Reviving downtown: the latest misguided attempt?

Sunday's Whirled had a front-page article about the city's plans for downtown east of Detroit and south of the Frisco tracks. (I know, I know -- it's been Burlington Northern for a long time now, but doggone it, the Saint Louis and San Francisco Railroad laid those tracks in 1882 and determined the cockeyed orientation of downtown Tulsa. I'll still call them the Frisco tracks, so as to differentiate them from the Katy tracks and the Tulsa Street Railway tracks.)

This 115-acre area, prospectively titled the East Village, was the subject of a redevelopment contract between the Tulsa Development Authority and DESCO, a St. Louis-based big box retail developer. The deal quietly expired without any progress. Now Mayor Bill LaFortune is in discussions with some private groups about redevelopment plans, which may involve a soccer or baseball stadium. The Whirled quotes the Mayor as saying, "The primary thrust of the redevelopment projects we're in discussion with will have the end result of the new urbanism concept for this city that we don't have now."

To be fair, the Mayor acknowledges that a stadium shouldn't be the focal point of the redevelopment:

LaFortune said any sports facility that is part of the redevelopment discussion "is more of a secondary theme to the primary theme of multi-use development. A stadium, whether it be soccer or minor league baseball, would be woven into the fabric of that project."

LaFortune said everyone has seen the success that downtown stadiums can bring to revitalization.

"We've seen it in city after city after city," he said. "The major difference of any discussions now regarding any professional sports is that it is not the No. 1 focus as it has been in the past."

City after city? Where, exactly, have downtown sports facilities sparked downtown revitalization? Not the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Not any of the sports facilities in downtown St. Louis. Where there has been revitalization around a sports facility, there are other attractions in place. I think the canal has had more to do with the liveliness of Oklahoma City's Bricktown than the Bricktown Ballpark or the Ford Center. If an attraction is going to make a difference, it has to be something that you can enjoy at any time, not just on certain scheduled occasions. The canal provides a promenade -- a place to stroll along, to see and be seen. The sports facilities bring people into the area to see Bricktown for the first time, but that only makes a difference because first-time visitors can see that there are lots of people who are enjoying themselves outside of the sports facilities.

A couple of things bother me about this news item. One is the hope placed in a sports facility, or any one big thing, to revive downtown. Another is the focus on finding one big developer to fix up the whole area.

It has taken fifty years to reduce downtown Tulsa from its glory days to its present state. This process has been helped along by expressway construction, urban renewal, skyscraper construction (and the increased demand for parking), and plenty of well-meaning revitalization attempts.

We won't erase half a century of mistakes overnight. The best examples of revitalization in Tulsa are along 15th Street and along Peoria, and in each case it has been a process of more than 20 years, beginning with some pioneers who saw potential in the old commercial buildings of Cherry Street and Brookside. The best city government can do is provide encouragement and remove obstacles.

1. Treat the conversion of downtown into a parking lot as the shame that it is. Call a summit of office building owners, downtown pastors, city and county officials, and the leaders of OSU Tulsa and TCC, and work out a way to meet parking needs and expansion needs without ever more demolition.
2. Improve connections within downtown. At long last, fix and reopen the Boulder Avenue overpass. Make the Denver Avenue viaduct and all the overpasses more comfortable and less forboding for pedestrians. Create a direct route connecting 3rd and Main in the downtown core with Archer and Main in Brady Village -- even if it means tearing down some ugly modern buildings.
3. Keep the street grid open. Don't close any more streets, and open some to complete the grid, like Frankfort between 1st and 2nd, Greenwood between 3rd and 5th, and 5th between Frankfort and Kenosha.
4. Insist that OSU-Tulsa build out its campus in an urban fashion. OSU-Tulsa has their land because the City of Tulsa condemned it for them. The City should strongly encourage OSU-Tulsa to remediate, and not repeat, the isolated suburban mall design of its current campus.
5. Improve connections between inside and outside the Inner Dispersal Loop for drivers and pedestrians.
6. Remember that retail follows residential. Encourage the urban pioneers who are already creating living spaces downtown and find out what obstacles are standing in the way of others following in their footsteps.

You'll find a very intelligent discussion of downtown revitalization happening at the TulsaNow forums.