quote:
Originally posted by Hometown
To be fair there are run down areas all over town. I'm always seeing wonderful houses that have been neglected even in popular areas like 15th Street and Peoria. Tulsa is a little worn around the edges in general.
Northwest Tulsa was built as a 1st Class White neighborhood. My great aunt lived in the Reservoir Hill flats with her executive husband back in the early 60s. Shortly after that White flight (caucasians moving to the White suburbs when Blacks bought into their neighborhoods) got started in earnest.
There are also areas that were built for low income people on the northside. Drive off of Lewis between Pine and Admiral and you find an occasional tiny shanty (1 room house).
The Greenwood Archer area was famous for it's Black owned businesses until White Tulsans burned it out. I can remember going with our housekeeper to her doctor in the Greenwood area. The blocks that I remember have since been demolished.
You make several good points about the history of North Tulsa. Reservoir Hill was and still is a neighborhood of impressive homes with some of the best views in the city. People are too quick to dismiss what north Tulsa has to offer. The homes in Brady Heights are and the area cleared for OSU expansion were of the same style and and construction quality that you'll find in historic North Maple Ridge or Swan Lake. The houses in Sequoyah neighborhood are much like the houses in White City or Florence Park.
The far north neighborhoods -- Suburban Acres and surrounding areas -- were built as white working-class subdivisions in the '40s and '50s. According to census stats, as late as 1960, the African-American population was mainly segregated to the area between the Frisco tracks on the south, Detroit & Cincinnati on the west, the Santa Fe tracks on the southeast, and Apache on the north.
In 1960, there were a grand total of 15 black residents in the City of Tulsa north of 36th Street North (Census Tracts 57, 79, and 80), out of a total population of 14,924. 242 residents were classified as of "other races." That's 98.37% white.
What follows is my speculation only, but I think it fits the facts:
* In the '60s, as white families in the far north subdivisions began to grow out of their starter homes, they were drawn to newer development and bigger homes on the southern and eastern edges of town -- e.g. the multitude of Park Plaza subdivisions. The completion of Skelly Drive in the late '50s helped push new development in that direction.
* Bird Creek and its flood-prone tributaries hindered development north of Apache, and until Gilcrease Hills in the late '60s, the Kennedy land in Osage County was unavailable for development.
* In the mid '60s, Tulsa joined the urban renewal craze, using Federal funds to wipe out the heart of the Greenwood district. The expressway cut through the middle of the commercial district and urban renewal took out the rest. The intent of the Model Cities program was to rebuild it as a better community, but it didn't quite happen that way.
* The African-American families displaced by urban renewal had to go somewhere, and the real estate community directed them toward the increasingly less fashionable far north neighborhoods.
* The completion of I-244 right around 1970 cemented the popular conception of everything to the north of it as "the black part of town." Whites from south of 244 avoided going north, except to drive through on the way to the zoo or the airport.
One small correction to your paragraph about the Greenwood & Archer area. It was famous for its black-owned businesses even after the whites burned it out. The residents of Greenwood rebuilt after 1921, and from Sanborn maps and photographs it appears that reborn Greenwood was more solidly built, substantial, and prosperous than what had been destroyed in 1921.
It was the post-'21 Greenwood that was immortalized in the song "Take Me Back to Tulsa" and in the name of the GAP Band. It was the post-'21, reborn Greenwood that you visited with your housekeeper. (I'm assuming you're not 90 years old. [
])
The post-'21, reborn Greenwood wasn't firebombed by an angry white mob; it was bulldozed under government contract as part of expressway construction and a well-intentioned revitalization program. (Some would argue about "well-intentioned," but at least some of the people involved in the Model Cities program were well-meaning.)
