Down by the river

Arkansas River set for a Kaiser-style makeover… and some water

Since the concept for A Gathering Place, touted as Tulsa’s world-class park to-be, a George Kaiser Family Foundation-led production along Riverside Drive, was announced two years ago, Tulsans have basked in its swanky details, released all slow like warm Werther’s Originals from grandma’s purse. Most recently we’ve reveled in news about the Playground to End All Playgrounds. The scoop on the nearly five-acre play area has Tulsa’s stay-at-home moms swooning more than they did over “Fifty Shades of Grey.” And that’s saying something.

These play areas are only a fraction of the nearly 100 acres that A Gathering Place for Tulsa will transform along the Arkansas River. More than 60 acres are slated for completion by late 2017—a gathering place indeed, where there’s a luxurious seven square feet for every Tulsan who lived here the year the project was announced.

The Chapman Foundations Adventure Playground, as it will be called, will be “multigenerational,” per the latest press release—which hopefully means grandmas are encouraged to slide and swing to their hearts’ content.

Additionally, the Biggest, Most Amazing Playground Your Face Has Ever Seen will offer seven play spaces. Is it mere coincidence that there’s one for every day? Or, in Momspeak, one for every day the kids (not yours, of course) bounce off the walls hollering about how bored they are? WE THINK NOT. We see what you did there, Foundations.

First, there’s a “Ramble,” which I imagine is a sidewalk lined with the kind of educational stuff kids run right past on their way to somewhere way more awesome, like the Skywalk Forest (treetop forts and a zipline!), Spiral Connector and Towers (swinging bridges 45 to 60 feet up!), or the River Giants (paddle fish-shaped climbing structure, and such!). There are two spaces for the younger kids, Fairyland Forest and Cloverville, though they should probably have been called, The Place Your Younger Kids Can Cry When You Tell Them They’re Too Small for the Big Kid Areas.

Bottomline: But they’ll be fine. The Fairyland Forest will offer playhouses and swings and climbing stuff, while Cloverville will be a safe haven for babies and their caregivers (that is, if it doesn’t turn into the locus of Tulsa’s next debate over public breastfeeding).

The last two play spaces will be a picnic place and a “state-of-the-art” water play area. Will the new Water Mountain be chiseled from Google glass and spout nutrient-loaded water that won’t kill your smartphone? A girl can dream.

Mud puddle be gone, dam it!

Ahh, the Arkansas River – the beloved, sloppy mud puddle that runs through town, separating West Tulsa from everyone else.

The lack of water in the river has been a bad inside joke amongst Tulsans for years. But there is a solution, dam it: A series of low-water dams below Zink Dam (under the Pedestrian Bridge) would help keep water in the channel, plus dams in Sand Springs and near Jenks. The bill should come to around $162 million, not counting the $20 million dam being considered for Bixby.

What’s old is new again, and now it’s time to talk about these damn dams once more. City Councilor G.T. Bynum, chair of the Arkansas River Infrastructure Task Force (ARITF just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue), led the charge, kicking off as lively a discussion as one can have talking water at a Monday evening City Hall in Your Neighborhood meeting (that event, by the way—is it a threat or a promise?).

Political support seems unanimous, from Tulsa’s nine city councilors and our mayor to the leaders of the river cities of Sand Springs, Jenks, and Bixby, according to Bynum.

Bynum threw all the buzzwords at the gathered crowd of 50 or so at the meeting, hoping to change hearts, minds, and the water level. He called it “a game-changing opportunity” that “any other city in this country would die to have.” Give us river water or give us death!

Bottomline: This is not a new idea, nor is it a new conversation. Tulsa has been trying to build low-water dams since 1961. Let me say this another way: Tulsa has been battling the low-water problem since the first American troops landed in Vietnam. We figured out how to leap about on the moon before we could figure out how to add more water to our piece of the Arkansas. We have 22 miles of riverfront property with only a handful of businesses there. Officials estimate the cost to build dams in south Tulsa, Jenks, and Sand Springs and to update Zink Dam as less than what we paid for the BOK Center. Sounds like a small price to pay to cross this off our wish list–but perhaps we are only excited about much-needed river development when it’s not coming out of our own pockets (ahem—see above). A Gathering Place’s estimated $700 million in construction along the river will only highlight the Arkansas as Tulsa’s winding little stretch of coulda-shoulda-woulda. The time to deal with the dammedable river is now.