Yes, downtown needs restaurants and bars and affordable housing and funky lofts and artists and musicians and bookstores and movie palaces and hotels and a big arena with Elton John performing inside and lots of attractive people with nice abs walking beautiful dogs on the street while drinking coffee and reading erudite Works of Literature...
...but in addition to that, I think downtown Tulsa needs a climbing gym. Imagine a place where downtown workers can burn off steam on a climbing wall during the lunch hour. Corporations could hold "team building" exercises during the day. Teenagers could literally "hang out" after school, and be met by their working parents and then walk as a family to a downtown establishment for dinner. Young professionals and college students could climb at night as a better way to "meet and greet" than hanging out at bars.
A climbing gym could be located in a cool old warehouse or, heck, even in the Renbergs building on Main (a much better use than storage and a parking lot, which it currently is...). It could be incorporated into the plans if a new YMCA is built. Or perhaps it could be done in partnership with OSU-Tulsa, which has a great climbing facility at the Stillwater campus...Though it should be open to all Tulsans, not just students.
Just a few dreams for Tulsa. I think it could be a great addition to downtown...and would attract people like me who don't have time to go way out to New Heights Climbing gym....but who spend a lot of time downtown.
I think thats a great idea. I always thought a trendy warehouse gym and climbing wall would be a great idea. Maybe there could be an outside one too with abseiling.
I think its good to focus on making lots of small changes to improve Tulsa, a kaizen aproach, rather than focussing all efforts on massive localised projects.
Climbing gyms are loads of fun and a complete body workout like no other. Where do you live that 11th and 169 is too far to drive...I'm assuming you live downtown.
I live walking distance to downtown, and I'm downtown almost every day. Nothing against New Heights (though I hardly ever find myself in that part of town)...I just like the idea of a downtown venue like this, which would be a great downtown amenity and I think it would appeal to a broad cross section of people, once they got exposed to it. The more, varied offerings we have downtown, the better.
In addition to the people who already work/play/live downtown, it would also draw from the surrounding neighborhoods (a bonus would be that they could walk/bike to get there). Oh yeah, I just thought of another potential customer base, all those tourists who will be downtown b/c of our fabulous arena, etc, etc.
Go lease some space and put one in.....
Too bad Tulsa doesn't have any abandoned grain silos around downtown. OKC has turned an old silo just south of Bricktown into a pretty cool, really tall climbing gym. It's called OKC Rocks.
I agree this is a great idea. If Wichita Falls, Texas can have one, why can't we?
http://www.elevatorrock.com/home.htm
quote:
Originally posted by Dana431
I agree this is a great idea. If Wichita Falls, Texas can have one, why can't we?
http://www.elevatorrock.com/home.htm
If Wichita Falls can have one we should by right have a minimum of five.