Tulsa is a car city, built by oil. Its central vein is Route 66, a monument to car culture in America. Despite the city-wide hard-on for motor vehicles, people walk stretches of Tulsa every day. I decided to join them. I would walk across Tulsa’s stretch of that old highway, I decided, east to west.
When preparing to walk across Tulsa, I thought about all the other long-walkers I knew of: the Peace Pilgrim, Mark Baumer walking for climate change awareness, people with purpose and many more miles ahead of them.
This walk was not like any of those. It was less than 11 miles, about four-and-a-half hours in total. It was curiosity driven. Maybe it was stubbornness that led me to think I could do it here, of all unwalkable places—where walkers find a way despite the car worship.
I did not do this walk barefoot, and I didn't do it for the environment (though climate disaster is the belly of my fear, always). I did this leisurely, watching for good weather. I did it to see my city with a new perspective, after having been gone for a few years. I did it because I could, and maybe to say I did.
The people who loved me were nervous—walking for miles in Tulsa is a wild concept to most. When the keys are in your hand, it just ain’t an option. Most people had concerns for my safety, my stamina, and the heat.
It was hot on the day I went out, a Sunday morning, but I had water and shorts. I had the luxury of people knowing where I was, where to meet me, and of being used to walking: luxuries not everyone has. I love the meditative space of the long walk.
This long walk started in East Tulsa.
11th and Garnett to 11th and Harvard
I started walking west across from a dispensary. While taking pictures at the Route 66 gateway sign, I saw a scissor-tailed flycatcher jump from branch to electrical box and back. Now there’s an Oklahoman omen.
From Memorial to Harvard, there was no cover from the sun. It beat down on the sidewalk, which reflected heat back onto my skin. Thankfully, I had at least remembered to put on sunscreen that morning.
I came across three other walkers. A guy with a shopping cart moseyed in front of me for a while, and would cross the street multiple times. I got honked at twice. Appreciation? Intimidation? I followed all the traffic rules and pushed walk buttons where I could—no jaywalking on my part.
It felt like each block had five car dealerships with the same used cars in slightly different colors or prices. My own car is pretty shitty: no A/C, 22 years old. The irony of walking past car after car after car for sale was not lost on me. Why not buy one, these places suggested, and solve your problems? Unfortunately, I didn’t budget for a new car on this walk.
There were no businesses open for me to wander into, besides three different QuikTrips. I walked past them all, breathing in gasoline and exhaust.
I passed the old Rose Bowl, which is now One Hope Tulsa, an “urban ministry” center. It was a Sunday morning around 10 a.m. when I walked by it. The parking lot was empty, and the ministry was closed.
11th and Harvard to 11th and Peoria
Right here is largely where I grew up. It's changed a lot. B-roll shots of this street (pre-Mother Road Market) are sometimes used in The First 48 when they mention the “seedy” parts of Tulsa. Last time I watched it, I recognized the old car wash where I would go to get change. Now, it’s an empty lot ripe for development.
The sidewalk was busted after Harvard. Chunks missing, gravel where sidewalk once was, detours that pushed me into the bike lane at times. Tacos Don Francisco’s old building is still for sale, and the mere sight of it made me crave two chicken tacos. It was about 11 a.m., and their new location, right across the street, already had a line of cars in the drive through.
Around Lewis, there are now huge parking lots for Mother Road Market, and a massive, gray, expensive mixed-use complex. Those studio apartments cost more than my two-bedroom apartment with a sunroom two miles west. I wondered, what do these apartments add, besides traffic? There’s still no comfortable tree cover. It’s still hot. There’s an openness to these buildings. Not a charming closeness, but instead the terrifying flatness of neutrals and blackened windows. There’s a dustiness to it all.
I am so used to this intersection and its changes. I’ve walked it a lot. I think what’s so damning about it is its sanitized newness. It’s all wrong. Where are my abandoned warehouses and shack-buildings with charm? Why is the apartment complex called Noma? Why are we naming areas based on businesses? This area used to be owned by a pair of Creek sisters. The house I grew up in is on a former allotment of Addie Perryman. I’m not saying it should be called the Perryman District, but hell, I find that more interesting than “North Market.” What happens to the Market District when Mother Road Market, named after a decommissioned highway, becomes another empty building?
My calves started to hurt around here. I stopped at a QuikTrip for some electrolytes and kept going.
I walked past Hillcrest, where my mother helps deliver babies. The giant hospital building usually provides enough shade, but at noon, the sun was inescapable. I walked the part of Route 66 that has undergone the most revitalization in Tulsa. It’s busy on weekends, and on Sunday is full of the after-church crowd, with people eating, shopping, and visiting: it’s the most walkable part of 11th.
Due to the prettying up of Route 66, neighborhood streets and local businesses are all within a five-minute walk of each other. The fresh neon signs and extreme kitsch all harken to a past of classic cars, road trips, and a manufactured simplicity. It emulates an early highway culture that doesn’t exist anymore; now it's a facsimile. The area’s Frankensteined nostalgia is part and parcel of its walkability. It’s an easily traversable trip through time in which you can buy modern goods.
11th and Peoria to the Neon Sign Park Across the River
Further down 11th, I walked between pickleball courts on one side and the Tulsa Race Massacre mass grave site at Oaklawn Cemetery on the other. There’s a plaque that faces the street inside the cemetery. I like that it faces the street. I like that it’s a gravestone. It presents the reality of the unmarked graves to onlookers. The atrocities are listed neatly, as atrocities are. I used to smoke weed in this cemetery parking lot as a teenager before we knew. Everything in Tulsa is layered on top of everything else—which is what all land is and which all land in America knows. It’s all spilled oil and someone else’s blood.
I felt most comfortable here. I was close to my apartment; I know this walk well. The sun was out and it was the afternoon, and I was grateful to have a huge water bottle with me. I got a coffee, ate lunch, and kept going.
Once I got farther into and past downtown, the walk got trickier as Route 66 and 11th Street shifted with the city. The main beats: Highway. Heat. Hot. Sun. Hot. Highway. The sparse trees and mini skyscrapers don’t shield the sun. I was hot and I would continue to be hot. That is just how it is.
As a pedestrian, I felt pretty safe during most of this walk. The most unfamiliar and uncomfortable part of my walk diverted me from 11th onto 12th, as Route 66 goes over the highway and around the fire station at 12th and Guthrie. On one side of the street, the sidewalk was lacking, and the other side of the street was directly above the highway. I took turns navigating grass and street and short strips of sidewalk.
When I crossed the river, I felt good. The end was there. I had gone through familiar to unfamiliar. Here, I was back to familiar. I walked up to the neon sign park where I would be finishing, and I saw the light (proverbial and neon) reflected in a fresh piece of roadkill in front of me. The writer in me was excited; the former 10-year-plus vegetarian side of me was not. It was a nine-banded armadillo, dead on the curb. I started this walk with that scissor-tailed flycatcher in motion, and I ended it with this armadillo. Not really a better way to bookend this.
* * *
I walked down Route 66 and all I got was sore calves.
Why do we care so much about a decommissioned highway? Sure, I’m into the idea of Route 66. The wear and tear of it. The way it’s so un-useful.
I worked at some businesses along Route 66 recently and talked to people who loved it. They loved the aesthetics, the American history, and, specifically, the car culture. They held on to something long gone because they find it comforting or fascinating. I like this way of being. I like people who are into things anachronistic to the times, and I’m like this too. (All I wanted to be in high school was a bookbinder.) There’s something about the dilapidated buildings in Tulsa that I’ve always loved: the faded colors of the old painted brick buildings. I love that we collect the neon signs, remnants of Americana nostalgia. It’s not new, or fresh, and I find that so much more interesting than when it is.
Walking a street synonymous with cars (most people my age were introduced to Route 66 through the 2006 film Cars) felt like I was both a tourist in my own city and a jaded local—which might be the Tulsan experience entirely. Conversations with my born-and-bred Tulsan friends start with reserved excitement about new opportunities coming into town but often end up in complaints about rising rent prices, a crowded downtown, and new builds. Despite all that, we still sometimes go to the Center of the Universe for the nostalgia factor.
I was struck by the lack of open businesses (made even more clear by the abundance of small car dealerships), and the fact that while it is technically walkable, I understand why people don’t choose to walk here. Frankly, it’s boring. If meditative states aren’t your jam, you might not choose walking as your main form of transportation.
More than the walking—which was laborious and physically challenging, sure, but I love physically challenging myself—I was struck by the changing of the city. My idea of Tulsa is stuck in the time when I grew up here. I think that’s either a human thing or a Tulsan thing. We aren’t very impressed with growth because it doesn’t feel important—not nearly as important as a favorite teenage hangout bulldozed to make way for luxury apartments or a storage facility or a parking lot.
What I love about the landscape of Tulsa is the persistence of nature. Beside our efforts to cover ourselves in asphalt, animals have their own journeys with their own routes. A scissor-tailed flycatcher will flit around and an armadillo will walk—at least until struck down by a passing vehicle. Tulsa’s a car city, after all.
