This paper discusses emerging issues in the development of future optical metropolitan area networks and describes the pioneering research at Stanford University to address some of them. The optical MAN space is seeing great innovation in industry and research. Trends such as network-wide reconfiguration, Internet protocol (IP) over WDM transport, tunable OADMs and novel fibers will emerge at the networking and physical layers. Through our four MAN networking projects, the Stanford OCRL has made a significant contribution to this innovation, which will help build powerful and exciting optical MANs.