Tulsa Smart Growth Conference 1996

TULSA: OUR NEXT 100 YEARS
Mayor / AIA Conference on City Design
January 18, 1996
Speaker: Welcome by Mayor M. Susan Savage

Introduction by Herb Fritz, AIA

Herb Fritz: My name is Herb Fritz. I'm an architect here in Tulsa, and I am the president of the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture. I'd like to start today by introducing the members of the head table. We have with us the mayor of Charleston, S.C. -- Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. We also have with us a noted professor of architecture and the director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College of New York -- Jonathan Barnett. The president of AIA Eastern Oklahoma -- Leisa Marshall McNulty. We have with us Bob Jones, professor emeritus and past director of the University of Oklahoma Urban Design Program at the University Center at Tulsa. And, of course, the mayor of the City of Tulsa -- Susan Savage.

It's dark out there, but I'd also like to introduce some members of the City Council who are here today. We have Councilor Gary Watts, Councilor Darrell Gilbert, Councilor Bob Gardner, and Councilor Darla Hall. We thank you all for coming; we appreciate it.

The conference you all are attending today is titled Tulsa: Our Next 100 Years. It is a partnership among the mayor of the City of Tulsa, Susan Savage; the Tulsa Foundation of Architecture; and the AIA Eastern Oklahoma Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Of course, we also have sponsors. Partial funding for the conference has been provided by the American Architectural Foundation Accent on Architecture, the McGraw-Hill Cos. Construction Information Group, the Amoco Corp., Public Service Co. of Oklahoma, Trammell Crow Co., Liberty Bank and Trust, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And we have graphics and artwork provided to us by Eslick Walsh Signage Group here in Tulsa.

And we also have supporters. The supporters include the Tulsa Chapter of the Building Owners and Managers Association, the Tulsa Chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Parks, the Oklahoma Chapter of the American Planning Association, the Oklahoma Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, and, of course, the OU Masters Program in Urban Design at UCT and the Tulsa Preservation Commission. I'd like to thank all of our sponsors and our supporters. Without their help, this important conference would certainly not be possible. And important it is. Urban planning and city design are serious issues. This conference is intended to be a way to begin some serious discussions about urban planning and the future of Tulsa. However, that can only occur if our elected officials believe in the power of planning. And we're lucky in Tulsa. We have a mayor who not only believes but understands why planning and city design are important to the future of Tulsa. Mayor Savage's understanding is one of the primary reasons this conference is taking place today. She has spent many hours helping put this conference together and I think she's ready to give us some more of her time. So please join me in welcoming the mayor of the City of Tulsa, the honorable Susan Savage.

Speaker: Mayor M. Susan Savage

Mayor M. Susan Savage: Thank you, Herb, and good morning to each and every one of you. Thank you for braving today's snowstorm. I picked up Mayor Riley from the airport last night at about 9:30, after his flight was delayed for an hour and a half, and I observed to him that in the course of his visit to Tulsa he would not only be able to enjoy our beautiful city but to enjoy it in most of the four seasons, in less than the 24-hour period he intends to be here.

So what a great day, as we look around our city and understand and see how significant the natural elements are and what an impact they can have. I think it brings well into focus the significance and importance of the physical component of life in our city. So today, we will spend the day focusing on Tulsa: Our Next 100 Years.

I'm pleased that Herb has thanked all of our sponsors. I wish to add my thanks to the organizers and sponsors of today's conference. This has been a labor of love for many of us. It has been an exciting opportunity and has really been a lot of fun to see how all the ideas and varied interests that are components of life in a city have come together. I believe there are few issues as current or as compelling as how we physically design and build for Tulsa's future.

Let me also welcome our two distinguished guest speakers -- Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joe Riley, my good friend; I look forward to introducing him later; and Jonathan Barnett, author and director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College of New York. And a special thank you to our presenter, Bob Jones, who has been a good friend to the design community here in Tulsa and has cared very much about the quality of life in our city.

Today is Tulsa's 98th birthday. And as our city moves closer to its 100th anniversary, it seems fitting to consider our history. Where have we been as a city? How have we grown? And it is also important to assess our current strengths and weaknesses in order to chart a fresh course that can guide Tulsa into the 21st century.

In The History of Tulsa, written by C.B. Douglas in 1920, we learned that the town of Tulsa, Indian Territory, was incorporated on January 18, 1898. The Indian Republic, an occasional weekly paper published in Tulsa at that time, gives us a glimpse of conditions that we now describe with that phrase "quality of life." And let me quote, "The Indian Republic believes that a better and brighter day has thus dawned for Tulsa. Conditions have become intolerable here and something had to be done. When the United States Commission, especially a high-classed jurist like Judge Elijah Tolett, is forced to leave Tulsa because of the fear for his life at the hand of a band of outlaws, when it is not safe at night to light up a store or residence without having that light shot out, when stores are blown up and their proprietor, one of our foremost citizens, killed as was Jeff Archer, and some fronts broken out as was Tate Brady's, when our kangaroo City Marshal, chosen by the Vigilance Committee, Tom Stuffelbean gets drunk and falls in the river and would have been drowned if it had not been for Burl Cox, when bands of outlaws roamed the hills on every side of town, it's time good citizens who expect to build a city here and raise their families, rise in their might and exert their right."

They further wrote on the subject of incorporation, and I quote from October 1, 1897, "It behooves our people to prepare for self government. Very probably, ere many moons, municipal privileges will be given to Tulsa. There will then be a glorious opportunity of making Tulsa one of the prettiest, most progressive and healthy towns in the entire country." It is clear that there were great expectations and great hopes that life and its many components would be enhanced with their ability as citizens of the community to determine their city's course.

So Tulsa's life as a city began with mayors, city leaders and civic- minded citizens setting the tone. It was Mayor Rhode in Tulsa's early days who oversaw the first paving of a street in our city. That was Main Street in downtown Tulsa not far from where we sit today. Mayor Thad Evans helped develop the Spavinaw water system and worked hard to overcome the division, both physical and emotional, caused by the 1921 race riot. In 1956, Mayor Jim Maxwell envisioned the modern city of Tulsa. He hosted the first international conference on the peaceful use of space. During his administration, many new facilities were built and enhanced, such as the Convention Center, the Central Library, City Hall, the airport and the idea of an inner dispersal loop. And certainly, a whole host of civic and cultural improvements were made possible by families with recognizable names such as Gilcrease, Phillips, LaFortune, Skelly, Aaronson, Perryman, Helmerich, Terwilleger -- the list goes on and on. Each of them felt building a community and having a place in which people could live and interact were essential to the life of a city.

Clearly, the shaping of our physical city has been as important a public policy issue as dealing with daily demands of budgets and other economic and social issues. Most cities, and the case is the same with Tulsa, were founded and grew because of certain attributes of their respective locations. In our case, the discovery of oil and the abundance of water made our location a desirable one. Other cities have developed because of seaports, transportation crossroads, or other types of raw materials that have been available.

Yet today, a shift is occurring in why people choose to live in a city, through the explosive application of technology to virtually every type of job and through the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. People now have more choices about where they can live and where they will live. This shift is profound. People are becoming increasingly "place-dependent," meaning they use other criteria than location for selecting where to live. Therefore, it becomes incumbent upon us to re-evaluate what is important about our city. The information economy requires an inventory that takes almost no storage space, can be created anywhere, can be transported instantly and cheaply, and can be adapted, expanded and modified at will. So life in cities will change as a result of it. And quality of life, city livability, and our ability as people to connect with the life of our city will lead to different decisions about where we choose to live. How we design and shape the physical city turns a location into a place.

With each of these issues, there are a number of significant design and planning questions. Simply stated, people like to visit or live in places that look nice, that are pleasing to the eye, and where they have a choice about how they will interact. Tulsa has benefited and can continue to benefit from the cues that have been given to us from cities like Portland, San Francisco, Baltimore, Charleston -- dynamic urban centers that are attractive because they have developed a vision for making their communities better places to live.

We have some unique opportunities and history that I believe position us very, very well and enable us to build upon the strides we have already taken to become one among those well-designed and memorable places where people like to be, to live, to work, and to recreate. In the onslaught of the social and economic changes that have occurred in the United States since World War II, many cities, particularly city centers, have lost much of their vitality. Many of you were present earlier this morning at the Downtown Tulsa Unlimited breakfast meeting to review some of the components of the downtown plan by the Blue Ribbon Task Force, a consortium of a number of interested groups seeking to look at ways to reuse, revitalize, and rethink the function of our central city. Our city is no different from hundreds across the nation, and while we have recorded some recent successes in attracting some of our larger corporate citizens to relocate and expand their downtown operations, there is no doubt that downtown, as an urban center, has changed dramatically -- certainly since 30 years ago when I was growing up in Tulsa and able to come downtown for shopping, for recreation, and for most of my individual needs.

So this joint effort in how we rethink the design, the shape, and the use of our central city core becomes essential to helping us define how we are going to treat other areas of our city. The North Peoria Corridor Task Force is one other example. It will give us a foundation upon which we can have further discussions about redevelopment and reuse of our inner-city neighborhoods.

Our job today is not to define what specific guidelines exist or what we might need. Our job instead is to take a look at some of the concepts about life in the city, how they fit together, what works, what we believe does not work, in order for us to move forward with a community discussion that will enable us to think and to explore ways that we build on strengths and visions of our first century. We have the opportunity to seize all the available assets in Tulsa to craft a more graceful, healthy, vibrant, and livable community for the next 100 years.

Developing a Tulsa approach to good urban design will benefit our wonderful community for years to come. And as many of you know, because many of you have been involved in working to achieve that, we have taken some important steps that have positioned us very well in developing a comprehensive urban-design strategy for our city.

We have begun by adopting ordinances designed to address two components of good urban design. In 1993, a landscape ordinance was created in order to promote the beautification of the City of Tulsa and to enhance its aesthetic quality. It also exists to promote reasonable preservation and replenishment of valuable trees and vegetation -- there being not only aesthetic benefits from that but environmental ones as well -- and to achieve a meaningful urban forest while permitting economically feasible urban development to occur.

A second urban-design component was created in 1988 when an ordinance was created to help protect our historic neighborhoods. Our historic neighborhoods were feeling encroachment pressures from incompatible residential and commercial entities and desired a means to control their own destiny. Since that time, four neighborhoods -- Gillette, North Maple Ridge, Swan Lake and Yorktown -- have been formally zoned under our historic-preservation ordinance. The benefits of historic infill preservation zoning have been reported from those neighborhoods, who say that this ordinance helps to enhance property values, it has helped to preserve the historic integrity of the neighborhood, and it has ensured a way to blend commercial and residential redevelopment such as the very, very successful Cherry Street project in the Swan Lake neighborhood.

And throughout the discussions that led to these two ordinances and other urban-design discussions, we have received the thoughtful help of active residents and neighborhood leaders, developers, and elected officials. We in Tulsa have learned to effectively involve citizens in the design process, which we believe creatively generates more energy and more ideas toward reaching our goals. We have a number of partners, as we know today from our many sponsors. But within our city framework, we have our Arts Commission, our Planning Commission, our neighborhood associations, the Board of Adjustment, our Historic Preservation Commission, and many more. Each and every one of them participates, through the decisions and recommendations they make, in setting a tone and placing a footprint on the style, design, and physical attributes of our city.

I hope today to challenge each of you and your organizations and companies to personally get involved in helping shape Tulsa's built environment in the 21st century. There are many questions for us to ask today, many things for us to consider as we plan our public and private improvements. Streets and roads are one example. Do we continue with the standard that has been set along Yale Avenue between 51st and 61st as a standard we want to replicate community- wide for major arterials with landscaping and buffers for the neighborhoods? In the area of parks and cultural facilities, just yesterday the City-County Library Authority discussed a new library facility in the Florence Park area. Is this a prospect for some sort of joint effort combining multiple uses that might provide not only the educational value of a library but also offer recreational value and neighborhood revitalization?

For our trail system we currently have completed, under construction, or under design, more than 50 miles of trails in and around our city. How do we continue to link those trail systems, which have become a model for other communities, to the urban center we are and ensure people have access to those trails from their neighborhoods?

In the area of flood control, we have certainly made great strides in turning our detention facilities from holes in the ground, as they have been described in the past, to multi-use facilities for recreational purposes and enhancements in neighborhoods.

Certainly the component of crime prevention in consideration of design speaks very loudly to any community concerned with the quality of life. What are the long-term implications of gated communities? Can cul-de-sacs help reduce property crimes? Can we illuminate our parks without keeping residents in adjoining neighborhoods up all night because of the 24-hour glow?

As Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

We need, and Tulsa needs, your skills and talent to be directly engaged in shaping our community and the generation of young people who today are on our streets and in our schools, but in the future will be in our board rooms and our city's business settings. And while I understand that design alone is only one part in community life in any city, it is a reflection of how people live, work, recreate, and travel. It directly defines the kind of city we have chosen to be.

I'm personally convinced that by improving the physical quality of our buildings, our streets, our parks, our public spaces, we can improve the livability of our community.

To conclude, I wish to share with you a thought that John Ruskin wrote nearly 150 years ago. He was referring to buildings directly, but it really applies to our communities as well. He wrote, "When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think as we lay stone on stone that the time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them. Men will say as they look upon the labor and the root substance of them, 'See, this our Fathers did for us.'"

Thank you for spending your day with us today. Thank you for participating in this really exciting discussion that we are beginning in Tulsa, and thank you for the care and the commitment that you have for our city.