What do you call the southmost part of Tulsa’s downtown? I’m legitimately curious, unsure if there’s an answer or even anyone who cares to contemplate the question. A nameless place is weirdly refreshing these days. Place names are plentiful yet frequently rootless. Sometimes they’re a speculative wish for what a neighborhood might become; elsewhere, they’re dripping with exaggerated nostalgia for a long-gone past.
An example is my Aunt Norma bragging about the “historical” accolades of her Dallas-Fort Worth suburb’s restrained downtown. It’s easy to scoff at, but she’s right. In this geographic context, anything older than Grapevine Mills Mall is indeed historic, worthy of district designation.
In Tulsa, our naming conventions are equally fluid, frequently aspirational, and downright manic, especially downtown. Few other cities rival our ratio of districts to downtown blocks. In the early 2000s, downtown was a sea of vacancies before pioneers like Libby Billings of Elote and Elliott Nelson of McNellie’s Group set up shop; today, the boundaries between our Deco, Blue Dome, and Arts Districts are blurry at best. If these districts are no longer distinct, it’s because Tulsa’s outgrown that era and fulfilled expectations that the blocks around these outliers would bloom.
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Looking north on Boston Avenue, you see Tulsa as it is: a modest metropolis. Looking the opposite direction, the imagination conjures little. South of 5th Street, there’s a sort of patchy area, a peri-threshold of semi-convincing buildings that house the threatened species known as full-time office workers.
Further south of there, though, is where density falls off completely. Parking spaces in this area vastly outnumber full-time residents. Churches with dwindling congregations are selling off property, and the few remaining, underoccupied apartment buildings appear as molting monuments.1
Drive Denver Avenue through this urban liminal space these days and your eyes may catch an unnatural shade of green. It belongs to a temporary art piece that was recently installed at the Plaza of the Americas, an unassuming triangular slice of concrete located between 7th and 8th Streets. For me, this piece sparks more creative thinking about the development of downtown Tulsa and the role of public art in modern city life than any dissertation or discussion possibly could. It’s exactly the type of public artwork Tulsa lacks—and what it needs.