Central Park Residences

• Posted by glennmax well1002 September 7, 2022 Filed in Arts & Culture #Central Park Residences  27 views
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  Tulsa World columnist Michael Overall is waxing poetic and mourning the impending loss of what’s left of Tulsa’s Civic Center Plaza in this recent article, suggesting Tulsa wants “to toss it away like an empty soda can.”  Seriously?   Central Park Residences

  I’ve laughed to myself over several of Michael’s urban planning observations the past few years, but this article really takes the cake.  He apparently has concluded that the completion of the Civic Center complex in 1969 fulfilled the then 50-year dream of a landmark municipal development that would forever reshape downtown Tulsa.

  Those dreams, dating back to 1924, were based upon two previous failed proposals that would have created civic complexes with government buildings of classical and art deco architecture surrounded by formal gardens, art museums, reflecting ponds, and fountains; not the “uncluttered, wide-open plaza” surrounded by minimalist geometrically stark buildings that were actually built.

  The Civic Center complex design was the brain-child of local architect Murray McCune.  McCune and architect Bob Jones collaborated on the project and according to Overall were reportedly influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a pioneer of the “less is more” philosophy in architecture.

  Without naming sources, Michael states the design won critical acclaim from around the world including a German publication which called it one of the “top architectural achievements in the world during the past century.” I’m glad the design won an award, but clearly the award did not come from those who have actually spent any time in the plaza over the years.  The civic center plaza as connective tissue and gathering-place has been a colossal failure since day one in my view.

  Show me a single photo of a thriving plaza filled with locals drawn to the space for anything other than to pay a water bill, court fine or stand in-line for jury duty.  Great “places” survive and thrive.  The Civic Center Plaza was never a great place and that is why it will not survive.  It is off-putting by its very stark nature, and not a place anyone but the homeless has ever sought to “hang-out.” If anything, it is the quintessential utilitarian design example of function over form, a hallmark of the aptly named Brutalist Architecture of the day.

  Michael’s article presumably was inspired by the recent approval of the newly created Arena District Master Plan.  The plan aims to transform the district into a vibrant 18-hour neighborhood that will convert existing spaces into a series of signature parks and plazas and repurpose the outmoded civic center through a series of catalytic public-private development opportunities.

  Astonishingly, Michael Overall compares this new plan to “the urban renewal projects that decimated downtown Tulsa in the 1960s and ’70s, when the city bulldozed several art deco masterpieces that people thought — at the time — were out of date and ugly and useless.”

   

  In fact, those structures were bulldozed not by “the city,” but by for-profit real estate developers trying to make a buck.  The buildings were lost not because they were ugly, but because they were functionally obsolete and mostly empty.  And, at the time, we had no historic tax-credits or other incentives to help owners repurpose them.  Hundreds if not thousands of Tulsans often attended the demolitions of historic buildings to collectively sigh at the loss of what they considered to be architectural treasures.