At last night’s council meeting, I was glad to see The Council unanimously* deny the application by the Indian Health Care Center to close Owasso Ave., between 6th St. and 5th Place. The Indian Heath Care Center had wanted to close Owasso in order to adjoin their property to the west of Owasso, thus creating a “campus atmosphere”.
The neighbors and community leaders opposed the street closing as they felt that it would interfere with the recently adopted** 6th Street Task Force Infill Plan. Many speakers came before the council to voice their opposition to this closure, but it was Jamie Jamieson, the developer and builder of The Village At Central Park, who best summed up the opposition.
First, a few questions for the Council to consider.
The street is public property. If there is no compelling civic reason to close it, why should we take things away from the public?
- If it contradicts the spirit of an enlightened, Neighborhood Plan, facilitated by the City, on which the 6th St task force has worked for five years, is it a good idea to close it?
- If it provides important, uninhibited access to the Park for the residential neighborhood to the north of 5th Place, should it be closed? And if it also provides public parking spaces, where noone’s permission to park is required?
- If taking the street out of the public realm diminishes the flexibility and viability of the re-development of a blighted, inner-city neighborhood, as this would.…should it be closed?
- If the neighborhood has already presented a solution that addresses the Health Care Center’s concerns, and saves them money, should it be closed to the public?
- If the City is now spending $6m. on major park improvements designed to help kick-start the area’s future prosperity, is this a time to privatize access to the Park from the neighborhood?
- What do you think is the solution to a ‘blighted’ neighborhood: replacing homes with surface parking lots? Or with new housing? Which to you better delivers the ‘general welfare’?
- If Public Works promised the closure of Owasso to the Indian Health Care Center ten years ago, as we have just been told, why did they not tell us? Why are we finding out this evening? Apparently they have been reassured ‘repeatedly’ by Public Works that this would happen? Why do they wait till tonight to tell us this, when their representative has been a member of the 6th St. task force for five years?
Next, a few clarifications.
I understand the Care Center’s goals to be:
- Safe walking from parking lot to building,
- More surface parking,
- The ability to extend the building to closer to where Owasso Avenue now is.
We have suggested solutions to meet all these:
- To keep the road in the public domain, as it is now.
- To add a brick crosswalk from parking lot to the Center;
- To install bollards to enhance the pedestrian experience;
- To add shade-trees along both sides of the road, set in the side-walk;
- To add landscaping between the sidewalk and parking lots;
- To support the Center in its application for a Special Exception or a Variance enabling it to build closer to the street – a design solution which is very consistent with the Infill Plan that will soon come before the Council for approval;
- To work with the City’s urban development team to obtain funding for these improvements from the Central Park TIF budget.
In this way we retain the public’s unimpeded access by car and on foot between the neighborhood behind the Center and Central Park. We add value to the Center’s property; and we add value to and preserve access from the neighborhood immediately to the north of the Center.
This solution - and it is a solution - is much more pedestrian-friendly than the super-block proposed by the Center.
A nicer word for ‘superblock’ in this instance is perhaps ‘campus’. But the Healthcare center’s plan does not create a campus: it creates a parking lot. The neighborhood’s plan will deliver a more campus-like feel by the addition of street- and landscaping that delivers a walkable, people-friendly environment for everyone. You don’t need to privatize streets to create a campus-like atmosphere. The walkable public alleys and streets of Oxford, Cambridge, London, the Sorbonne in Paris, enhance the campus atmosphere of their universities, they don’t detract from it. And the campus of the University of Tulsa does just fine with public streets running through it.
The solutions of the 6th St. task force contained in the Neighborhood Plan include the principle that wherever possible we sustain the grid system which serves the City well; and that we should enhance sidewalks and sustain alleys, which provide access, alternative pedestrian routes and places for children to play.
The closure of this street would reduce the neighborhood’s access to the Park at precisely the time when the Park is undergoing a radical transformation into a jewel in the heart of Tulsa. This is not a time to diminish the public realm and cut residents off from the Park; it is a time to dignify access to a Park that is the centerpiece of a revitalized neighborhood. To inhibit access flatly contradicts the spirit of five years’ work by the neighborhood’s Task Force.
The IHCRC asserted that one purpose of such a closure is to ensure the safety of employees of the IHRC. This doesn’t really hold water, since:
1 Owasso Ave. provides access to a residential neighborhood. It will never be more than the quiet neighborhood street it is now - even when it is transformed into the compact, walkable neighborhood envisioned by the 6th St. Task Force.
2 You don’t close a street because pedestrians might get hurt. If that were the case, we would be closing every neighborhood street in Tulsa and turning the place into a giant, surface parking lot. You design the street to make it pedestrian-friendly in the first place. That is what we have proposed to the IHCRC.
Mr. Norman has repeatedly referred to the fact that we at the Village At Central Park vacated streets. Yes, we did. But he neglects to mention that we put new ones in, and immediately re-dedicated them back to the City, so that those nice new roads belong to the citizens of Tulsa; they are not private property. In fact, it took some doing to persuade the City to take public ownership of the alleys that we built!
We have also created more public access, both vehicular and pedestrian, than had been there previously.
In conclusion: there is an excellent alternative to closing the street that meets both the Center’s needs and the neighborhood’s vision. So there is no reason for diminishing the public realm.
I urge you strongly to deny this application.***
And they did! Thank you City Council for recognizing that the needs and priorities of the public, in this case, outweighed the needs and priorities of one private group. Congratulations to the members of the 6th Street Task Force and all the other citizens and community leaders who have worked so tirelessly to better this part of town.
* Councilors Sullivan and Henderson were not in attendance
** TMAPC has recently approved the 6th Street Task Force Infill Plan. The plan has been passed to the Council, but they have not yet adopted it. However, it is expected that they will adopt the plan.
*** Mr. Jamieson's time expired. He was unable to recite his entire speech. However, The Council did hear most of it.
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