The Tulsa Time Blues

I recently met a woman who had given up her job as a Houston oil company executive to sing full-time in a national touring company. I asked her if she had ever performed in Tulsa, and what she thought of the city. Her response was polite and restrained. After some prodding, she admitted that it was one of the least hospitable cities she had visited. Car-less and trapped in a downtown hotel, she and her fellow performers couldn’t wait to get back on the road.

A mid-sized city most people have heard of but few can place, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is in the midst of an identity crisis. In the late 1990s, Tulsa’s city government proposed a grand building scheme known as the Tulsa Project, hoping to rescue Tulsa from its image void while revitalizing the downtown. The effort resembled countless other so-called urban revitalization schemes that larger cities had employed, with a few twists. 

Tulsa’s big idea was to take a failed model and scale it down to Tulsa size. Instead of primary conventions, Tulsa would go after tertiary ones in a new small convention center. Instead of professional sports franchises, we would finance not one but numerous facilities scattered around the city center, to capture amateur sports venues such as high school swim meets or gymnastic competitions.

Voters rejected this plan, but Tulsa’s problems remained, and a group of citizens began a grassroots movement. “Grassroots” seemed much healthier than the city planners’ sugarcoated schemes. Paying homage to the country-western hit and Eric Clapton remake, round two was called “Tulsa Time.” With the planners help these citizens proposed yet another convention center–this time nestled in a green strip, rolling from downtown to the river. This “grassroots” version of the same old idea, however, failed at the ballot box as well.

In the past year, Tulsa has witnessed a “Tulsa Vision Summit” with over 1000 attendees, as well as the launch of a new grassroots website called “Tulsa Now.” In TulsaNow.org’s discussion forum, participants, in a desperate attempt to identify the magic project that will save the city, have been crying out for everything from mask festivals to a downtown public green. Last October even saw a “Battle of the Plans,” in which developers, citizens, and others duked it out over the most visionary project. Beyond proposals from a contingent of New Urbanists, the plans were mostly totems of one local cultural icon or another, the most distracting in the form of a skyscraper-sized downtown oil derrick connected to smaller derricks and laced with cable cars, a sort of downtown Tulsa a la Disney. 

While it’s exciting to see community spirit thrive in the face of so many failures, the friction from our collective wheel-spinning is becoming unbearable. I want to scream out to Tulsans to think. If these projects are getting us nowhere, what’s the point of yet another?

Tulsans understandably want an American city to be proud of, but we should slow down and think about the quality urban places we love and why we love them. Is New York just its skyscrapers? Is San Francisco only a bridge? What do these cities, big or small, have that Tulsa does not?

There is a magazine in town oddly named Urban Tulsa. When it interviews influential Tulsans, the publication asks them for a list of their favorite cities. Cities from Boston to Chicago, Savannah to Santa Fe, are often mentioned in the same breath as Tulsa. I suppose there is no place like home, but honestly, which one of these is not like the others? Here is a simple test. Park your car in the heart of any of these places, step onto the sidewalk, then ask yourself where you are. Now try it in Tulsa. The difference should be clear. Those cities are real, definable, urban places. Is Tulsa? Until that issue is addressed head-on, no sports venue, arts festival, or public green space is going to make a difference.

In its present form, all of Tulsa looks suburban. Even downtown is more an office park than an urban village. Cars are used for all trips. Consequently, each element of city life–housing, jobs, stores–is increasingly separated from others by miles of asphalt, creating a city of parking lots, expanding highways, and little else. How can an outmoded, suburban Tulsa compete with a shinier and even less dense suburb on our fringe? We should leave the suburban market to the suburbs and try to develop a new urban market for ourselves, incorporating the time-honored principles of Jane Jacobs’ school of urbanism. We should focus on creating exciting urban streets, which will encourage personal and economic exchange qualitatively different from the social and economic interactions of the suburbs.

Some may complain that there isn’t much fine print in this prescription, but we must make a mental detour before there can be details. Tulsans must insist that our civic leaders, urban planners and developers refocus on the traditional street, and establish a real reason for people to live in Tulsa instead of the surrounding suburbs. In the past decade, we’ve seen developers building projects in sight of big cash flows, architects designing big, inspirational complexes, and planners focused on the community’s big picture. Nobody promotes the traditional street, or the little connections that tie all these larger goals together. For cities that–like Tulsa–either no longer have truly urban spaces, or never had them, the path to an authentically urban future is not obvious. Unlike the well-worn message of traditional urbanism, alien buzzwords like smart growth and infill mean little to most people. We must deal with the mental landscape of Middle America before we have any hope of changing its physical form. Focusing on the urban street will have the greatest resonance and the greatest success. Let’s stick to it. Perhaps it will then finally be Tulsa’s time to stop singing the city project blues.