The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

Download :  https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005372/ (https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005372/)




The Library of Congress has two downloads of the Aero view of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1918.  If you wish to participate perhaps you should download and print a copy (a print is still cool if it is old & a subject of discussion).

I printed mine at AHHA on a day of $5/hour access to the studios (Tue., Thur., Sat.).  Copy centers can print pretty cheap.  There is a charge for printer use at AHHA.  Thing is: this is a  special map/illustration.

If you try to locate the Sager hotel building at 1st & Detroit on this 1918 image you will see it did not exist in this birds eye view of Tulsa.  County records show 1918 construction.  Just afterwards.  Earlier someone noted it was 1910.  What did exist on the fringe area here are three small buildings.  Guess?  “Men’s, Women’s, & Colored,” is my guess for 1918.

The buildings to the East of course is ½ now El Guappo’s.  The other half?  Reputation: house of ill-repute.

South of Third & east of Main is mostly gone except for about a half dozen buildings.  The Grocery @ Elgin & 1st (NW) is also still standing.  Note:  across the street… Santa Fe depot does not exist yet.  County records show it should.  The Yokozuna building shows in the aero view.

I’d like to see this in 3-D.  We got the technology & this is a key asset.

The map is a wonderful resource.  Would love to talk about it.

I love that rendering. I've seen it before and noted several inaccuracies in locations and dates. Since it is a drawing and not an aerial photo I can only guess that the artist wasn't too interested in details, the details were lacking or simply got tired and thought no one would care.

For instance, the placement of the railroad as it curves near Detroit and Cincinnati to cross the Arkansas River close to 31st street is wrong. Detroit and Cincinnati are on the wrong side of the tracks. Then it shows a mountain on the west side of the river at 31st. It isn't there. I wouldn't have noticed but my home is between Cincinnati and Detroit. It was built in 1917 (corroborated by phone book listings at the time, available at TCCL) as well as Lee Stadium. Neither one is shown. Some homes on my street predate by 8 years this map but are not indicated.

There are others but it is interesting for its look and general placement of buildings and growth of the city, not its accuracy.

The upper portion of the map is stylized.  That's acceptable for this image as it works as art... like a stuffed moose head in Pittsburgh, the city that gave us much art that now resides in NYC & DC, a moose head is all we know.

But none of those streets go as far as 31st.  Seems for style, the draftsman stopped well before 21st.  The idea that the railroad crosses before Boston is wrong.  He stopped at Cry Baby as you can't see the the river bank from this perspective.

Do you see Philbrook?  Way out there.  Cherry street & about 3-more streets South, thats all.  Lots of detail here.  Heck of a historical document.  Just a beginning.

Mountain looks well placed for understanding our topography, Turkey Mt. Is South.  Check out number of windows in a structure...

Did you notice the east-west street names on the left (east) side of the map?
From the bottom up:
Admiral
Hodges
Burnet
Collins
Querry
Fostoria*
5th
Birch
6th

*This may helps explain the Forstoria Building at Utica & Archer.

I know its art. It shows Lincoln Elementary at 15th and Peoria and Madison ave to the west. Upon closer inspection I found my house (at least a cluster of buildings on the block) at 19th and Detroit, though Lee Stadium which pre-dated this map and my home is not shown. 19th at that time was named Tookah street. The railroad is a bit off at that point though, it would indicate that it crossed Detroit at 15th-18th where housing existed, once again, it is art. The map does go as far south as 20th. It then shows a mountain, presumably Turkey mountain, way too far north by a couple miles. So, its credibility for placement, naming or existence of buildings in 1918 is low.

As a guy who started at Lincoln in Kindergarten (1972) and I barely remember it, wasn't it at 15th and Peoria?  I grew up at the 1400 block of S Elgin (no longer there due to the IDL) until I was about 6 when they started buying the houses for the IDL construction.

Yes, and it still is. The Kindergarten and gymnasium are the separate two story building where the deli is now. The rest of the school is in the traditional "L" or "U" shape that Kendall, Whittier and Lee all used. I coached a little league baseball game on the Lincoln playground in the late 80's. Glad they didn't raze it for a cheap shopping center.

If you look around 3rd and Mabell, you can see the trolley crossing over the railroad tracks and continuing south east on third. Fun.

Art or Map?  Definately both.  Detailed?  Heck yes.   Not like the railroad ties are shown. It's a great map.  Using the Sanborne insurance maps I have correlated outhouse locations and more!

 Now I know why Hodges Bend got it's name, but it's a block north.

  So much...  We are lucky to have this.

That area is now known (as it approaches the Arkansas) as Heavy Traffic Way.  Would love to know when that name was first applied.  Because of the terrain this is the logical route that any future highway would snake through.

Sweet.!!   Rose Pawn Shop building was there at 2nd and Elgin.  Have heard it was a Ford dealership about then.  Old man named Mr. Brown used to work there when young, he said, and worked at Rose's too when he was old.

OK Historical society sells a 17x27 print online for 10$, along with other maps.  I bought my copy through them :)

https://pay.apps.ok.gov/okhistory/store/app/subcategory.php?category=2&subcategory=16

The track placement as noted is off. That said my house is on that map, even has the part of upstairs that was built at the time. Pretty cool. What's interesting to me, the houses that still stand in this neighborhood are all represented by shape and style in this map drawing.

County assessor website has a built date of  1915 but we have found documentation that predates that for the house around 1910-1912. Close enough that it does not matter.

What's that large building next to the 21st 11th street Arkansas bridge?

I thought it might have been a street car related building. Either a turn-around or a depot.

Tulsa Cold Storage Co.

Such a gorgeous view of our past.  If we could simply plunk this urban form onto our modern city, it would be a great place to live.

The thing that strikes me most is how unobtrusively the rail and trolley lines fit into the urban fabric.  Compare this to the destruction wrought by the IDL. (I can't decide if it's more like the German blitzkrieg or simply Sherman's march to Atlanta.  Either way, thousands of buildings and homes were destroyed so we could create a concrete noose around our city.) Such a horrendous and inefficient way to transport people.  And then there's parking...

Just for fun, I created a little graphic to show how many downtown blocks were destroyed by the creation of the IDL.  The answer?  98. (Give or take.)  I used a normal block from the Riverview neighborhood to create the squares.  When the IDL is "only" half a block wide, I tried to space the blocks out to allow for that.

(http://www.accidentalurbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IDL-waste-by-block.jpg)

Just imagine if we'd stuck to trains and trolleys instead.  Imagine having almost 100 more blocks to create homes, businesses and jobs.  Then add several dozen more blocks that would not be wasted on surface parking lots.  Maybe we could fund our schools with the improved density, and we wouldn't even need to worry about state funding cuts to education...because we wouldn't even need money from the state.

A girl can dream, can't she?

Actually, I think a strong argument can be made that the IDL is an incredibly efficient way to move people into and out of downtown Tulsa.  As with most urban highway/freeway projects in the 1950s-70s, the engineers were very clear eyed about designing efficient highways to move cars/people.  Unfortunately, those engineers took no or very little account of any other short/intermediate/long-term impacts those highways would have on the people and communities they were intended to benefit.

Looking backwards from our advantaged viewpoint, it is hard to understand how or what kind of growth projections or other considerations the engineers were considering to deem it necessary to build such a tight noose around such a relatively small downtown geographically with such a low density.  However, our IDL looks a lot like the loops around downtown Dallas and Houston - two other cities that grew up during the automobile age and shared oil booms with Tulsa, albeit on much grander scales.

I suspect if you read or watch Tulsa Chamber promotional information from the 1960s and 70s, glowing talk of plans/completion of our shiny new IDL would have been as prominent then as stuff about “walkability” and downtown living is today.  It is pretty easy to imagine that without the IDL, Tulsa would be a much smaller city today than what it is.

Tulsa was growing fast during that time.  I moved for 4 years about 1959 to 1963.  From then, it went from Mayo Meadows - Fairgrounds - being at the edge of town to it being in the middle of town.  31st and Sheridan was the end of pavement going east - it was gravel from there on.  Got paved soon.  The BA was there when we got back.  Used to drive out to BA after school just to see what was going on with the sh$t-kickers in the sticks.... City kids just clueless about what is more important.

The IDL was planned probably about as well as could be done, but everything was moving so fast, it was overtaken by events and was not the best solution in just a few years - maybe 5 to 8 in the 60's.  By then, it was too late to stop, even though it was being built into the 70's.

And the move south was VERY well entrenched and developed - Ranch Acres, and Southern Hills were already in place in the early 50's.

Having fun with this. Its as much like an artist's rendering as it is a map. Found Owen Park, (but no Roosevelt) next to Duluth street (now Edison) but as you go south on Phoenix a warehouse building sits at Archer and Phoenix that is dated 1896 but doesn't appear to be a similar building on this map. Still much fun to pick out buildings you can identify by shape.

Tulsa was ruled by builders and developers in the fifties and sixties. They populated all the key positions as commissioners, school board members, and authorities. Together with bankers and real estate brokers, they decided the older neighborhoods were expendable to keep the suburbans coming downtown. And they kept cutting costs by eliminating sidewalks, parks and grid patterns. Built profit by opening and closing schools that were no longer neighborhood schools but area schools. Consider how little need there actually was for a Broken Arrow expressway at that time. Broken Arrow had no more than 7000 in population in 1967. Most folks entered downtown on Admiral, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 11th. Packed every day and convenient. But the realtors/builder/banker coalition really salivated at all the flat, cheap, easy to build on land between here and the suburbs. We needed the homes for burgeoning boomers but half the city wasn't considered choice enough (west and north) and cheaper taxes outside the county would fuel growth there and possibly take our tax base. Then we had to have some way to get them back into downtown where their jobs were. So, we needed the modern Trump wall, the IDL.

Show me whose on your school board, your commissioners (fire, police, water, streets etc.) or your councilors, who your largest banks are and I'll show you the kind and location of your city's growth. They were all white, middle aged male veterans with the requisite biases. Many still are!

Roosevelt School was built after 1918, as far as I know.

There's no warehouse at Phoenix and Archer.

There was never a 15-story skyscraper on the south side of 4th, between Main and Boulder, as far as I know.

I'll drive by there today to refresh my memory. The two story warehouse is on the south side of SS expressway and has the date emblazoned in stone. Roosevelt, not sure but its architecture would be right for 1918, similar to Central and the Owen Park neighborhood certainly pre-dates 1918 so likely they had a school to serve them. My father (born 1919) went to nearby Irving.

One block west of Phoenix at Quanah and Archer is the 1896 warehouse now Cowen Construction. Roosevelt was 1926. I don't know about a 15 story you referred to. Is the 1911 Waterworks building on the map?

I think 1896 is a reference to the year Cowen Construction was founded, not when a warehouse was constructed near Quanah Avenue and Archer Street.

On the Aero View, there's a skyscraper shown on the south side of 4th, between Main and Boulder, about 15 stories tall.  As far as I know, there was never a building of that size at that location.

I poke at Broken Arrow, but it was - and almost still is - a nice little town.  It is now getting way too big and getting way too messed up from people moving in from bigger places and bringing all their 'baggage' with them.

Friends and I started driving the BA when they first opened it and when you got off at 161st exit, went down to 61st, then turned left to go to town.  Straight ahead was a little bit of town and a gravel road that went to the river.  Could get from Hale parking lot to downtown BA in about 10 minutes.  Wasn't much traffic and could go 90+ mph pretty easily...

The expressway system and the IDL are efficient in moving traffic to/from downtown.  But it depends on exactly where downtown.  If the location is near one of the IDL interchanges, then it can be very efficient.  However, if driving to/from the location requires circuitous routes on a series of one-way streets, then it can be less efficient. 

The IDL disrupted the fine-grained pattern of Tulsa's streets and blocks.  The disruption caused longer trips for many local origins/destinations.


In the mid-1950s until around 1960, the planners and engineers were projecting population growth through the year 2000, and traffic volumes through 1975.

As unusual as that would seem, I think you are correct. Too much of a coincidence that Cowen was founded in 1896 and the building built in 1896. They probably chiseled that date many years later. Its pretty old though.

And in answer to my own question, yes the façade of the Waterworks building 1911 is clearly visible.

yep agree

I love that building on Quanah.  Is it being used for anything or just storage/vacant?  Nice skyline views from the upstairs Windows.

I've seen Cowan trucks coming and going. Seems to be in use. The rest of the corner seems to be abandoned. A shame because it leads directly into the western entry to Brady district.

There were a lot of reasons the trolley lines became unprofitable.  Some of them included franchise fees from cities that viewed the trolleys as cash cows and then regulated the fares below a profitable level.  Trolley lines were almost all privately owned in the early 20th Century.  Buses, cars, and jitneys used the roads for free.  Trolleys had to maintain their tracks and sometimes the roadway around the tracks that the buses etc used for free.  Of course, some lines were just in a nonprofitable area and there were some bad business decisions too.

Streetcars and trolleys around the country were bought by General Motors, who then cut service and ripped out the lines, while introducing intentionally-terrible buses to force nudge people to buy their own personal automobile. Here's a great video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4) that addresses the issue. And another (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFhsrbtQObI)

GM lost lawsuits over that little adventure, but by the time the lawsuits were done, the trolleys were already gone.

I had read that they merely bought the locomotive and trolley car manufacturers to control the manufacture and parts replacement for both forms of transportation while applying pressure on government to make sure road building was subsidized then strangled them out of business. After all, millions of car owners paying gasoline taxes for cars along with license and excise taxes vs stodgy old mass transit was very appealing to expanding, suburban cities of the fifties. Throw in that cities were in bed with suburban land developers to augment their phoney baloney jobs and you get the picture. They got screwed, blued and tattooed.

like Arrow said, they were the victim of a variety of forces.

They lost anti-trust lawsuits, too.

Lots of economic factors - that was one, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Interesting video. 

One must realize though that as the transit holocaust was in full swing that the trolleys were mostly in decline.  Many had deferred maintenance on both the tracks and the cars.  They were not a smooth riding, comfortable way to get about.   Bring about the Electric Railway President's Conference Committee.  They defined the specifications for a smooth riding, upholstered seat trolley that came to be known as the PCC Cars. These are the streamlined (art deco?) trolleys.  The PCC Cars kept many trolley lines running for decades.
http://www.american-rails.com/pccs.html

First one shows self-driving cars...we are only 16 years late!

We have come full circle - now all the road systems are ALL in decline!  If we had maintained both/either system, we might have had two good, complementary systems.

There are some public services that should never be privatized.

Water.
Sewer.
Roads/rail/transportation.


Probably others.

It seems to me we long ago missed the boat on spending large sums of money to recreate Tulsa’s small coverage area of fixed rail trolley service.  Instead of pining for the return of 19th century transportation technology, we should focus on what transportation is really going to be like in a decade or so as autonomous self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous.  Just this week, Uber started testing a self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh.  Tulsa should embrace this and similar technology and try to be on the leading edge of it.  Let OKC, Dallas, Houston, et al. be stuck subsidizing their underperforming fixed rail systems as Tulsa zooms off into the future.

The idea of "19th century" transportation is exactly the propaganda BS that you are expected to swallow without thought or use of any reasoning ability.  Worked in 1952, working now...

IF for some reason that were true - which it isn't - then how does one explain the advanced public transportation systems of virtually every other civilized country in the world?

Yes, we should focus on the future.  And autonomous self-driving is solely an extension of the problem that we currently have with individual driven vehicles.  Take the concept of riding in comfort without having to do the driving yourself - PLUS the expense and all other adverse issues of auto driving.

That’s some accusation.  If fixed rail had worked so well in 1952, it wouldn’t have disappeared from virtually every city that was not densely populated.  Oh wait, I forgot, General Motors, acting as Dr. Evil, single-handedly killed off popular trolley lines all over the country and brainwashed Americans into moving to single family homes in the suburbs where they would need 2 cars per family.

Even though it was the simple fifties, it was still a complicated, complex set of circumstances that created suburban sprawl, the death of mass transit, the change from railroad passenger trains to freight trains, etc. This thread has laid out some of those factors but you seem to think it was just old fashioned, single issue problems and solutions.

The idea of self driving cars in every driveway seems not real compatible with the move towards higher density in urban areas and conversion of high rise buildings into housing. Mass transit would seem to be a better fit for those movements. Maybe suburbia could justify them. I don't suppose we could have both?

"Tulsa should embrace this and similar technology and try to be on the leading edge of it.  Let OKC, Dallas, Houston, et al. be stuck subsidizing their underperforming fixed rail systems as Tulsa zooms off into the future."

Yes. Lets look forward. Autonomous vehicles should be a big boon for cities like Tulsa that do not have an expensive fixed capital public transit service. And it should provide service to more people who are left behind by our current public transit system. What can we do to be ready for autonomous vehicles rather than being the 46th state to permit them?

Not an accusation - just a statement of historical fact.  GM was convicted of anti-trust violations at that time.  And no, not single handed, but in concert with big oil and tire companies.  Through National City Lines.  Now here is the accusation - you are unknowing of the history and as of this post, are not taking the time to learn it.  Ya gotta know the history....  I know you can do better than this - I have seen it here in the past!!

Yes, that last was part of the plan.  Watch the videos on some of those earlier links.  Good history intro.


So, where is your interpretation of how the entire rest of the civilized world can make this work very well, but we can't?  Is it a lack of engineering/technical talent?  Is it a lack of viability of concept?  Is it the same reasons we are #38 in the world for healthcare?

Who knows?   Tell us your thoughts!  And show how/why/what/when/where.


And we haven't even touched on how wasteful, in a wide variety of ways, urban sprawl is related to farm/ranch/agricultural land, and it's contribution to heat island effects.

While admittedly sarcastic, that was my point - American underwent a transformation in the boom years after WWII that fundamentally changed living and commuting routines and habits, and which doomed many trolley systems.

Self-driving vehicles will not be limited to single family cars.  I probably have the least amount of vision of anyone I know, but even I can see the potential for self-driving vans or small buses as a way of moving large number of people around the city much more efficiently and with much more flexibility than any fixed rail system ever can.  Tulsa is unburdened with an existing trolley or true mass transit system and the vested stakeholders of such systems looking to protect the status quo, so we can look to new technologies to address our transportation needs.  For once, our past years of inaction can work to our advantage, if only we seize it.

Autonomous vehicles require no input from the passenger.  Move person/goods from one place to another with no input from the transportee.  

Sounds a whole lot like public transit - rail trolleys, possibly!

The first video in the previous post showed Congressional testimony by Mayor of San Fran (I think).  As is done so often today by the big corporate interests and their lackey's in Congress, they tried to attribute the idea to him that he wanted to get rid of cars.  Which of course was another RWRE lie from the 50's!  (Remember Senator McCarthy??)  Rail trolley was never the entire solution.  Autos also should NOT be the entire solution - a proper mix of technology and infrastructure is what is appropriate.  And if you had ever driven in California, or New  York, or Baltimore, or Boston, etc, you would have a great understanding of the problem.  Rail trolley along with subway is an excellent part of the solution.

And autonomous vehicles are widely used in some areas - go to a big airport sometime.

And a proper use of autonomous vehicles in personal transportation would be similar.  It is again, the wastes of individual transport for applications that are better served by other means.  Suitability to purpose!  Not to mention convenience, efficiency, etc.

“Historical facts” are in the eye of the beholder.  There are lots of things written that debunk the “General Motors streetcar conspiracy.”  Here’s one:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Is this article more true than those you referenced?  I have no idea.  But then again, neither do you.

I’m not and have never held myself out to be a transportation expert, but it does not take an expert to see that Tulsa and cities like it will not become large users of traditional mass transit like fixed rail trolleys in my lifetime.  The money spent on building image burnishing amusement park trolleys around downtown can be much better allocated to improving existing bus service and adopting modern technologies that will make most existing midsize city mass transit systems obsolete within a decade or so.  That’s not fact, that’s just my opinion.

Flexibility, yes.

More efficiently when sufficient quantities of people are going from-to the same places, no way.

How are you going to reduce the vehicle count with small autonomous vehicles?  It would save some of the need for parking downtown but that is the only saving I can see. 

The net vehicle count goes down with any use of non-personal transportation.  Cabs, Uber, autonomous, public transport, etc.   An individual only uses their particular auto for a small part of the day.  It sits somewhere for the remainder.  Any form of vehicle sharing increases the net active use of those vehicles, and results in a decrease in the number of actual vehicles in use over time.   (Same thing for any form of "distribution",  increase the utilization of the resource (fork truck, semis, etc...) and the number of those resources required goes down.

True, but that ignores the social, cultural, marketing and economic forces also at play. People see cars as freedom, expression of personality, status, pleasure, income generation, etc.  Change those views and the profit making enterprises that benefit from them and you can then apply your formula for reducing the vehicle count. That's a big job.

I should have been a bit more specific.  I was thinking of the number of cars on the BA, 169, 75.... during rush hour.  Unless there are single vehicles carrying large numbers of people, the same number of cars will be on the road.  Cars parked during the day take up space but don't contribute to traffic while parked. 

Another thought: Unless the non-owned vehicles are stored near the people that will use them, the number of miles driven by the non-personal transportation could easily be twice the miles driven by a personal vehicle.  I base "twice" on a vehicle that is downtown that is dispatched to perhaps Broken Arrow to take a person downtown.  That will not help either pollution or fuel consumption.  I realize that not all trips would be this wasteful but it is something to think about.

I think autonomous cars will help increase walkability and also transit use.

First, more people will opt to not have cars or not have as many and will use uber and autonomous cars more often.  The next logical step will be that people/neighbors will begin to carpool to work more often (perhaps again in autonomous cars/small busses/vans).  This will begin to introduce subtle mental/social changes (like getting used to waiting for a ride, which is kind of like a halfway step to getting more people used to... waiting on a bus or other forms of transit for instance).  Also there is a growing push to change zoning laws to allow for, and in some cases actually promote, more transit & pedestrian friendly areas, add that to more people getting more used to not having as many cars and or using other transportation options and once again, more subtle shifts towards creating a different type of environment. 

And on the topic of suburbia, remember in many instances there were pushes to change zoning laws to favor new, auto centric, suburban style development and prohibit pedestrian/transit friendly development.  Blacks and poor people use busses and transit, if you create areas where transit is essentially illegal, and or you have to be wealthy enough to at least have a car to get to those places, and you can't walk if you do manage to get there by transit.... well that helps keep the "undesirable" people constrained and out of your part of town.  You want to ride at the front of the bus so bad... go ahead, we will destroy that kind of lifestyle and build our own where you can't come.  I remember hearing some old people talking about that kind of thing in the South, and all that zoning just flew all over the US like wildfire. 

I envision a new game where drivers with large, old vehicles try to trip up the autonomous vehicles the same way the British fighter pilots tipped the wings of the German V-1 Buzzbombs of WWII.
 
  ;D

You have the right idea for downtown.  I don't believe it makes sense for transit from BA, Jenks, Bixby....  For the outlying suburbs, large, multi passenger vehicles are the only thing that makes sense for transit from the burbs.   Waiting for a ride is OK up to a limit. That limit depends on the distance to be traveled.  I will not wait 30 minutes for a trip I could drive (or walk)  in 10 minutes.  One of the overwhelming issues of public transit is time between vehicles (headway). One of the things the Red Arrow lines (Where I got my TNF name) did to spur ridership was to reduce headway and fares.  It worked.  WWII and fuel rationing helped but the effect lasted well beyond WWII.

The $.11 fare (1963ish) for students equates to about $.85 today allowing for inflation.

In the early 20th Century, amusement parks were a vital part of trolley lines.  The parks were built to encourage city dwellers to ride the trolleys on weekends to escape the heat of the city for a few hours.  It was certainly a financial ploy to use the trolleys on the weekends but it worked for quite a while. Willow Grove Park near Philadelphia PA lasted into the 1960s.

If you are instead referring to the entertainment value of a downtown circulator trolley line, you may have a valid point but I disagree.  Public transit to a dead end at downtown will probably result in a non-use failure.  Why would anyone ride transit only to be forced to walk a half mile to their destination?  Transit studies have shown that people are willing to walk about 1/4 mile.  Beyond that, they will seek an alternate mode.

Back when airbags were first going into cars in a big way, I can remember there were quite a few incidents where people stole cars with airbags, went joy riding and intentionally crashed them to get the 'thrill' of being the first on their block to deploy an airbag in a wreck!   I can definitely see a similar type joy ride event with these - trying to fool the auto pilot of another car....

Lol !!   Eye of the beholder....that's good.  

Facts presented before during and after the actual conviction.  Documented for decades.  And that post actually goes into all the public knowledge base.

And then veers off into his own little fantasy world...  Keep in mind, this is about documented events from a wide variety of sources.

Versus the one you posted written by a guy in a mobile home park directly across Nicholson Lane from Perkin Elmer and Xoft, Inc, in San Jose, CA.  With the polite Wiki note at the top about the neutrality being disputed.  



You are right - Tulsa is highly unlikely to ever be as enlightened, informed, or forward looking for the best interests of it's citizens as one would hope!  So we won't have a good mix solution of public transportation.  Just the inevitable ongoing mess of diesel buses spewing in the air.  With declining ridership due to reduced service, all spiraling downward and costing more and more like it has for decades.  Like what happened with trolleys when GM got involved.

For those interested, I have posted a list of books about trolleys, interurbans and electric traction in general in a new thread Trolley Books.

Back to the picture, art, map image...

One could match a lot of details here with data from the County Assessors', old photos, Sanborne insurance maps, and with a buildings point elevation cloud or wire-frame model, drape 1918-ish images to create an older Tulsa.


https://goo.gl/photos/DQXRh9Wz9zUXrY8G8 (https://goo.gl/photos/DQXRh9Wz9zUXrY8G8)
 
(https://goo.gl/photos/DQXRh9Wz9zUXrY8G8)



What can that do?  Well GKFF funded a Tulsa Then and Now app showcasing the B.Ford photos...  This could do so much more.  Time to contact the Hackers.

Many or most buildings on the aero view match reality.  However, the highrise I mentioned in a previous post, shown on the south side of Fourth Street, between Main and Boulder -- I don't think it ever existed.  Around 1918, there may have been plans for a skyscraper at that location, but I've never heard of it.

It's a mystery to me.

In mapping deveopment we allways throw a wild herring in there to maintain that it isn't blindly coppied.  For AT&T I added a streed named after me.  It was our dataset.