Having moved away from Tulsa I have become accustomed to getting questions when I disclose where I was born and grew up. Sometimes I’ll mess with people and talk about riding a horse to school, but my unremarkable physical frame and lack of any twang in my speech usually make the ruse hard to sustain for long. And thus I quickly clarify that my life in Tulsa was mostly indistinguishable from the lives of many of my peers in the professional-managerial class. “I mean, we shopped at Target,” is a comment I often deploy to exorcise any lingering mental images of cowboys and tumbleweeds. And I always follow up with a simple statement, whose truth no demographer ever had to convince me of: “I mean, Tulsa is a city.”
As an adult I have called a series of bona fide Big Cities home: Berlin, DC, Chicago, New York, and now San Francisco, and measured against such places Tulsa will never rank the highest, whether in terms of density or public transit. And growing up I was always aware of where we stood in the pecking order. My freshman year of high school in 1991 saw the debut of Urban Tulsa Weekly, which my cohort of intellectual friends and I eagerly consumed for worldly content in the pre-Internet era, even as we scoffed with sarcasm at the aspiration of the publication’s title. And every time we were dropped off or picked up at the Java Dave’s Coffee at 15th and Peoria (the epitome of Gen X sophistication), or later drove ourselves to and from the late night diner Village Inn for coffee and pie, we were reminded of the fundamentally suburban character of our lives. But none of this shakes my fundamental belief, however, that Tulsa is a city.
And yet it’s only three decades since I last lived in Tulsa that I’ve come to understand the origins of this certainty and appreciate the type of urbanism that my hometown instilled in me. This awareness stems in part from a work of architectural theory published in 1972, three years before my parents moved to Oklahoma and five years before I was born. Learning From Las Vegas was prophetic in offering a framework for reflection on the built environment of Tulsa as it has existed during my lifetime. Originating in a workshop at Yale, the book was a provocative intervention in architecture and urban design, calling for scholars and critics to take seemingly unplanned spaces such as the Las Vegas Strip more seriously, or at least just accept them at face value. As critic Christopher Hawthorne summarized in a retrospective piece for the book’s 50th anniversary, the authors argued for “understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be.”
This idea of approaching a city on its own terms has inspired me to reflect on the kind of urbanism Tulsa instilled in me. And what I have realized is that beyond any architectural analysis, Tulsa has always been a city for me because of the people and spaces it gave me access to: a piano teacher who built a haven of modernism in an unassuming Broken Arrow home, a symphony orchestra and performing arts center that hosted an early and awkward attempt at gay dating, and a long-defunct bookstore where as a newly out-of-the-closet man I taught myself how you go about meeting a cute stranger. Through these and other experiences Tulsa taught me the value and values of city living.
***
About as often as I am asked about growing up in Tulsa I am asked how I got into classical music. I always give credit first to my parents, both of them gifted musicians in various capacities and who prioritized providing their children piano lessons with our family’s teacher, Beryl Nash, who died in 2018. When I was her student and even for many years after I was never aware of the backstory of “Ms. B,” whose biography now strikes me today as nothing short of inspirational, with the particulars of her life reaffirming Tulsa’s status as a city.
Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter, The Talegate
Ms. B was born in Lubbock in 1943 and graduated from high school in Pampa, an hour’s drive northeast of Amarillo.1 She went on to study at the University of Oklahoma and earned a Master’s degree in piano and organ performance, and from 1980 until her retirement was the music director at the Church of St. Benedict in Broken Arrow. Along with this position she made a living by teaching piano at a studio she maintained in her home, called the Music Institute of Tulsa. She never married or had children.