I came across an interesting map while looking through the agenda for tonight's Tulsa City Council meeting. The background material for one agenda item includes the original 1908 plat for the Orcutt subdivision, part of what is now known as the Swan Lake Neighborhood. (It's page 3 of this 389 KB PDF document.) Orcutt was platted before the city adopted a regular pattern of street naming, and apparently the developers were allowed to pick their own names for streets. The subdivision was bounded by Peoria on the west, Victor on the east, 15th on the north, and 17th Place on the south. I had speculated that the rebranding of the walkable shopping district along 15th between Peoria and Utica as Cherry Street might have been a bit of marketeer myth-making, but now I've seen the documentary evidence for the name.
So here are the names of the streets and avenues as they are today, and what they were called back in 1908:
Peoria Ave.: Pine St.
Quaker Ave.: Olive St.
Quincy Ave.: Maple St.
Rockford Ave.: Jasmine St.
St. Louis Ave.: Forest Ave.
Trenton Ave.: Park Ave.
Troost Ave.: Percival Ave.
Utica Ave.: Utica Ave.
Victor Ave.: Porter St.
15th St.: Cherry St.
16th St.: Orcutt St.
17th St.: Wall St.
17th Pl.: Capitol St.
The names were still in place in 1917 when the old Orcutt Lake amusement park was platted as Swan Park subdivision, although the new standard names were encroaching -- the northern boundary of the new subdivision was still Capitol St., the western boundary was Forest Ave., but the southern boundary was called 19th St. And that jog in Utica at 17th Place was even more pronounced back then -- see page 2 of the above-linked PDF.
Comments (5)
I wish Tulsa had less numbed street names. Even if it did make it a snap to traverse Tulsa when I first moved here...I still would rather have names over numbers.
Posted by Steven Roemerman | September 8, 2005 8:49 AM
Posted on September 8, 2005 08:49
Oh, I don't know, it's fun to call Triple A and tell them you're stuck near the intersection of East 66th Street South and South 75th East Avenue.
Once.
Posted by CGHill | September 8, 2005 8:59 PM
Posted on September 8, 2005 20:59
Yeah, the numbered streets are easy to get mixed up sometimes. You go to 31st St. and 93rd EA, and you realize you're supposed to be on 93rd STREET somewhere in the 3100 block.
Tulsa has a pretty good numbering/name system for it's streets. They're pretty logical once you get used to them.
Of course, Forest, Terwilliger, and other random roads throw me for a loop all over again.
Posted by MeeCiteeWurkor | September 8, 2005 10:15 PM
Posted on September 8, 2005 22:15
When I delivered furniture for Dillards, I didn't mind the numbered streets . Broken Arrow always had me checking the phone book page with the hundred blocks or a map.
Here is a link to a picture of the house my family owned on the east side of Utica and the 17th area. It and the strawberry farm was sold for St.Johns Hospital.
http://tulsaworld.cc/cblog/uploads/stjohnfarmhousefiltered.jpg
Posted by D.Schuttler | September 8, 2005 11:48 PM
Posted on September 8, 2005 23:48
Our address ends in "Street". The Tulsa post office employee that separated our mail kept giving us mail that really was supposed to go to a "Suite". Mike asked how Pitcock Electric was in a neighborhood right off of 15th. Way back then, the company was allowed to place their workshop named Pitcock Electric there because they had squatter rights. My grandparents owned a large home where Utica Square is now. The Brook theater is Brookside sometime had triple
features, and many years ago definitely offered
double features for only 25 cents to see two different movies. Across from the Brook theater, you could buy ice cream for a nickel a
dip and they were very large dips of ice cream.
By Southminster Presbyterian Church on Peoria there was a grocery store.
Posted by susan | September 9, 2005 12:56 AM
Posted on September 9, 2005 00:56