There’s this new park in Tulsa, Okla., and it’s amazing. I went on a weekday afternoon last month expecting calm and quiet and instead encountered thousands of people, mostly families with kids. It was the first public-school break since the Gathering Place, as the park is called, had opened Sept. 8, and it seemed like everybody in and around Tulsa had decided to check it out.
My fellow park visitors, while skewed toward youth, were of many different ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, sizes, hairstyles, physical capabilities and, one assumes, political views. They all seemed impressed, and mostly delighted. I certainly was. I texted my wife photos of a couple of the huge and fanciful play structures, and she said they reminded her of the justly famous Diana, Princess of Wales’ Memorial Playground in London, where we used to take our son when he was little. “Except about 10 times bigger,” I responded. There are also ponds, meadows, a boathouse/lodge/cabana with panoramic views of downtown Tulsa and the Arkansas River, a walkway over Tulsa’s Riverside Drive and along the river, circuits for bicyclists and skateboarders, and lots more.
Given that I had a copy of a book called “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life” sitting in my car, I couldn’t help but think of the Gathering Place in those terms. Same went for some of the other great public spaces created in the past decade or two – the park-over-the-freeway (Klyde Warren Park) in Dallas; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.; the Scioto Mile in Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City’s Bricktown Canal – that I encountered this fall.
Now that I’ve read the (fascinating) book and talked to its author, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg, I know that he mainly had more mundane palaces in mind. Klinenberg identifies it chiefly with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the thousands of public libraries he built. Libraries are at the core of the book: spaces where everybody is welcome, knowledge is free and interaction with others is encouraged.
The evening before I visited Tulsa, I went for a stroll along Oklahoma City’s Bricktown Canal, modeled shamelessly but effectively on San Antonio’s famous River Walk, with Mick Cornett, who stepped down in April after 14 years as the city’s mayor. “We all live in cities we didn’t build,” he mused near the end of our walk. “Going forward, let’s think about how to do it and create cities around people instead of cars. That doesn’t happen organically.”
In Tulsa, the impetus and the bulk of the funding for the Gathering Place came from a local philanthropist, George Kaiser, who owns Kaiser-Francis Oil Co. and a majority stake in BOK Financial Corp., among other things, and currently ranks 119th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In Oklahoma City, the sales tax for downtown revitalization was followed by a voter-approved extension to pay for public-school improvements. And Klinenberg makes much in his book of the 2-to-1 2010 referendum vote in Columbus, a city that has invested a lot in high-profile downtown improvements, to increase property taxes to avert public-library cutbacks in the wake of the Great Recession. Maybe investment in big, shiny palaces for the people actually goes hand in hand with public investment of a more quotidian sort.
The notion that cities and towns are uniquely placed to be sources of political innovation and societal renewal is a frequently voiced one, in part because there seems to be so little chance of such a coming-together at the national level. So yes, enjoy your spectacular new palace, people of Tulsa. Let’s hope it leads to the construction of lots of smaller ones.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.