Recently in Tulsa::History Category

As a point of comparison, Tulsa Transit bus service doesn't run evenings (except for a few special night lines), and typical headways are 30 minutes or longer between buses.

DO YOU KNOW
THAT
STREET CAR SERVICE
STARTS

On the Kendall-West Fifth car line at 5:00 a.m. and after 6:44 a. m. a car each way every eight minutes.

On the Main street line at 5:20 a.m. and after 6:00 a.m. every seven and one-half minutes.

On the Bellview-Owen Park line at 5:15 a.m. and after 6:00 a.m. a car each way every 10 minutes.

On the North Peoria-South Frisco line at 5:10 a.m. and a car every fifteen minutes except during the afternoon rush hours, a car every ten minutes.

Tulsa Street Railway Company

Oklahoma
Union Railway Company

Interurban cars leave Tulsa every hour on the hour from 6 a. m. to 12 o'clock midnight for Sapulpa and every hour on the half hour from 6:30 a. m. to 11:30 p. m. for Red Fork.

Interurban cars to Sapulpa carry baggage and express.

Package freight car leaves First and Guthrie streets 8:45 a. m. and 2:45 p. m., daily except Sunday.

(From p. 12, Monday, May 15, 1922, Tulsa Daily World, Weekly Business Review, a weekly page of small ads from local businesses, ads for two of Tulsa's three streetcar companies, the strictly local Tulsa Street Railway and the interurban Oklahoma Union Railway, which connected Tulsa, West Tulsa, Red Fork, and Sapulpa, as well as providing local service in Tulsa and Sapulpa. The third company, Charles Page's Sand Springs Railway, connected downtown Sand Springs with Archer Street in downtown Tulsa. A half-page ad in the Sunday, October 16, 1921, Tulsa Daily World, says that the TSR runs from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.)

Jack Frank, maker of many wonderful films about Tulsa history, has posted home movie footage of a Christmas parade in downtown Tulsa, from sometime in the late 1940s. The vantage point is on the east side of Main Street, a hundred feet or so south of 6th Street, looking west across Main Street and northwest beyond 6th on Main. The only nearby building still standing is the former HQ of Public Service Company of Oklahoma on the southwest corner of 6th and Main.

The floats are elaborate, appear to be depictions of nursery rhymes, but there are no signs to indicate who the sponsors were.

Someone who knows vehicles might be able to pinpoint the date more precisely. The three long words identifying the business on the northwest corner of 6th and Main (where Dalessandros once was located) might be a clue as well.

One of the fun things about blogging for over eight years is when someone posts a comment or sends an email about a long-ago blog entry. Someone is searching on the web for information, perhaps about family or friends, and finds one of my entries, then writes a note to fill in more details, often with a touching personal story.

Yesterday, Brenda Terry posted a comment on my entry on the 90th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot, in which I talked about Greenwood after the riot -- its rebuilding and flourishing, followed by its second demolition in the name of urban renewal. She offered her own recollections and those of her mother. Brenda is the daughter of blues great Flash Terry; Rocky Frisco recalls sitting in with Flash's band on Greenwood back in 1957, one of the anecdotes I cited in my talk about Greenwood's post-riot rebirth.

Thanks Mike for the information posted on this site regarding Greenwood's Post Riot history.

I am actually the oldest daughter of Flash Terry, you mentioned him briefly in your presentation. Recently my mother spoke about musicians who visited our house in the late 1950's before they were famous (i.e. Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Blues Bland, but that's another story).

My mother grew up on North Owasso, west of Peoria during the late 40's after her mother died. Her mother, before she died in 1940, lived directly across the street from the Mt. Rose Baptist Church on Lansing. She speaks fondly of those days, and of Greenwood. Actually everyone you speak with about Greenwood who is old enough to remember the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's in those days, speak with a hint of pride in their eyes, and a longing for the unity and pride they experience is visible in their voices. One of the memories I have as a very small child in the late 50's, is of my aunt who lived in one of the rooming houses on Deep Greenwood (looks like one of the homes in the photos posted). She worked as a dispatcher for a taxi company. Even now I can remember how bustling and alive the area was back then. When I think of the history plowed down in the name of progress, my heart sinks. The neighborhoods were a testimony for strong and determined people, who in some cases, had fought their way up from the bonds of slavery. During Urban Renewal development, my great-grandmother's home (where I was born),and rental property were destroyed.

Years later, Dunbar Elementary School where both my mother and her children attended, destroyed. I am ashamed that every residence who had history in not only Greenwood, but North Lansing, Owasso, and other streets now under I75, did not make their voices heard, and more importantly make themselves understood. I was a teenager at the time with no interest in history, but since I began researching my family history, I have learned that to know our history is to understand ourselves. Without this knowledge we have no foundation and lack direction.

Thanks again and with deep regards, Brenda.

Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) chairman Bill Leighty came across a wonderful documentary short subject about Tulsa. The 15 minute film was part of the Cities in America series, produced by the United States Information Service, the Cold War-era organization that used a variety of media to promote a positive image for America overseas.

The film tells the story of Sam Carson, a long-time Tulsan who had watched the city develop from its early days, his son Henry and daughter-in-law Ellen, and his grandchildren, Tom, Eddie and Janet. I'm curious to look them up in the Polk directory.

The film shows downtown Tulsa in its post-World War II heyday, with scenes on Boston and Boulder Avenues, a brief shot of kids emerging from a Saturday matinee at the Delman Theater. If you look closely and quickly, you'll spot the Beacon Building when it still had a beacon on top, 320 Boston when it was the National Bank of Tulsa. The University of Tulsa dominates one section of the film, and you get brief glimpses of the American Airlines maintenance facility and the lovely Art Deco municipal airport terminal.

At some point, I hope to give this little film the full James Lileks treatment, a lengthy blog post with still shots and details about each. I'm intrigued by one brief scene about 5 minutes in, showing a modern looking Oklahoma Tire & Supply store (you may have known it as OTASCO), with Vandevers in the background. The next scene shows a modern facade on a dress shop called Dorothy's. It ought to be possible to date the film by some of the features. Near the end of the film, it's mentioned that the Arkansas River has not yet been dammed. There are brief shots of a school, a library, and a park.

For now, enjoy, and tell us if you spot anything or anyone you recognize.

MORE: Architect and Tulsa history lover Paul Uttinger has written a scene-by-scene commentary, identifying locations in the film, and he thinks he's pinpointed the date:

1. On the map of Tulsa (time mark 1:05), West Tulsa and Garden City are shown east of the river. East Tulsa is shown north of the CBD. Trovillion is shown to the southeast of the CBD. I've read that Alsuma was re-named Trovillion for a short time. Howard is shown east of downtown Tulsa, about halfway between Trovillion and Dawson. I've never heard of a place called Howard there.

2. (1:44) Outside the Delman Theatre, Sam Carson waits for his grandchildren. He looks at the placard for The Last Round-up, starring Gene Autry. A poster for The Kissing Bandit, starring Frank Sinatra, is displayed in the window behind the placard.

3. (2:05) Sam, Janet, and Eddie walk north toward 3rd Street on Boulder Avenue in front of the World and Tribune building. The bottom of the Skelly Building sign is visible behind them. On the west side of Boulder, we can see the Citizens State Bank ( http://www.tulsalibrary.org/JPG/B1911.jpg ) and the Beacon Building at 4th, part of the Petroleum Building and the Halliburton-Abbott Building (with the Sears store sign) at 5th, the corner of the Medical Arts Building at 6th, and a spire of Holy Family Cathedral at 8th. There's two-way vehicular traffic on Boulder.

4. (2:15) The Carsons walk west on 4th, heading toward Boston Ave. Two-way traffic on 4th.

5. (2:21) The three have turned south on Boston. They're on the sidewalk next to what was originally known as the Cosden Building, which is now the old portion of the Mid-Contintent Tower.

6. (2:34) They're still walking south on the east side of Boston, but suddenly they are north of 4th Street again!

7. (2:44) Eddie and Janet wave to a policeman from the northeast corner of 4th & Boston. The policeman appears to be standing next to the Pioneer Building, but I don't see the Bell System "Public Telephones" sign that was displayed on that corner ( http://www.tulsalibrary.org/JPG/B9978.jpg ).

8. (2:55) The Carsons look at an oil boom display in a Philtower window.

9. (4:49) Looking south on Boston from the Katy tracks. The First National Bank Building appears to be under construction, with a crane leaning out over Boston near 5th Street.

10. (4:53) Looking northwest at 4th & Main (Arby's is there now).

11. (4:55) Northeast corner of 4th & Main (Ken Brune's Reunion Center Bldg now).

12. (4:58) I don't recognize this corner. It might be the Daniel Building at 3rd & Boston, but I can't tell for sure.

13. (5:16) A brief moment of racial integration. I don't recognize the location, but my guess is that it's near 3rd & Main, because I think the bottom of the Holly Store sign is in the background of a previous scene.

14. (5:24) Looking northwest near 6th & Boston. The Vandever building spans over the alley between Main and Boston, and an old Vandever's sign is still faintly visible from 6th Street today. The view of the sign we see in the short film has been blocked by the Enterprise Building since around 1954. In the film, Burt's Malt-A Plenty Ice Cream store is on the corner where the Enterprise Bldg is now, just north across 6th St from the Oklahoma Tire Supply building.

15. (5:27) Another moment of racial integration on a public sidewalk? Dorothy's was a clothing store for women, but in those days, men went there for a particular pre-Christmas event:

Recently, men have been returning to "occupy" that location once again.

16. (5:31) Back to the World and Tribune building on Boulder, between 3rd and 4th.

17. (5:34) Renberg's and Clarke's on the east side of Main, 300 block. I noticed that Renberg's changed their logo in the 1948 Polk directory to the lowercase type face we see in the short film and on the facade of the building today. The last time I peeked inside a few years ago, Renberg's former ground level sales floor had been converted to a parking garage.

18. (5:40) Looking south at the Boston Avenue Methodist Church tower from 12th Street. The Fred Jones Ford dealership is on the southeast corner ( http://www.tulsalibrary.org/JPG/D4611.jpg ). Wat Henry Pontiac is on the southwest corner ( http://www.tulsalibrary.org/JPG/C1589.jpg ).

19. (7:08) The exterior of the "Carson" residence at 1735 S. Detroit Ave. In the 1946, 1950, and 1955 Polk directories, James Forster is listed at that address.

20. (7:14) Part of the house at 1725 S. Detroit is visible as Tom Carson leaves home to catch a bus to TU.

21. (7:19) Tom hails the "S. Denver" bus at 18th & Detroit. The bungalow at 302 E. 18th is visible in the background. The bus is heading west on 18th (7:29).

22. (12:37) Looks similar to a few of the tanks near 21st & 33rd W Aveune ( http://tinyurl.com/TulsaTanks ).

23. (13:53) A partial view of the old Art Deco style Municipal Airport building.

24. (14:21) Looking southwest at 6th & Main.

25. (14:29) Old Public Library building at 3rd & Cheyenne. A bit of the the Mid-Co Bldg is visible in the background.

26. (14:37) 12th between Columbia Place and Delaware Avenue, looking northwest ( http://tinyurl.com/WilsonMS ).

27. (15:04) Henry Carson smoking somewhere northeast of the CBD. The final skyline view might have been shot from the top of the hill near North Elgin and Independence, judging from the perspective.

My best guess is that most or all of the local filming was done during the warmer months of 1949, based on the clothing worn by pedestrians and TU students, the lush foliage, the release date for The Kissing Bandit, and in-progress construction photos of the First National Bank and Trust building in the Beryl Ford Collection.

This is encouraging news: In a few weeks, as soon as PSO puts the necessary electrical hookups in place, the Bell family of Bell's Amusement Park will be operating a few of their kiddie rides at the Saturday Flea Market in west Tulsa. The rides will be open on Saturdays during the flea market's weekly session.

Saturday Flea Market is at 5802 W. 51st Street S., just about a mile west of the southwest junction of I-44 and I-244. They boast 100 vendors in two climate-controlled buildings and outdoors. It's just east of JRP Speedway.

It's a humble re-beginning, but it echoes the way Bell's Amusement Park began in 1951 with a half-dozen small rides at the County Fairgrounds. It wasn't until 1969 that Zingo, the wooden roller coaster, began operation, and many of the park's other major attractions -- the Phantasmagoria dark ride, Himalaya, White Lightning log flume -- came into being over the course of the 1970s.

It also reminds me of the way the Snyder family brought back the Mayo Hotel: First converting the basement into paid parking, then converting the lobby and mezzanine as an event space, then leasing the storefronts, with each stage providing revenue for the next stage of renovation.

The location is just a couple of miles from the site of the long-vanished Crystal City Amusement Park, on Southwest Blvd between 41st Street and 33rd West Avenue. The site is now occupied by the Crystal City Shopping Center (whose name was the nemesis of radio announcers). Crystal City was home to a roller coaster named Zingo, which became the namesake for the wooden coaster at Bell's decades later. The 1939 Sanborn map shows Zingo ("scenic railway") hugging the highway, a stream flowing through the property (with a monkey island in the middle of it), a massive dance hall, a giant pool with a large bath house, "amusement houses", Dodgem (bumper cars), a ride called "Bug," a few smaller rides, an octagonal refreshment building, ticket offices, and something called Hiram's Barn. TulsaGal has photos of Crystal City Amusement Park from the late 1920s that show many of these features.

(Click the picture to open a very large version of the map in a popup window.)

According to the County Assessor's records (parcel 31125-92-27-17380), the Crystal City Shopping Center was built in 1954 and sits on 442,060 sq. ft. of land, a bit more than 10 acres, about the same size as Bell's footprint at the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. Comparing the Sanborn map (Volume 3, Map 501) to the assessor's map, it appears that the highway department routed I-244 around the shopping center, taking homes to the east and moving the Tulsa-Sapulpa Union tracks further east as well. The site of the old amusement park is fully intact.

If I may dream a bit: Wouldn't it be cool to restore Crystal City on Historic Route 66 as an amusement park, right next to a restored Red Fork Main Street? Wouldn't it be cool to run an electric streetcar between Crystal City and the new Route 66 Village? The shopping center has seen better days, there are a whole bunch of rides that need a new home, the site has good visibility from the freeway, and it would give Route 66 travelers even more reason to follow the old alignment through Tulsa.

I came across some research, based on the 2000 U. S. Census, calculating various indicators of racial integration in the nation's 100 most populous metropolitan areas. It points to an impressive degree of progress over the last half century in Tulsa.

Racial Integration in Urban America: A Block Level Analysis of African American and White Housing Patterns

According to that paper, 16.3% of the City of Tulsa's population and 9.4% of the Tulsa Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) was African-American in 2000.

The researchers analyzed the racial composition of each census block, sorting them into four categories:

• >= 20% Black and >= 20% White (the authors of the study term these "black-white integrated blocks")
• < 20% Black and > 50% White
• > 80% Black
• Other Mixture

A census block is the smallest unit of census statistics. Streets, creeks, railroads, section lines, city limits all serve as census block boundaries. For example, a city block split in two by a railroad track would result in two census blocks.

In the Tulsa MSA, there were 75,471 African-Americans in the 2000 Census. 28.0% lived on blocks where the population was at least 20% black and at least 20% white. 28.7% lived on blocks where the population was less than 20% black and at least 50% white, 36.0% lived on blocks where the population was at least 80% black, and 7.4% on blocks with some other racial mixture.

Put another way, in 2000 64% of African-Americans in the Tulsa metro area lived on racially diverse blocks. In 1960 that number was below 10%. While there is a concentrated area of black population in north Tulsa, two-thirds of Tulsa's black population is scattered across the map.

I don't have census block data on population by race in 1960, but I do have that data by census tract -- areas of a few dozen blocks, often about a 1/2 square mile in area. In 1960, blacks were 8.7% of the City of Tulsa's population. In 1960, 91.6% of Tulsa's blacks lived in six census tracts -- 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11 -- about 4 sq. mi. area bounded roughly by Cincinnati Ave on the west, Mohawk Blvd on the north, the Santa Fe tracks on the east. Outside of the City of Tulsa, the only significant clusters of blacks in Tulsa County in descending order, were the rural part of tract 2 (bounded by Mohawk Blvd, Yale, Peoria, Apache and 36th St. N), the city of Sand Springs, tract 67 (likely that most were in the South Haven subdivision near 51st St and 33rd West Ave), tract 76 (likely around Rentie's Grove), and tract 90 (likely in and around Alsuma)

So we've gone from over 90% of blacks living in a small part of the city in 1960 to living all over the metro area -- 64% outside of predominantly black areas -- in 2000. That seems like progress to me, but the authors of the research don't rank Tulsa as significantly integrated (see their maps of Tulsa) because there are so few blocks on which the population is at least 20% black and at least 20% white. In a city where the overall black population is less than 20%, that doesn't seem like a good measurement of integration.

Of course, geographical integration isn't necessarily a good measure of social integration either, as we tend to connect with people we know from church, school, and work and may not spend much time with our own neighbors.

Here are a couple of maps from the 1960 census reports, showing tracts in and round the City of Tulsa and for the rest of Tulsa County. I've superimposed pairs of numbers on some of the tracts. The first number is the number of blacks, the second is the total population of the tract. Red numbers are inside the city limits; blue numbers are outside. Click the pictures to view full size:

I'm working on analyzing the C-1 forms submitted by candidates for Tulsa City Council. In the process of locating real residential addresses for donors who insist on listing their business addresses, I needed to look at Osage County land records, and while I was there, on a whim I searched for "WILLS JAMES" as in James Robert aka Jim Rob aka Bob Wills. Wills owned a ranch described as "north of Tulsa" where he and his extended family lived. I'd always wondered exactly where it was.

His dream was to retire there with his whole band, but World War II intervened, the band went their separate ways, and he went to California, returning to Tulsa for a few years in the late '50s before heading to Texas for the rest of his career. His final resting place is in Memorial Park Cemetery here in Tulsa.

Lo and behold, I found this: A journal entry dated 2010/08/17, the result of a quiet title lawsuit in Osage County, CV-2001-403. The Grantor list has 32 names and appears to include Bob Wills, his parents, all of his brothers and sisters, one of his ex-wives (the former Mary Lou Parker of Pawhuska), and a number of nieces and nephews.

WILLS, J T
WILLS, EMMIE LEE
WILLS, BOB
SULLIVAN, RUBY WILLS
SULLIVAN, ROBERT LEE
HOUSE, ELOISE WILLS
WILLS, JOHNNIE LEE
MCKEE, HELEN WILLS
MCKEE, JIM ROB
KERR, OLGA LOUISE WILLS
WILLS, LUTHER
WILLS, JOHN DAVID
WILLS, BILLY JACK
WILLS, JOHN DEWEY
WILLS, DOROTHY
MCKEE, JIM ROB JR
OMSTEAD, KAREN L KERR
WILLS, JAMES R II
WILLS, JOHN D
LARIOS, KASEY LEE WILLS
TAYLOR, BOBBIE NELL SULLIVAN
WILLS, LORENE M
CLOUD, MARY LOU PARKER WILLS
MORROW, DELTA SUE HOUSE
STOUT, LERLENE HOUSE
COPPEANS, MILLICENT ANN WILLS
WILLS, JOHNT T
KELLEY, DAYNA MCKEE
SUITOR, SHYRL ANN KERR FIDDNER
BOUCHARD, JOYCE LEE WILLS
WILLS, LUTHER JAY JR
WILLS, BILLIE JACQULYN

Grantee is Presley Ford, Jr. An obituary reports that he died on January 15, 2002, at the age of 86.

On the court docket, the list of summonses appears to include all of Bob's living relatives as of 2001 and is followed by a long list of "entry of appearance and disclaimer of interest" notations in 2002. Then eight years intervene until the plaintiff moves to substitute the Osage Nation as plaintiff, and in two months, the title is quieted.

Here are the specifics from the county clerk record.

Legal description:

S15 T20N R12E NE NE
S14 T20N R12E NW NW L1
S14 T20N R12E SW NW L2
S14 T20N R12E NW SW L3 Partial
S15 T20N R12E SE Partial

Instrument number: I-2010-005504
Book 001428
Pages 0181 to 0187

Mapping the location seems simple, but it appears that the township/range/section system for Osage County is skewed with respect to the rest of the state. The property appears to be north of the Osage Million Dollar Elm Tulsa casino and northeast of the old Downtown Airpark, but you'd need to see the full legal description in the lawsuit and an official plat map to know for sure. I don't have time to translate legalese, but there may be some relationship to the casino parcel, which was finally taken into trust in July 2011. (It had been thought that any land within the former Osage Reservation could be used for a tribal casino, but federal courts ruled that it's not a federally recognized reservation, so the land would have to be placed into trust.)

There's more research to be done. I imagine that the parcel settled by the quiet title suit may have only been a portion of Bob Wills's ranch. I'm curious to know what legal mishap left title to the land in question. I may need to mosey up to Pawhuska some day soon.

I'd like to give the cover story in the new issue of This Land the attention it deserves, but at the moment I'm overwhelmed by a backlog of entries in progress about the Tulsa City Council primary, now just eight days away, so we'll make do for now with links:

Lee Roy Chapman has written a detailed, well-researched historical essay on the links between Tulsa founding father Tate Brady, the Ku Klux Klan, a vigilante attack on IWW members (and the daily newspaper that supported it), and the city's attempt to dispossess the black Tulsans whose homes and businesses had been burned and looted in the attack on Greenwood (the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot).

Sidebars to the story: Steve Gerkin's history of Beno Hall, Tulsa's Klan HQ on north Main St., and a transcript and audio re-enactment of Tate Brady's testimony to the tribunal investigating Klan activity in Tulsa.

Fox 23 spoke to Tulsans about changing place names that honor Brady, including the Brady Heights historic neighborhood, Brady Street, and the Brady Arts District. I'm inclined to agree with 94-year-old race riot survivor Wess Young:

He doesn't want the neighborhood's name to change. "That's history, why would you try and change what has gone one and not show what progress you have made," he told FOX23. He says he doesn't live in Tate Brady's neighborhood, he lives in his neighborhood. No matter what name it has. "It doesn't bother me because I have the privilege to live where I can afford."

My thinking -- keep Brady Street and Brady Heights as a humbling reminder that men like Brady were a part of Tulsa's past, but pick a better name to market the area north of the tracks downtown. I like Lee Roy Chapman's suggestion: Call it the Bob Wills District.

I've recently come across several Facebook pages designed for reminiscing about location-specific childhood memories, and since I started this post several more have sprung up.

I've signed up for "You grew up in Catoosa if you remember.....". I never lived in the City of Catoosa, but Catoosa was more than just its corporate boundaries. Catoosa schools were the focal point of the community, and the district covers Rolling Hills (unincorporated territory back in the '70s), the little community four miles east on old 33 near Nuckolls Store, Ponderosa Estates, and several trailer parks. Rolling Hills Shopping Center and the surrounding neighborhood and the rural area between Catoosa and "Tulsa Proper" were within Tulsa's city limits after 1966, but there was still a connection with Catoosa.

Our family moved to Rolling Hills in 1969, then moved a mile west into the City of Tulsa in 1978. I started out at Catoosa schools, my mom taught kindergarten there for 28 years, and my sister graduated from there. Our family belonged to First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills for 17 years, and Dad was a deacon for much of that time. Dad also helped found the Port of Catoosa Jaycees chapter. I remember going to the candy store across from the elementary school; Mr. Sam the principal, Mrs. Martin the school secretary, and Mr. Parham the custodian; getting Rex's Chicken at Li'l Abner's Dairyette (owned by the Yocham family -- Mrs. Yocham was my "beginners" Sunday School teacher); riding my bike to the In-N-Out at Admiral and 200th for an Icee or walking to the U-Tote-M at 193rd & 4th Street for a Coke; swimming at the Blue Whale or the Rolling Hills trailer park pool.

Another group is open only to those who grew up in north Tulsa (north of Admiral) in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A west Tulsa Facebook group launched today.

If you lived around 31st and Yale between 1967 and 1987, you probably went to Shaw's Drive In, and there's a Facebook group for that, too.

It's been fun to see old familiar names and read about old familiar places. If you find other Facebook groups devoted to reminiscing about growing up somewhere in the Tulsa area, please leave a comment with the name of the group and a link.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: The success of the "You grew up in Catoosa if you remember..." group has inspired the planning of a sort of reunion on Saturday, October 15, 2011.

MORE: There's now a group devoted to Nowata, my Dad's hometown.

Today is the 90th anniversary of a white mob's attack on Tulsa's African-American district, known as Greenwood after its principal avenue. The attack, which began the evening of May 31, 1921, killed hundreds and left thousands wounded and homeless.

Once hushed up, the attack known as the Tulsa Race Riot has received an increasing amount of public attention over the last 30 years. I have half a shelf taken up with books on the topic, and I will leave that history to others who have told it far better than I could ever hope to do.

What is often overlooked is the triumph and tragedy that followed the riot. The story of Tulsa's Greenwood District did not end in 1921, and over the last few years I've taken it upon myself to learn that story and attempt to bring it to a broader audience.

After the riot, there was an attempt by the city's white leaders to keep Greenwood from being rebuilt. The City Commission passed an ordinance extending the fire limits to include Greenwood, prohibiting frame houses from being rebuilt. The idea was to designate the district for industrial use and resettle blacks to a new place further away from downtown, outside the city limits.

African-American attorneys won an injunction against the new fire ordinance; the court decreed that it constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment, a taking of property without due process. The injunction opened the door for Greenwood residents to rebuild.

They did it themselves, without insurance funds (most policies had a riot exclusion) or any other significant outside aid....

The Greenwood district flourished well into the 1950s. In 1938, businessmen formed the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce. A 1942 directory lists 242 businesses, including over 50 eateries, 38 grocers, a half dozen clothing stores, plus florists, physicians, attorneys, furriers, bakeries, theaters, and jewelers -- more than before the riot 21 years earlier. The 1957 city directory reveals a similar level of commercial activity in Greenwood....

The rebuilding, subsequent renaissance, and final removal of Greenwood are documented by aerial and street photos, land records, fire insurance maps, newspaper stories, street directories, and census data.

All that raw data is fleshed out in the memories of those who lived through those times. Some of those stories have been captured in books like They Came Searching by Eddie Faye Gates and Black Wall Street by Hannibal Johnson.

Here are a couple of reminiscences included by Gates in her book that clearly connect the term Black Wall Street to the post-riot, rebuilt Greenwood:

"They just were not going to be kept down. They were determined not to give up. So they rebuilt Greenwood and it was just wonderful. It became known as The Black Wall Street of America."

- Eunice Jackson

"The North Tulsa after the riot was even more impressive than before the riot. That is when Greenwood became known as 'The Black Wall Street of America.'"

- Juanita Alexander Lewis Hopkins

But then came the planners:

"Slum clearance," as a cure for Greenwood's ills, had been discussed for years, but in 1967, Tulsa was accepted into the Federal Model Cities program.

Model Cities was not just an ordinary urban renewal program. It was intended to be an improvement over the old method of bulldozing depressed neighborhoods. The Federal government provided four dollars for every dollar of local funding, and the plan involved advisory councils of local residents and attempted to address education, economic development, and health care as well as dilapidated buildings.

For all the frills, Model Cities was still primarily an urban removal program: Save the neighborhood by destroying it. Homes and businesses were cleared for the construction of I-244 and US 75 and for assemblage into larger tracts that might attract developers. Displaced blacks moved north, into neighborhoods that had been built in the '50s for working class whites.

Only the determination of a few community leaders saved a cluster of buildings in Deep Greenwood -- but these buildings are isolated from any residential area, cut off from community.

In April 1970, as Tulsa's Model Cities urban renewal program was beginning to demolish homes, Mabel Little, whose new home was burned down in the 1921 attack, told the Tulsa City Commission [from the April 11, 1970, Tulsa Tribune]:

"You destroyed everything we had. I was here in it, and the people are suffering more now than they did then."

Years later, Jobie Holderness reflected on the spiritual damage done by urban renewal:

"Urban renewal not only took away our property, but something else more important -- our black unity, our pride, our sense of achievement and history. We need to regain that. Our youth missed that and that is why they are lost today, that is why they are in 'limbo' now."

Here's my talk on this topic at Ignite Tulsa in 2009:

And here are links to previous BatesLine entries about Greenwood's renaissance:

Greenwood 1957: A summary of commercial activity in Greenwood, based on the 1957 Polk street directory of Tulsa.

Greenwood's streetcar: The Sand Springs Railroad (includes photos)

The rise and fall of Greenwood (includes high res 1951 aerial photo of Deep Greenwood)

Tulsa 1957 restaurants: A KML (Google Maps) file locating restaurants listed in the 1957 street and phone directories, including many that lined Greenwood Ave.

Film of Oklahoma's 1920's black communities

Notes on the sources documenting Greenwood's post-riot renaissance

Physical signs, such as the commemorative plaques along Greenwood's sidewalks and on the Greenwood Cultural Center, that document the district's reconstruction after the riot and demolition during urban renewal

Finally, here at a glance are three Sanborn maps from 1915, 1939, and 1962, showing Deep Greenwood over the decades:

Sanborn Map: Deep Greenwood in 1915

Sanborn Map: Deep Greenwood in 1939

Sanborn Map: Deep Greenwood in 1962

While looking for something else, I came across this, entered into the Congressional Record by Illinois Congressman Phil Crane on August 4, 1994 (p. E1664). Crane describes it as a speech Paul Harvey gave in Tulsa on April 2, 1994, but it reads more like a radio commentary reflecting on a visit to Tulsa. Harvey had returned to his hometown to speak at a benefit for the Salvation Army in March of that year.

Over my shoulder a backward glance.

The world began for Paul Harvey in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Ever since I have made tomorrow my favorite day, I've been uncomfortable looking back.

My recent revisit reminded me why. The Tulsa I knew isn't there anymore. And the memories of once-upon-a time are more bitter than sweet.

Of the lawman father I barely knew.

The widowed mother who worked too hard and died too soon. And my sister Frances.

Tulsa was three graves side-by-side.

Recently I came face-to-face with the place where a small Paul Harvey's mother buttoned his britches to his shirt to keep them up and it down.

Tulsa is a copper penny which a small boy from East Fifth Place placed on a trolley track to see it mashed flat.

It's a slingshot made from a forked branch aimed at a living bird, and the bird died, and he cried, and he is still crying.

That little lad was seven when he snapped a rubber band against the neck of the neighbor girl, and pretty Ethel Mae Mazelton ran home crying, and he, lonely, had wanted only to get her to notice him.

Somehow he blamed Tulsa for the war which took his best friend, Harold Collis...

And classmate Fred Mrarkgraff...

And never gave them back.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, he learned the wages of sin smoking grapevine behind the garage and getting a mouthful of ants.

Longfellow Elementary school is closed now; dark.

Tulsa High is a business building.

The old house at 1014 is in mourning for the Tulsa that isn't there anymore.

It was in that house that a well-meaning mother arranged a surprise birthday party when he was sixteen; invited his school friends, including delicate Mary Betty French without whom he was sure he could not live.

He hated that party for revealing to her and to them his house, so much more modest than theirs.

Tulsa is where the true love of his life waved goodbye to the uniform that climbed aboard a troop train.

She was there waiting when he got back but they could not wait to say goodbye to Tulsa.

Tulsa was watermelon picnics in the backyard and a small Paul blowing taps on his Boy Scout bugle over the fresh grave of a dead kitten.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, used to be the fragrance of honeysuckle on the trellis behind the porch swing.

Mowing for a quarter neighbors' lawns that seemed then so enormous.

Only Tulsa's delicious tap water is as it was.

That and the schoolteachers...

Miss Harp and Miss Smith and Isabelle Ronan. These I am assured are still there somewhere--reincarnated.

In a sleek jet departing Tulsa's vast Spartan Airport at midnight, I closed my eyes and remembered...

When Spartan was a sod strip...

And a crowd gathered...

And a great tin goose landed...

And Slim Lindbergh got out...

And a boy, age nine, was pressing against the restraining ropes daring to foretaste fame--and falling in love with the sky.

No...

The Tulsa I knew isn't there anymore. But it's all right.

A new Tulsa is.

I'll not be afraid to go home again.

I have made friends with the ghosts.

Note: I've corrected obvious misspelling and punctuation errors from the online Congressional Record (CR), and replaced the CR's use of three asterisks to indicate ellipsis with the standard three dots. The CR text mentions "Karold Collis" and "Fred Mrarkgraff." Harold Collis of Tulsa is listed in the roll of Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard dead in World War II, so I've made that correction. I couldn't find any name resembling "Fred Mrarkgraff" in either the Army or Navy lists of casualties for Oklahoma, so I've left that uncorrected.

Zingo is for sale. The Bell's Amusement Park roller coaster that thrilled generations of Tulsans is being auctioned off on eBay by Better Price Surplus Warehouse for $400,000 or best offer.

Roller Coaster for Sale. Engineered and manufactured by Philadelphia Toboggan Co. Erected in 1968 and dismantled in 2006. The Zingo Roller Coaster formerly at Bell's Amusement Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma has been dismantled, put in storage and is now for sale. The train, track, gears, motor, chain, bent legs, and lumber (2x6, 2x8, 4x4, 4x6, 6x6, 6x8, 6x12). Tens of thousands of board feet of lumber, all double kiln, dried pressure treated, yellow pine painted with white latex. The coaster was 72 feet at its highest point and 2,675 feet long. This lumber can be cut, sorted, loaded etc, at its present location as long as its gone by 5/30/2011.

This coaster is for sale as a whole unit or can be separated into 2 lots. The lumber as 1 lot and all other components (train, track, gears, motor, chain, etc.) as Lot 2. The asking price is $250,000 USD for each lot, or $400,000 USD in its entirety or Best Offer by 4/15/2011. This equipment and lumber must be moved from its present location by May 30th, 2011. We will entertain any serious offer and help with the logistics of the move. Contact Marc Price at 918-625-0492 or email bargains@betterpricestore.com

It's not unheard of for a wood roller coaster to find a new home. Frontier City's Wildcat was relocated from Fairyland Park in Kansas City. Knoebels' Phoenix came from Playland Park in San Antonio. According to the Roller Coaster Database, there are only 167 operating wood roller coaster in the entire world; 120 of them are in North America. Perhaps Zingo can find a good home in another part of America or another part of the world. Or perhaps someone could find a place for it here in the Tulsa area.

MORE: News on 6 talks to Robby Bell:

Bell says he decided to sell Zingo because he needs the money to help open a new Bell's. And he says he's only selling what could be easily replaced, unlike some of the other rides at Bell's.

"So certain pieces we don't want to turn loose of, but Zingo is just a matter of lumber and bolts. And we have the trains and the chain, but even if we sold that, that could be replaced," he said.

In case you missed it, Joseph Hamilton, restaurant reviewer for Urban Tulsa Weekly had a cover story last week that at least partly answered a question I've long pondered: how would one go about keeping kosher in Tulsa?

I'm a brother of Zeta Beta Tau, which was founded as a Jewish fraternity in 1898, but became non-sectarian in 1954. During my years at MIT, about a third of our chapter's brothers were Jewish. It was interesting to notice the various levels of observance, particularly regarding dietary laws. Several brothers had a kosher kitchen set up in the basement, and they took turns cooking for each other. Just a few blocks from our house, on Harvard Street in Brookline, you could find a variety of shops offering kosher food. A number of brothers who came from less observant homes started to keep kosher and to adopt a more observant way of life while in college. But many of the Jewish brothers ate the same food as the rest of us; alternative entrees were available when pork was the main dish.

Hamilton's story does a good job of explaining that keeping kosher goes beyond avoiding pork and shellfish. It affects the appliances and utensils you use in cooking, your dishes, and the way in which meat is prepared. It is a challenging and complex way of life and requires careful thought and planning.

It also requires nearby merchants who can provide kosher ingredients. So are there kosher butchers and kosher delis in Tulsa? Is it practical to keep kosher in Tulsa?

But Rabbi [Marc] Fitzerman of B'nai Emunah said no one should have trouble finding kosher foods.

"Kosher-supervised goods are widely available in every part of the country," he said. "This is a fast-growing part of the economy; with many people who are not Jewish themselves seeking out kosher goods on the assumption that supervision insures greater quality. The challenge is almost always kosher meat.

"Many markets in Tulsa carry it, and the Synagogue always stocks products for the sake of convenience. But like many smaller communities, we don't have a local kosher butcher who can supply fresh goods. I hope that the Synagogue will eventually be able to remedy that problem, but it's a work in progress."

Rabbi Charles Sherman of Temple Israel said that because of the almost total lack of kosher restaurants and a decided lack of a Jewish neighborhood and temples within walking distance, Orthodox Jews simply don't move to Tulsa. Keeping an Orthodox and kosher lifestyle is an almost unachievable goal in anything other than the most austere of circumstances.

Others in the Jewish community echo his sentiments by saying without hesitation that there are no places in Tulsa that accommodate the kosher community well and no kosher-only meat markets at all. Even travelers passing through Tulsa planning to stick with a kosher diet have to pack their bags with a few of their own foods. The Tulsa International Airport only offers retail packaged items that are certified kosher.

I was pleased to see that Hamilton spoke to Rabbi Yehuda Weg of the Chabad House, home to Tulsa's often-overlooked third synagogue, Beth Torah. Temple Israel, a Reform congregation, and B'nai Emunah of the Conservative denomination have been around for 96 and 94 years respectively. Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism, has only been in Tulsa since 1988, the first Orthodox presence in the city since B'nai Emunah moved into the Conservative fold some decades ago. Unlike the two older congregations, Beth Torah doesn't have a large and elaborate physical plant; they are based in a 1940s farmhouse on a couple of acres, tucked back in a neighborhood. It would have been interesting to read Rabbi Weg's advice to those seeking to keep kosher in Tulsa.

MORE about Jewish history in Tulsa and Oklahoma:

Wikipedia's list of synagogues in Oklahoma, including inactive synagogues in Ardmore, Enid, Chickasha, and Hartshorne.

"Jews" article in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: The Jewish population in Oklahoma peaked at 7,500 in the 1920s, was about 5,000 at the 2000 census.

Part 1 of Tulsa's Jewish Pioneers, which notes that in the 1910s, there were two kosher butchers -- one at Main, Boulder, and Haskell, and one on 9th between Cincinnati and Detroit.

Meats 2 U: A shop at B'nai Emunah offering kosher meat.

Wikipedia article on Jewish religious movements, explaining the differences between Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and other movements

Natasha Ball (Tasha Does Tulsa) has posted the notes from her presentation last week at Ignite Tulsa 3 -- 19 Ways to Get to Know Your Town (Even If It's Not Tulsa). All the suggestions are good (except maybe 17 -- if I ever do Foursquare it'll be under a pseudonym). I particularly approve of the advice to see a city on foot and to get involved in church, clubs, and causes, particularly if you plan to be around for a while. (On a recent trip to Wichita, I attended the unveiling of their new downtown plan; very interesting to compare it to the PLANiTULSA process.)

Over the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to spend some extended time in other cities. Here are five things I do to get to know a new city.

1. Study a map: Google Maps and Tom-Toms are all well and good, but there's no substitute for poring over a street map on paper to get a handle on where things are, how they relate to one another, and what might be of interest. A map gives you opportunities for serendipitous discoveries that you might never make on the web: A point of interest with an obscure or intriguing label, a street that deviates from the grid, the names of neighborhoods and districts. If you're a AAA member, you can stop by the office on 15th St. between Utica and Lewis to get a street map for a city you're planning to visit -- it's included in your membership.

2. Peruse the WPA Guide for the state: Back during the Great Depression, the Federal Government set writers and photographers to work documenting each of the states -- history, culture, economy, cities, and highways -- as they were in the late 1930s. Each book features a series of driving tours with descriptions of landmarks and historic sites. Some of the places are long gone, but many are still there, if perhaps overlooked. You'll find these books in the library (and on Google Books) under a number of names: Federal Writers' Project, American Guide Series, WPA Guide. Often the book will have a map showing the paths that U. S. and state highways took through town in the days before freeways and interstates, and that leads me to my next point.

(Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State ought to be on the bookshelf of every Oklahoman. If you can find the University of Kansas reissue, The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma, it contains an essay by historian Angie Debo that was cut from the original edition.)

3. Follow the old highway routes through town: Look for a map from the 1950s or earlier showing the streets that were designated as US or state highways, and then drive the road between downtown and the outskirts of town. On the edge of the city, you'll find commercial architecture from the heyday of the family road trip: old motels and tourist courts, diners, gas stations, tourist traps, and curio shops. This is where you're likely to find flamboyant neon signage designed to catch the eye of a weary dad behind the wheel of his station wagon. While roadside architecture along the interstates looks the same from one end of the country to the other, back before the interstates roadside buildings bore the imprint of local character and local imagination. Here you may still find cafes that once catered to tourists and truckers but now mainly serve the locals.

Closer to town, the old highways are likely to take you past the kind of neighborhood commercial districts which are often incubators for urban revitalization. Tulsa's Cherry Street developed along what was once U. S. 64, the main road between Tulsa and Muskogee and Ft. Smith. This is where you might find an interesting antique shop or a hip coffee house.

You might be able to find this sort of map in the state's WPA Guide. Many state highway departments have posted scans of old official highway maps online: e.g. Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri.

4. Hang out in an indie coffeehouse: You don't have to answer all your email from your lonely hotel room. Find a friendly locally-owned coffeehouse with wifi. These places often serve as de facto community centers, and the bulletin board and the barista can tip you off to live music, gallery exhibits, festivals, lectures, and other types of local flavor. I always check IndieCoffeeShops.com, a crowd-sourced database that uses Google Maps to help you locate coffeehouses. When I find one that isn't listed, I give back by adding it to the IndieCoffeeShops.com database. You can filter the search for wifi, food (more than just pastries), beer and wine, and whether or not smoking is allowed and outdoor seating is available. UrbanSpoon is another way to search for cafes, pubs, and restaurants with free wifi.

5. Check out the local alt-weekly: Many alt-weeklies publish an annual "Best of" edition that will clue you in to the locals' favorite places to shop, eat, drink, and play. You can usually find the most recent "Best of" on the paper's website. The latest edition (likely available at the aforementioned indie coffeehouse) will give you a calendar of events and often interesting feature stories spotlighting local issues, performers, artists, and eateries.

William Franklin, a Tulsa muralist, wants to create a museum in Tulsa devoted to Art Deco. He calls the idea "Decopolis," and he's working incrementally to gather fellow deco fans to help make this dream a reality. Supporters of Decopolis held a Deco Ball earlier this year in the zig-zag deco lobby of the Oklahoma Natural Gas building at 7th and Boston. The next promotional event is a Gatsby Picnic on Sunday, October 3:

The idea comes from the book the "Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the lawn of his mansion, Jay Gatsby would throw fabulously extravagant parties that everyone longs to attend. Gatsby has his own beach, a swimming pool, tents having overflowing food buffets, and live music under the stars. These parties, frequented by the sophisticated old money families from the east and the new, "rough around the edges" wealthy from the west, were the epitome of 1920s indulgence and opulence.

A Gatsby Picnic is a chance to step back to this luxurious time and have a little fun. Period costume is highly encouraged. The setting for our picnic will be the lawn of the magnificent Harwelden Mansion. There will be tents selling foodstuffs, but we do en­courage you to bring a picnic basket and blanket. Some even go so far as to set up dining room tables and chairs or have a sitting room type set up with say, comfy wicker chairs, a rug and coffee tables. We will be having a contest for best picnic set-up. We will also have badminton, bocce ball, and croquet games going on. Plus, we will have "deco era" 1920's-40's cars at the event. If you know of anyone who has a car from that era, have them go to our sign up page on the DECOPOLIS website, we would love to see them there. The picnic is free, but as this is also a fundraiser to help create an Art Deco Museum for Tulsa, we will have raffle tickets, great silent auction items, and a percentage of what is sold at the food and arts tents will go towards the museum fund.

Here's more information on the 2010 Decopolis Gatsby Picnic, and here's where you can apply to be a food or art vendor at the picnic.

For more info about Decopolis, visit the website and sign up for the monthly Decopolis Star Dispatch, an email newsletter with updates on museum plans, a spotlight on an Art Deco building or artifact, and period cartoons, drawings, and jokes.

I received an email of appreciation about the BatesLine entry on Radio's Online History Resource, and I was asked how I find this stuff. In this case, I had done a Google search for Hal O'Halloran -- his name had come up in an email conversation among a group of us who were regular listeners and callers to Hal's sports talk shows in the late 1970s and early 1980s on KXXO, KTOW, and KELI.

As it happened, the reader who asked the question, radio veteran Chuck Fullhart, had worked with Hal in the 1970s, and he had an interesting story about one Tulsa station's broadcasts of our minor league baseball team at the time, the Tulsa Oilers of the American Association:

I had the pleasure of working with Hal doing the Oiler broadcasts one season. If memory serves me correctly, it was the time after he had left 8 and had started doing the talk shows.

My job as PD at KBJH, later KCFO was one of the more interesting and challenging that I held while worshipping at the Shrine of The Golden Transmitter.

And working with guys like Hal made it a real pleasure.

The station income went into a black hole in the college books somewhere (the licensee was American Christian College-Billy James Hargis's school that he founded), and we were constantly looking at sports events and anything that we could peddle to make money in the afternoon and evening hours.

What you heard was what you got with Hal. Really just a nice guy, and extremely knowledgable as a broadcaster and sportscasster. That was 8's loss.

We just provided Hal with a mixer and mike, and made sure that the phone line was installed, and Ma Bell managed to put a few gray hairs on my less that plentiful head of hair by getting the installation done an hour before an away match started.

KCFO also made a deal with the devil, A. Ray Smith, to carry the Tulsa baseball games for about 2 seasons.

I didn't have to deal directly with the gentleman, but I had heard the stories about him for years.

Terry Green was the announcer on the payroll at the time with the team.

The first year, it was just putting in the phone lines to the away games, and selling the time.

The second year, after looking at the costs, someone made the decision that we would not carry the away games,since the cost of the phone loops were to expensive, and that the away games had to be recreated.

This was a real challenge for a station with no sound library, and a relatively primitive setup with equipment. Lots of mikes, and a couple of studios, but not much else.

We finally went to a few of the games, recorded the background sounds, bats cracking, cheering, etc. and put them on carts.

When Terry was in the studio for the away games, he would crack a bat, or the guy on the board at the time would crack the bat, and make sure that the crowd cheered, etc.

It was hard to believe that we were actually doing that in the early 70s, when it probably had not been done since the mid 50s.

One of my most prevelant memories is Terry's recovery after asking some ball player a question during the pre game or post game when he would interview and spotlight the various players, and there being nothing but dead air for 30 seconds while the highly paid, athletically talented but either not too interested or just bored player would either not respond or just grunt a yes or no. That's the best training in the world, and I think all three people listening at the time realized it.

Many thanks to Chuck for allowing me to share this story on BatesLine. For more of Tulsa's sportscasting and baseball history, be sure to check out TulsaTVMemories.com, where you can find some of my reminiscences about Hal O'Halloran, too.

Oklahoma City has a new museum. Retro Metro OKC was launched recently, an online archive of Oklahoma City history, devoted to making artifacts and images of the city's past more readily accessible to the public via the Internet. Its mission statement:

Retro Metro OKC is dedicated to educating the community and its visitors about local history by collecting, preserving, displaying and interpreting materials reflecting the heritage of Oklahoma City.

And from the "about us" page:

RetroMetroOKC was started in September, 2009 by a group of history enthusiasts wishing to better promote and tell the history of the greater Oklahoma City metro and to support and work with like-minded organizations whenever possible. We are dedicated to making history fun and accessible to all. The founding group consists of historians, authors, urban planners, attorneys, real estate professionals, videographers and designers with ages ranging from 17 to 70.

I see some familiar names on the founders' roster: Oklahoman reporter and blogger Steve Lackmeyer (president of the organization), Jack Money (reporter and co-author with Lackmeyer of two books on Oklahoma City history, and co-founder of okchistory.com), Doug Loudenback (who has singlehandedly created a great web resource on Oklahoma City history), urban planner Blair Humphreys.

A Retro Metro OKC press release (via Dustbury) explains how the collection will be built:

Retro Metro OKC operates differently from other organizations in that we have no museum, we have no physical collections, and in most instances the materials we display remain in private ownership. In a typical situation our volunteer crews go to a home or business to scan an owner's collection and the owner participates in the project by sharing information about the photos and documents as they are being scanned. The materials never have to leave an owner's possession -- the owner is simply asked to sign a release that allows for the materials to be displayed online.

The owner of such materials is given a disc of the digitized images and documents -- and copies also will be given to the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Metropolitan Library System to ensure they will be preserved for future generations.

This is exciting. It's a great way to collect and display historical information, and I look forward to seeing the collection grow. I'd love to be a part of such an effort here in Tulsa. So much material is already in the possession of the Tulsa Historical Society (photographs, ephemera, and artifacts, including the massive Beryl Ford Collect), the Tulsa Library system (vertical files, old government documents), INCOG (historical aerial photos and maps), the City of Tulsa (permits, ordinances, maps) -- but it needs to be digitized, categorized, and organized online in some form. The Retro Metro OKC folks were wise enough to realize that no one person, no one organization could tackle the job alone.

Nevertheless, I'm thankful for the all the local Tulsa history that is already available online. Tulsa Gal has been posting photos and ads from the Official Book of Tulsa in Pictures, a special publication for the 1927 International Petroleum Exposition and Tulsa State Fair. Her July archive contains all six parts of her Tulsa 1927 series.

Some of the most interesting aspects of these photos are the incidental details that are captured, details that would have been routine at the time, not noteworthy, but which are fascinating today. James Lileks calls this phenomenon "inadvertent documentary." For example: Go through the Tulsa 1927 posts and count how many times you see streetcar tracks, streetcar wires, or an actual streetcar.

Tulsa Gal also posts a regular photo trivia question on the Tulsa Historical Society Facebook page.

My apologies for the lapse since my last post. I've been writing, but it's all technical stuff for the gig that pays most of the bills.

While I was at the Coffee House on Cherry Street cranking away on that technical documentation, a customer at the next table, a gentleman named Cecil Cloud, said hello, identified himself as a BatesLine reader, and mentioned a post here about historic maps.

Cecil showed me an amazing collection of U. S. Geological Survey maps of Indian Territory and Oklahoma, online at the University of Texas Perry Castañeda Library Map Collection. Most of the maps predate statehood.

Take a look at this map showing Tulsa as part of the Claremore quadrangle, 1897. What's fascinating is that this is before the Dawes Commission, before land was allotted in quarter-sections to enrolled tribal members, and therefore before the familiar grid of section line roads was established. The townships, ranges, and sections were established, and are shown on the map as a reference grid, making it possible to pinpoint old locations with respect to the present day arterial grid. But the roads on these pre-1900 maps show a network of roads that follows the land, connecting settlements as directly as the terrain will allow.

Here's the section of the map covering what is now midtown and downtown Tulsa.

The grid of early day Tulsa is there, laid out parallel and perpendicular to the Frisco tracks which gave birth to the town. But the grid extends only from modern day Cameron St to 4th St, Cheyenne Ave to Cincinnati Ave. Beyond that, notice the hub of trails just east of present day 21st and Harvard, probably close to the high point that was more recently occupied by a water tower (just east of 21st and Louisville).

Notice too the creeks and streams, long before they were turned into underground storm sewers or rerouted into concrete channels. It's interesting, too, to see the locations of fords and ferries.

Here's an interesting contrast in the neighboring quad to the north, covering Washington, Nowata, and northern Rogers counties:

• Nowata quadrangle, 1897
• Nowata quadrangle, 1913

In just 16 years, the network of trails has been mostly replaced with a grid of section line roads, new towns have been established, and every few miles there's a school. Note the electric railway linking Bartlesville, Tuxedo, and Dewey.

More amazement at the PCL online archive:

1:250,000 USGS maps, including Tulsa maps from 1947 and 1967, covering all of Oklahoma northeast of Jenks. Note that the 1947 city map of Tulsa shows the Tulsa County Fairgrounds within the Tulsa city limits. The 1947 topo map shows the Union Electric Railway connecting Nowata and Coffeyville.
McGraw Electric Railway Manual Maps, 1913: Streetcar maps from nearly everywhere except Oklahoma, including Joplin, Little Rock, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Brooklyn.

Reader Sue Snider was kind enough to send along a bit of letterhead from the Oklahoma Hotel, something she found while sorting through things after a move.

OKLAHOMA HOTEL
EUROPEAN
R. E. DRENNAN, PROPRIETOR
MODERN IN EVERY PARTICULAR
COURTESY AND SERVICE

There's no address on it, but it may be the "New Oklahoma Hotel" identified on the 1939 and 1962 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps on the southeast corner of 2nd and Cincinnati, on the second and third floors, above the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company (better known to Sooner boomers as OTASCO). This is the northwest corner of Block 107 of Tulsa's original townsite. Thanks to reader Mark Sanders, we know that the 1947 Polk City Directory lists the New Oklahoma Hotel at this location. The 1957 Polk directory doesn't show a hotel at that location, so Ms. Snider's estimate of a date in the 1940s is probably accurate.

In 1960, it was the most populous downtown block with 199 residents. Today it's a surface parking lot serving the Performing Arts Center and Tulsa's new City Hall.

I haven't been able to find out anything about proprietor R. E. Drennan, but I see a few current Tulsa listings for the Drennan name, so perhaps there's a connection.

This sort of thing never happens, right? Never, ever would a secretive group of private business leaders direct the redevelopment decisions of public agencies from behind the scenes. And if they did, well, we just have to trust that these business leaders know far more about urban development than the unwashed masses, as is readily apparent by the wealth they accumulated in completely unrelated fields of endeavor, right? We just have to trust that they have the best interests of the city at heart.

The OKC History Blog has an entry about a group of Oklahoma City business executives called Metro Action Planners and their efforts (of questionable legality) in the late 1970s to implement architect I. M. Pei's plan for downtown redevelopment. The story begins with Pei's return visit in 1976:

His summons to appear came from a new, informal group of downtown Oklahoma City business leaders assembled by the Chamber of Commerce to expedite implementation of his plans for the area.

The group - Metro Action Planners - was led by Southwestern Bell President John Parsons. The group had no office, no phone number, and no mailing list. And no vice presidents or directors were allowed.

Its membership was limited to CEOs, presidents and downtown property owners, and those who belonged included Charles Vose, president of First National Bank and Edward L. Gaylord, publisher of The Daily Oklahoman.

Behind the scenes, the group picked which retail developer would get a shot at building a planned indoor shopping mall:

In April [1977], the Urban Renewal Authority sought new proposals and got them from a local man, Bill Peterson, Dallas-based developer Vincent Carrozza, who estimated he could get the project done in six to 10 years, another outside developer, Starrett-Landmark, and Cadillac Fairview. (5)

While Carrozza, in particular, had no doubts about his project's future success, Cadillac Fairview's proposal was much more reserved in that regard.

The latter's proposal cautioned that there was "absolutely no certainty at this time that sufficient department store interest can be committed to ensure that the major Galleria retail can proceed in the near future."

But, Carrozza enchanted Metro Action Planners. The group, in fact, committed itself to raise $1.6 million needed to create a limited partnership with the developer to get the project going.

Before the end of April, 1978, Carrozza had his deal with local leaders.

Then everything unraveled when the developer asked for a favor from an official who, evidently, wasn't part of the in-crowd:

Oklahoma's attorney general launched a probe in August of 1980 to determine whether Carrozza, urban renewal and Metro Action Planners had restrained trade by creating an informal building moratorium downtown to enhance possibilities that the Galleria project would be successful.

The Metro Action Planners, it had turned out, had approved a moratorium on downtown building in October 1978. The following year, Carrozza had contacted an Urban Renewal commissioner, asking him to seek a second moratorium from the group. At the time, Carrozza was finding it difficult to find financing for a second office tower he was building on the Galleria site.

The commissioner - Stanton L. Young - declined to carry out Carrozza's request, and was not implicated of any wrong-doing.

Neither, curiously, was anyone else.

But while the attorney general's investigation went nowhere, the damage to this super-powerful group of downtown leaders had been done.

Metro Action Planners abruptly disappeared from the downtown redevelopment scene.

So much for corporate commitment to the free market. This shadowy group choked off downtown development to clear the path for their favored developer, who (by the way) never completed his project. The land -- most of a 2 x 2 superblock -- continues to sit mostly empty. The new downtown library was built on the northwest corner of the site.

But I'm sure this situation was peculiar to Oklahoma City, and powerful, private groups have never steered the actions of Tulsa's urban renewal agency, and if they did, I'm sure it was for our own good.

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post urging the stewards of the Beryl Ford Collection to post the collection on Flickr, so as to invite public participation in collecting data about people, places, and times depicted in photos and ephemera from Tulsa history. A couple of months later, I learned that Flickr has a special program specifically for archives like the Beryl Ford Collection. It's called Flickr Commons, and it's being used by the likes of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and national archives in the US, UK, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Texas.

Smaller institutions are participating as well: The Bergen Public Library, the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest, and the Upper Arlington (Ohio) History collection. Tulsa's Beryl Ford Collection would fit right in.

The institutions are participating in Flickr Commons to make their collections more widely available and to extend their ability to identify what they have, using Flickr's built-in tools to collect comments, notes, and geographical and chronological metadata about each photo.

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

Today I found a great example of how this works. The Smithsonian Institution is publishing a series of photos called "Women in Science." One of the photos is of Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin. The photo's description:

The Flickr community is invited to assist in the identification of Ms. Goodwin.

And so they have. Within a month or so, someone found her 1924 wedding announcement in the Washington Post's online archives. A mention of her high school and age led to her photo in the Central High School yearbook, and later obituaries for her father and husband turned up. Recently, her granddaughter came across the photo and provided more information about Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin, and why this artist would have been included in the Science Service's collection -- she was an illustrator for a science magazine.

More here about E. S. Goodwin on indicommons, a blog devoted to interesting finds in The Commons on Flickr.

Here's another example of Web 2.0 collaboration to identify historic photos: Amateur history detectives discovered that the surname of this woman of science had been mis-transcribed from handwriting -- "Gans" was misread as "Gaus."

MORE:

Still plenty of mystery women of science to be identified: Who is J. M. Deming? Or Miss W. Dennis?

Indicommons brings together photos of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair from various Commons collections. There's a Google Earth overlay of Columbian Exposition photos, too.

The Texas State Archives debuts with architectural drawings of state park facilities built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

Yesterday, I took part of the afternoon off and took our three kids to the Tulsa Historical Society in Woodward Park. It was our first visit as a family, and we all enjoyed it immensely.

The "carrot" to get us in the door was a special Spring Break promotion for families -- complete a History Detective Scavenger Hunt and win a 2010 Tulsa Historical Society membership. (I learned about the promotion via their @TulsaHistory account on Twitter.)

The scavenger hunt involved finding answers to questions in the museum's exhibits -- Tulsa in the 1940s, Seidenbach's Department Store, Zebco, lost movie palaces, construction photos of historic buildings. We only had an hour and were about to finish well within that time, but we could easily have spent much more time exploring. I understand that the Seidenbach's exhibit is about to close, so if you're interested in the history of ladies' fashion and retail, you'll want to visit very soon. (An exhibit on Tulsa baseball opens in April.)

THS does a great job of exhibiting its historic photographs and artifacts, both in making them easy to view and in providing context for appreciating their significance. I loved the megasized prints of aerial and streetscape photographs in the '40s exhibit -- it made it easy to show my kids the places they know and the places that are long gone. (Comment from the 13-year-old on the '40s streetscape photos: "I wish downtown still looked like that." Comment from the 9-year-old on color photos of the Akdar Theater / Cimarron Ballroom: "They tore that down for parking? Were they blind?")

When we turned in our completed scavenger hunt paper, we were signed up for our membership, and the kids were given a copy of Tulsa History A to Z, a book filled with photos and interesting stories of Tulsa's past.

As THS closed for the day, we went back to the car to retrieve scooters and a bicycle then walked across the parking lot to the Tulsa Arboretum. The collection of trees is ringed by a paved path that was just right for our 4-year-old and his Lightning McQueen bike. As we circled the park, he had us stop at every brass nameplate so I could tell him the English and Latin names of each tree.

The Tulsa Historical Society is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free!

MORE: Become a fan of Tulsa Historical Society on Facebook to see daily historic photos and trivia questions and news about THS events and exhibits.

James Howard Kunstler, the author of provocative books on urban design, architecture, and the economy (The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, World Made by Hand), has named the new building for Clinton Middle School, on W. 41st St. in Tulsa's Red Fork neighborhood, as his "Eyesore of the Month":

Presenting the new Clinton Middle School, Tulsa, Oklahoma -- a building that expresses to perfection our current social consensus about the meaning of education.

Read for yourself his description of the new building, accompanied by photos, and scroll to the bottom of the page to click through his list of previous Eyesores of the Month. It's harsh but fair.

(Be aware that, although he doesn't have any rude words on that particular page, Kunstler is fairly free with expletives on other pages on the site.)

On his Historic Tulsa blog, Bill Miller has photos of the old Clinton Middle School as the demolition process was underway. Even in its final hours, the old school retained its dignity. There's a pre-demolition close-up picture of the main entry on the Webster High School class of '76 website. A Facebook group called "I went to the ORIGINAL Clinton Middle School" has a collection of photos from the final tour of the old Clinton Middle School.

It's always a surprise to get a comment on an old post, usually a pleasant one.

Over the last 24 hours, two old blog entries have received comments.

The first, from Lisa S. of Joshua, Texas, was posted to my July 2008 entry about a visit to the pictographs at Paint Rock, Texas. Last week, she and her dad were heading back home from visiting the town of Paint Rock and decided to follow the signs to the pictographs. I guess she was looking on the web for more info, came across my writeup, and was kind enough to report her own wonderful tour of the pictographs.

The second, from Howard Giles, posted from an Albuquerque, N.M., IP address, complains bitterly about my May 2009 entry on a 1981 Downtown Tulsa Unlimited plan for redeveloping what we now call Brady Arts District (or, better, the Bob Wills District). I had quoted from an April 7, 1981, Tulsa World business news story on the plan, which included extensive quotes from planner John Lauder of Urban Design Group. Mr. Giles thinks I should have done further research -- actually sought out a copy of the plan -- before writing anything about it. I replied: "It's not meant to be a finished piece of research, just a snippet of information I thought deserving of wider exposure. I let my readers know the source of the information and where it could be found so that an interested reader could do further research on his own." In my reply, I invited Mr. Giles to share any specific information he has about the 1981 plan.

Apropos the recent story on high water usage, here are a couple of public service announcements on water conservation featuring Gailard Sartain:

Check out the Tulsa TV Memories YouTube channel for more glimpses into Tulsa broadcasting history, including several more clips from KGCT 41, the short-lived attempt at news-talk TV on downtown Tulsa's Main Mall.

Amanda DeCort of the Tulsa Preservation Commission has a blog entry today about a blog devoted to paintings of Tulsa's buildings and streetscapes:

Local artist Celeste Vaught is on a mission to paint as many of Tulsa's fantastic historic buildings as she can. You can check out her "Brick X Brick" series by visiting her blog, http://celestevaughtart.blogspot.com/. Vaught's striking paintings have captured everything from the Atlas Life Building to the Phoenix Dry Cleaners.

In her "About the Artist" blurb, Vaught writes:

"How did you go from painting flowers and still life to painting buildings?" you might be wondering. As I was driving around Tulsa, I noticed, of all things, how many really neat old apartment buildings we have. It was Eugene Apartments, a striking white deco complex that began this journey of painting Tulsa architecture. I discovered a real passion for capturing the beauty of these structures. Tulsa is one of the best places in the world to see Art Deco Architecture. It's my goal to paint as many interesting Tulsa buildings before they disappear. I'll try to share a little history and some of the thinking/methods behind my paintings. For Tulsa natives, I hope you'll identify with each of the paintings and for those unfamiliar with our lovely city, may you be encouraged to visit soon!

A typical Vaught blog entries includes one of her paintings, the history of the featured buildings, and information on the composition and technique involved in capturing that moment and turning it into a piece of art.

The example above highlights the sign on the Atlas Life Building. Click the link to go to her blog entry and a larger image of the painting.

You can find out more about Celeste Vaught and her work on her website.

In response to a thread at TulsaNow's public forum, here is a map showing the routes of Tulsa's three streetcar/interurban lines: Red is the Tulsa Street Railway, blue is Oklahoma Union Traction, and green is the Sand Springs Railway. The latter two lines had interurban routes to Sapulpa and Kiefer and to Sand Springs respectively, and the interurban tracks continue to provide diesel freight service. OUT is now known as the Tulsa-Sapulpa Union Railroad. Click the picture to see a much bigger version.

To make it easier to explore the routes, here is a Tulsa streetcars and interurbans KMZ file, for use with Google Maps and Google Earth.

The routes are largely based on maps and text in the book When Oklahoma Took the Trolley, as well as some documents from City of Tulsa archives. If you have any corrections or questions, please leave a comment below or drop a line to me at blog at batesline dot com.

View Larger Map

UPDATE: I counted 14 discrete suggestions. The number 11 was selected from a range of 1 to 14 by the random number generator at RANDOM.ORG. And the winner is... Adam, who nominated "C is for the Center of the Universe." Thanks to all for the excellent ideas, which induced a powerful combination of nostalgia and appetite.

A week ago I told you about Jack Frank's latest DVD, Tulsa A to Z, a collection of 26 fascinating pieces of Tulsa lore from the Admiral Twin drive-in to John Zink and his race cars.

I finally had the chance to watch the entire thing, including the wonderful extras -- material that didn't fit in the main presentation but was worth including in some way. If you've missed those QuikTrip commercials from the late '70s with Ben Jones and Lamar the sheepdog, you'll find them here, along with a couple of even older Quik-Trip commercials celebrating the Koolie. There's also some sad but sweet home movie footage of a visit by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to Nelson's Buffeteria in 1993.

Jack has generously provided BatesLine with a copy of Tulsa A to Z for a contest giveaway. So here's the deal: To enter the contest, post a comment on this entry with your nomination for a future edition of Tulsa A to Z. For example, "Y is for Yahola, the big lake at Mohawk Park." Or, "Z is for Mr. Zing and Tuffy."

Now, it's going to be impossible for me to pick the best idea from what I'm sure will be a wealth of great suggestions, so I'm going to pick a random entry of those submitted before the deadline of 11:59:59 p.m. CST, Monday, December 7, 2009. Multiple entries are OK, but don't go overboard. (Too many comments from one IP address, and you're likely to get auto-flagged as spam.) Profanity or vulgarity will get your entry excluded and your IP banned. Please keep it positive, in the realm of something Jack might actually use on a future show. I reserve the right to exclude an entry if (in my opinion) it doesn't include a suggestion that meets these criteria. The decision of the judge (me) is final.

All submissions (and ideas contained therein) become my property, and I hereby grant Jack Frank and Tulsa Films license to use the submitted ideas in future productions. In order to win, you must include a valid e-mail address with your comment so I can contact you if you win, and you must be willing to provide a valid mailing address so I can send you the prize. (Please don't post your mailing address with your entry. I'll get it from you later if you're the winner.) Your submission constitutes your agreement to the rules of this contest.

MORE: Ida Red, Brookside's rock'n'roll boutique, will be screening Tulsa A to Z at an open house this Thursday evening, December 10, 2009, 5:30 - 8:30 pm, celebrating their new location at 3336 S. Peoria Ave. (just a few doors down from the old place).

Come check out our new location, our new items while shopping with a glass of wine and some holiday treats!

Jack Frank will be with us to talk about and sign his new DVD! Talk about an amazing Holiday Gift! We will be viewing his DVD BIG on our projector!

We will also have the music of the Red Dirt Rangers!

The party will last from 5:30-8:30! Don't want to miss this great combination of fun!

There's an exciting article in the latest Urban Tulsa Weekly about an effort by my friends Justin and Leah Pickard to establish a small neighborhood grocery in the Brady Heights neighborhood in a 1920s building on Latimer between Cheyenne and Denver Aves. (So strictly speaking, it's not on a corner.)

Pickard described herself and her husband as community activists and Christians who are interested in a number of social issues, including the inaccessibility of affordable, healthy food for many north Tulsans and the lack of affordable home ownership options for those in low-income areas. The opportunity to open a corner market offering fresh, nutritious food was one they simply couldn't pass up, she said.

Pickard said she and her husband were educated about many of the problems facing north Tulsa by neighborhood activist Demalda Newsome of the North Tulsa Farmers Market. She said they are opening the market to help resolve some of those issues and not because they consider it a good economic opportunity.

"Oh, definitely--we're keeping our day jobs," she said. "I'm actually a stay-at-home mom most of the time, and (the store) is right around the corner from our house, so it'll be easy to get over there. But we'll be hiring people to work there because we wanted to create jobs. We wanted to have the opportunity to create employment."...

"We're going to offer healthy food, lots of organic food and lots of local stuff," Pickard said. "We're going to stay away from unhealthy food. If a (convenience store) carries it, we won't. In fact, there's one at Pine and Cincinnati near here. If people want junk food, they can go there."

Pickard said the building has two storefronts, and they will be leasing space to a neighbor who wants to open a coffeehouse on one side.

"She's ready to go," she said.

Pickard said she and her husband also are working with NTEDI to establish a distribution warehouse available to small, independent markets, so the owners can band together and place their orders from wholesalers in bulk, passing the savings along to customers. That will help make fresh, wholesome food affordable to all, she believes.

Justin's brother and sister-in-law, Nathan and Kristin Pickard, are also very active residents of Brady Heights. Nathan recently served as president of the neighborhood association, both Nathan and Kristin serve on the board, and they host occasional house concerts for musicians passing through Tulsa.

The Pickards are a wonderful family, and I know they will put a lot of sweat equity and a lot of love into this project, as they already have in the Brady Heights neighborhood. It will be exciting to see this project come to fruition.

Tonight (November 30, 2009) also brings another fascinating glimpse of Tulsa's past to the Circle Cinema in Whittier Square, Admiral Blvd. and Lewis Ave.:

RadioTU presents a screening of "Going to College", a film about life at The University of Tulsa in the forties, on Monday, November 30 at 7:00 pm at the Circle Cinema. The voice of Dr. Ben Henneke is heard as a high school couple visits classrooms, campus facilities, and Greek houses as they looked sixty years ago. Shuttles will depart from the south side of ACAC for the Circle, located at 3rd and Lewis, beginning at 6:30 pm. For more information, call the Circle Cinema at 585-3456.

Admission is free, and the event is open to the community.

The screening is sponsored by The Office of the President of the University of Tulsa, Public Radio Tulsa (KWGS / KWTU), and radioTU (student radio station at TU). The Circle Cinema Foundation was kind enough to donate the space at the Circle Cinema for the event.

Photo of TU's Kendall Hall, 1950, from the Beryl Ford Collection.

Tonight at 7:30 on KOTV is a half-hour preview of the latest from Jack Frank's wonderful Tulsa Films series: "Tulsa A to Z." Each letter of the alphabet provides a jumping-off point for explaining a fascinating, often obscure aspect of Tulsa history and culture. The broadcast will air on OETA's statewide network Wednesday at 7 p.m.

Jack sent me a preview copy of the DVD last week. My favorite letter so far: "X is for Xanthus," which is not only about this particular oddly named avenue, but Tulsa's street naming system in general. I was also fascinated to learn about a collection of historic photos owned by Mayor-elect Dewey Bartlett Jr. Famed Tulsa eateries like White River Fish Market, Knotty Pine BBQ, Nelson's Buffeteria, and J.J.'s Gourmet Burgers all earn a place in the alphabet, and so do entertainment venues like the Admiral Twin drive-in and the Spotlight Theatre's long-running production of The Drunkard.

The DVD arrives just in time for Christmas, and you can find it at Steve's Sundry, Dwelling Spaces, SpiritBank, QuikTrip, and Borders, and online at tulsafilms.com.

Here's a preview:

Pastor J. H. Dotson during the construction of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. The photos appear to show the remnant of the ruins of the 1921 structure, which had been roofed in 1937 and was being used for worship, being incorporated into the new structure, c. 1948. Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.

I was looking for something (the National Park Service's "1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconnaissance Survey," a 2005 publication that identified sites of importance related to the riot, which used to be on the web, but is no longer).

I found something else: Mt. Zion Baptist Church's registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. The application was written in April 2008 by Cathy Ambler, Ph.D., a preservation consultant based in Tulsa.

The application, accompanied by maps and photos, both current and historical, tells the story of Greenwood before, during, and after the riot through the story of Mt. Zion. The church's brand new edifice, dedicated in April 1921, was destroyed on June 1, 1921. The membership met in members homes and, later, in a roofed section of the building's ruins until they raised enough money to pay off the debt from the destroyed building and to build a new structure, which was not complete until 1952.

The document is worth reading for a synopsis of the story of Greenwood from its earliest days, through riot, rebuilding, and urban removal, and as a tribute to the indomitable spirit of the members of Mt. Zion.

MORE:

Here is Mt. Zion Baptist Church's webpage on the history of their building.

Two weeks after the riot, Walter F. White, a reporter for The Nation published an on-the-scene report of the causes, its aftermath, and the corrupt and lawless state of Tulsa in 1921.

I was googling for a restaurant sign in an old photo of Bob Wills' tour bus, the restaurant turned out to be the Old Tascosa in Amarillo's Herring Hotel. The Herring Hotel, like Tulsa's Mayo and Oklahoma City's Skirvin, is still standing but has been closed for over 30 years, waiting for someone to bring it back to life.

My search led me to this wonderful page of Amarillo postcards, photos, and news clippings, mainly from the 1960s. I've never been to Amarillo, but the pictures still managed to inspire some nostalgia, as I saw a number of places that were familiar from Tulsa's past. For example:

• A Zuider Zee Restaurant -- Tulsa had one on the north service road of I-44, east of Memorial Drive.
• Woolco, a department store that would anchor Amarillo's Western Plaza Mall in 1967, just like Tulsa's Woolco at the western end of Southroads Mall, two years later.
• A Shamrock gas station (before the shamrock leaves became diamonds)
• A Ramada Inn neon sign, with the innkeeper and his horn -- Tulsa's was on the south I-44 service road, west of Yale
• T. G. & Y. (5¢ TO $1.00)
• Furr's -- here it's always been a cafeteria; in Amarillo it was a grocery chain
• A neocolonial Borden Milk plant, just like the one that used to stand on the southwest corner of 51st and Garnett
• Plenty of roadside hotel chains along Route 66 -- Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn
• Local motels with cool mid-century architecture and neon
• Restaurants with Japanese-style architecture and faux Chinese food -- chop suey and chow mein -- like Tulsa's Pagoda

Here's another page of Amarillo pix with

• a downtown much like ours once was
• drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants, including a Griff's Burger Bar (ours was on 21st up the hill from Sheridan)
• a streamline deco bus depot
• a downtown building with a lighted tower that showed the weather forecast
• a Downtowner Motor Inn -- ours is still standing at 4th and Cheyenne
• Polk Street -- the main drag -- all lit up at night

I spent the last half of last week and all weekend at home dealing with a particularly nasty virus, and in the process missed a family gathering in Arkansas and what must have been an interesting political discussion. To compensate for the abnormal quiet in the house, I had the TV going all night, with the History Channel running endless repeats of an interesting two-hour documentary on the JFK assassination. I caught bits and pieces of it every time a coughing fit woke me up.

So nothing new from me, but here are some recent Tulsa blog entries of interest:

Tulsa City Councilor John Eagleton has the memo from Mayor Kathy Taylor announcing that September sales tax revenue is $1.2 million below her budget projections with this comment:

The numbers vindicate Councilor Bill Martinson's prediction that the Mayor's numbers were overly optimistic and would leave the incoming mayor and council with difficult budget choices.

Eagleton also was quoted in a story on the city's budget problems in the current issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly, reminding of his spurned efforts in earlier years to rein in spending increases to core inflation:

In 2006, he said, the economy was good, and sales tax receipts were high.

"And we spent every penny we earned," he said. "We gave raises all around that are now baked into the cake. So, it becomes harder and harder every time, with each budget cycle downturn, to meet our budget."

Eagleton favors a budget process based on the core inflation rate that sets aside revenue for the inevitable downturns of the future. Some smaller sacrifices today can help the city avoid having to make what he calls the "Draconian cuts" required in the current budget.

"If we had done that in 2007 and 2008, yes, we would still have to trim the edges, but we wouldn't have the eight furlough days we did have," he said.

Despite Tulsa's budget crisis, Meeciteewurkor reports that some city workers in the Human Resources Department may have received $2500 bonuses for "superb" participation in a city-run training program. The head of the local municipal employees' union says the interim HR director verbally confirmed that the "stipends" were paid and has submitted an open records request seeking written confirmation.

Fear an Iarthair offers some thoughts on Bible translations and reminds that the original preface to the King James Version "advised the reader to read the Scriptures in several translations."

Historic Tulsa has an entry on the Dawson schoolhouse, built in 1908, one of the few (perhaps only) Romanesque structures remaining in Tulsa.

PR consultant Mandy Vavrinak is now blogging on public relations for the Journal Record. According to a press release announcing the blog:

Vavrinak will anchor the newly-launched PR blog, dubbed "Public Relations > Beyond The Press Release" and will focus on the reality of good public relations.

"I want to share solid how-to info for businesses as well as stories from the trenches, good examples and bad examples, and also be a resource for PR information," Vavrinak said. The PR blog will feature contributions from other area PR pros as well, including Kristen Turley, an active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). New posts will be appearing weekly, and comments are encouraged.

Finally, please keep Brandon Dutcher's newborn daughter Anne Marie in your prayers (and her parents, siblings, and doctors, too).

If you've read BatesLine long, you'll know that I'm fascinated with forgotten bits of local history, such as the history of Greenwood between the 1921 destruction and rebuilding and its second destruction by urban renewal in the early '70s. It's wonderful to see old photos and to read reminiscences that help bring a long-gone locale back to life in the reader's imagination.

In 2007, Cecil Gomez published a book about West Tulsa, the small town wedged in between the Arkansas River, the Cosden (later Mid-Continent, D-X, Sun, and now Holly) Refinery and the Texaco (now Sinclair) Refinery. West Tulsa had its own main street and its own neighborhood schools, churches, and shops. It sat on the Oklahoma Union interurban line linking downtown Tulsa with Sapulpa (the railroad lives on as the Tulsa-Sapulpa Union line).

Gomez grew up in a Mexican neighborhood called the "Y", a cluster of 11 railroad workers' homes surrounded by the Santa Fe and Frisco railroad tracks, just northeast of 21st and Union. In 1996, Gomez published a memoir of his life growing up in such surroundings with his parents and 11 brothers and sisters.

Gomez's book, West Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1939, Before and After: The Greatest Little American Town (That Once Was), expands on those memories to cover the little town across the tracks, and Gomez draws on the memories of other early day residents to accompany historic photos, some that he has collected, some from the Beryl Ford Collection. A couple of chapters are devoted to the destruction wrought by urban renewal in the mid-1960s, which went beyond merely removing out the less desirable housing to wipe out nearly all of the commercial district as well. The close-knit community was dispersed, and a few churches are about all that remain from West Tulsa's heyday.

(Photos from the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.)

I was pleased to see that Gomez makes use of the 1939 Polk Directory to pinpoint the locations of the businesses and residents of the day and includes excerpts from the directory in an appendix to the book.

Steve's Sundry at 26th and Harvard has several copies of the book, and you can also buy the book directly through Gomez's website. It would make a great gift for anyone interested in Tulsa history whether they have a connection to West Tulsa or not. (Hint, hint.)

Congratulations and thanks to Cecil Gomez for documenting the history of this forgotten town.

Here it is:

Here are some previous entries on BatesLine that touch on Greenwood and include some of the material I shared at Ignite Tulsa.

Greenwood's streetcar: The Sand Springs Railroad (includes photos)

The rise and fall of Greenwood (includes high res 1951 aerial photo of Deep Greenwood)

Greenwood 1957

Film of Oklahoma's 1920s black communities available through Global ImageWorks

Tulsa 1957: Restaurant map

Notes on sources documenting the resurgence of Greenwood

Goodbye Tulsa has a remembrance of Betsy Horowitz by her son Andrew. Betsy Horowitz was a Maple Ridge neighborhood activist who was part of the successful fight to stop construction of the Riverside Expressway through her neighborhood in the 1970s. She moved to the Dallas area a decade or so ago, and she passed away earlier this year.

I only met Mrs. Horowitz once and that only briefly -- her daughter Jean Ann was a classmate of mine at Holland Hall, and the Horowitz home in Maple Ridge was one of the sites of the Junior-Senior party. But I heard plenty about Betsy during the mid-seventies. It wasn't unusual for one or more Holland Hall parents or alumni to be serving on the City Commission or running for office, and my group of friends paid more attention to politics at every level than was usual for middle school boys. (On my bulletin board through the summer and fall of 1974: The list of candidates for state office from the Tulsa Tribune.)

What I knew about Betsy Horowitz was filtered through the local newspapers and the KRMG morning show. At best, these sources told me, Betsy was a joke, an overweight loudmouth. Her son Andrew mentions that people connected her with feminist Bella Abzug, an outspoken feminist of the day.

At worst, she was a dangerous obstructionist, standing in the path of progress. As a map-obsessed kid, I was all about seeing the dashed "proposed" lines on the map turn into broken, colored "under construction" lines and ultimately into solid, completed freeways. Anyone standing in the way of that was by definition a Bad Person, so it was easy for me to fall in with the conventional view.

I don't know if it was an actual news report or just a silly rumor that she had had her mouth wired shut as part of a liquid diet weight loss plan, but the conventional wisdom was that this was a good thing and wouldn't it be nice if it were permanent. (I'm not the only one who remembers this.)

My other vivid memory of Betsy's political career is her radio ad for one of her mayoral campaigns. A parody of Charlie Rich's crossover country hit, the lyric ran, "Betsy will stop what goes on behind closed doors." The ad communicated a problem that persists today at Tulsa's City Hall -- a hallmark, in fact, of Mayor Taylor's administration -- with deals being done behind the scenes and presented to the public and their representatives as a fait accompli for their ratification.

It's easy now to see that Betsy Horowitz was a valiant defender of neighborhoods against heedless destruction in the name of moving cars around. She and her allies not only stopped a freeway, but they made the renaissance of Maple Ridge possible and gave us the start of Tulsa's extensive trail system.

The Riverside Expressway's route was conceptualized in 1956, but firmly set in 1962. The expressway was planned to follow the Midland Valley Railroad right-of-way from Riverside Drive to the southeast interchange of the Inner Dispersal Loop. If you want to see the path of the expressway -- where the exits were planned, what buildings would have been sacrificed -- there's an atlas in the Central Library map case:

Comprehensive functional plans for the long range highway needs for Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tulsa metropolitan area expressway system. Prepared under the direction of the Oklahoma State Highway Dept. in cooperation with U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads.

As you drive the boulevards of Maple Ridge today, it's easy to forget that the district was not always popular and beloved. In the post-war period, Tulsans of every class wanted new, and wealthy Tulsans built homes along the ridge to the south-southeast, toward Southern Hills Country Club. With an expressway planned, Maple Ridge homes could very well have followed the pattern of big, old homes in urban neighborhoods in other cities -- subdivision into apartments and slow decay. Many Maple Ridge homes were badly "wreckovated." It wasn't until the expressway was off the map that the cachet of Maple Ridge began to return.

The Goodbye Tulsa piece links to a Wayne Greene column about Betsy Horowitz in the Tulsa World from 2008 which begins:

Is it safe to say something nice about Betsy Horowitz yet?

She's been gone from Tulsa 11 years now. Has enough time passed that her many enemies -- and many, many friends -- are willing to listen to someone say she was right about at least one thing?

Evidently it takes being dead or at least long gone from Tulsa, and no longer a threat to anyone's big plans, before it's safe to credit a naysayer with being right. The same column points readers to Wayne Greene's blog entry explaining why it's OK to praise Betsy Horowitz's neighborhood activism while damning White City resident's opposition to the Tetched Mahal on the other side of I-244. (I have a feeling I'll get some grief over that epithet, but I think it's a good pun, so it stays.) There are certainly distinctions, but the arguments Greene puts forth in support of the activists who fought the Riverside Expressway would have been torn apart as obstructionist nonsense by his predecessors on the World editorial page.

At root, the White City and the Maple Ridge activists are both about trying to preserve the quality of life in a neighborhood against plans that sacrifice that quality of life for the sake of some presumed greater good. The usual arguments against the neighborhood are that the impact on quality of life won't be as great as the homeowners fear, that the homeowners are selfish for putting their own desires ahead of the needs of the general public, and that the plans have been on file at the "local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now."

I'm reminded of World editorial writer Ken Neal's sendoff to Vince Sposato, a New York-born troublemaker like Betsy Horowitz, an opponent of urban renewal who was actually displaced by an expressway, and a frequent candidate for office. The World's obit states:

His love of politics was born from a love of people, according to his family.

In the 1950s, he championed civil rights and special educational needs. In the 1960s, he fought against urban renewal and the taking of people's homes without just compensation.

In 1974, Sposato found himself fighting for his own home. The city had condemned the property because it was needed for part of the construction of the Inner Dispersal Loop. Sposato eventually lost his fight for the house that he and his wife had owned for 22 years.

At the time, I advised the members of the Reform Alliance on the City Council, who were facing sharp criticism for not rolling over on the issue of suburban water service, not to hold their breath waiting for the approval of the Whirled: "If you want the Whirled to say something nice about you, drop dead."

It's interesting that both Horowitz and Sposato came to Tulsa from New York, where confrontation in politics and in daily life is a given. Tulsa needed, and still needs, dissidents who are willing to be pushy and willing to be called obnoxious. I'm sure they were told numerous times, as I've been told, that they needed to tone it down, work within the system, don't ruffle feathers, don't rub people the wrong way. They probably did try that, and they no doubt learned that playing nice only makes it easier for your cause to be ignored. And when you stand up for something and are persistent, you are going to be called angry, obsessed, rude, etc., even if you are as pleasant as can be. Every "troublemaker" on the City Council started out trying to work within the system, convinced that the previous troublemakers failed by not being nice enough.

A comment on one of the World stories, posted by a sometime commenter here, challenges the significance of Betsy Horowitz's leadership role in stopping the Riverside Expressway. I have no doubt that the legal challenge of which he writes was essential. But politics doesn't stop at the courthouse door, and without Horowitz's willingness to call public attention to the issue and to take a heap of ridicule as her pay, I doubt the court challenge would have been successful. (I would love to know more specifics about the court case.)

In the midst of ragweed season, I should mention one other significant contribution made by the Horowitz family to Tulsa's quality of life: Dr. Leon Horowitz, Betsy's husband, was a founder of the Allergy Clinic of Tulsa.

Wayne Greene wonders when it's safe to praise a naysayer. I'm wondering when it's permissible to fix blame on the individuals and institutions who, time and again, pushed schemes that the naysayers rightly warned against. Why do we never give due credit to those who were right and due blame to those who led us to disaster?

MORE: Tulsa District 7 City Councilor John Eagleton recalls that in 1968, after he was hit and dragged by a car as he was crossing 21st Street on his walk to Lee School, Betsy Horowitz took up the cause of school crossing safety and school zones. (He heard about this second-hand, as he spent the Summer of Love in a body cast.)

In my Ignite Tulsa talk on the "Greenwood Gap," I mentioned in passing the physical indications of the rebuilding and flourishing of Tulsa's African-American district after it was burned in 1921 by a white mob. I would have included photos of some of those signs, and I had some that I'd taken, but I couldn't find them, so earlier today I took some more, finding dates on buildings, on cornerstones, and on commemorative plaques that tell the story of Greenwood's post-1921 resurgence. (Click that link to view the set on Flickr.)

The churches, and the dates on their cornerstones, beg the question: If there wasn't a rebuilt neighborhood nearby, why were the churches rebuilt there? (Further, why did congregations build newer fancier buildings in the late '50s and early '60s?) (NOTE: In the olden days, churches were built in neighborhoods and people traveled short distances to church. They weren't set up like consumer-oriented big-box stores with huge parking lots, isolated from neighborhoods.)

Here's the Williams Building at 102 N. Greenwood Ave., rebuilt in 1922, after the building previously on that site was destroyed by the riot. Note the year above the name of the building.

After the jump, you'll see the plaque set in the sidewalk next to the building, and two more plaques -- one on the entrance to the Mabel B. Little Heritage House and the other on the entrance to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Thanks to the organizers, speakers, and audience for last night's Ignite Tulsa event. It was a great experience, and I only wish I could have stayed through the entire program -- family needs called me home shortly after I spoke. I'm happy I had the chance to come back to the afterparty and chat with many very interesting folks. More to say about the total Ignite Tulsa experience later.

Someone asked if the source material for my talk is online. A lot of it is already, in past BatesLine entries. I plan to post links to key articles and go into detail on my sources. For now, if you're impatient, Google Greenwood on this site.

When an OSU professor wrote a response to my 2007 column on the Greenwood gap, challenging the factual basis for what I wrote and my conclusions, I responded by detailing my sources, which may be of interest here (this is the original reply, not the edited version that appeared in the paper):

I'm always pleased to know that someone has given one of my columns a close and critical reading, as OSU Political Science Professor J. S. Maloy has done with my column on the rise and fall of the Greenwood district. This aspect of Tulsa history is important but overlooked, so I welcome his interest. I empathize with his disappointment that so little of Greenwood remains. My column was an attempt to use available evidence to explain why things are the way they are.

The issues he raises deserve a detailed and specific discussion: Which level of government is to blame for Greenwood's second destruction; whether Greenwood was rebuilt after the riot and how the reconstruction was funded; whether local officials in 1921 took a free market approach to rebuilding Greenwood; the role of racism in the city's treatment of Greenwood; and whether the free market is to blame for the lack of progress in Greenwood since urban renewal.

I agree with Maloy that what our city has done to Greenwood is a self-inflicted wound. I should have made it more clear that city officials made the decisions to route I-244 through the heart of Greenwood and to bulldoze most of the rest of it in the name of urban renewal. The Federal Government only supplied the funds to carry out the city's plans.

Prof. Maloy expresses doubt that Greenwood was fully restored following the riot. An examination of the sources I used in researching my column will confirm that it was.

He can read for himself the recorded memories of Greenwood residents contained in the books I cited: Black Wall Street, by Hannibal Johnson, and They Came Searching, by Eddie Faye Gates, both residents of Tulsa and active in the community.

He can visit the mapping department of the Indian Nations Council of Governments (INCOG), 201 W. 5th St., Suite 600, and view historical aerial photographs, such as the one from 1951 which ran with my column.

He can go to the 4th floor of Central Library and page through the shelf of Polk City Directories and Cole Cross Reference Directories, dating back to 1911, which list residences and businesses street by street, ordered by house number. With the help of a pre-1960 street map (urban renewal destroyed much of the street grid), he can trace the year-by-year evolution of commercial avenues like Greenwood and Lansing and the district's more residential side streets.

He can explore the Sanborn Fire Maps, which document location, footprint, number of stories, and types of buildings for use in fire insurance risk assessment. They were kept up to date until the early '60s as buildings were built and demolished.

Maps for the entire state are available to cardholders on the Tulsa Library website (http://www.tulsalibrary.org:2048/login?url=http ://sanborn.umi.com).

Select the map set for Tulsa that says 1915-July 1926 (that's a typo -- it's really July 1962), and then take a look at sheets 9, 33, 50, 55, 82, 90, and 91. An earlier map set, dated 1915, will illustrate what Greenwood was like in the years before the riot.

Maloy mentions Tee's Barber Shop, located in one of the handful of Deep Greenwood buildings that were spared from urban renewal. The next time he's there, he should notice the markers in the sidewalk which show where businesses were located before the riot. He'll see that many of the markers contain the words "reopened" and "rebuilt."

If he'll walk to the corner of Greenwood and Archer and look up to the west, he'll see the year "1922" -- a year after the riot -- carved above the name "WILLIAMS BLDG." The plaque in the sidewalk explains that Williams, who also owned the Dreamland Theater across the street, was the first to rebuild all of his properties after the riot.

So if we can agree that Greenwood was fully rebuilt after the riot, the question becomes how.

Maloy is correct that there was very little aid from the government and white charities. It makes it all the more impressive that the African-American community was able to rebuild, but they were determined and they did. African-Americans in other cities raised money to assist Greenwood's reconstruction, and Greenwood's own residents worked, scrimped, saved, provided mutual assistance, and expended sweat equity to rebuild.

Maloy is incorrect in stating that city officials in 1921 took a laissez-faire attitude toward Greenwood. The democratically-elected City Commission of the time tried to use government regulation -- a fire ordinance -- to prevent Greenwood residents from rebuilding. Attorneys from the community challenged the ordinance and won an injunction, clearing the way for reconstruction. (Joe Lockett v. the City of Tulsa -- see pp. 87-88 of Scott Ellsworth's Death in a Promised Land.)

Maloy says that I overlook the role of racism in the history of Greenwood, but I think my references to segregation, racist mobs of white looters, and a city government that wanted to remove blacks to a new district beyond the city limits point clearly enough to the racism behind those actions.

Some urban renewal advocates may well have been motivated by racism, but some proponents were well-intentioned progressive activists trying to bridge the gap between Tulsa's black and white communities. The story of Tulsa's Model Cities program deserves to be explored in depth, and I would welcome the chance to talk to those with first-hand knowledge.

Finally, Prof. Maloy wants to know why the "Do-It-Yourself approach" which worked to rebuild Greenwood after the 1921 riot hasn't worked in the 40 years since urban renewal and the construction of I-244.

It's simple: After 1921, the land remained in private ownership, and the victims of the riot could rebuild what had been burned down.

But in the '60s and '70s, urban renewal took the land out of private ownership. Most of the south end of the district is still owned by some government entity. The urban renewal authority has sold some of the land in the northern part back to private owners, but mainly for residential and industrial development. There is no land available for new commercial development.

For example, if you wanted to rebuild the Holloway Building at 350 N. Greenwood Av. (home, in 1957, to Holloway's Hardware and Appliances, Holloway Dental Laboratory, a doctor's office, and an advertising and painting company), you'd have to fill in a pond, and you'd have to get permission from Prof. Maloy's employer. OSU-Tulsa controls all of Deep Greenwood north of I-244, with the exception of two churches and the City's Greenwood Cultural Center.

The commercial buildings between King and Pine Streets (including the Rex Theater) which faced Greenwood were cleared by urban renewal and replaced with suburban homes facing the side streets, many of which have been turned into cul-de-sacs. Only a few churches, Carver Middle School, the old Public Library (now a Unitarian Church), and a few homes remain from the pre-urban renewal days.

City officials created an industrial park out of the area between the Midland Valley and Santa Fe tracks and south of Pine, which once had been residential and commercial. (It had its own movie theater, the Regal, on Lansing Ave.) Morning Star Baptist Church and Hutcherson YMCA are about the only buildings in that area that survived urban renewal.

There is one part of Deep Greenwood which might yet be redeveloped, south of I-244 and northeast of Archer and Elgin. It is owned by the Tulsa Development Authority (the renamed urban renewal authority). There have been proposals for mixed-use development on that site, but the TDA has yet to approve any of them, to the consternation of many north Tulsa community leaders.

Maloy objects to comparing Greenwood to Cherry Street and Brookside. Contrary to his assumptions, big developers didn't produce the rebirth of those neighborhood commercial districts. Along with the adjoining residential areas they went through a period of decline before their rediscovery and renovation. About 20 years ago, aspiring small business owners looking for a place to operate found cheap and often run-down storefront space in the old buildings along Peoria and 15th Street. If Greenwood had been left standing, it too might have been rediscovered.

Prof. Maloy concludes by saying that "the free market will always indulge racism, ignorance, fear, and sheer pettiness of spirit in the name of profits. Only a democratic process--public investment constrained by public consultation--can do better."

But world history is full of examples of a majority oppressing a minority by means of the power conveyed by democratic processes, often by limiting the minority's ability to own property and to buy and sell freely.

It was a democratically elected (and Democrat-controlled) legislature that created Oklahoma's racist Jim Crow laws. Democratically elected officials abetted the pillaging and burning of Greenwood in 1921 and tried to block its reconstruction.

Private individuals, businesses, and churches rebuilt Greenwood after the riot. A democratically elected city government, using public funds, demolished almost all of it in the name of urban renewal. Admittedly, the democratic process was distorted because city officials at the time were elected on an at-large basis, but nevertheless the tyranny of the majority, not the free market, was at work.

The evidence is there for Prof. Maloy's perusal, if he cares to look.

Michael D. Bates

If you've ever wondered, "Is Michael Bates capable of expressing himself concisely?" you and I will both have a chance to find out tomorrow night, Thursday, September 17, 2009, at Ignite Tulsa. The event will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Blue Dome Diner, at 313 E. 2nd St., between Detroit and Elgin Aves. Admission is free, but Répondez, S'il Vous Plait.

Ignite Tulsa is a series of five-minute presentations on a variety of topics. Each speaker will have a slideshow with 20 slides, automatically advancing at 15 second intervals. Here's the list of presenters and topics (alphabetically by presenter's last name):

• Be Nice. Don't be Rude or Sad by Chris Barton
• The Greenwood Gap: Mythbusting pop history with contemporary documents by Michael Bates
• How Not to be Waldo: Brands that Stand Out in a Crowd by Emily Campbell
• Salvation in the Stacks: Tips, Rants, and a Patriotic Finale from a "Librarian 2.0" by Sarah Clark
• If someone gives you roses you should be pissed off by Matthew Galloway
• Visual Thinking: Boost Your Creative IQ by Sean Griffin
• P2P Anti-Piracy: A Skunk Works History given by Dr. John Hale
• Fighting Global Warming with Green Building by Craig Immel
• Why Truth is Overrated by Jeff Martin
• Top Ten Venture Capital Lies by William Paiva
• The iPhone & Future of Art & VisCom In Tulsa by Ray Pearcey
• Get your Head in the Cloud: Creating a lean organization by leveraging cloud computing by Nathan Phelps
• How to tell your boss to %@$# Off! by Scott Phillips
• Challenging Yourself by Geoffrey Thomas Simpson
• The United Linen Story - how to market a 20th century company in the 21st century by Scott Townsend
• Keeping Up with the Online Joneses by Brad Vernon
• Brain Research in Tulsa by William R. Yates, MD

I'll be talking about the post-1921 history of Greenwood and the sources of information that can debunk historical myths and tell us about the mostly-vanished African-American city-within-a-city. (I covered this topic in my June 13, 2007, column, "The Rise and Fall of Greenwood," but there will be some new angles and info in Thursday's talk.)

TulsaGal has been posting scans of past Tulsa ephemera on her blog. The latest scan is of a little 16-page magazine called This Week in Tulsa, December 31, 1948 edition. Recently she posted a copy of the competing magazine, The Downtowner, from March 19, 1948. The magazines had ads for nightlife, restaurants, theaters, and more mundane retailers. Where possible, she's ferreted out photos from the Beryl Ford Collection of the places that advertised in the two magazines.

As an interesting point of comparison, Iowahawk has scans of a similar, but much racier, 16-pager serving the Chicago convention business: The April 3, 1959, edition of Night Life in Chicago.

MORE FUN TULSA EPHEMERA: Irritated Tulsan has a promotional flyer for Scene2News from the 1970s, handed out at the Tulsa State Fair, featuring Jack Morris, Jerry Webber, and John Hudson. When I see a clock that shows 10 pm, sometimes there's a voice that booms out in my head, "IT'S TEN O'CLOCK! JACK MORRIS NEWS TIME!"

Links of interest from around Tulsa and nearby:

Jim Hartz went exploring around the old KOME studios at 8th and Main and took some photos. KOME 1300 was one of Tulsa's five AM stations back in the '50s, and in 1958 it was the station that sent Rocky Frisco, then known as Rocky Curtiss, on a bike ride to Ft. Hood, Texas, to interview Elvis Presley, who was going through Army basic training at the time.

Speaking of Rocky Frisco, he is a candidate for Tulsa City Council District 4 and in September will be inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. Here's a very interesting biographical interview with Rocky -- a bit of music, a bit of local history, a bit of politics.)

Natasha Ball went to the Ottawa County Fair and has written a letter of complaint.

Tyson and Jeane Wynn are moving their business, Wynn-Wynn Media, from Claremore back to their hometown of Welch, in Craig County. They've located in a storefront on Main Street. The relocation allows them to be closer to Jeane's parents. It's made possible by the spread of high-speed internet to rural America, so they can pursue their line of work (working with Christian authors) as well from Welch as from anywhere else. (Some of my ancestors -- the Newmans -- spent some time in the vicinity of Welch, and my great-grandparents, Carl Everett and Icy Newman Bates, are buried in the cemetery west of town.)

Tulsa Food Blog visited Shiloh's and loved it. (That bottle of red stuff -- strawberry-rhubarb jam -- try it on your homemade rolls.) Here's Shiloh's website.

Jeff Shaw has pulled ahead of me in the race to retroblog our vacations. He's up to day four in San Antonio. (I'm still stuck at 5 pm on day 3.)

Tulsa TV veteran Lee Woodward has some of his artwork available for view on Flickr.

NMcruiserchick worked for the Peaches Records and Tapes store at 52nd and Sheridan back in 1979-1982, and she has lots of photos to prove it.

David Schuttler notes a survey showing that many airports are concerning themselves with their impact on areas beyond the 65 dB noise level zone. Is Tulsa, he wonders? And David has some beautiful lightning pictures from last week.

Steven Roemerman has some new lyrics with which to scratch the cognitive itch (aka "earworm") known as "Girl from Ipanema."

Be sure to visit Historic Tulsa for more photos and stories of our city's wonderful collection historic buildings.

Some Tulsa State Fair history: Chris Miyata has posted a set of photos and scans of the Tulsa County Fairgrounds in the mid-1960s. There are photos of the IPE Building (now the QuikTrip Center) at the Tulsa State Fairgrounds and scans from a 1964 booklet highlighting 15 years of improvements to the Tulsa State Fair. The highlight is a stunning aerial color photo of the IPE Building near completion, with a very small Bell's Amusement Park to the west. Look for the Bell's giant globe, the water towers, and the KELi satellite.

NOTE: The Down on Main Street festival was originally scheduled for May but was rained out, and it's been rescheduled for this Saturday.

This coming Saturday (August 8, 2009) from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., old downtown Red Fork will be home to a "Down on Main Street" festival. Red Fork was a separate town once upon a time, annexed into the City of Tulsa circa 1927. It's now home to the first "Main Street" program within the City of Tulsa.

Oklahoma has had an active and successful Main Street program for many years, encouraging restoration of historic buildings and the commercial revitalization of dozens of small-town downtowns across the state.

The Main Street program is not just for small towns. Oklahoma City has four active Main Street programs: Stockyards City, Capitol Hill, Plaza District, and Eastside Capitol Gateway; Automobile Alley used to be on the list, too. When I asked City of Tulsa officials back in the late '90s about starting it up here, the responses were oddly reluctant, as if such a thing might get in the way of tearing buildings down.

At long last, two years ago, Red Fork became the first Main Street program in the city, with hopes of bringing Southwest Blvd -- old Route 66 -- back to life. The Down on Main Street festival is part of the program to promote the area and bring the community together. From the festival flier, here are the events planned:

• Pie contest
• Ollie's Restaurant's Blue Plate Special
• Live music
• Global Garden's Kids' Zone
• Art show
• Farmers market with a Westside charm

The festival will take place along Southwest Blvd. near 41st St. Parking and Shuttles will be available at Webster High School, 1919 West 40th Street., and OSU Women's Center, 2345 Southwest Blvd.

The deadline to enter the pie contest is TODAY (August 3, 2009). You must have your entry form and a $5 fee to the Red Fork Main Street office, 3708 Southwest Blvd, by 5 p.m. Click here for a form and more details.

Here's hoping for good weather for Saturday's Down on Main Street festival.

Bill Miller has launched a blog devoted to the history of Tulsa and, in particular, to the history of Tulsa's buildings.

Most of the entries on the Historic Tulsa blog are about a particular building -- some well-known (Riverside Studio / Spotlight Theater), but many that are obscure (e.g., the William D. Whenthoff residence, a streamline Art Deco design by Joseph Koberling on College Ave. south of 11th Street).

If you're into Tulsa history, you'll want to add Historic Tulsa blog to your feed reader.

bobwills.com, the official Bob Wills website, has launched a podcast called Bob Wills Radio, hosted by Jim Goff. Each episode features music and excerpts from interviews with members of the Texas Playboys. New episodes will go up each Monday at noon.

The inaugural edition features a 1983 interview with steel guitar legend Leon McAuliffe. Leon talks about how he came to play steel guitar, how he became a part of the Texas Playboys back in 1935, his friendship with Tex Beneke, and the beginnings of his band in Tulsa after World War II. His first band was a horn-dominated swing band, designed to set him apart from the western swing bands around. After touring the local dance circuit, Leon found that the audiences expected him to play western swing, so he canned the horns, hired some fiddle players, and switched back to western swing. (Harlequin Records has a disc of the big band version of Leon McAuliffe's band, from 1946-8.)

Toward the end of the podcast, there's a version of "T-U-L-S-A Straight Ahead," sung by Leon and backed by the Original Texas Playboys, the band made up of Bob Wills sidemen that performed from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. (For some reason, recordings of the Original Texas Playboys are really hard to find.)

Also on the bobwills.com website, you can purchase for download a 36-minute interview with Bob Wills recorded in 1949. Before you buy, you can hear a three-minute excerpt in which Bob Wills talks about their first dances at Cain's Ballroom, what kind of music you'd hear at Cain's before the Texas Playboys took up residence, and why they had to buy Cain's from Mr. & Mrs. Cain. (They started out at the Playmor, NW corner of 2nd and Madison, a second-floor dance hall -- retail below -- about half the size of Cain's.)

A browser crash took out a bunch of edits to a post about my recent trip to southern California, and I'm in no mood to recreate all that now.

So crack open a Mulo and visit Irritated Tulsan and his collection of vintage ads from summers past, including one for the Kip's Big Boy at 11th and Trenton. He's got some pretty neon photos, too, and he wants your favorite memories of Bell's Amusement Park.

Modern Tulsa has a photographic recap of the "Living in Hi-Fi Tour" of Lortondale's mid-century modern homes.

Holly Wall has a guest post up at Tasha Does Tulsa reporting on Thirsty Thursday at Drillers Stadium.

A fascinating new blog, Tulsa Gal, focuses on Tulsa history. Nancy is a researcher and volunteer for the Tulsa Historical Society.

Finally, make your blood boil with the Infrastructurist's then-and-now photos of beautiful train stations that met the wrecking ball.

Notes about demolition and neglect, here and elsewhere:

From the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.

Red Fork's oldest remaining high school building is to be demolished. The 1925 building served for most of its history as Clinton Middle School, but when first built it was the high school for the Red Fork district, which was previously located on the Park Elementary campus, which dates back to 1908. (The Park high school was built in 1918, according to the Sanborn map, but has been gone for decades.) Clinton continued as a high school until 1938, when Daniel Webster High School opened. This story tells about the time capsule discovered in its cornerstone:

When officials took down the cornerstone, they found a copper box not much bigger than a car stereo in a gap in the brick wall.

In it, they found a small U.S. flag with 48 stars, several yellowed copies of The Tulsa Tribune newspaper, and lists of members of the Order of the Eastern Star, Red Fork Masons, Red Fork school board members and faculty and staff members at Clinton, which was a high school in 1925.

The Tulsa Public Schools website has a slide show and high resolution images of some of the objects in the Clinton Middle School cornerstone.

The first time I found my way onto W. 41st Street many years ago, I was impressed and amazed by the civic buildings along this half-mile stretch between Union Ave. and Southwest Blvd:Trinity Baptist Church, Pleasant Porter School (originally Clinton Public Grade School), sited in a shady grove of tall trees, Clinton Middle School, and the Clinton Memorial First Baptist Church of Red Fork -- each had a certain dignity that marked Red Fork not as a suburb, but as a town in its own right. The old Baptist Church was demolished to make way for the new Clinton Middle School; now the old school is being torn down after 84 years of service.

(Here's some more historical information on the Clinton family and the school that stood on their old homestead.)

Four miles north-northeast, someone has taken photos of the interior of the Tulsa Club building, on the northwest corner of 5th and Cincinnati. The art deco building has been left to rot, unsecured, by its current owner, and it has become the target of graffiti vandals who seem to know that no one cares. I've been in the building twice: Once for the school prom ("Dutchman Weekend") my sophomore year in high school, and once just after the Tulsa Club shut down for good and the fixtures were auctioned off. There are hints of what once was, but the interior is pretty well trashed.

On to Detroit, where the last vestiges of old Tiger Stadium, aka Briggs Stadium, are being demolished for no good reason. The infield stands still stood, and preservationists had been working successfully to raise funds to preserve them, maintain the diamond as a community ball field, and use the stadium structure as a museum to house broadcaster Ernie Harwell's collection of memorabilia. Despite the progress of preservationists in raising funds, the Detroit City Council decided to turn even more of their once-bustling city into flat nothingness.

Neil de Mause explains what made Tiger Stadium special and worth saving:

Tiger Stadium is now the last surviving example of an old-style upper deck overhang. Yankee Stadium will be gone shortly; Fenway Park doesn't have an upper deck to speak of; and Wrigley Field, for all its charms, has a top deck set way back from the action. That leaves the sliver of stands still standing in Detroit as the only place in the world where baseball fans will be able to experience what was once commonplace: cheap seats that, thanks the miracle of cantilevering and the willingness to make some field-level patrons sit in the shade, are closer to the field of play than all but the priciest field-level seats at modern stadia -- stunningly close at Tiger, where Tom Boswell famously wrote that sitting in the upper deck behind home plate and watching Jack Morris pitch enabled him to truly learn the importance of changing speeds.

I saw a game there once. In 1988, my last full summer of bachelorhood, my friend Rick Koontz and I went on a week-long "Rust Belt Tour" that took us to Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park (the original one), Tiger Stadium, Cleveland Municipal Stadium ("the mistake by the lake"), and Riverfront Stadium. 21 years later, only Wrigley still stands. We had great seats to watch the Tigers play the Yankees, a game the Tigers won, 7-6 in the bottom of the ninth, a six-run inning that concluded with an Allan Trammell grand slam home run. It was the most exciting game of the trip, and a great place to watch a game. (It was also the night the Pistons lost to the Lakers in Game 7 of the NBA finals. We were relieved, given Detroit's reputation for violent celebrations.)

National Trust for Historic Preservation president Richard Moe writes of Tiger Stadium:

Demolishing the stadium is a mistake. Even in its diminished, partly demolished state, the stadium served as a defining feature of the historic Corktown neighborhood-a reminder of better days, but also a cornerstone for future revitalization of the community. Redevelopment of this iconic historic place for, among other things, youth baseball leagues, could transform it back into the thriving center of community activity that it once was. Now, city leaders have chosen a course that will in all likelihood lead to yet another empty lot in Detroit-the last thing the city needs.

More from the National Trust for Historic Preservation on Tiger Stadium's demolition:

Despite a protest at Tiger Stadium last week, Detroit contractors began razing the 1923 structure the following day. Late Friday afternoon, a judge issued a temporary restraining order, which should have halted all destruction, but crews continued demolition until the end of the day.

On Monday Wayne County Circuit Judge Prentis Edwards lifted the restraining order and rejected the conservancy's request for the injunction.

"[Demolition crews] were out there an hour after the decision. They didn't waste any time," says Michael Kirk, vice president of the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy, which requested a permanent injunction to halt the demolition. "We don't understand it. There's no other development deal pending for the site, so the need for speed doesn't make any sense."

City attorneys argued that the conservancy could not raise enough for the $27 million construction project to retain Navin Field, the oldest part of the existing stadium complex.

Plans to demolish the remaining section of the old stadium were set back in motion after a 7-1 vote on Tuesday, June 2, by the board of Detroit's Economic Development Corporation. Waymon Guillebreaux, executive vice president, said in a statement last week that the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy "is still far short of its targets" agreed upon in a memorandum of understanding with the city that was signed last fall and claimed the conservancy did not have "secure commitments for funding the project."

The board acted despite $3.8 million earmarked by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) for the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy's plan; an identified $19 million from new market, "brownfield," and state and federal historic tax credits (some of which were already applied for and approved); and $500,000 in grants, loans and private donations.

Lowell Boileau, a painter, created a website in the late '90s called The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, a site that contains hundreds of images of abandoned and now-demolished buildings, including abandoned suburban buildings that took the place of previously abandoned urban buildings.

Zimbabwe, El Tajin, Athens, Rome: Now, as for centuries, tourists behold those ruins with awe and wonder. Yet today, a vast and history laden ruin site passes unnoticed, even despised, into oblivion.

Come, travel with me, as I guide you on a tour through the fabulous and vanishing ruins of my beloved Detroit.

It's a tour worth taking -- well-organized with an "express" path that hits the highlights, and "detours" that allow deeper exploration.

Sadly, at a time when mainstream public support for historic preservation is growing, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has decided to squander its hard-won credibility by turning its blog over to the promotion of "gay pride" during the month of June, in a series of posts that have nothing to do with preserving and protecting historic buildings. (One exception: There is a post about preservation in West Hollywood; the "gay" connection is that it was written by a preservationist drag queen.) The latest example is this essay on "gayborhoods" entitled "Pardon Me Sir, But Can I Queer Your Space." This is a classic example of a venerable organization being hijacked to serve someone's personal agenda rather than the cause for which it was founded.

There are a couple of tours happening in and around Tulsa this weekend that may tickle your fancy:

An all-day bus tour of historic all-black towns will take place this Saturday, from 7 am to 5 pm. Freed slaves from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation founded a number of towns south and east of Tulsa around the turn of the 20th century. Other towns were established in the newly opened Oklahoma Territory at the end of the 19th century as part of a black statehood movement.

The tour is $30. For information and to make reservations call 918-596-7280. (Found via TheMidtowner.)

This New York Times story is a good introduction to Oklahoma's all-black towns. Alison Zarrow has made her photoessay on Oklahoma's black towns, Wish You Were Here, available online.

This Saturday evening, 5:30 to 8:30 pm, the Modern Tulsa committee of the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture is hosting a tour of homes in the mid-century modern neighborhood of Lortondale, east of Yale Ave. between 26th and 28th Streets.

Designed and built in 1954 by Tulsa duo Donald Honn (architect) and Howard Grubb (builder), the Lortondale Neighborhood was the recipient of a multitude of national design awards. The neighborhood was featured in an array of magazines including House and Home and Better Homes and Gardens.

In recent years Lortondale has experienced something of a rebirth. A new generation of homeowners, interested in modern design, are snapping up the houses just as fast as they come on the market. After decades of neglect, many of the houses in the neighborhood are being restored to their former modern glory. Most importantly, the Lortondale Community is experiencing the same restoration.

This year's tour seeks to convey the energy that is the Lortondale Neighborhood today. Featured are 6 houses in various stages of completion. From the beginning stages of a restoration to a virtually complete example of HiFi-modern bliss, this tour of Lortondale will show you what all the buzz is about.

Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 the day of the tour, and available at Dwelling Spaces, Urban Furnishings, Ida Red Boutique, and the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture office. All the details are available at the Modern Tulsa website.

The tour is self-paced. You can start at any home and purchase a ticket at the first house you visit:

• 4912 E. 26th Terrace
• 5331 E. 26th Pl.
• 5342 E. 26th Pl.
• 4953 E. 27th St.
• 4958 E. 27th St.
• 5312 E. 27th St.

There's an ongoing online tour you can follow vicariously. A family is visiting all 77 of Oklahoma's counties, taking photos, and recounting their travels. You can follow their progress on the 77 Counties blog. (The latest entries will also be linked on the BatesLine Oklahoma headlines page.)

I'm in the throes of a major effort at work and only have time to throw you a few links to good reading elsewhere:

For your viewing pleasure, Tulsa TV Memories links to the Life archive and photos from February 1952 of KOTV general manager Helen Alvarez. Besides photos of the lovely Mrs. Alvarez, the archive shows the Channel 6 news, weather, and sports sets of the day, plus photos from the Sun Refinery and of a powwow. (Does this qualify as a Rule 5 post?)

Irritated Tulsan discovers that the Boulder Ave. bridge is safe enough -- for the crane that's demolishing it.

Steve Roemerman has posted a new podcast, reacting to Councilor G. T. Bynum's comments during last week's ballpark assessment vote.

Chris Medlock has a new podcast up, reacting to comments about city election "reform" made by former Mayor Susan Savage. And he talks to State Sen. Randy Brogdon about the legislative session and the gubernatorial campaign.

I was sad to learn of the death of Beryl Ford, the collector of historic Tulsa photographs and ephemera. Ford was 83. Every Tulsan with a desire to understand our city's past owes him an immense debt of gratitude.

I can't find words strong enough to explain how important his life's work is to our ability to understand Tulsa history. The Beryl Ford Collection, now in the hands of the Tulsa Historical Society thanks to the Rotary Club of Tulsa, is an irreplaceable part of our city's collective memory. The earliest years of Tulsa are no longer a part of living memory, but Ford's collection gives us some idea of what it was like. The Ford collection shows us central Tulsa at its post-war peak. It also shows us its dismantling.

Increasingly, baby boomers have to turn to the Ford collection to see the places we remember from our 1950s and 1960s childhoods, as mid-century businesses are lost to highway expansion, redevelopment, and renovation.

The collective memory is a tricky thing. We develop myths about how things used to be and how they came to be the way they are now. (E.g., "the Greenwood gap".) For Tulsa the Beryl Ford Collection, alongside other contemporaneous records like phone books, street directories, and newspapers, helps to correct the false memories and the false explanations they engender.

Mr. Ford's passing is a reminder of the work that still needs to be done to make the most of what he left us. I still hope to see high resolution scans put online with Flickr Commons, so they can be geocoded, tagged, and described in detail.

Here is a link to past BatesLine items that make reference to the Beryl Ford Collection.

MORE: From the comments, a tribute from Mark Sanders, one of Beryl Ford's cousins:

Thanks, Michael, for honoring Beryl Ford on your blog. We do owe him a debt of gratitude. As you know, Beryl was my second cousin, and my own fascination with Tulsa history is due in large measure to my access to Beryl's collection while he still owned it.

Tulsans should understand and appreciate that Beryl's relentless collecting - particularly at times when preservation of historical assets was not a culturally-valued pursuit, i.e. the 1970s - was motivated solely by his love for Tulsa and the highest ideals of preservation. The pursuit of financial gain was never part of his personal agenda. As he began to feel his own mortality in recent years, he looked to place the Collection, not with the highest bidder(s), but with an institution that would keep it together and make it readily available to the citizens of Tulsa. I, like you, trust that the Historical Society and Library will do all that is required to make this collection a powerful and accessible historical resource. One of the tragedies of Beryl's passing is that we have now lost the Collection's most capable geocoder/tagger/describer. Hopefully, other old-timers and students of Tulsa history will step up to that important task.

Finally, Tulsans should know something of the character of Beryl Ford, and the intensity of his affection - and that of the entire Ford family - for Tulsa. Beryl is a life-long Tulsan, but the Ford family's roots in Tulsa came about quite by happenstance. In the 1910s, when Beryl's father, Jewell (then a teenager), ran away from the family farm near Sallisaw, his grandfather (my great-grandfather), Nathaniel, followed up a rumored sighting in Tulsa, and took a train there - intent , literally, to walk the streets until he found his son. It wasn't necessary - within 2 blocks of the train station he met him on the street. Jewell immediately regaled his father with stories of ample construction job opportunities in Tulsa's booming economy. Nathaniel - who was a pioneer of the Pentecostal movement in Oklahoma - took all this as a sign that the family should move to Tulsa. So he returned to the farm, put the draft animals on a railcar and moved the household to Tulsa to begin a horse-driven excavation business. Some of Tulsa's existing landmark buildings, and - sadly - some that are now surface parking, were Ford excavated.

Beryl, like most of the other Fords, made his living in the building trades. He was never part of Tulsa's ruling class or social elite, but he made a contribution to Tulsa's history every bit as meaningful as that of any storied oil baron or newspaper publisher. And like the most of the rest of his family, he lived simply (in Tulsa's McClure Park neighborhood), valuing faith, family and community over the accumulation of wealth and status.

May he rest in peace; and may we all follow his fine civic example.

From the City of Tulsa Planning Department, notice of a meeting to gather public input on how best to use Tulsa's share of federal historic preservation funds:

The Tulsa Preservation Commission invites Tulsans to participate in the development of the City of Tulsa's Annual Certified Local Government Program.

A meeting will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, May 14, 2009 to receive public input. The meeting will be held on the 10th Floor of City Hall @ One Technology Center, located at 175 E. 2nd Street in downtown Tulsa. Parking is available at the southeast corner of 2nd & Cincinnati.

A portion of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Historic Preservation Fund is allocated for participation in the Certified Local Governments program. Each year, the Tulsa Preservation Commission uses this money to facilitate preservation within our City. Citizens can provide assistance in identifying ways to best use the 2009-2010 funds.

Funds can be used for such projects as:

• Inventory and/or National Register Nomination of historic resources within the community;
• Increasing public awareness of historic preservation; and
• Preparing amendments or updates to the Tulsa Historic Preservation Plan and Historic Preservation zoning program.

With your support we can continue to build on Tulsa's preservation achievements.

Please contact Amanda DeCort, City of Tulsa Planning Department, at (918) 576-5669 for more information.

Here's a very insightful comment by someone with the handle "innercityartisan," posted next to my column about the PLANiTULSA small-area workshop for Forest Orchard, about the way expressways and other barriers to pedestrian and auto traffic on surface streets can blight a neighborhood. It also provides a picture of living in and near downtown a generation ago. (Emphasis added.)

I was there at the meeting. And I grew up in this area in the 50's and 60's. The more I think about the idea of removing the east leg of the IDL, the more I like it!

As kids, we walked or took the bus downtown to the movies. I walked to Central H. S., my gym class played field hockey in Central Park. At noon we students ran around a very busy downtown for lunch and did all our teenage shopping in the department stores and record store. We knew all the "secret" ways to get from one building to the next and across alleys. We were at home downtown, we felt safe and in a way we were supervised by the tens of thousands of people that lived and worked in the inner city.

My grandfather, a geologist, had his office in the Mid-Continent Building. We went to parades, enjoyed the Christmas lights and explored eateries with him.

I am now involved with the Pearl District and where I grew up and work in my home between the Gunboat Parks within the IDL. I am also involved with the Brady Arts District and the East Village at 3rd and Lansing. All these areas suffer because of the "Great Divide."

As has been recognized by other more recognized writers and activists, any city area that runs up against a large "dead" tract of land such as an expressway right-of-way, with no through foot traffic, tends to die and shrivel away. Large parking lots such as those around Hillcrest Hospital or cul-de-sacs and turnarounds that stop through traffic and long chain link fences can mean blight to a neighborhood.

After all, how can your neighborhood become an area that people discover and want to visit or live in if no one ever goes into or through it? And how can you feel safe living, walking or playing with no one around to keep an eye on things?

The only people to "discover" the Brady district have come for events at Cain's and the Old Lady on Brady and most of them don't stay. The Brady area is not so "alive" with activity in many continuous storefronts that a person can feel completely safe walking alone at night. Few people live there. Visitors don't tend to stop and explore. Hopefully the Ball Stadium will increase the number of buildings and residents.

I'm concerned that the vision for the Pearl District with shops and restaurants, small grocery stores, dry cleaners etc. will not happen in development areas placed next to the IDL. This condition also effects the "East Village" or "East End" which is directly across the IDL from the Pearl district. And yet these two neighborhoods could exponentially increase, the interest, excitement and potential resources available for walking residents and visitors if they were actually more connected and accessible to each other. The existing few overpasses between these areas feel long, exposed and very windy!

Get rid of the IDL or cross it with overpasses that have buildings on them. Something that encourages people to hang out and provide a friendly safe environment.

This coming Saturday (May 2, 2009) from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., old downtown Red Fork will be home to a "Down on Main Street" festival. Red Fork was a separate town once upon a time, annexed into the City of Tulsa circa 1927. It's now home to the first "Main Street" program within the City of Tulsa.

Oklahoma has had an active and successful Main Street program for many years, encouraging restoration of historic buildings and the commercial revitalization of dozens of small-town downtowns across the state.

The Main Street program is not just for small towns. Oklahoma City has four active Main Street programs: Stockyards City, Capitol Hill, Plaza District, and Eastside Capitol Gateway; Automobile Alley used to be on the list, too. When I asked City of Tulsa officials back in the late '90s about starting it up here, the responses were oddly reluctant, as if such a thing might get in the way of tearing buildings down.

At long last, two years ago, Red Fork became the first Main Street program in the city, with hopes of bringing Southwest Blvd -- old Route 66 -- back to life. The Down on Main Street festival is part of the program to promote the area and bring the community together. From the festival flier, here are the events planned:

• Pie contest
• Ollie's Restaurant's Blue Plate Special
• Live music
• Global Garden's Kids' Zone
• Art show
• Farmers market with a Westside charm

The festival will take place along Southwest Blvd. near 41st St.

The deadline to enter the pie contest is TODAY (April 27, 2009). You must have your entry form and a $5 fee to the Red Fork Main Street office, 3708 Southwest Blvd, by 5 p.m. Click here for a form and more details.

Here's hoping for good weather for Saturday's Down on Main Street festival.

Here are some interesting publications relating to early-day Oklahoma on the websites of the National Archives and the Internet Archive.

The National Archives has an online sample of documents from their Center for Legislative Archives about Oklahoma's path to statehood including:

• Survey Map of Oklahoma and Indian Territory showing distances, municipal towns, and post offices, published by George Cram, 1902
• President Benjamin Harrison's nomination of George Washington Steele to be the first Governor of the Oklahoma Territory, May 8, 1890
• First page of the Joint Statehood Convention, Oklahoma City, July 12, 1905
• HR 12707, A Bill to enabling the people of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories to form a state constitution and State government, January 20, 1906
• Pages from a pamphlet called "Souvenirs of Tulsa - Indian Territory," 1906, which was submitted to Congress as evidence of Oklahoma's readiness to be admitted to the Union
• Telegram from T.H. Marlin of the Indian Territory to Joe Cannon, March 13, 1906
• Letter from Edwin Meeker of the Oklahoma Territory begging the House to concur with the Senate's amendment to the statehood bill, March 13, 1906
• Engrossed HR 12707, An act to enable the people of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories to form a state constitution and State government, first page, June 16, 1906
• Engrossed HR 12707, An act to enable the people of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories to form a state constitution and State government, endorsement, July 16, 1906

The main page has thumbnails of each item, which you can click on to see an enlarged view. You can also download a high-resolution scan of each item. (For example, the full-res version of the map is 68 MB.)

The Internet Archive offers a 1916 book, now in the public domain, called Men of affairs and representative institutions of Oklahoma. It comes from the collection of the New York Public Library. It features photographs and descriptions of important Oklahomans of the day, with an emphasis on Tulsa. You can view the book online, or download it as a PDF and in various other formats. I found it while looking for information about Tulsa's streetcar companies.

Cyrus Stevens Avery, who would become the father of Route 66, is one of the featured "men of affairs":

oil producer and farmer, Tulsa, born in Stevensville, Pa., on August 30, 1871, son of James A. and Ruie Avery. Educated in the public schools. Received A. B. degree from William Jewel College, Liberty, Mo. He is a Democrat and has served two terms as commissioner of Tulsa county. Is a Mason of high degree, being a member of the Consistory and Mystic Shrine. Member Board Directors Chamber of Commerce, Tulsa, and president Good Roads Association of the State.

Other Tulsa notables include Glenn T. Braden, founder of ONG and namesake of Braden Park, Patrick J. Hurley, Robert Galbreath (the man who discovered the Glenn Pool), and Harry Sinclair. Pat Malloy, Sr., is in the book -- former county attorney, Notre Dame graduate: "Mr. Malloy was left an orphan at the age of 14, a cyclone at Salix, Iowa, having killed his father, mother, two brothers and a sister."

Toward the back of the book there's a photo and description of the late lamented Manhattan Court apartments at 11th & Cincinnati:

On the opposite page is shown Manhattan Court, Cincinnati avenue and Eleventh street, owned by David J. Kelley, of the Manhattan Oil Co., Tulsa, the most beautiful and most exclusive apartments in the Southwest. The suites are three rooms and bath; interior trimmed in mahogany; quarter-sawed oak floors throughout; specially designed electric light fixtures; building scientifically ventilated; construction, asbestos and fire-proof stucco. Manhattan Court has its own pure water system connected with each apartment for all purposes; instantaneous hot water; steam heat; all kitchens open on beautiful interior court with its fountain of pure water and lawn; under personal direction of superintendent, always on premises; iron grill entrance for trades people in rear, adding to the exclusiveness and privacy of the occupants; special store room for each occupant in the basement; kitchens completely furnished with gas range, pantry kitchen table, sanitary refrigerator, connected with air vents and flush drains; garbage container furnished; garbage and waste burned; container thoroughly cleaned daily; each department connected with vacuum cleaner, work done by superintendent; sanitary bed in each apartment; large closet with modern appliances for clothing; bathrooms tiled and white enamel; recessed tubs, porcelain fixtures, plate-glass mirrors, medicine cabinets recessed in the walls; adjustable head shower baths; all bath rooms fitted with white enamel accessories: highest standard of plumbing and modern fixtures with latest sanitary appliances of approved design.

Manhattan Court occupies a convenient and attractive site in Tulsa. The artistic and attractive exterior of this structure, combined with its modern, luxurious and convenient interior, offers a must desirable residence for discriminating and appreciative people who understand that it is not how much money one spends, but what
is received in return for such expenditure.

Manhattan Court is not excelled by any similar structure in the United States and it is with some degree of pleasure that the owner has been privileged to contribute his share in this manner to the welfare and upbuilding of Tulsa. These flats are all rented a year ahead, and have a large waiting list.

Other back pages are devoted to a four story building called the Oklahoma Hospital, somewhere in Tulsa, the Tulsa Pathological Lab at 3rd and Cheyenne, the R. T. Daniel Bldg at 3rd & Boston, Boswell's Jewelry, the Gallais Building (now known as the Kennedy Building), the seven-story Brady Hotel, the three-story Overton Grocery.

Construction in the new Maple Ridge neighborhood is highlighted in a two-page ad for Stebbins, Eisenbach, Tucker, and Darnell, General Agents. They project that Tulsa will soon pass Oklahoma City. "[H]ere is to be the great city between the Missouri river and the Gulf coast...."

One page is devoted to Oklahoma City's extensive streetcar and interurban system. Nowata's Savoy Hotel and Mineral Baths gets a page. Several two-page spreads are devoted to various Oklahoma oil refineries. There were once many more in Tulsa besides the two that remain.

Photos of the original Kendall College building and Kemp Hall (the girls' dorm) will make you mad at TU all over again:

The present college is located at College Hill, and has a thirty-acre campus with five college buildings. Three hundred and fifty young men and women can be accommodated. Kendall likes Tulsa and Tulsa likes Kendall. The city has given the ground and about $200,000. The college work consists of nine departments, instructed by a University-trained corps of twenty-five men and women. The course is four years, leading to classical degrees, academic course of four years, corresponding to first-class high school courses. Also special courses in music, art, expression, domestic science, oil geology, business a'nd normal training. The dormitory facilities are unexcelled in the state. Every room is an outside room, and the chapel seats 550. A 55,000 pipe organ was installed in 1915. The gymnasium is one of the best in the state: building 65x90 feet, with a basket ball court. 40x70 feet. Visitors' gallery that will seat 500, bowling alleys, dressing rooms, equipped with lockers and shower baths.

Gone, every last bit of it.

The big surprise was seeing Moman Pruiett in this august and respectable company: "Prior to April 15, 1916, Mr. Pruiett had defended 346 men and women charged with murder; and he now has on his docket thirty-nine similar cases. In addition to this record, he has assisted in the prosecution of 37 charged with murder; and has been equally successful as a prosecutor. It is said that he had defended and caused to be acquitted more men for murder than any other lawyer in the world, and he has not yet been practicing twenty years." I didn't expect that he'd be respectable enough for inclusion. A recent biography of Pruiett is titled He Made It Safe to Murder.

A search of the Internet Archive for Tulsa turns up quite a lot of video of city council meetings, public forums, and other events by David Schuttler. It's interesting to realize that the work of this enterprising blogger/videographer is better preserved and more accessible to the public than the news coverage of local TV stations. Many sermons by Dennis Gunderson of Tulsa's Grace Bible Church turn up as well.

MORE to come: Jack Blair of the Tulsa City Council staff has sent along a number of city documents about our streetcar companies -- very interesting stuff that I hope to get posted in the not too distant future.

Over the last 9 days, I:

• Wrote two regular columns for Urban Tulsa Weekly
• Wrote two extra thousand-word pieces, which will appear in UTW's Spring Thing, one of the paper's two annual full-color special inserts
• Edited and cross-checked a 75-page technical proposal, writing or re-writing sections of it, working 10-12 hour days, including weekends

On Sunday arrived at the office about 1 p.m., lunch in hand. I broke for dinner about 7:30, writing a first draft of my column, returned to the office about 9, and went back to work on the proposal, incorporating last minute corrections and making sure we hadn't left anything out. At 3 a.m., five of us -- the executive VP, the engineering director, the program manager, the tech writer, and me -- gathered in the conference room to cut and streamline to get the proposal under the page limit. We finished about 4, and I went back to work on the column -- sent it in at 5:49, drove home, set out the trash, and was in bed about 6:10. Slept five hours and went back to the office to give the printed proposal a final review.

This evening, my 12-year-old son and I went to Will Rogers High School for their "Second Monday" architectural tour which runs from 6:30 - 8:00. The monthly tour is free, but they hope you'll buy popcorn, soda, and special calendars to help support the theatrical program. The next major production is the 45th edition of the Will Rogers Roundup, a variety show that will run in mid-April in the school's beautiful 1500-seat auditorium. The school, which opened in 1939, is beautiful inside and out.

(Here's Joseph Koberling's commentary on the architecture of the school he designed with Leon Senter.)

The WRHS alumnus who gave a historical lecture in the auditorium at the start of the tour (didn't catch his name, but he did a fine job) related a conversation he had at the National Preservation Conference last fall. The preservationist came to the WRHS booth in the exhibit hall and wanted to know what the school was used for now and when it was renovated. The preservationist was certain that, like many historic buildings, WRHS had been badly remodeled or neglected at some point in its history, and that it had been deemed obsolete and repurposed in some way. The remarkable thing about Will Rogers High School is that they've simply done a great job of preserving it, continuing to use it for its original purpose and never "wreckovating" it.

Back home, I still had laundry to do and a three-year-old to bathe.

But now I'm beat. There's some interesting new stuff over in the linkblog. I'm off to get some sleep.

I mentioned a few weeks ago my stunned amazement as I drove down Quincy Ave.:

Looking south on Quincy Ave. from 6th St., I noticed a tell-tale pair of parallel cracks in the asphalt, each crack about the same distance from the middle of the street. The distance between the two cracks was about the same as the width of a standard gauge train track....

As I passed 8th St. heading southbound on Quincy, the parallel cracks swerved to the right. A bit further on, I noticed another pair of parallel cracks, about a foot away from the pair I had been following. The two pairs of cracks, swerved back toward the middle just north of 10th St. It looked very much like a spot where a single track split in two to allow streetcars heading in opposite directions to pass each other.

My jaw dropped when I spotted this.

Here is one of several photos I took of Quincy Ave between 8th and 10th Streets, showing cracks in the asphalt, which reveal where once ran the Tulsa Street Railway streetcar tracks. Here, looking north from 10th St., you can see where a single pair of tracks splits into two, so that cars headed in opposite directions could pass each other. Neighborhood lore holds that this was a stop on the line.

Here's a link to the whole Tulsa Streetcars set on Flickr, which will grow as I add other photos of remnants of Tulsa's streetcar and interurban system.

MORE: From the September 10, 1915, edition of Railway Age Gazette, an item about the ambitious plans of the other streetcar line in town:

TULSA TRACTION COMPANY -- This company was recently incorporated in Oklahoma with $100,000 capital and plans to build from Tulsa, Okla., southwest to Sapulpa, also extensions connecting Broken Arrow, Bixby and Okmulgee and a line north to Collinsville, in all about 80 miles. The company has bought Oklahoma Union Traction line in Tulsa. G. C. Stebbins, president; A. J. Biddison, vice-president and general counsel; I. F. Crow, secretary and treasurer, and B. C. Redgraves, superintendent.

And in the Sept. 24, 1915, edition:

This company was recently incorporated in Oklahoma with $100,000 capital, it is said, to succeed the Oklahoma Union Traction Company. A line will be built south of Tulsa, Okla., to Sapulpa and Okmulgee, and on the north to Collinsville. The company now operates six miles of single track to Orcutt Lake. G. C. Stebbins, president, and B. C. Redgraves, superintendent.

I was sad to learn tonight of the passing of legendary radio broadcaster and Tulsa native Paul Harvey at the age of 90.

Harvey grew up at 1014 E. 5th Pl. -- the house is still there -- went to Longfellow School at 6th and Peoria, and then Central High School, starting his radio career at KVOO when he was still in high school. (They were all within walking distance of each other back in the '30s -- KVOO was in the Philtower.) A few years ago he reported receiving a letter from a more recent resident of that house, who had found a wood-shop project in the attic with his name on it -- bookends, I think it was.

I started listening to Paul Harvey's broadcasts in the mid-1970s, at a time when he wasn't carried by any Tulsa station, at least none that I could find. I listened to him on KGGF 690 out of Coffeyville, Kansas. Eventually -- sometime in the late '70s, I think -- KRMG picked him up.

When I started working in Tulsa after college, I often ate my lunch in the car at a nearby park, listening to his noontime broadcast. If I missed him on KRMG at noon, I could catch him on KGGF at 12:40.

It could be hard to listen to Paul Harvey's broadcasts over the last few years, as time finally took its toll on his vocal cords, but it was still the same interesting variety of news, still the same distinctive speech pattern.

See-Dubya has a fitting remembrance over at Michelle Malkin's blog:

Paul Harvey put news out there that no other outlet touched. His Paul Harvey News and Comment scoured the wires for random stuff-and ideologically inconvenient stuff- you just didn't hear on the Big Three mainstream TV news, and crammed it all in to crisp five minute chunks, complete with terse commentary and the occasional wry thwack of sarcasm-and he still had time for the inevitable personalized pitches for Buicks and the Bose Acoustic Wave Radio. Here's what he had to say about his advertisers:

"I can't look down on the commercial sponsors of these broadcasts," he told CBS in 1988. "Too often they have very, very important messages to put across. Without advertising in this country, my goodness, we'd still be in this country what Russia mostly still is: a nation of bearded cyclists with b.o."

Zing. He was always like that. Paul Harvey invented blogging; he just did his blogging on the radio....

His radio show wasn't particularly ideological-you could tell he leaned right but it was mainly through the choice of stories and headlines he picked out. He also had a syndicated column back in the day that my state paper carried, and he was a rock-ribbed Middle American (Tulsa native, in fact) social and fiscal conservative with a heart of gold, a deep love of country, and no illusions about the stakes of foreign policy. He was a Reaganesque thinker, as well as a Reaganesque communicator.

(See-Dubya notes: "I kind of trace the groundswell of interest in [Fred] Thompson back to his time broadcasting from Paul Harvey's chair, and likewise the deflation of the Thompson bubble to the time he left it." Hearing Fred in that setting certainly sparked my interest,)

THE REST OF THE STORY:

You can hear Paul Harvey in full voice in this clip on Lileks.com from 1968.

This page about Tulsa radio on Tulsa TV Memories notes that he was a student of Miss Isabelle Ronan at Central High School, and includes a Real Media clip of Paul Harvey speaking on the Larry King Show about his education, his career, and his optimism.

Here's Paul Harvey's entry in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.

AND THERE'S THIS:

WGN radio, his Chicago home base, has audio clips from Paul Harvey's broadcasts and speeches and the ABC News radio special on the life and career of Paul Harvey which was heard this morning on KRMG.

KOTV has a story that includes video from his 1994 speech at a Tulsa fundraiser for the Salvation Army.

Route 66 News remembers Paul Harvey's support for a couple of Missouri Route 66 businesses.

Washington Post obituary: "Broadcaster Delivered 'The Rest of the Story'" (It's by Joe Holley. Wonder if he's any relation to the southpaw fiddler.)

Paul Harvey, 90, a Chicago-based radio broadcaster whose authoritative baritone voice and distinctive staccato delivery attracted millions of daily listeners for more than half a century, died Feb. 28 in Phoenix.

A spokesman for ABC Radio Networks told the Associated Press that Mr. Harvey died at his winter home, surrounded by family. No cause of death was immediately available.

Mr. Harvey was the voice of the American heartland, offering to millions his trademark greeting: "Hello Americans! This is Paul Harvey. Stand by! For news!"

For millions, Paul Harvey in the morning or at noon was as much a part of daily routine as morning coffee.

HERE IS A STRANGE:

Aaron Barnhart gives a couple of examples of Paul Harvey's impact -- one coming from Keith Olbermann. Keith Olbermann?

"I was his official fill-in from 2001-03 and I was overwhelmed by the thought that went in to the selection and flow of stories. Even when he was off, his rules were in place: each segment began with hard news, moved on to commentary, ended with celebrity and then something light or silly. Then a commercial. Then repeat. Then another commercial, etc.

"I stole it almost entirely for 'Countdown.'"

Bathtub Boy's interpretation of Harvey's demand that ABC replace him as his heir apparent seems a little off:

And though he liked my work, and consented to let ABC groom me to succeed him, when an executive flew to Chicago to get his consent to the network giving away free a Sunday version of his show, done by me, he immediately told them not only would he not agree, but if they did not find a different back-up and write it into a new contract, he would not go on the air the next day. Probably the most job-secure, most irreplacable man in broadcasting, without whom the franchise would sink to 10% of its value, and yet he was convinced he was about to be shown the door. The mind reels.

I don't think Paul Harvey was afraid of losing his job. I think he was afraid of the franchise he had built over 50 years being handed over to a nutter like Olbermann.

But wash your ears out with this, from Barnhart's closing paragraphs:

Finally, a word about Paul Harvey's non-verbal communication. No one in radio got away with the silences that he did. His pauses weren't just pregnant, they were Nadya Suleman pregnant. They were amazingly long, by radio standards. They challenged the listener's assumption that an interruption to the flow of continuous noise meant something was wrong. Nothing was wrong; Paul Harvey just wanted the listener's attention back, in case it had drifted. The great communicator was speaking to his invisible audience with invisible words. And they listened.

So now, as you finish this, don't just observe a moment of silence for Paul Harvey. Listen to the silence.

AND MORE:

Kimmswick, Mo., home of his Reveille Ranch, remembers Paul Harvey

Some childhood details from the New York Times obit:

He was born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa, Okla., on Sept. 4, 1918, the son of Harrison Aurandt, a police officer, and Anna Dagmar Christian Aurandt. His father was killed in a gun battle when he was 3, and his mother rented out rooms to make ends meet. He was raised a Baptist, and it influenced his views.

As a boy he was fascinated with radio and built a receiver out of a cigar box. As a teenager, he had a strong resonant voice, and in 1933 a teacher at Tulsa Central High School escorted him to local station KVOO-AM and told the manager: "This boy needs to be on the radio."

He was taken on as an unpaid errand boy, but soon was allowed to deliver commercials, play a guitar and read the news on the air; two years later, he got his first paycheck.

Christopher Orlet remembers the broad appeal of Paul Harvey's "Rest of the Story":

I remember crawling in from college football practice at 5:30 p.m. -- this was the early 1980s -- and collapsing on a locker room bench while over the loudspeaker came The Voice halfway through his evening broadcast, which wasn't news at all, but a feature story where some famous person's identity was revealed in a surprise, twist ending....

Talk about a surreal scene: fifty exhausted college football players from all across the country lying all over a locker room floor in silence waiting for Paul Harvey to reveal the identity of today's subject. "And now you know...the rest of the story...Paul Harvey...Good Day!" Only then would we hit the showers.

Columnist Bob Greene remembers the many times he sat in the studio for a performance of Paul Harvey News and Comment:

He would make these warm-up noises -- voice exercises, silly-sounding tweets and yodels, strange little un-Paul-Harvey-like sounds -- and he showed no self-consciousness about doing it in front of someone else, because would a National Football League linebacker be self-conscious about someone seeing him stretch before a game, would a National Basketball Association forward be worried about someone seeing him leap up and down before tipoff? This was Paul Harvey's arena, and he would get the voice ready, loosening it, easing it up to the starting line.

And then the signal from the booth, and. . .

"Hello, Americans! This is Paul Harvey! Stand by. . . for news!"

And he would look down at those words that had come out of his typewriter minutes before -- some of them underlined to remind him to punch them hard -- and they became something grander than ink on paper, they became the song, the Paul Harvey symphony. He would allow me to sit right with him in the little room -- he never made me watch from behind the glass -- and there were moments, when his phrases, his word choices, were so perfect -- flawlessly written, flawlessly delivered -- that I just wanted to stand up and cheer.

But of course I never did any such thing -- in Paul Harvey's studio, if you felt a tickle in your throat you would begin to panic, because you knew that if you so much as coughed it would go out over the air into cities and towns all across the continent -- so there were never any cheers. The impulse was always there, though -- when he would drop one of those famous Paul Harvey pauses into the middle of a sentence, letting it linger, proving once again the power of pure silence, the tease of anticipation, you just wanted to applaud for his mastery of his life's work.

He probably wouldn't have thought of himself this way, but he was the ultimate singer-songwriter. He wrote the lyrics. And then he went onto his stage and performed them. The cadences that came out of his fingertips at the typewriter were designed to be translated by one voice -- his voice -- and he did it every working day for more than half a century: did it so well that he became a part of the very atmosphere, an element of the American air.

A couple of years ago, I told you about historian Currie Ballard's amazing find of films taken in Oklahoma in the 1920s of African-American families, communities, businesses, and events. (This YouTube user has some clips from the films.)

These were in the news again recently, and in looking for more information I came across the website of Global ImageWorks, a service that provides stock footage. They list Ballard's collection in their online catalog:

BLACK AMERICAN TOWNS FROM 1920s

Global ImageWorks is exclusively representing a rare and unique film collection discovered by historian Currie Ballard consisting of six hours of film documenting the daily lives of successful black towns in Oklahoma thriving in the aftermath of the infamous Tulsa Riots of 1921. The footage illustrates a little known piece of history and includes footage showing entire black communities visiting one another's country homes, parading through downtown Muskogee in some two dozen Packards, crowding an enormous church in Tulsa not long after the riots, gathering at the National Baptist Convention, and traveling to Europe. It includes black cowboys riding horses amidst oil derricks rising from their ranches, various sporting events including rare footage of the 1928 Los Angeles to New York "Great American Foot Race" in which three of the finishing runners were black Americans. The material found by Ballard came in 29 cans and was shot by the Rev. S. S. Jones, a circuit preacher assigned by National Baptist Convention to document the glories of Oklahoma's black towns of Guthrie, Muskogee, and Langston.

The embedded video on that catalog page is a series of short clips from the collection, which appears to have been beautifully restored.

A site search turns up six "tapes" containing footage from the collection. Here are the titles links to each item page, each of which includes a detailed list of the scenes contained therein:

OKLAHOMA COVERAGE 1924 -1928 - MIDDLE CLASS BLACK LIFESTYLE Tape #: 3382 | Date: 1920s | Location: Clearview, Muskogee, Langston, Bristow, Tulsa, Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Oklahoma coverage of middle class black family life in Clearview, Muksogee , Langston and Bristow showing families on their farms and their oil wells. Unique footage from the Currie Ballard Collection. 1925-1927

AFRICAN AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS LIFESTYLE IN BLACK RUN TOWNS IN OKLAHOMA 1920S
Tape #: 3383 | Date: 1920s | Location: Muskogee, Harlinville, Depew, Boley, Duncan, Okemah,Taft, Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Scenes of black middle class lifestyle in Oklahoma in completely black run towns of Muskogee, Duncan etc. in 1920s. Church, train scenes, Antioch cadets, black kids in school, grocery and filling stations, farms, and local commerce. From the Currie Ballard Collection.

PEOPLE AND LIFESTYLE IN BLACK RUN TOWN OF MUSKOGEE, OKLAHOMA IN 1925
Tape #: 3384 | Date: 1920s | Location: Muskogee, Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Various residences of people living in Muskogee, Department store, basketball team and high school speling contest, classes, faculty etc. From the Currie Ballard Collection

MIDDLE CLASS LIFE STYLE SHOWING RESIDENCES, FAMILIES AND SCHOOLS.
Tape #: 3385 | Date: 1920s | Location: Okmulgee, Tulsa, Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Middle class life style showing residences, families and schools. From the Currie Ballard Collection

OKLAHOMA - AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFESTYLE
Tape #: 3386 | Date: 1920s | Location: Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Various towns of Oklahoma, residences,schools, baptism, construction, lifestyle, Masons parade, Masonic lodge, Church. From the Currie Ballard Collection.

OKLAHOMA AFRICAN AMERICANS
Tape #: 3387 | Date: 1920s | Location: Germany, Jerusalem, Italy, Oklahoma | Length: 60:00 | Master Format: film - 16mm video - digi beta | B/W

Oklahoma African Americans from the Currie Ballard Collection.

Some of the Tulsa-related scenes:

• The Oklahoma Eagle Divinity Company, Greenwood Street 1927 Tulsa


• Tulane Avenue Baptist Church Bus from New Orleans, Louisiana at Gen Convention Tulsa Brady Theater 1927 Tulsa


• Church members leaving church winter brick church inner city


• Scenes from Thanksgiving Day 1925 parade and football game: "MTH Muskogee vs. BWH of Tulsa" (Tulsa won, 13 to 9)


• Mr. Jessie Brown new $75,000 Funeral Home, 540 E. Easton 1928 Tulsa


• Brown Funeral Service 1928 Tulsa


• Union Baptist CadetS at State SS & BYPU Convention, Rev. D.C. Cooksey August 4, 1928 Tulsa


• Train loaded with cars, oil derrick in background


• Church Baptist Cadets


• Ground Breaking Union Baptist Church Pastor D.C. Cooksey Officers and Members August 4, 1928 Tulsa


• Church ground breaking (older Church burned down during Tulsa Race Riot 1921)


• Tulsa Business League Dr. S.S. Jones (right to left) Tulsa


• Dr. S.S. Jones eyeglasses Tulsa


• Mt. Zion Baptist Church after the Riot Photo Stills (right to left) Tulsa


• Greenwood Street seven years after Tulsa Race Riot 1921


• C.B. Bottling Works, 258 E. Archie (right to left) Tulsa


• Soda Pop Bottling Company


• Jackson's Undertaker Co. (right to left) Tulsa


• Booker T. Washington High School, noon hour Tulsa


• Dunbar Grade School (right to left) Tulsa


• Dunbar Agri Gardens (right to left) Tulsa

There are scenes from many Oklahoma cities and towns, including Okmulgee, Muskogee, Haskell, Coweta, Ardmore, Langston, Bristow, Taft, El Reno, Oklahoma City, Lawton, Depew, Boley, Wewoka, Boynton, Gibson Station, Wetumka, Eufaula, Red Bird, Porter, and Holdenville plus scenes from travels to Paris, London, Chicago, and the Holy Land.

These, along with old street directories, newspaper microfilm, and Sanborn fire insurance maps, could be the makings of a fascinating documentary.

MORE: From an Oklahoman story on the films from September 2006:

The significance, he said, is the "positive light it puts on blacks in this state. Under the heat of Jim Crow laws, it showed that blacks were prosperous."

Many blacks living in the 1920s were former slaves, and the films show a bustling and prosperous way of life, Ballard said.

"It was rare for a white person to have the camera and equipment in those days," he said. "For someone black to have a camera was unreal. That's what makes it so rare. The movies are from an African-American point of view....

Some of the movies were taken just a few years after the Tulsa race riots of 1921, which virtually destroyed the city's Greenwood district. Jones chronicled the 1925 (black) National Baptist Convention in Greenwood and an accompanying parade.

"The movies showed the strength and resilience of the people of Greenwood to pull off a national convention and to rebuild what was burnt to ashes," Ballard said.

That's the footage that also impresses Blackburn. Like Blackburn, he said it shows the people were able to not only recover but to prosper.

"It would have been easier to be intimidated and to run away and go to St. Louis or Chicago," Blackburn said. "This film footage is very important."

What is interesting, Blackburn said, is that the films show no signs of destruction, but vitality of the Tulsa black community.

STILL MORE: Currie Ballard was recently appointed Assistant Secretary of the Oklahoma State Senate.

I was driving around the Pearl District -- the topic of my upcoming column -- this evening just about sunset. Looking south on Quincy Ave. from 6th St., I noticed a tell-tale pair of parallel cracks in the asphalt, each crack about the same distance from the middle of the street. The distance between the two cracks was about the same as the width of a standard gauge train track. I had noticed this phenomenon before, on Archer St. downtown, where the Sand Springs Railway once ran down the center of the street.

Quincy Ave. was the route of a branch of the Tulsa Street Railway, which ceased operation in 1936. The line left downtown on 3rd and branched north and south on Madison. The north branch ran along 1st to Lewis to 7th to the TU campus.

The south branch turned east on Fostoria (now known as 5th Pl.) running past the house where Paul Harvey grew up, then headed south on Quincy, terminating just north of 15th St.

As I passed 8th St. heading southbound on Quincy, the parallel cracks swerved to the right. A bit further on, I noticed another pair of parallel cracks, about a foot away from the pair I had been following. The two pairs of cracks, swerved back toward the middle just north of 10th St. It looked very much like a spot where a single track split in two to allow streetcars heading in opposite directions to pass each other.

My jaw dropped when I spotted this.

I don't know for sure that there are still rails beneath the asphalt, but if there were rails, I would expect them to have some effect on the integrity of the asphalt as they expand and cool at a different rate than the other material in the roadbed.

Keep your eyes open. You may just see a remnant of a Tulsa that no longer exists.

On May 20, 2008, the famed Rock Cafe on US 66 in Stroud was gutted by fire, but the stone walls remained standing. Owner Dawn Welch was determined to rebuild. After some false starts, reconstruction is on track for completion in late spring, according to Dawn's latest update, posted on January 20. The interior framing is complete and the roof trusses are now in place. If she meets that late spring target, the cafe would open just about a year after the fire.

It gives me hope for the old Temple Israel building at 14th and Cheyenne, which was gutted by fire in late January. The brick walls are still up, and I'm hopeful that Kevin Stephens, who owns the historic building and adjacent lots, will press ahead with his planned restoration and repurposing of the building. It's an important part of our city's history. After Temple Israel moved away in the '30s, to 16th & Rockford (now home to a playground for Christ the King Parish), the building was home to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Its companion, the original home of Congregation B'nai Emunah, just three blocks away near 11th and Cheyenne, was torn down some years ago for parking for the Teamsters hall next door.

The U. S. Geological Survey is mapmaker to the Federal Government, but their topographical maps are used by ranchers, hikers, hydrologists, miners -- anyone interested in the shape of the land and what lies beneath. Because they also depict cultural features in rural areas -- roads, houses, schools, churches, cemetaries -- they can be useful for recreating history, too.

Up on the fourth floor of the Central Library, quadrangle maps of the Tulsa area from the mid-to-late '70s are laid out atop the map cabinets. The maps are actually an update of maps from the 1950s, with changes marked in purple. While some features from the '50s are obscured, many are still visible.

Old USGS maps provide the kind of information about rural areas that the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps provide for developed areas. I'd love to find Tulsa area USGS maps from the '50s and earlier.

I did find a bit of a 1913-4 USGS map showing Tulsa and environs from Pine to 111th St. S, and from the 96th Meridian (Osage County line, west of Elwood) to east of Yale. It's on p. 9 of the March 2006 issue of The Outpost, the newsletter of the Three Forks Treasure Hunters Club, in an article on historical USGS quadrangle maps. It's interesting to see what roads were there already, almost 100 years ago. Tulsa had grown only out as far as 21st and Utica, except for the western part of the Whittier neighborhood and an area labeled Kendall north of 11th between Lewis and Harvard. There's a place called West School on an unimproved road at about 76th and Delaware. The most interesting change: Back then it was called Jill Creek, not Joe Creek. (Or did the USGS man just mishear?)

Dan Weber, a senior at the University of Tulsa, has a column in the school's student newspaper, The Collegian, about the impact of TU's campus expansion and its efforts to attract more residential students on its relationship with the city from which it takes its name:

[The class of 2009 has] lived out our four years in a transitional setting, hemmed in by orange barrels, while the administration finally realized its long-awaited opportunity to recast the campus image.

Now construction is essentially complete (since the financial crisis has remaining projects on hiatus) and we're finally inhabiting the more residential and attractive campus that's supposed to aid TU's obstinate struggle to breach the hallowed U.S. News Top 50.

We seniors, then, are uniquely able to appreciate what the campus has gained and lost in the process to attract all those precious National Merit Scholars.

TU has lost a sense of belonging to Tulsa and gained the feeling of a glorified boarding school for students from Texas and Missouri.

Weber mentions Starship Records and the Metro Diner, once on 11th St but demolished to make way for TU's new grand entrance on 11th St., the University having decided that its grand entrance on Delaware Ave. (the U) was no longer grand enough. Weber calls the two businesses "Tulsa institutions that meant more to locals than the view of the Collins Hall fountain ever will."

The clichéd complaint that spurred the Chapman Commons "front door" project was that traveling along 11th Street, those unfamiliar with the campus wouldn't be able to recognize that they were adjacent to a university.

Since 11th also happens to be midtown's leg of Route 66, TU was squandering a golden opportunity to latch onto the mythos of the Mother Road. Ironically, now gazing upon Chapman Commons one wouldn't immediately recognize that they were adjacent to Route 66.

I'd encourage Mr. Weber to dig deeper into the history of TU's relationship with the city and its immediate neighbors. Until ORU opened its doors in 1965, TU was the only institution of higher learning in the city. Tulsa didn't have any sort of state-funded higher ed until Tulsa Junior College (TJC) in 1969.

Before then, TU was Tulsa's only college. It was the place where Tulsans went to college because they could live with their folks and save money while they earned a degree. TU's stadium was built for and at one time owned by the public school system, for use by the high school athletic program as well as the Golden Hurricane. The TU baseball team played at Oiler Park; the basketball team played at the county's Fairgrounds Pavilion and then at the city's Assembly Center. The law school was downtown across the street from Trinity Episcopal Church. The engineering school was up on N. Lewis.

50 years ago, the main campus was contained between 5th and 7th, Delaware and Gary, surrounded by neighborhoods on all sides. Businesses and churches scattered around the neighborhoods catered to students and locals alike. At some point, in the late '50s or early '60s, the single family neighborhoods around campus were rezoned to allow apartments. One house at a time was cleared to be replaced with a single-story strip of four or five small apartments.

As the neighborhood lost its integrity, it made it easy for officials to label it blighted, in need of urban renewal. The city could then use its power of eminent domain to take land that TU wanted for expansion and sell it to the college for redevelopment.

TU might have continued on its original course, scattering facilities around central Tulsa, integrating its students in the life of the city. That's been a successful model for the Savannah College of Art and Design, which has classrooms and student housing all over the city's historic district, enlivening the city with students and renovating historic buildings in the process.

Instead TU's leaders wanted a typical integrated, isolated campus, and they had governmental muscle at their disposal to make sure they got the land they wanted.

TU has many great academic programs, but it is no longer the sole option for higher ed for Tulsans, not by a long shot. It's certainly not the most affordable. If there were ever justification for the city to assist a private college with its expansion needs, that justification is no longer valid.

(Hat tip to Route 66 News.)

In this week's issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly I wrote about the proposed look for the new downtown ballpark, and I mentioned the location's connection with two railroads and the Greenwood district:

From the 1910s until sometime in the 1990s, the site was bisected by the M. K. & T. railroad tracks. For the first 50 years of that period, the interurban from Sand Springs ran down the center of Archer until about a half-block east of Elgin, where the tracks curved northward, running roughly where the ballpark's outfield fence will be. The trolley tracks then ran down the middle of Greenwood Ave. from Brady St. to Haskell St., before veering off to the east to connect to the Santa Fe tracks to the north.

You can still see some old bits of the track behind the commercial buildings on the west side of Greenwood. The triangular shape of that block of buildings marks where the Sand Springs and Katy railroads crossed paths. If you look closely, you can see where the middle of Archer and the sidewalk on its north side were patched when the interurban tracks were removed.

In the Tulsa Library's online archive of the Beryl Ford Collection of historic Tulsa photos, I found a series of photos showing the Sand Springs line in Greenwood in what appears to be the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not all of the photos were taken at the same time, but I've put them in order starting near the corner of Greenwood Ave. and Brady St. and moving north to where the tracks leave Greenwood Ave. at Haskell Ave. and head north-northeast along a road called Greenwood Pl. toward a junction with the Midland Valley and Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad tracks north of Independence St. Each photo and caption is linked to a slightly larger version on the library's website. Someday I hope to see a full resolution version of each these pictures, which would make it possible to pin down details like years on license plates, street signs, and names and numbers on buildings.

The Sand Springs Railroad's waiting room at the Tulsa end of the line was on the northwest corner of Archer and Boston. I do not know whether or not passengers were carried all the way to Greenwood Ave.

Sand Springs Railroad interurban tracks, looking north toward Brady St. & Greenwood Ave., Busy Bee Lunch (in the Center Hotel building), and Vernon AME Church. While the Vernon Church is still there, as is the building in the foreground, in between is now the route of I-244.

If you're looking for out-of-the-ordinary Christmas gifts, here are a couple of special shopping opportunities around Tulsa for tomorrow, Saturday, December 13, 2008:

From 4 pm to 6 pm, Jack Frank will be signing his latest Tulsa Films DVD release, Tulsa Deco, as well as the two volumes of Fantastic Tulsa Films. The signing will be at the midtown Borders, 21st and the Broken Arrow Expressway. The hour-long Tulsa Deco show is a great gift for the longtime Tulsan with a love for local history and architecture or for the newcomer who's heard about Tulsa art deco and wonders what all the fuss is about.

And from 3 pm to 11 pm, Ida Red, at 3346 S. Peoria in Brookside, will be the site of the Handmade Holiday Market, featuring the work of The Knit Owl, Such Pretty Things, Blue Turtle Soap, Holly Rocks, and Clover Studios. There will be live music from Joy and Day, Fiawna Forté, and Erin Austin.

Both events are great opportunities to support local artists and artisans.

UPDATE: Tulsa Deco will re-air on Sunday, December 7, at noon on KTUL channel 8.

If you love Tulsa's beautiful Art Deco architecture, if you're fascinated by our rich history, you're going to want to own a copy of Jack Frank's newest DVD in his Tulsa History Series: Tulsa Deco.

The quality of this production fits its subject: Everything about it is a delight to the eye, from the Deco-inspired fonts used in the titles and captions to the menu graphic -- a juxtaposition of representatives of the three main types of Deco: streamline (the 32nd and Utica all-electric house), zigzag (Boston Ave. Methodist), and PWA (Union Depot), against a background of rotating beams of light and floating clouds.

Jack Frank's camera lets you look up close at the wonderful detail on some of our most famous buildings. You get a tour of the inside of the Adah Robinson House at 11th Pl. and Owasso Ave., and the history of the Riverside Studio (aka the Spotlight Theater), both Bruce Goff designs. Deco churches are represented by Boston Ave. Methodist and Christ the King Catholic Parish. You'll see the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westhope, and you'll hear some stories about the house from Florence Barnett, who grew up in the home.

The other featured buildings: The ONG Building at 7th and Boston, Philcade, Gillette-Tyrrell (Pythian) Building, Warehouse Market, Union Depot, the Fire Alarm Building, Will Rogers High School, Fairgrounds Pavilion, Tulsa Monument Co., City Veterinary, the Brook, Boulder on the Park (once home to Holland Hall and then KTUL radio), and several streamline residences, including the aforementioned home at 32nd and Utica.

There are fleeting glimpses of many other, more modest Art Deco buildings, and you begin to appreciate what a wealth of deco we enjoy in Tulsa.

Mixed in with modern footage of these Art Deco treasures are historic films related to these buildings from the period when they were built.

The show not only spotlights the buildings but the people who care for them: homeowners, business owners, restorers, preservationists, and even tourists. I enjoyed the interview with a couple from near Boston who were touring Route 66 and set aside extra time to tour Art Deco buildings in Tulsa. They downloaded a list of buildings from the Tulsa Preservation Commission website, then programmed the addresses into their GPS. It's a great example of how cultural heritage tourism can bring people to our city, if we're wise enough to preserve the artifacts of that heritage and to help visitors find and engage them.

(The only false note was an attempt at the end of the show to link the BOK Center to Art Deco. It's understandable, however, given that the video was sponsored by the Bank of Oklahoma and Matrix, which was part of the team that designed and engineered the BOKarena.)

KTUL channel 8 will show an abridged 30-minute preview of the DVD on Tuesday, December 2, at 7 p.m., but you will want to own the full hour-long DVD.

Here's the trailer:

The DVD includes nearly another half-hour of extras:

There are lengthy excerpts from a 1995 interview with historian Robert Powers, who passed away earlier this year. In addition to an extensive discussion of the Pythian Building, he explains why two of Tulsa's favorite "Art Deco" buildings -- the Adams Hotel and the Midcontinent Tower -- aren't really Art Deco at all.

There's a fascinating look at and inside J. Paul Getty's bunker/home on Virgin St. east of Sheridan. I'd heard about this poured concrete and glass block structure, built near Getty's Spartan Aircraft factory, and designed to protect him from storms and air raids, but I'd never seen what the inside looked like.

Another extra features the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture and TFA's collection of historic architectural drawings, along with more apt comments from the architects, historians, and Art Deco lovers who were interviewed for the video.

You can buy Tulsa Deco at Steve's Sundries, BOK branches, Walgreens, QuikTrip, and online at www.tulsafilms.com.

In last week's issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly, I urged making cultural heritage tourism the focus of Tulsa's efforts to attract visitors. Rather than marketing Tulsa as an "ocean of sophistication in a cultural desert," Tulsa should embrace its place in Oklahoma as "the capital of a region where visitors can experience the untamed, exuberant spirit of the American West in all its variety."

For whatever reason, the people we pay to promote Tulsa to the world -- the Tulsa Metro Chamber's Convention and Visitors Bureau -- seem uncomfortable promoting the unique aspects of our region. They position Tulsa as superior to and separate from the rest of Oklahoma, an oasis of sophistication in a cultural desert.

It's a distinctly Midtown Money Belt point of view, and it makes Tulsans seem like a bunch of insecure, provincial rubes, putting on airs -- the urban equivalent of Hyacinth Bucket.

While we should be proud of the cultural amenities that make Tulsa a great place to live, our tourism marketing should focus on what sets our region apart from the rest of the world.

A Milanese woman who lives a few miles from La Scala and the salons of Versace and Prada isn't likely to visit Oklahoma for the opera or Utica Square shopping, but she might come here to eat a chicken fried steak on Route 66, experience Oklahoma! in an open-air theater, or attend a powwow.

A resident of Berlin wouldn't cross the pond to see a Tulsa production of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, but he might travel here to two-step across Cain's curly maple dance floor, search out Ponyboy Curtis's hangouts, or attend the annual Kenneth Hagin Campmeeting -- depending on his particular passions.

Tulsa should position itself not as an enclave of Eastern sophistication but as the capital of a region where visitors can experience the untamed, exuberant spirit of the American West in all its variety.

Read the whole thing, and read more about how other cities and regions have successfully used their history as a tourist draw at culturalheritagetourism.org.

From alumni of the Pratt Institute, who visited Tulsa for the National Preservation Conference:

First of all, Art Deco. It's everywhere. This Deco boom town was nouveau riche ripe with OIL! when they built it. We walked some of the shiny, shapely and well loved lobbies on our tour of downtown.

Secondly, people from Tulsa are nice, and in a good way! Not annoying at all.

And finally, like everywhere else, Tulsa is what you make of it. They celebrated their centennial last year; it's a baby of a city and has toddler like tendencies. It's fun and ridiculous, but after a certain amount of time you want to hand it back to mom and return to the adult party.

Irritated Tulsan has posted the second set of scans from the program for the 1969 University of Tulsa football homecoming game against the University of Houston.

This section includes player photos and plenty more ads, including a KTUL channel 8 ad featuring their sports director, Hal O'Halloran, a fine man that I had the privilege to get to know about 10 years later. This page has a half page ad for Kerr-McGee's Blue Velvet motor oil, Irish Mike Clancy's Pizza Village (11th & Mingo), the Country Fare restaurant (3627 S. Harvard), and the Casa Loma Barber Shop, which was in the old Max Campbell Building at 11th & Birmingham.

I.T. also continues to cover Mayor Kathy Taylor's 11th hour efforts to keep Tulsa Regional Medical Center open with a list of 10 funding options.

Irritated Tulsan says that this non-blogging life is interfering with his ability to write quality content, but that's manifestly not the case. Like an oyster, he continues to turn minor irritations into pearls of hilarity (and sometimes wisdom).

• Honest Downtown Tulsa Signs
• An open letter to Mayor Taylor, about her belated response to the indigent medical care problem, wherein we are introduced to the term, "Blond Gnome District."
• "Turdlips," a touching story of baseball ineptitude and childhood conflict resolution (like IT, I was a clueless right-fielder, when they let me play at all)

The best of all is not original material but scans of the first 16 pages of the program for the 1969 University of Tulsa football homecoming game, with a promise of more to come. The section that was posted includes ads for Page-Glencliff Dairy (and their Golden Hurricane ice cream), DX, Skelly, KVOO, Rainbo, Eddy's Steakhouse, R. A. Young and Son, Williams Brothers, Thornton, Smith, and Thornton, and Brown Dunkin (with sketches of their downtown, Southland, and Northland stores). There are profiles of TU President J. Paschal Twyman (marking his first anniversary with the school), athletic director Glenn Dobbs, and Head Coach Vince Carillot and his assistants. There's a roster of the 1969 team. Dobbs was honored as Mr. Homecoming 1969 -- Steve Turnbo's byline is over the article about that honor.

An article about the history of TU has this intriguing conclusion:

Recent addition to the University's curricula is a new bachelor of arts degree program in urban studies as a part of a $92,000 contract with the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The first of its kind for undergraduates in the nation, the TU-HUD project will lead to the establishment of TU campuses in Washington D.C., and possibly other major cities.

Just found this, from Tulsa Business Journal's October 27 edition: The Max Campbell building, with its distinctive roof of multicolored clay tiles, is going to be restored as a hotel and retail space. That's the original function of this 1926, block-long building on 11th Street between Birmingham and Columbia.

Aaron Meek, owner of Group M. Investments Inc. said he plans to restore the building turning the space into a hotel with an events center and restaurant in the bottom level.

"It is my understanding that the building was originally a hotel on the top stories, and the bottom was used as retail space," Meek said. "We have gotten enough interest to where we are going to go back to that original purpose."

The project isn't new territory for Meek, who he said worked primarily on the restoration of older homes and properties in the mid-town area.

"We love the old buildings and love getting them back to their original state," he said. "We're working on another project down the street that we're turning into lofts.

In 1957, this building was home to a drug store, an auto parts store, a barber shop, an office supply company, and, upstairs, the Casa Loma hotel.

It's a neighborhood landmark that has been in that spot since before Route 66 was routed down 11th Street.

In the story, Meek notes how costly it is to restore a building. Hopefully, he'll think to apply for the historic register status to which the building is entitled, which would qualify him for state and federal tax credits. This restoration seems like it would also be a good candidate for the Route 66 Corridor Restoration Program. That program was used to help accomplish the restoration of the Vickery Phillips 66 station at 6th and Elgin, which is being reused as an Avis car rental location.

Unfortunately, reauthorization of the Route 66 Corridor Restoration Program is being blocked by our own Sen. Tom Coburn. Here's a link to Coburn's statement and the key excerpt:

Several tourism related measures, including a couple that have already become a favorite piggy bank to pay for congressional earmarks, such as the Save America's Treasures program, the Preserve America program, and the Route 66 Corridor Preservation program. The Route 66 program is currently restoring aging gas stations, motels and restaurants. Unfortunately, tourism has declined with many Americans unable to afford the cost of gas and, as evidenced by this bill, Congress' misplaced priorities threaten to drive up the cost of travel.

While I understand his perspective, this program is administered by the National Park Service and is in keeping with the NPS's mission of protecting the nation's heritage and making it accessible to visitors from our own country and from overseas. Interest in Route 66 has been growing (a long-term, Internet-fueled trend that has received a giant boost from Pixar's Cars), but at the same time, landmark roadside buildings continue to be lost to purposeful demolition and to demolition by neglect.

As Route 66 expert and author Emily Priddy points out, cruising the Mother Road is a very affordable vacation destination, and people looking for cheap ways to see America are rediscovering Old 66:

I don't know where Coburn is getting his information. Yes, some Americans are having trouble buying gas, and no, they're not traveling as far. But in my extensive travels on Route 66, I have met literally hundreds of small business owners. I've spoken with many of them this year. They are all in a position to know what's going on along the Mother Road -- and what's going on is that Route 66 is thriving, largely because of increases in foreign travelers (who are used to unholy gas prices); locals (when you can't afford Disneyworld or the Grand Canyon, you explore your own backyard); and bargain hunters (fuel-efficient speed limits and great values on food, lodging and entertainment make Route 66 a penny-pincher's dream).

The Route 66 Corridor Restoration Program is not an earmark. Congress appropriates money for the fund, but the NPS processes applications for the grants, which must be matched, and must go to projects that meet the NPS's standards for the treatment of historic buildings. No money has been earmarked by Congress for specific projects. Originally envisioned as a 10-year, $10 million program, only $1.2 million in federal money has been granted over the first seven fiscal years. The program ends at the end of Fiscal Year 2009. The new bill asks Congress to authorize $8 million over 10 years, starting in FY 2010.

Compare that to the $15 million allocated by Vision 2025 for the highway, which would work wonders on Tulsa's stretch of 66 if it were used as matching grant money for neon repair and building restoration. (It won't be, sadly.)

This may be one of the government's most cost-effective programs to encourage historic preservation and tourism, as the government foots less than half of the bill and doesn't have to pay for ongoing operation and maintenance of the sites that are improved.

My column in this week's UTW is a recap of the National Preservation Conference, which came to Tulsa back in late October. Below are some blog entries with reactions from conference staff and other conference attendees, but first I want to spotlight a blog I've just recently learned about: Rex and Jackie Brown are fans of mid-century modern architecture, and they post photos of buildings of that sort from around Oklahoma on their blog, Oklahoma Modern.

I've got some photos from the conference, too, and I'll get those uploaded and linked here sometime this weekend.

Here are those links:

PreservationNation: Tulsa Poster Presentations: Phillips 66 Stations: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

PreservationNation: Plenary, Reception Officially Open the National Preservation Conference

PreservationNation: The Old and the New: Native Americans and Preservation

PreservationNation: Video: Charles Stevens Dilbeck - The Tulsa Homes

PreservationNation: Breaktime in Tulsa: Exhibit Hall Offers Treats, Information

PreservationNation: The Tall, the Ornate, and the Sacred: Strolling Through Downtown Tulsa

PreservationNation: Rehab Solutions for Aging Moderns

PreservationNation: Candlelight House Tour Puts Tulsa Hospitality on Display

PreservationNation: Two Trust Bloggers Treat Themselves to a Day Trip to Bartlesville

PreservationNation: Tulsa Poster Presentations: Making an Impression, Poster-Style

PreservationNation: Preservation Round Up: Fall at Lincoln's Cottage, House Museums, Post-Katrina Homes

PreservationNation: Going Green Tulsa Style: Final Thoughts on the National Preservation Conference

PreservationNation: 1950/60s Neighborhoods... What to Save and Lose?

1950/60s Neighborhoods... What to Save and Lose? | Teardown Post

PreservationNation: Tulsa's Closing Plenary Looks at Historical Narratives, Need for Preservation Laws

Tips for Better Boards « National Trust Historic Sites Weblog

House Museums and Ultimate Use « Time Tells

Oklahoma Business Q&A with Richard Moe | NewsOK.com

National Trust For Historic Preservation Press Website - Press Releases

Destination Tulsa Conference is a first for Oklahoma

National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Preservation Conference Runs from Oct. 21-25, 2008 in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Looking more than a little out of place, there's a shiny Airstream trailer parked on the Williams Center Green at 3rd and Boston.

It belongs to StoryCorps, a non-profit organization which aims to collect the life-stories and memories of ordinary Americans. The process works like this:

1. You pick a friend, relative, or acquaintance that you'd like to interview.
2. You reserve a 40 minute time-slot for recording your interview.
3. You compose some good questions for the interview.
4. You conduct the interview.
5. When you're done, you get a CD of the interview; a copy is archived in the Library of Congress.

Interview a parent or an elderly neighbor. Have your kid interview you. Talk to someone who remembers downtown or Greenwood in their glory days, before urban renewal.

The StoryCorps trailer will be in Tulsa through November 29. Follow that link to book a time and learn more.

If StoryCorps isn't coming to your town, they offer some alternatives along with some tips for recording your own interviews.

Saving buildings is important, but we also need to save the memories associated with those buildings. StoryCorps is one way to do that.

Ark Wrecking is doing banner business this year. Sheridan Village, a two-story suburban shopping center on the southwest corner of Admiral and Sheridan, is set for demolition.

Construction began on Sheridan Village in September 1953 and the center opened in November 1954. It was once home to a Borden's cafeteria, a J. C. Penney's department store, a Brown's Boot Shop, and (in an out-building) an OTASCO. I can remember going to Penney's for back-to-school clothes in the early '70s -- we'd hit there and the Froug's at Admiral and Memorial. McCune and McCune were the architects.

When it opened, the center included Penney's, Crown Drug, a T. G. & Y. five-and-dime store, a Humpty Dumpty supermarket, Oklahoma Tire and Supply Co. (OTASCO), several business and professional offices, and a branch of the Tulsa Public Library.

Tom Baddley at Lost Tulsa has more Sheridan Village history and a Flickr photo set of the Sheridan Village.

I've got to finish my column tonight, but I have display ads and some text from a story about the center in a June 1957 "Old Fashioned Bargain Days" supplement to post.

If you have any interest at all in fixing up older buildings (even if you don't think of them as particularly historic), visiting and promoting historic landmarks, economic revitalization of small towns and rural areas, walkable communities, "green" buildings, infill that respects existing development -- if you like pecans or fudge or Frankoma pottery -- if you want to connect with fellow Tulsans interested in protecting and preserving our great neighborhoods or our classic downtown and midtown buildings -- if you'd love to support preservation while winning a weekend away in a historic hotel -- if you want to learn how lasers are used to support restoration of historic buildings -- if you are interested in a degree program in preservation (or know someone who is) -- if you want to visit with the architects converting the Atlas Life Building into a Courtyard by Marriott -- if you want to know what communities across the country are doing to turn history into economic development ....

You need to come down to the Tulsa Convention Center on Friday, between 9 and 5, to spend some time at the exhibit hall for the National Preservation Conference. It's free and open to the public, and it's a great way to learn a lot. Friday between 9 and 5 is your last opportunity to see the exhibits. Yes, it would be nice if they had evening or weekend hours, but they don't. Come on your lunch hour, have a look around, and meet fellow Tulsans and people from across America with an interest in preservation.

The 2008 National Preservation Conference is underway right here in Tulsa.

On Wednesday some conventioneers took buses to field sessions here in Tulsa and around northeastern Oklahoma, while others attended panel discussions and workshops on various topics related to historic preservation. Late in the afternoon was the opening plenary session, held at First Presbyterian Church.

Coming up today, tomorrow, and Saturday, there are some open-to-the-public opportunities worth your time and interest:

Thursday, 6 pm to 7 pm: The National Preservation Awards ceremony, at Will Rogers High School, 3909 E. 5th Pl., one of our somewhat hidden Art Deco treasures.

Friday, 5:45 to 6:45 pm: A lecture by Route 66 sherpa Michael Wallis on the "Romance of the Mother Road," at First United Methodist Church, 10th & Boulder, downtown.

Saturday, 10:30 am to noon: Closing plenary session, in the assembly hall of the Tulsa Convention Center, featuring talks by art historian Nell Irvin Painter and Anthony Tung, author of Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis

The exhibit hall, at the Convention Center, is also free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Friday. Exhibitors include universities with degree programs related to historic preservation, booksellers, companies that make building products used in restorations, government agencies, consulting firms, and non-profit groups.

Many of the exhibitors are from Tulsa and the surrounding region, so it's an opportunity to connect with others who are engaged in preserving our irreplaceable places. A partial list of local exhibitors:

Coalition of Historic Neighborhoods of Tulsa
The Coury Collection
Frankoma Pottery
Brown Mansion, Coffeyville, Kans.
Tulsa City-County Library System
Yellow Pad, Inc.
Saline Preservation Association, Pryor, Okla.
Oklahoma Route 66 Association
Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Dept.
Oklahoma Main Street Center
Loman Studios (stained glass)
MATRIX Architects Engineers Planners
Guthrie Chamber of Commerce
GH2 Architects
Cherokee Nation
Bryant Pecan Co.

I'll add links later. You can see a full list of exhibitors in the conference program, beginning on p. 54 (3 MB PDF).

Finally, there may still be some tickets available for purchase for some of Saturday's field sessions and events. Even if you're a lifelong Tulsan, you'll learn new things about your city on these tours.

I took the Tulsa Art Deco tour on Tuesday afternoon. The tour included an inside look at the fascinating house Bruce Goff designed for Adah Robinson at the corner of 11th Pl. and Owasso Ave., an all-too-brief stop at the Tulsa Historical Society (which has a fascinating exhibit on Tulsa in the 1920s), and a reception in the lobby of the ONG Building on the NW corner of 7th and Boston. The Hille Foundation owns the building and is exploring plans to convert the upper floors into condominium lofts, as a real estate investment for the foundation. The building is a beautiful example of late '20s zigzag deco, and it was exciting to get a look inside. This would be the first condominium conversion of a downtown office building.

Staffers with the National Trust for Historic Preservation have been blogging about their experiences in Tulsa on the Preservation Nation blog. Here's an account of the Sacred Spaces bus tour, which included a number of downtown churches, Temple Israel, and the Oral Roberts University campus.

MORE: Ron of Route 66 News has found much of interest at the conference, including a seminar on the preservation of neon signage.

The National Preservation Conference, which comes to Tulsa next week, is making tickets for several Saturday, October 25, field sessions available to the public. There is a cost for each event, but you can sign up for these events without having to pay the conference registration fee. There are five field sessions available, all starting at 1:30 p.m. For Tulsans, this is a great way to learn about your hometown history.

Tulsa Overview (ticket price $35) 1:30 - 5:00 p.m. From being the end point of the notorious Trail of Tears, to railroad and market town serving surrounding cattle ranches, to thriving oilboom city -- Tulsa has a diverse and vibrant history. See how all these influences still resonate in modern-day Tulsa. Featured sites include Gilcrease Museum, Roosevelt School, Tulsa's oldest house, Cain's Ballroom, Tulsa Union Depot, Williams Technology Center (HOK), and the Tulsa Municipal Building (Old City Hall).

Downtown Tulsa Safari (ticket price $20)
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Lions and tigers and... dolphins? Pigs and turkeys and buffalo, too? In downtown Tulsa? Absolutely! There's an urban jungle in the heart of the city if you know where to look. Go on an offbeat architectural safari to spot the whimsical terra cotta wildlife on Tulsa's buildings.

Going Green, Tulsa Style (ticket price $35)
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
It's great to be green in Tulsa. See some recent renovations of older buildings that have made concern for the environment a priority: Dennis R. Neil Equality Center, the SemGroup Building, the Fire Alarm Building, and East Village.

Tulsa's Historic Gardens (ticket price $35)
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Philbrook Gardens, Tulsa Rose Garden, Woodward Park, and Swan Lake are just some of the special spots to be visited or viewed. Find out how Tulsa's most renowned horticultural attractions were developed from pastures, farmland, and a Creek Indian allotment.

Mid-Century Tulsa: Back to the Future! (ticket price $35)
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Celebrate Tulsa's mid-century homes of the Future. Featuring mid-century neighborhoods such as Lortondale and Ranch Acres, see how residents have worked diligently to restore the architecture of their homes and their communities. Creative marketing, community education and sheer determination have created a mid-century feeding frenzy with homes being snatched up by design savvy and preservation-minded buyers.

The public may also buy tickets ($75 each) for the closing party at Cain's Ballroom, featuring western swing legends Asleep at the Wheel.

All of the above tickets will be for sale during normal business hours at the National Preservation Conference registration desk in the Tulsa Convention Center.

From the Tulsa Preservation Commission blog:

Please join us Wednesday, August 27th for a Community Workshop to shape and evaluate Tulsa's Historic Preservation Strategy.

This public workshop will be from 5:30 - 7:30pm in the new City Hall, 175 E. 2nd Street, 10th Floor South conference room (map it). On-street parking at meters is free after business hours. Please use the 2nd Street entrance.

Your insights and vision for preserving and enhancing the historic character of Tulsa would be appreciated. We hope to see you there!

For more information, call 918-576-5669. Please feel free to share this invitation with your friends and colleagues.

With the comprehensive plan update underway and national attention on Tulsa's historic assets, thanks to the upcoming National Preservation Conference being held here in October, this may be the moment to make preservation a priority in Tulsa.

RELATED:

Steve Patterson reports that a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation is joining the City of St. Louis and the State of Missouri in a SLAPP suit against two preservation activists who filed lawsuits in an effort to save a 100-year-old building in downtown St. Louis.

Many thanks to the readers of Urban Tulsa Weekly who have, for the second year in a row, voted for me as Tulsa's Favorite Blogger in the Absolute Best of Tulsa readers' poll:

Michael Bates, Urban Tulsa Weekly's own uber city news geek and pundit extraordinaire, is the man. With his encyclopedic knowledge of Tulsa's history and of the inner workings of city and county government and his piercing insight into the goings on of the city's elite, his weekly columns are often a source of both dread and delight to local leaders. The man is a machine, though, so a weekly column is hardly enough of an outlet for him to say all that he has to say, nor for readers to get their regular fix of his words and wisdom. So, there's always his blog at Batesline.com.

Congratulations to Tulsa World music writer Jennifer Chancellor for getting a "close call" in this category. Although many editors and writers at the daily have blogs, Jennifer is one of the few who is really taking advantage of the medium, updating on a near-daily basis. Most recently she's been posting lots of photos and video from Rocklahoma. I shall have to work much harder if I want a threepeat. (Or maybe lobby to have a separate category for music bloggers.)

I was also happy to see a win in the coffee house category for one of my favorite hangouts, the Coffee House on Cherry Street, with Shades of Brown, another favorite hangout, as a close runner-up. The two coffee houses set the standard not only for good coffee but for community gathering places.

(Note to PLANiTULSA team -- as part of your outreach to Tulsa's young people, hold some "bull sessions" at these coffee houses. Just plan to show up, hang out, and expect to have some great conversations about the city's future.)

I was also happy to see Callupsie win in the Local, Indie Produced Album for their recording debut:

No other established band in Tulsa is as hard-working as Callupsie. And their particular brand of indie jazz-punk is one of the most unique sounds to emerge from the city in quite some time. Produced by Stephen Egerton over just two sessions (the entire album took a total of several days to record), the debut is a ridiculously catchy collection of pop tunes (pop in the best sense) that is just waiting to be played on college stations across the country. To boot, they're four of the nicest musicians you'll ever meet. You all chose well on this one.

The ABoT issue includes some of the more interesting "fill-in-the-blank" responses to questions like, "If I were mayor," and "You are so Tulsa if you..."

My favorite: "If I were mayor... I'd build the Golden Driller a girlfriend." I know just the girl. She's somewhat older, but a lot better looking than the old roughneck. She's "The Goddess of Oil", a 1941 sculpture by Tulsa World staff artist Clarence Allen. The plan was to erect a 40-foot version of the sculpture at the next International Petroleum Exhibition, but the outbreak of World War II got in the way. The model was 19-year-old Marjorie Morrow. Although the full-sized version was never erected, the original sculpture stayed in Morrow's family, and her grandson, muralist William Franklin, hopes to see the original artistic vision realized. You can read all about it and donate to the project at goddessofoil.com.

A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C. (Library of Congress collection)

A few weeks ago I suggested that the Beryl Ford Collection of historic Tulsa photos would benefit from the kind of user interface offered by Flickr:

The ideal online presentation of the Beryl Ford Collection would have several characteristics, taking advantage of Web 2.0 technology:

1. Each photo available in a range of resolutions, including the highest resolution possible -- at least 600 dpi.
2. Searchable extended descriptions and tags.
3. The ability for archive visitors to add comments (memories associated with the photo, historical details) and to add descriptive tags to aid searching.
4. The ability for archive visitors to attach notes -- highlighting certain details in the photo that might otherwise be overlooked.
5. The ability to search by geography -- to zoom in on a map and see photos in and around a particular location.

I learned today that someone already had this idea: The Library of Congress. In January, the LoC launched a pilot project, posting photos from their archive on Flickr. Flickr's "The Commons" project now includes four other archives: The Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum, the Powerhouse Museum (Australia), and the Bibliothèque de Toulouse.

The Commons project has two main objectives:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

In a FAQ about the LoC's Flickr pilot program, they give the reasons the LoC is doing this:

• To share photographs from the Library's collections with people who enjoy images but might not visit the Library's own Web site.
• To gain a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the Library and users of the collections.
• To gain experience participating in Web communities that are interested in the kinds of materials in the Library's collections.

Each of the LoC's photos on Flickr includes catalog information, with a link back to the image's home on the LoC website, where higher-resolution versions of the images, including the original, uncompressed TIFF scans can be viewed and downloaded.

So far, the LoC has posted about 4,000 photos on Flickr, including a set of 4x5 color Kodachrome images from the late '30s and early '40s and a set of Bain News Service photos from the 1910s. The Bain photos have very little information attached, and the LoC is hoping to learn more about the people and places depicted through comments and notes posted via Flickr.

Flickr's The Commons seems like a perfect match for the Beryl Ford Collection.

Sometime this past winter (judging from how low the sun is in the sky and the presence of piles of ice storm debris in many photos), Google sent its 360-degree car mounted camera around Tulsa, taking street view photos of nearly every street. (Hat tip to Steve Roemerman, who to a Street View of his old house with his truck parked inside.

Street View images are more recent than Google's satellite view: The satellite still shows the old Mayo Meadow Shopping Center, while Street View shows Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market. Bell's Amusement Park is still there on the satellite image, but the replacement slab of asphalt shows up in Street View.

If you were wondering what was there along I-44 before ODOT bulldozed it, Street View can help (at least until they return for another pass). Here are the Monticello Apts. near 51st St and Birmingham Ave. And here's the entrance to Dick Gordon's guitar studio at 51st & Trenton.

(Too bad they didn't have Street View when Beryl Ford started collecting photos.)

There are all sorts of oddities that turn up. So far this is my favorite: The Street View of Cain's Ballroom shows people in sleeping bags lined up for tickets to some concert.

The folks over at TulsaNow's public forum are having fun spotting interesting street scenes and speculating on when the photos were taken. User PonderInc wants to know, "So, can we pay them to come back to Tulsa in April and May, when everything's blooming and green?!"

UPDATE 2009/10/12: Commenter Lacee Galloway writes:

Actually. This picture was taken on November 11, 2007. I know this because I am IN the picture. It was the day of a Hanson concert at the Cain's venue. My sleeping bag is first inline.

I've added three more blogs by and about Oklahoma to my blogroll. You'll see new entries from these blogs pop up on the powered-by-NewsGator blogroll headlines page. (I'm thinking it may be time to break out the Okie blogs to a separate page. What do you think?)

Random Dafydd (that's the Welsh version of David) grew up in Tulsa but now lives in Bartlesville. His blog covers Tulsa history, ancient manuscripts, and many other topics. Here are a couple of his recent historical entries: Tulsa before the railroad: Taylor Postoak Home and Tulsa Architecture, Hooper Brothers Coffee. The latter entry includes photos of the historic building on the edge of downtown at Admiral and Iroquois.

Green Country Values, which covers politics and regional events. Here's an entry about a trip last Saturday to the Lavender Festival and Stone Bluff Cellars. Blogger Jenn also has the scoop on U. S. Rep. John Sullivan's Private Property Rights Protection and Government Accountability Act, which addresses eminent domain abuse in the wake of the Kelo v. New London decision.

Finally, Save ORU chronicles the rebuilding of Oral Roberts University's finances and credibility. reacts to the AP report of declining enrollment:

(I found that last blog via Club Fritch, the blog of two ORU graduates, Ryan and Gillian (Rowe) Fritzsche, who are now in the film industry. They have a category called ORUgate.)

If you have a blog that you think would be of interest here at BatesLine, drop me a line at blog at batesline d0t com.

Every city has them: Small creeks and streams that have been converted into culverts and buried beneath streets and buildings. The bend in the San Antonio River that became Paseo del Rio narrowly escaped being converted to a storm sewer in the 1930s. Two recent blog entries highlight underground streams in two of the world's greatest cities.

Strange Maps has a map and descriptions for London's lost rivers, 15 streams that flow into the Thames, including the River Fleet:

The Fleet flows under King's Cross, which was originally known as Battle Bridge, after a place where Queen Boudicca is reputed to have fought the Romans. It ends in the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge. The river gave its name to Fleet Street, which in turn became a collective term for the British press, as most newspapers had their offices there. It almost gave its name to a tube line, but since its opening coincided with the Queen's silver jubilee, the Fleet Line was named the Jubilee Line. On a quiet moment in front of the Coach and Horses pub in Ray Street, Farringdon, you can still hear the Fleet's flow through the grating.

And Ace has this item about fishing in the basements of Manhattan buildings, where there is access to streams that were long ago covered over:

It seems that the many rivers and streams that flowed through Manhattan before it was turned into a vast concrete jungle could not simply be paved over. Those waterways had to be diverted and channeled underneath the buildings that now tower above them.

Here in Tulsa, there are several buried streams in downtown and midtown, including Elm Creek, which runs from the western part of Kendall-Whittier neighborhood, to Centennial Park (where it is in the open briefly), then underground through the Gunboat neighborhood and the 18th & Boston area to its outlet beneath the east end of the 21st Street bridge. (There was a proposal to reopen Elm Creek near 18th & Boston about 15 years ago as a riverwalk promenade, and the Sixth Street Task Force has proposed reopening the creek as a canal down the middle of 6th Street.) Cat Creek runs under Archer downtown and empties into the Arkansas River beneath I-244. Mill Creek, in the eastern part of Midtown, is underground until it reaches McClure Park.

The Beryl Ford Collection is a tremendous resource, and I've enjoyed exploring the collection on the Tulsa Library website, but looking for specific photographs of interest can be a frustrating experience, with vague captions and clumsy search options. The low resolution of the scanned photos can be frustrating too, as intriguing details which are probably legible on the original are not discernible on the library's scans.

The ideal online presentation of the Beryl Ford Collection would have several characteristics, taking advantage of Web 2.0 technology:

1. Each photo available in a range of resolutions, including the highest resolution possible -- at least 600 dpi.
2. Searchable extended descriptions and tags.
3. The ability for archive visitors to add comments (memories associated with the photo, historical details) and to add descriptive tags to aid searching.
4. The ability for archive visitors to attach notes -- highlighting certain details in the photo that might otherwise be overlooked.
5. The ability to search by geography -- to zoom in on a map and see photos in and around a particular location.

That last point is essential for researchers. I've begun a series on BatesLine.com called "If Asphalt Could Talk," using Sanborn maps, city directories, and old photos to reconstruct what downtown blocks looked like before the upheavals of the last forty years. Being able to search geographically would make it easier to find photos that depict a given block.

I understand that Tulsa Library may not have the bandwidth, storage, or technical wherewithal to provide this kind of presentation. Thankfully, there is already a website that provides this kind of capability: Flickr.

I've been using Flickr for a couple of years now and have uploaded over 3,000 photos. I have a "pro" Flickr account, included as part of my AT&T DSL account, which allows me to upload an unlimited number of images. Each photo can be up to 20 MB in size. There's no limit on the bandwidth used by people viewing my photos.

I have placed about 1700 of my photos on a map. It's possible to search an area for anyone's photos, for photos from a particular user, or for photos with a particular tag.

Since Flickr is owned by Yahoo, which is partnered with AT&T, our local telephone company, they might be willing to provide an account for THS as a corporate donation. If not, a pro account is only $25 per year.

The process of uploading, describing, and tagging 24,000 images would be tedious, but I'd certainly be willing to volunteer, and I'm sure many other Flickr-literate history buffs would as well.

From a blog called The Road Trip Destination Guide:

Sadly, few of us opt to navigate the road less traveled. During a recent side trip on Route 66 in Oklahoma, I found plenty of interest. Sadly though, I also discovered that many of the mom and pop motels and old carnival style road side attractions are falling victim to decay and abandonment. Or, worse yet, in urban area they're being torn down to make way for more fast food restaurants and other boring franchised business establishments.

Both Preservation Oklahoma and The National Trust for Historic Preservation have named Route 66 Motels to their most endangered places list. Unfortunately, city governments are often focused on developing new business no matter what the cost to the culture and heritage of the community. An article in the Urban Tulsa Weekly described one faction of the City Council as the "build anything I want anywhere I want" crowd. I'm not an expert on Tulsa, but there seems to be a rift in the city between those who would rather tear down everything old and build new, and the other camp that would like to preserve some of the character and culture of Tulsa.

The Tulsa area has lost a large number of Route 66 motels just within the last couple of decades. In other cases, wonderful neon has been replaced by boring backlit plastic. The Shady Rest tourist court on Southwest Blvd. and Max Meyer's tourist cabins between Sapulpa and Kellyville were the most recent losses. The owners probably didn't even recognize the significance of the buildings.

A little break from politics:

Mike Ransom of Tulsa TV Memories has posted video of the KTUL-TV signoff, February 18, 1979, narrated by Cy Tuma over a music bed of Henry Mancini's "Dreamsville," featuring John Williams (better known as a prolific movie soundtrack composer) on the piano.

The signoff begins with an image of the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code Seal of Good Practice and closes with the call letters of the station and the microwave transmitter superimposed on KTUL's 1,909-ft. tower, once the second tallest free-standing structure in North America. (And one that took its toll on birdlife, according to this 1987 ornithological paper.)

Here's a transcript of Cy Tuma's voiceover:

This seal is a symbol of Good Television. KTUL-TV observes the high standards of programming and advertising recommended by the Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Channel 8 welcomes your comments. Write anytime to KTUL-TV Box 8 Tulsa Oklahoma.

This is television station KTUL-TV, Channel 8, Tulsa, Oklahoma, owned and operated by Leake Television Incorporated, transmitting on microwave transmitter WBE-731.

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed today's programs. KTUL-TV pledges continuous service to our community with television programs that entertain, inform, and educate. We seek to serve the public needs by offering assistance to representatives of all community activities, and if we may help your organization please let us know by contacting Betty Boyd, KTUL-TV public service director.

Now on behalf of the management and staff of KTUL-TV, we wish you a very pleasant good night and good morning.

MORE: KTUL's great "8's the Place" promos from the '70s are online on KTUL's history page.

Gary Shore, longtime meteorologist at KJRH in Tulsa, died today of a heart attack in Sioux City, Iowa. He was 55.

Shore changed the TV weather business in Tulsa forever. While he wasn't the first professional meteorologist on the air in Tulsa -- Don Woods has that distinction -- his hiring represented a shift toward putting the science of forecasting in front of the viewers.

I remember seeing his first forecast on a TV in some storefront in the lower level of Southroads Mall. (Not Looboyles, but right next to it, I think.) We joked about his intro the next day at school: "How's the weather, Gary?" "Scary!"

He was only 25 when he started at what was then KTEW (now KJRH) in 1978, where he was chief meteorologist until 1995. Shore later worked at KWMJ-53 in Tulsa, then moved on to Huntsville, working for the last six and a half years at KCAU in Sioux City. A couple of memories from his co-workers:

"I always got a kick out of Gary. He had such a broad knowledge, and a LOVE of the weather, that he could talk about it forever. When ever we had time to fill, we knew we could count on Gary to fill the time. A lot of people didn't realize just how much Gary liked it here. He loved how crazy the weather could be here." -- Anchor Larry Wentz.

"Gary always had a song in his heart. No matter if he was on his way into work or just walking down the hall, he was always humming a tune. It was that love of life that he brought to his weather forecasts and to Siouxland." -- Anchor Jenna Rehnstrom.

Gary Shore had fond memories of his time in Tulsa and is remembered fondly here as well.

The weather won't be very interesting where he's headed, but that'll just open up more time for singing. May he rest in peace.

(Found via the TulsaNow Forum.)

MORE: Dan Satterfield remembers the man to whom he owes his career:

I first met Gary Shore in the Summer of 1979. I had written him a letter asking if by chance he needed a weather intern. I was a second year college student majoring in Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.

Gary was the Chief Meteorologist at the NBC affilliate KJRH TV in Tulsa. He had taken the town by storm. He had a Masters degree in Meteorology, and had already nailed some incredible forecasts. One in particular I remember is his forecast of three inches of snow. The local NWS office was forecasting flurries and so was every other TV guy in town. Not Gary, He was insistent that we were in for a significant snow fall.

Tulsa had 3 inches and Gary was the talk of the town....

I stood up at his wedding and he was best man at mine. We kept in touch and if I ever had a really tough snow forecast, I always gave him a call. Most of the time I had it right- because I learned from the best.

I do mean the best. I know of no one who was a better forecaster. Many people in Mannford Oklahoma owe there lives to his Tornado warning and there many other towns where people can say the same. There are a several people who are now working in cities big and small as forecasters both on air and off who owe Gary a debt of gratitude.

(Via Bubbaworld.)

STILL MORE: KJRH has a tribute page to Gary Shore, with a brief clip from a promo from his days at Channel 2. They also link to a tribute section of their forum and a tribute page on the KCAU website.

Midtown Tulsa is on Preservation Oklahoma's 2008 list of the state's most endangered historic places.

Details will be released later tonight, along with the other locations on the list. Here's the Preserve Midtown press release:

Midtown Tulsa has been placed on Oklahoma's Most Endangered Historic Places List for 2008.

On Thursday, January 31, 2008, Preservation Oklahoma will announce the 2008 Endangered List at the Gaylord-Pickens Oklahoma Heritage Museum, 1400 Classen Drive, Oklahoma City, 6:00pm.

Since 1993, Preservation Oklahoma and the State Historic Preservation Office have sponsored the Most Endangered Historic Places List. It serves as a sample of the thousands of landmarks across Oklahoma in need of our attention. Three proposals were entered from Midtown Tulsa neighborhoods: Yorktown Homeowners Assoc., Maple Ridge Homeowner's Assoc and from the grassroots organization PreserveMidtown.

The purpose of this list is to inform a larger public about the property and to focus attention on the challenges historic places face. While the listing does not ensure the protection of the site or guarantee funding, the designation has been a powerful tool for raising awareness and rallying resources to save these endangered sites.

Previous years' lists have included Downtown Tulsa and Route 66 motels. Tulsa is the site for the 2008 National Preservation Conference, presented by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Jack Frank has put together a number of wonderful films about Tulsa's past, using old news footage and home movies to show us what our city used to be like -- the ordinary, everyday stuff as well as the big news.

Jack has issued a new DVD, Fantastic Tulsa Films, Vol. 2, a follow-up to last year's popular disc. Included are home movies from Bell's Amusement Park in the '50s, and color film of a convertible ride through Utica Square, years before Vic Bastien declared it "Fashionable."

Fans of Tulsa TV Memories will enjoy film from the Mr. Zing and Tuffy Show, Lee and Lionel, and KOTV's Dance Party.

There's even some footage from 1920s Oklahoma A&M football, including a clip from the 1926 Bedlam match with the "U. O." Sooners.

The DVD will be previewed tonight with a 30 minute program on KOTV channel 6, but there's much more on the DVD.

There's a page on Jack's site about preserving your home movies and donating them for use in future editions.

If you have films containing scenes of Tulsa or Oklahoma, we'd love to see them. Maybe they will even be used in one of our upcoming shows. We know your films are valuable, so here's our arrangement. Allow us to view your home movies, and if we find something interesting that we would like to use, we will have your films professionally transferred to broadcast-quality master tape at no cost to you. You will then receive a copy of your home movies on VHS or DVD, whichever you prefer. Your original films can either be returned to you, or donated to the Tulsa Historical Society, where they will be properly stored, and well cared for.

Tune in tonight, buy the DVD, and step back into Tulsa's past.

An announcement from the Tulsa Preservation Blog:

On October 14, Tulsa's oldest historic district will open its homes to the public for a tour of some of the State's most original and historic homes.

Brady Heights invites you to celebrate the State's Centennial year at the 2007 Historic Home Tour featuring the best in Green Renovation products and practices. Visit a new breed of energetic Tulsans
influencing our legacy through responsible, sustainable living.

Come and tour beautiful historic homes while learning how you can apply energy conservation practices to your own home. Tickets are available from noon to 4 p.m. at Centenary United Methodist Church, 621 N. Denver Avenue. For more information, call (918)592-9135 or visit the Brady Heights website to purchase tickets online.

This tour is not to be missed!

The tour runs from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for children 12 and up; children under 12 are free, but you can get them at a discount if you buy in advance online.

The Brady Heights website is well organized and full of information about the neighborhood's history and current activities -- worth a visit.

I've been so busy creating content for this coming week's Urban Tulsa Weekly that I haven't had time to link the current issue's column. It's about what I call the Greenwood Gap Theory, the widely-held notion that nothing happened in Tulsa's one-time African-American commercial district between the 1921 Race Riot and the late '80s construction of the OSU-Tulsa campus.

To fill the gap, I look at the historical record provided by aerial photos, street directories, and oral histories, all of which reveal that Greenwood was rebuilt after the riot, better than before in the view of many, but it was government action -- in the form of urban renewal and freeway construction -- that produced the empty lots in the '70s which OSU-Tulsa replaced.

An annotated aerial view of Deep Greenwood (the part of the district extending a few blocks north of Greenwood and Archer) from 1951 accompanies the story. Here's a larger version of the graphic for your perusal (1 MB PDF). (The scan of the aerial photo was done by INCOG at a cost of $35. INCOG has aerial photos of the entire county taken at roughly 10 year intervals.) And this photoset contains the pages from the 1957 Polk City Directory for N. Greenwood Avenue, showing the businesses, churches, and residences in house number order. Specifically they are pages 357 through 360.

Over on the TulsaNow forum, Steve, who has collected some very interesting material on the history of his current neighborhood, Lortondale, has written some of his memories of growing up in Tulsa in the '60s and '70s and is inviting others to do the same. He grew up in Moeller Heights and attended the very modern St. Pius X Catholic school and parish in that neighborhood. (The neighborhood appears to be named after the owner of the farm on which the neighborhood was built; the parish met in the barn before the building was completed.)

Also, there's a discussion about the origin of Tulsa's street and avenue names. If you're curious to know who named the streets and why the names were chosen, or if you have some knowledge to share on the topic, click on through.

From the March 11, 1957, Tulsa Tribune we learn which Lewis gave his name to Tulsa's Lewis Avenue:

Services for Mrs. Elizabeth Bell Lewis, widow of S. R. (Buck) Lewis, pioneer Tulsa attorney and real estate developer for whom Lewis Avenue was named, will be at 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Musgrove Funeral Home at Claremore.

Burial will be in Woodlawn Cemetery there.

Mrs. Lewis, 84, died in a Claremore convalescent home Saturday after an illness of six months. She lived in Tulsa for many years before returning to her native Claremore last fall.

Her husband died in February, 1950. He had lived in Tulsa since 1887 and was a Democratic Party leader for many years.

He organized the Cherokee Land Co., a real estate firm which developed the Cherokee Heights Addition north of Archer Street and west of Lewis Ave. He also helped write a three-volume "History of Tulsa" and wrote "History of the Cherokees."

Mrs. Lewis was a first cousin of the late Will Rogers, former state Sen. Clu Gulager of Muskogee and the late John Gulager, Muskogee County judge, and a second cousin of former state Sen. Dennis Bushyhead of Claremore.

She was a sister of Mrs. A. V. Robinson of Claremore.

Blogger Kirk Demarais of Secret Fun Spot has long been fascinated by Phantasmagoria, the dark ride at swiftly vanishing Bell's Amusement Park. He detailed his history with the ride, along with photos and sketches, in this entry from February 8.

As sometimes happens when you post something on a blog, he got a reply from someone else with an interest in the topic -- long-time Bell's electrician Buddy Stefanoff, who offered Kirk the chance to come look around inside the ride as it was being dismantled and packed to move. In the process, Kirk learned more of the history of Phantasmagoria and some of its intriguing secrets.

"Farewell" may not be the right word, actually. Toward the end of that second entry you'll find a sneak preview of a concept for a new dark ride at Bell's new location, wherever that may be.

On a related note, a couple of days ago my wife and six-year-old daughter were driving past Expo Square on 21st Street, and as they went past Zingo, my little girl -- and she's small for her age -- started talking excitedly about all the rides she could ride this year that she was too short for last season. That's when my wife had to break the news -- Bell's was going away. She sobbed the rest of the way home.

From my years of involvement with the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, I know how relieved the immediate neighbors are that Bell's is going away. Personally I never wanted to see it leave entirely; I liked one Sunrise Terrace homeowner's proposal to have Tulsa County accommodate Bell's expansion toward the interior of Expo Square, along the State Fair Midway and away from the neighborhoods. Neighboring homeowners very reasonably wanted to prevent any encroachment into the open space buffer along the west side of the Fairgrounds.

There was a long legal fight to revoke the county's permission for Bell's to construct a new coaster closer to the neighborhood, and it was finally resolved this last year with a compromise. With Bell's gone, the neighbors won't have to worry about Bell's expansion plans anymore.

They will have to worry about whatever County Commissioner Randi Miller plans to put in its place. Oh, she says they don't know what's going to be done with the land, but you don't throw away a revenue source without something in mind to replace it. My intuition is that Miller has known what will be going in there since long before she announced that Bell's was being evicted, but she isn't yet willing to take the political flak for the decision.

(The neighbors will have more say over what will replace Bell's if the City of Tulsa annexes the Fairgrounds. Without annexation, only the County Commissioners and officials directly appointed by them will have a role in choosing the new use. With annexation, any change in zoning, any special exception, or variance would have to come through the City of Tulsa's zoning process, and would be more likely to be compatible with the surrounding neighborhoods.)

Would it have killed Miller and the Fair Board to give us just one more summer to say goodbye to the park as it has been for decades?

MORE: Kirk has a new post up about the White Lightnin' log flume ride.

There's an interesting thread over at the TulsaNow Forum about the history Lortondale neighborhood, on the east side of Yale Avenue at 26th Street. The subdivision of homes with low pitched roofs and glass walls was built in 1954 on what had been a farm belonging to the publisher of the Tulsa Whirled (thus the name) and later the original site of Meadowbrook Country Club (now on 81st Street between Memorial and Mingo).

One of the fascinating facts supplied by Steve, a 20-year re