Urban Tulsa Weekly: July 2021 Archives

If you went looking for BatesLine recently and found nothing, it's because the server was offline from late Tuesday, July 13, 2021, until sometime Wednesday evening, July 14, 2021. According to BatesLine's hosting provider, the downtime was "due to a MAC address conflict after a chassis swap. However, they were unable to boot the server up by different means. As a last resort, they have restored guests from backup to idle hypervisors." Sounds like a planned upgrade (which we weren't notified about) that encountered a problem that should have been anticipated.

Just before everything went haywire, I added a couple of my old Urban Tulsa Weekly columns to the archives.

As faithful readers will no doubt recall, I wrote the weekly "Cityscope" column for UTW from September 2005 to May 2009. The newspaper ceased publication in November 2013 and the newspaper's web presence vanished shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, the website was set up in a way that was hard for the Internet Archive to navigate, and much of the site's content has been lost.

I kept copies of everything I submitted and retained my rights. (I stopped writing for UTW in May 2009 because I refused to sign the new freelancer's agreement which would have given UTW full "work for hire" rights.) Very slowly, over time, I've been posting those old columns and feature stories here, in the UTW Column Archive category.

Here are the two additions:

A recent essay by Addison Del Mastro calling for shared parking in suburbia prompted me to post my April 29, 2009, column proposing a parking pool for businesses and churches along Cherry Street and outlining a mechanism to make it worthwhile for all concerned.

In November 2008, I wrote a piece linking Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light," to urbanist Christopher Alexander, showing how Kinkade's paintings exemplify many of the patterns that comprise Alexander's Timeless Way of Building.

Although his work may be sold in suburban malls to be hung on suburban walls, the realities of suburban life do not intrude onto Kinkade's canvas.

In Kinkade's cityscapes, the townhouses and commercial buildings come up to the sidewalks and have windows that allow passersby to see inside. In his neighborhood scenes, the houses have porches and big windows facing the street.

The buildings have eye-catching details above the windows and along the rooflines. The scale of the buildings and the details are proportionate to the pedestrians passing by. The light is gentle, coming through building windows, from small lights reflecting on the façade or signage, or from subdued streetlights....

Kinkade's paintings sell because they depict places where people want to be, places that are full of life.

But thanks to zoning laws with their setbacks and segregations by use and minimum numbers of parking spaces, thanks to modern commercial building practices and lending practices, thanks to indiscriminate demolition and the lack of conservation ordinances, places like these are harder and harder to come by.

And so instead of inspiring in their suburban owners the hope of living in such a place, these paintings embody a bittersweet nostalgia for the kind of streets that, they have been led to believe, can not exist in the modern world. Oh, maybe in a big city on the east coast, or over in Europe, but not in a sprawling Sun Belt metropolis like Tulsa....

Imagine that Tulsa could be so beautiful and full of life that people who had never been here would hang paintings of our streetscapes on their walls and dream of someday coming here.

More to come, eventually.