The river walks at San Antonio and OKC are on a scale more like Brookside or Cherry Street with water separating the two sides of retail development instead of asphalt. There simply is no way to do what has been done in San Antonio with the Arkansas unless you do this along a tributary or do a side-stream like they did in OKC.
The Arkansas River is much more analogous to the Ohio River at Pittsburg, Cincinnati, or Louisville. The biggest difference between Tulsa and major hubs along the Ohio, Mississippi, or the Hudson is those three rivers are navigable at major cities, whereas the Arkansas retains it’s prairie character through Tulsa. As transportation hubs, those cities have had river front commerce out of necessity for around 200+ years.
Cincinnati celebrates their park space in anticipation of completing a trail connecting those parks:
Ohio River Trail is planning on to complete the 4.75 mile segment from downtown to Lunken connecting our world class riverfront parks to east side neighborhoods and the 333 mile Ohio to the Lake Erie trail by 2017.This will leverage our region’s most valuable natural resource, the Ohio River, with the construction of a regional trail network.
https://eastendcincinnati.wordpress.comIn other words, cities much older than Tulsa are just now catching up to the type of river trails Tulsa has now had for four decades.
In comparison, here’s San Antonio:
Bing Thom said during the roll out of “The Channels” proposal that the Arkansas River was not “human scale”. I believe his intent was, you can’t stand on one bank and wave at your friends on the other bank because you can’t see them from the other side. By its nature, it lacks the coziness of the canals other cities have constructed. The canal in San Antonio was originally devised as a stormwater sewer and was to be paved over, just as we paved over Elm Creek through downtown Tulsa. Elm Creek is our cozy canal opportunity. Filling the Arkansas River from Sand Springs to Haskell and decorating the banks with commercial development still will not even come close to emulating the river walk in San Antonio. It’s not the correct scale.
Tulsa can actually be a leader rather than a follower in improving and celebrating our park space along the Arkansas River. That is being done with The Gathering Place. When it is completed, it is supposed to be a world-class park others will want to emulate. Don’t we want other cities to look at Tulsa and say: “Now there’s a place which resisted the temptation to dreck up its banks with commercial development.”?
We’ve already seen the city seems so desperate for commercial development along the Arkansas that they were too afraid to tell the developer of the supposed REI space they had to do something attractive. Instead, from renderings anyone here has managed to dig up, it looks like park users will see a 30 foot lay up slab wall from the trail. Oh, we will also get a bank and maybe a restaurant or two, maybe a nail store or phone store. The development further down Riverside near the Creek Turnpike on Tulsa’s side also missed an opportunity to embrace the river- turning it’s back, instead of its front to the river.
Across the river in Jenks, they did manage to get it right with Riverwalk Crossing (architecturally-speaking) even though they have had trouble retaining tenants. It may have helped if there were entrances toward parking and the river for each retailer/restaurant to make it more attractive from the parking side. I honestly don’t have the right answer on how to correct the vacancy issue other than there really was not that much pent up demand for retailers to locate next to a prairie river or there wasn’t enough demand on the part of consumers to eat or shop next to the river. Putting water in the river is not some magic elixir to change consumer spending habits or the realities of commercial leasing.
This is something which needs to undergo extreme scrutiny before we start selling off or doing 99 year leases up and down the river with out of state developers who are only in it to make a buck doing the construction. They could care less if the development goes tits-up a few years after they have left the city. I’d hate to see a bunch of speculative development sitting half empty and rotting along the river.
I personally prefer our park space as a sanctuary as the rest of our city runs out of empty development space. Parks and recreation equates better to the quality of life that will attract desirable employers and demographics, not what we have in the way of retail.
