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Tulsa City Council preview, 2021/05/05: 36th & MLK TIF
AFTER-ACTION REVIEW: All items on the regular council meeting agenda were approved without dissent. There was only one controversy: Gary Brinkner, vice chairman of the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, objected to special event application for the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, which would block off Greenwood and Archer for three...
Preserve the Midland Valley Pedestrian Bridge
Tulsa's Midland Valley Pedestrian Bridge and Zink Lake Dam viewed from the west bank, south of the bridge and dam, February 14, 2016 Resistance is gathering to the plan to demolish the Midland Valley Pedestrian Bridge across the Arkansas River. Although an engineering analysis from 2015 shows that the 110-year-old...
OKC Spaghetti Warehouse, Bricktown pioneer, closes; Tulsa store remains open
Spaghetti Warehouse, one of the catalysts for transforming a neglected neighborhood of warehouses into Oklahoma City's Bricktown entertainment district, closed its doors today after 26 years of business, a victim of the surrounding district's success. The restaurant opened for business, with space for 425 diners, on November 12, 1989, at...
TulsaNow District 4 candidate forum, Wednesday, June 4, 2014
TulsaNow is hosting a forum for the candidates for Tulsa City Council District 4. The candidates will face off in the June 24, 2014, primary election. The forum will be held on Wednesday, June 4, 2014, beginning at 6 p.m., at Foolish Things Coffee, 10th and Main in downtown Tulsa....
Downtown Tulsa needs demolition limits, regulatory and tax relief
Route 66 "planter" and "nature band-aid" attempt to distract from ugliness of Tulsa Community College surface parking lot. UPDATE 2019/11/29: I'm revisiting this entry years later, as Strong Towns uses Black Friday to call attention to parking minimums, zoning laws that require a minimum number of parking spaces based...
Bill Leighty on historic preservation
Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission chairman Bill Leighty has an excellent op-ed in the latest issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly about the importance of historical preservation to Tulsa's future. I'm tempted to quote the whole thing. The heart of the article is an account of a recent Preservation Leadership Training...
What will become of Wilson Middle School? Public meeting Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Tulsa Public Schools is holding a public forum on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 6 to 7 pm, regarding the sale of Wilson Middle School, one of 14 school buildings closed at the end of the last school year as part of the district's cost-cutting plan. The forum will be held...
Carless couple profiled in <em>Tulsa Business Journal</em>
Kristin and Nathan Pickard, the Brady Heights couple whose 30-day experiment in commuting through Tulsa by bicycle is nearing its end, were profiled by Holly Wall in the latest (February 1, 2010) issue of Tulsa Business Journal. If you haven't visited their blog in a while, you'll want to get...
My mayoral manifesto
An edited version of this column appeared in the April 1, 2009, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is no longer available online. Posted online June 15, 2016. Election Day 2009 is a mere seven months away, and a credible opponent to Mayor Kathy Taylor's bid for re-election...
2008 National Preservation Conference planning meeting, June 19
It's a great privilege for Tulsa to host this year's National Preservation Conference, to be held in October, and it's a great opportunity for Tulsans concerned about historic preservation, adaptive reuse, sensitive infill, neighborhood conservation, art deco architecture, and urban design to raise local awareness on these issues. Here's an...
Tax Increment Financing (TIF): The Basics
An edited version of this column appeared in the October 31, 2007, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available online courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Posted online September 9, 2017. Infrequently Asked Questions about Tax Increment Financing: The Basics By Michael D. Bates What's all...
Blogger Bash recap
Had a great time at the first-ever bash for faith-friendly Oklahoma bloggers. About 14 folks showed up -- Don Danz has the list here and here . (Browse around to see several of his entries about the event.) Dan Lovejoy has some great pictures here, with links to larger versions....
Skelly/Froug's protests to continue
Tulsa Area Preservation Society held another protest Wednesday outside the Skelly Building, one of two buildings which the Tulsa Whirled plans to demolish later this summer. (I couldn't manage the time away from work this week, unfortunately.) Protests are planned every Wednesday from 11:30 to 12:30 through August to call...
If you seek his monument, you're parking on it
I see that Dean Van Trease, outgoing president of Tulsa Community College, is getting a block of Boston Avenue double-signed in his honor. It would have been better to name the Downtown campus's vast swath of surface parking in his honor -- the Van Trease Treeless Expanse, perhaps. TCC has...
More Savannah notes
* Savannah has a number of historic home tours, and one is presenting a variation on the traditional haunted house. The Isaiah Davenport house (Historic Savannah Foundation's first preservation success) has a living history presentation this month called "Deadly Pestilence", a depiction of the yellow fever epidemic of 1820, based...
Broughton Street
Skeptics will object to my use of Savannah as a role model for Tulsa. Savannah, after all, was founded in the 1730s, the first city in the colony of Georgia. It's renowned for its beautifully restored historic district, full of buildings which were around long before the railroad came to...
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