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William Hudnut III
A Vision for Urban America
by Wayne Greene
Just east of Elgin Avenue, on Fourth Street, on the east side of
Tulsa’s downtown, a bus bench sits in front of a sagging, industrial site that
has seen better days.
 The bench has a sign.
“Tulsa is beautiful,” it says.
That sign, former Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut III told the
Mayor’s Vision Summit, is a metaphor for the attitude necessary to revitalize
the city.
“It’s a symbol,” he said. “ So much has to do with our
attitude.”
A Game of Chess
Hudnut started his presentation with a tale from his childhood.
His father was an avid and talented chess player and was once invited to join a
stranger in a game. The man quickly defeated Hudnut’s father, who asked what
his strategic secret was. “Begin at the end of the game,” the man said,
“and work backwards.”
The same advice applies to Tulsa as it tries to imagine its
future, Hudnut said. First the city should think about where it wants to go, and
then decide how to get there. Drawing that map is a process that has to begin at
the grass roots, he said.
“It’s got to come from the people. It’s got to bubble up,
as it were, percolate up, rather than from the top down.”
That doesn’t mean that the process is not led, but it implies
that it must be inclusive in approach, he said.
He described sitting during the summit’s early moments with
three people near the back of the room. One was an immigrant from France. One
was an African-American community leader. The third was a businessman.
When Hudnut asked why they were taking part in the summit, each
expressed different anxieties about Tulsa’s present and its future. But, each
also expressed optimism about the Vision Summit process and the new
administration of Mayor Bill LaFortune.
The process of bringing all segments of the Tulsa community
together to think and plan for the future is one burgeoning with possibilities,
Hudnut promised. “The momentum that’s being generated here is going to carry
on to great, great days ahead. I’m sure,” he said. “Tulsa can only get
better. It’s a well-kept secret.”
“The message today is choose life. The message today is
thrive or die. The message today is choose to thrive.”
‘Be What You Are’
Hudnut said the process of building a better future begins by
identifying existing strengths in the community and setting achievable goals
around those.
Before the summit, Hudnut took a driving tour of Tulsa with
Tulsa Zoo Friends Executive Director Mary Collins. From that tour he listed 13
strengths he found in Tulsa.
- Resilient strength
- A strong, higher education foundation
- Generosity of spirit
- An established arts and cultural community
- The highest capacity fiber-optics system in the nation
- A partially developed riverfront full of possibilities
- Affordable housing and a low cost of living
- Accessibility
- A diverse culture
- A thriving volunteer spirit
- A thriving urban forest
- A foundation of core businesses
- An active, dedicated religious community
Hudnut urged building from those strengths on a regional
basis.
“If we do live in the age of the regional city … then we
have to learn and practice the art of cooperation,” he said. “We’ve
got to include Bixby and Owasso and Jenks and Broken Arrow and say to all
the towns, ‘Come let us region together,’” he said.
Hudnut asked the people at the summit who lived south of
51st Street to stand and about half of those present rose. “That shows
that even though you live farther out, you care,” he said. “We’re all
in it together.”
The Importance of Downtown
Hudnut emphasized the need for a thriving downtown district
for the entire community to grow. “We need downtown,” he said.
Hudnut anticipated the challenge that many citizens never go
downtown and see no need in publicly supporting it. The benefits of a
thriving core city are often hidden, he said. A vital downtown is key to
jobs and prosperity throughout the region. “There will be a benefit to the
people outside of the central city because of what happens in the central
city,” he said.
But, he pointed out, the downtown of tomorrow may not be the
downtown of yesteryear. Instead of being the Central Business District,
downtown may well become the Central Social District.
Tulsa suffers from an image that it is a nice place to live,
but not a nice place to visit. The battlefield for overcoming that
perception is downtown, he said.
He described three demographic cohorts of a successful
downtown renovation:
- “Singles” – unmarried, technologically savvy young adults who
will find work and bring innovation to whatever community attracts them.
- “Mingles” – married, childless young professional couples that
have a stronger interest in entertainment and cultural aspects of a
community than in schools.
- “Jingles” – “Happy empty-nesters” with disposable incomes
and interest in a stimulating place for their later years.
All three groups are willing to live downtown or willing
to leave an area if it does not provide the kinds of cultural and
entertainment opportunities best provided by a downtown cultural area.
“I think there’s a great opportunity here,” he
said.
Strategies for Success
Hudnut outlined features of a successful strategy for
reaching that opportunity. A winning strategy, he said,
- is built around big successes and small successes, he said. The
community has to plan for major projects, such as a new convention
center, a sports arena or a new higher-education campus, while also
fostering and then celebrating smaller accomplishments — boutiques,
two-way streets, newsstands, coffee shops and green spaces.
- will build first what people will relate to, generating continued
enthusiasm for the program and continue to build incrementally, he
said.
- will mix public and private efforts and, perhaps most importantly,
it will be shaped by a positive mental attitude flowing from the
community’s leadership.
“A leader is someone who creates a vision. A leader is
someone who communicates that vision and then gets other people excited
about it,’’ Hudnut said.
The Indianapolis Example
Throughout his speech, Hudnut referred to his own
experiences as the mayor of Indianapolis for 16 years for examples of
successes and failures.
As mayor, Hudnut envisioned Indianapolis as a center for
amateur sports activities and rebuilt the city’s troubled downtown
area around that idea. In building on the community’s strengths, an
amateur sports focus made sense. By contrast, trying to make
Indianapolis into a successful shipbuilding center was not.
In understanding the limits to what was possible, he
brought the Pan Am Games to Indianapolis in 1987. But, when the media
asked if his next goal was the Olympic Games, he said it was not.
Indianapolis was too small for that. A successful vision builds on what
is already in the community and aims for achievable goals, he said.
While regional cooperation was important to the
Indianapolis success, Hudnut was less enthusiastic about regional
government. A unified city-county government gave Hudnut a regional
base, but also left him with a divisible and unwieldy legislative body
with 29 city councilors.
In revitalizing the city’s central district, he
planned big successes including a new downtown campus for the Indiana
University-Purdue University-Indianapolis campus, a downtown shopping
center and a domed stadium.
A New Beginning:
Hudnut concluded his remarks with a charge that the
future success of Tulsa will rely on the cooperation of everyone present
at the summit.
“Today’s the beginning of a new building process,”
he said. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t builders. I
congratulate you, and I wish you well.”
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