Moon Shot?

A smart man I know recently asked about Tulsa. “If you had to take a guess, what’s our moon shot? What’s the next big project that will put us on the map?”

There’s a lot of valuable talk going around, all on the subject of the next big thing. Austin did it. Nashville did it. The accelorationists among us figure that it’s now our turn, suggesting everything from drones to dirt bikes to data farms. All we need is for the holes in the cheese to align, which generally means big philanthropic support.

Part of this has to do with our successes. The Gathering Place has been transformational, an enormously ambitious, imaginative project which has actually changed the face of the city. I would say the same for the BOK Center and the churn of events it has brought to Tulsa. Two likely candidates for demolition and renewal are the Performing Arts Center and Expo Square. For a while someone mounted colored lights facing 21st Street and it made enough of a difference that I stopped hating the Tulsa Driller. Where are those lights when you need them most?

But my innermost hope is that we keep hammering away at the unfinished business of re-creating downtown. Take a look at pictures from the Fifties. Before Utica Square and Southroads Mall, downtown streets are thronged with pedestrians. Despite the micro-aggressions aimed at Northside shoppers, it’s a place of encounter for Black and white citizens. You can almost hear the hum of talk and traffic. Contemporary Tulsa cannot compare, not even in the Arts District north of the railroad tracks. When I come downtown, I have the streets to myself.

Enter my hero, the inestimable Jane Jacobs. Out of her encounter with the demonic Robert Moses, she called out a message to urban America: the essential, lifegiving experience of a city is what happens on the street: the coming and going of shoppers and restaurant goers, the slurp of ice cream cones, the busy intrusiveness. It’s the neighborhood of shared activity and experience, the small-business owner who knows each of her clients. It’s the browsing, the window shopping, the hi-and-how-are-yous. It’s the great beehive of a living urban landscape where we move through the happy obstructions of sociability.

We could do that here, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by knitting together our nodal points of development. We somehow have to connect Antoinette and Chimera with Dust Bowl Lanes and Juniper Restaurant. Is it too much to ask for low-cost street cars?

If I could use my personal executive orders for good, I’d require every building to create ground-floor retail with big glass windows and easy access. The essential thing is to be able to see in and see out, so that we are constantly looking into each others faces. Then I’d use shade sails connected to tall buildings on either side so that we could walk in summertime up Boston and Main. That’s another way to make a consequential difference in the granular experience of an urban environment. In her owlish glasses, Jane was right. You don’t get a city by catering to private cars.

Many people will fault me for my yearning nostalgia. No, I don’t want us to return to the racist Fifties or somehow make war on modern suburbia. I’m just noticing that in places like Broken Arrow, suburbanites longing for the experience of a city are creating a town center that serves the purpose. We need to pay attention to the subtleties of that process.

The secret of urbanization may not be big office buildings but places where people walk and talk, live and buy groceries, and go out to dinner. It’s the hive of restless seeking and finding, of eating at tables crowded on the sidewalk so that we can see each other pass by in the evening.

On the frontispiece: Jane Jacobs, New York City urban theorist and visionary.