Tulsa: December 2006 Archives

An edited version of this column was published in the December 27, 2006, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Here's my blog entry linking to the column. Posted July 13, 2021. See the end of this entry for a postscript.

As I walked out of the Coffee House on Cherry Street late Sunday night, I looked up and down 15th Street. The buildings were lit by a soft glow. No one was on the street, but it didn't feel lonely.

Even today, as a cold steady rain comes down, there's still something cheery about Cherry Street.

Is this the best street in Tulsa?

To be sure, there are other streets in Tulsa with a similar history and pattern: Brookside (Peoria between 31st and 38th), Harvard between 11th and 21st, 15th between Columbia and Harvard, 18th and Boston, 6th east of Peoria. All of them feature small commercial spaces, originally for groceries and other shops to serve homes within walking distance. Some of these other places are thriving today, some have yet to be rediscovered. Some never developed as a continuous commercial street; others did but have been damaged by incompatible redevelopment.

Can we figure out what makes Cherry Street work, bottle it, and sprinkle it on the rest of the city?

Here's my attempt at distilling l'essence de la Rue Cerise.

Cherry Street (in case you're new here) is the marketing name adopted by the businesses lining 15th Street between Peoria and Utica Avenues. The name "Cherry Street" appeared on the plat for the Orcutt Addition, laid out in 1908. In the late 'teens city street names were standardized and Cherry Street became an extension of 15th Street.

Like most healthy urban places it did not spring full-blown from a planner's brow, but evolved piecemeal over time, and it did so in a period before it was common for every family to have a car, so that most daily errands were accomplished on foot or with the help of public transit.

The 1932 Sanborn Fire Map of Tulsa shows Cherry Street as nearly all single-family dwellings, except for the Alhambra Building at the northeast corner with Peoria, a filling station where Subway now sits, Lincoln School, St. Mark's Methodist, and the Sacred Heart Church and School (now Christ the King Parish and Marquette School), a couple of two-story apartment buildings and a few small, isolated shop buildings.

Sitting on the section's center line, a boundary between 160-acre Dawes Commission allotments, Cherry Street lined up with streets in neighboring subdivisions, so it developed naturally as a through street. As a through street, it was a natural place to locate a business catering to residents of the Orcutt Addition and other residents on what was then the far east side of Tulsa.

In 1926, the Oklahoma Highway Department designated 15th Street between Boston and Harvard Avenues as US Highway 64, cementing the street's importance as a commercial corridor. That stretch of 15th Street would carry that designation until the completion of the Broken Arrow Expressway in the early '80s.

Over the decades, one by one, homes on 15th were replaced with the sturdy brick retail buildings that are there today.

Surprisingly, Cherry Street was never a streetcar route, but two streetcar lines served it - a Tulsa Street Railway line terminated just to the north of 15th, while the Oklahoma Union Railway's line to Orcutt Amusement Park (now Swan Lake Park) crossed 15th on St. Louis Ave., jogging a bit on 15th because of a misalignment of streets with the subdivision to the north.

Cherry Street works as a place because it "obeys" some basic rules about the relationship between buildings and street. In his book City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, David Sucher boiled it all down to Three Rules that bear repeating:

"(1) Build to the Sidewalk (i.e. Property Line): Create a strong 'streetwall' in which each building meets or comes close to the sidewalk....

"(2) Make the Building Front 'Permeable': Connect the inside of the building and the sidewalk outside with windows and doors....

"(3) Prohibit Parking in Front of the Building: Put on-site parking above, below, behind, or beside. Sub-Rule: Allow on-street parking: Stop-and-go parking is essential to real shopping districts."

At the time the street developed, this was the conventional way to build. Cherry Street Square at the corner of Trenton Avenue is a good example of a modern development that follows the rules and provides off street parking without significantly interrupting the "street wall."

There are a few places along Cherry Street where the rules aren't obeyed - the full block of parking for Lincoln Plaza, the blank wall along Marquette School's parking lot, the lack of a sidewalk in front of Subway, the car wash. But these exceptions aren't so concentrated that they change the essential character of the street.

Please note that Cherry Street is a pleasant place despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it has yet to be "streetscaped" by the city. The conventional wisdom is that, in order to revitalize a street, you need to replace concrete sidewalks with brick pavers, add fancy cast iron "street furniture" (benches and trash cans), street trees, planters, and "bump outs" to narrow the street and slow traffic flow.

Almost always, streetscaping entails erecting an old-fashioned looking streetlight every 50 feet, each with an acorn-shaped light fixture sitting atop a fluted cast iron post. Instead of giving off the gentle glow of the early 20th century gaslights they are intended to imitate, these acorn lights are as bright as something you'd find in a maximum-security prison. The glare is a distraction to passing drivers, blocking the view of store facades and display windows. These lights shine everywhere but where the light is needed - on the sidewalk.

If you want to see the ugliness that these lights can cause, go up North Main in Brady Village some Saturday night. The acorn lights block and obscure the lovely and historic "Cain's Ballroom Dancing" neon sign. This is an abomination and must be changed.

Cherry Street's sidewalks are plain concrete, and there are few street trees. It has only 10 streetlights, all mounted high atop utility poles at street intersections, and yet it is not a gloomy or foreboding place at night. The streetlights are complemented by incandescent façade lighting on the buildings. (Go look at the Bourbon Street Café for an example.) There's plenty of light for making your way down the sidewalk, but not so much that it wrecks your night vision.

There are two significant threats to Cherry Street. Both have to do with Tulsa's zoning code, which was designed with suburban development on undeveloped land in mind. The zoning code is a bad fit for traditional commercial districts like Cherry Street.

There were no parking requirements when most of the buildings on Cherry Street were built. It was expected that customers would either walk or park on the street. Today, Tulsa's zoning code requires a certain ratio of parking spaces to square footage, with a different ratio for each type of business. Each business has to have its own parking on its own lot, or else get special zoning permission for parking on a separate lot. A minor change in use for a retail space can mean a drastic change in the number of required parking spaces.

It ought to be possible to create a parking district, allowing businesses, churches, and schools to share off-street parking if they wish. The required number of spaces ought to take into account differences in peak parking demand for different businesses in the district.

The other threat is from the catch-all Commercial High Intensity (CH) zoning classification that was applied en masse to traditional neighborhood commercial districts when the zoning code was adopted in the '70s.

While CH zoning allows you to build a traditional sidewalk-fronting brick commercial building, it also allows you to build an enormous metal-sided, windowless barn, separated from the street by acres of parking.

Many cities have a specific "neighborhood commercial" zoning classification for such areas or use a "neighborhood conservation district" to establish standards that closely match Sucher's Three Rules.

Cherry Street has a lot to teach us about successful urban places in Tulsa. Let's make sure we learn the right lessons from it.

POSTSCRIPT 2021/07/13: Cherry Street has changed dramatically in the last 15 years. The streetscapers finally did get a hold of it, reducing the street to two lanes, adding bumpouts and replacing some parallel parking with back-in angle parking. Some genuine zebra crossings were added, helping pedestrian safety. The car wash (NW corner of 15th and Trenton) and a couple of older homes that had served as retail buildings (north side between Rockford and Saint Louis, NW corner of 15th and Troost) were replaced with new buildings that obey David Sucher's Three Rules, despite the absence of zoning requirements to do so. Swan Lake Historic Preservation District continues to appreciate in value. On the other hand, the little neighborhood to the north, wedged between the Broken Arrow Expressway and Cherry Street and unprotected by historic preservation zoning, has been devastated by demolition to support excessive minimum parking requirements for these new Cherry Street buildings. And then there's Bumgarner's Folly: The open field between Troost and Utica south of 14th Street, rezoned as Office High Intensity in 2008, was cleared of mature trees and historic homes and apartment buildings and has sat largely empty for a dozen years, except for the occasional produce tent and now a coffee drive-through.