKC citizens. It was a busy, busy place.
It’s sort of bewildering to see the anchor store of this whole intersection sit empty year after year. Is there no one with an idea or the resources to bring it back to life?
Anyway, I quickly tweeted out the photo with a short message, describing it as a “hip-hop happening place” in the ’80s, because that’s how I thought of it.
Little did I know that the words “hip-hop” would trigger an avalanche of interest in the post. Within 24 hours, the post had 15,000 views.
Two days later, views top 20,000 and almost 1,500 Twitter users had actually clicked on the photo for a closer look.
At first, I thought, ‘wow, there’s a lot of interest in this old, abandoned grocery store.’
Then it hit me. There are a lot of hip-hop fans out there who follow everything related — music, lifestyle, people. I’m sure many of them have set their accounts to send an alert anytime the words ‘hip-hop’ are mentioned in a tweet.
By Saturday morning, the Tweet had more than 27,000 views. And growing.
It’s been my first brush with a viral tweet, all because I wasn’t hip-hop enough to know what I was saying.
Apologies to disappointed hip-hop fans.
Jim Stafford's BlogOKC 