Here is an article that puts a lot of things both current and past in perspective..
To my way of thought, regarding Downtown, there have been no wasted opportunities. No
spilt-milk... just a continuing evolutionary process..
The make "it rich" crowd could have slapped together some prefab facade and called it urban and Downtown all they liked.... it wouldn't have made it so.
from the Journal Record.
http://www.tulsabusiness.com/article.asp?aID=46736&page=1 The Urban Planning Game
Stephen Hillman
2/4/2008
Urban Planner Jack Crowley is charged with envisioning a way to take all the players in downtown development and turn them into a win for revitalization.
And, that includes working out a way to bring the new piece on the board, the city’s proposal to develop a stadium for the Tulsa Drillers downtown, into play.
“It’s a giant chess game,” Crowley, who is special adviser to the mayor on urban planning, said. “It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for downtown. The trend across the country is to bring these facilities downtown. We have a 90-day window, and part of making financing feasible is determining how can you stretch it and maximize the income from related facilities. That is where we are headed.”
Mayor Kathy Taylor announced Jan. 22 the city had a four-month exclusive agreement with Drillers owner Chuck Lamson to negotiate on a city-owned stadium, which has been estimated to cost no more than $70 million.
The 6,000-seat ballpark would be on the east side of downtown between Elgin Avenue and the IDL, and Fourth and Sixth streets.
Taylor said the city is considering private funding, lease money from the Drillers and public financing for the project, but stressed whatever options are chosen will not impact street repair funding. One option includes raising the hotel-motel tax, which stands at 5 percent, for a defined term.
A Learning ‘Bump’
Crowley is the perfect person to bring on board to support Tulsa’s redevelopment.
A former Tulsan and OU graduate, Taylor and OU-Tulsa President Gerard Clancy, M.D., forged a strategic partnership to bring Crowley to Tulsa and loan him to the city as a special adviser to the mayor.
Crowley, who has served as dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia from 1996 to 2006, joined the faculty at OU-Tulsa as a visiting professor in the College of Architecture.
His career as a planner spans three decades and began with work in Lawton and Seminole. He has been chief planner for the Oklahoma State Park System, executive director of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission and director of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. Crowley also served for seven years as vice president of Williams Realty in Tulsa to develop multiple public/private partnerships.
With undergraduate degrees in architecture, business and art history, a master of regional and city planning, and a Ph.D. in urban geography, all from the University of Oklahoma, Crowley’s first priority will be to coordinate the City’s revitalization efforts in downtown. He will also lend his expertise to help enhance planning for the city’s mass transit efforts. Crowley will also provide support for the development of PlanIt Tulsa, the new Comprehensive Plan for the City.
“Having been here for 18 years and then on and off for the last 12 years as a consultant for Williams, I have seen Tulsa full time and then I have seen it in time lapse, so the learning curve isn’t going to be difficult,” Crowley said.
Since he came on board in early January, he said he has been “reconnecting with the people I have dealt with and the new people that have entered” the downtown revitalization effort.
“That’s what I have been doing for the last three weeks on a fairly intensive basis, and then I work late at night and try to take these ideas and put them in graphic form,” Crowley said. “A lot of times when people are asked to support something, if there is not a very clear picture of it then it is difficult for them to support. What I find myself doing is taking these ideas and tying them all together and then drawing a very clear picture of how they can be mutually supportive.”
Crowley said the mayor’s principal challenge for him is the revitalization of downtown and the connection of downtown to the Arkansas River.
“The two are interconnected,” he said. “The success of downtown is going to be in a large part attached to how the river relates to it because that is one of the great assets of Tulsa. If you are going to get residential downtown, and a lot of other things, then you are going to have to figure out how to connect it to one of the principal green corridors”.
Dot on the MapAfter years of little or no growth downtown, Crowley points to a number of areas of new development.
“You have had a pretty strong but scattered approach to developing the Brady and the Blue Dome Districts. Those have come along pretty much on their own, but it is tough for the people doing that because there is not a lot of critical mass, they are developing it themselves,” he said. “Now 2025 comes along and the Route 66 corridor, which is kind of a tourism attraction, and you have the BOk Arena and the subsequent expansion of the Tulsa Convention Center – that’s a very substantial project, a big dot on the map.”
In conjunction with those developments, Crowley sees potential for the stadium to take place.
“You can’t just assume that the day after that thing opens that there is going to be a high-rise hotel next to it,” he said. “But I think that you will see a lot of quick responses, such as the potential for surrounding it with residential and entertainment right in the immediate vicinity of the ballpark, and that may even take place as a part of the original development.”
“The key is to design that field and develop it so it accommodates surrounding development, and not design it so that you have to try to make outside development fit later on,” he said.
Crowley said part of his assignment is to help develop a master plan for downtown.
“I think the game plan is going to end up being – how do you reinforce the Blue Dome and the Brady districts, and how do you connect the arena to it so the arena visitor can take advantage of what is already there on the ground and the new restaurants that some of the developers in those districts are already planning,” he said. «
