Preserve Midtown

Tulsa will be the site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference, October 21-25, 2008. Tulsa realtor Martin L. J. Newman has served on the National Trust’s Board of Advisors for the last nine years, and he will be Co-chair of the 2008 conference.

To get a sense of what to expect in 2008, you can visit the website for the 2007 conference in Minneapolis at nthpconference.org.

Lortondale neighbors are working to get their neighborhood of midcentury modern homes placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The futurist homes were created in the 1950s by Tulsa architect Donald Honn and builder Howard Grubb. The neighborhood is between Yale and Hudson avenues and 26th Street to 27th Place.

The neighborhood was the first in the nation where every home featured central air and heat. It was also the first in Tulsa with a neighborhood pool.
Homes feature large expanses of glass, open-space planning, and flagstone. Preservation-minded residents and new home buyers have been restoring the houses and seeing their property values rise faster than the Tulsa average. For more information, you can visit their website at http://lortondale.com.

Until recently, Historic Preservation zoning was the only way to preserve a neighborhood’s buildings and character. It comes with big responsibilities, and is rarely appropriate.

But there are other ways to maintain a neighborhood’s buildings and character. In Conservation Districts, mass and scale (not architectural style) is at issue, and guidelines are created by the neighborhood itself, instead of a city committee. In other cities, factors for conservation might include:

• Mass and Scale–The traditional mass and scale of the area shall be maintained
• Building Form–A building shall have basic roof and building forms that are similar to those seen traditional in the neighborhood
• Construction Materials–Building materials shall contribute to the visual continuity of the neighborhood.
• Building Orientation–The traditional patterns of building orientation shall be maintained.
• Building Alignment–The distance from the street or property line to the front of the building shall be similar to that seen traditionally in the neighborhood.
• Project Context–The project shall be compatible with those neighborhood characteristics that result from common ways of building. This sense of setting shall be preserved.
• Character-Defining Features–Major character-defining features of the property under review shall not be destroyed.”

Conservation districting “offers residents a useful tool to protect older, established neighborhoods that have a distinctive or cohesive character, have some historic resources within its boundaries, lack sufficient support for designation as historic district, but desire protection from teardowns, incompatible development, or commercial encroachment.”
Instead of a city committee of historians and architects, a conservation district “enables residents to take an active role in identifying their concerns and determining what level or type of protection they want for their neighborhood (and) to protect existing neighborhood commercial centers or encourage new investment when desired…through the adoption of both development and design-related controls.”
— Miller, Julia. Protecting Older Neighborhoods Through Conservation District Programs. National Trust for Historic Preservation (2004)

UPDATE: Bad infill is not unique to Tulsa. The photograph above is from the National Trust of Historic Preservation, and it is of a house in Dallas.

The most restrictive protection that the City can grant a neighborhood is a Historic Preservation overlay. For the vast majority of Midtown, this is overkill. But what does it actually involve? Are residents required to paint their houses an approved color, get permission for remodeling, or keep satellite dishes off their roofs? No.

An HP overlay codifies a list of common-sense guidelines tailored to protect the architectural distinctiveness of a notable neighborhood. Tulsa’s first HP overlay was the Brady Heights district of 1904-1930 homes. Among other regulations, residents are strongly discouraged from installing vinyl siding, enclosing their front porches to make new rooms, and installing replacement windows with bare aluminum framing. Maintenance costs are higher, but the growth of property values outpaces similar unprotected neighborhoods.
Photo courtesy Tulsa Preservation Commission

Give back to your community and help us with our neighborhood efforts.

PreserveMidtown.com is an effort to encourage appropriate infill in Tulsa.   Donations are needed for website maintenance, printing yard signs, bumper stickers, and more.

To donate, please make check to:

Preserve Midtown
1611 S Utica Ave PMB 274

Tulsa, OK 74104-4909

Or, you can donate with your credit card:

We sincerely appreciate all donations to help support this grassroots effort.  Working together we can impact issues that affect us where we live!

This quiet street, basically a long cul-de-sac, is populated with houses that have 50-foot setbacks, wide front yards, and distinctive homes that merit historic preservation or conservation. Fifty years ago, in response to a lot split, area neighbors joined in a covenant agreement to preserve the neighborhood’s character by providing that only single family homes would be permitted on the then-existing lots. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was inappropriately zoned RS-2 in the 1970’s, and this zoning opened the door for lot splits.

Last year, a developer bought two houses in the neighborhood, tore them down, and to exploit the zoning mistake, applied for and received a lot split from the INCOG and the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC). Neighbors, alarmed at the developments, petitioned INCOG to down-zone the neighborhood to its proper RS-1 density. Under current zoning regulations, however, TMAPC excluded the properties with pending development - turning the neighborhood into a checkerboard of RS-1 and RS-2 zoned lots. The neighborhood plat is now a mockery of urban planning.

The neighborhood has united against the development company in the neighborhood’s effort to prevent the lot split and ensure adherence to a 50 foot building line. Part of the neighborhood’s advocacy was to erect signs to call public attention to its plight. The developer, however, has retaliated with two separate lawsuits against the homeowners, drowning the residents in legal costs and seeking to stifle their First Amendment right of free speech. Many are widowed retirees on fixed incomes. This is a worst-case scenario, but one that is typical of current development practices in midtown Tulsa, and we will be watching this one closely.

When everything south of 41st Street was still farmland, and Tulsa was growing fast in the post-war baby boom, Ranch Acres was born. Created in 1950 by I.A. “Jake” Jacobson, the innovative developer of Southland and Northland shopping malls, Ranch Acres was one of the first suburban tract developments in the United States. It initially stretched from Harvard to Florence, but by 1958, the development had spread to Delaware.

Residents of this neighborhood should be aware of its historical significance, and should know that there are ways to protect its character. Historical preservation may be too extreme for this neighborhood, but certainly some action is in order to restrict the oversized, out-of-place houses that have been built in the last few years.

Here, at 3129 E 27th St, a modest 50s/60s ranch-style house was leveled and replaced. The new house dwarfs its neighbors: the roofline is more than twice as high as any of its neighbors. All the landscaping, except one single tree, was sacrificed to make room. Despite their grand appearance, homes like this are typically constructed with surprisingly fragile materials. Masonite siding is commonplace, and when water finds a seam, the material swells and rots rapidly. New homeowners are typically surprised by the maintenance required to keep their houses from deteriorating.

Preserve Midtown is a community based effort to provide information and advocacy for midtown homeowners concerning the issues of infill, teardowns and inappropriate existing zoning.

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At 3704 S Birming- ham Ave, architect Frank Lloyd Wright built his ‘Westhope’ home for cousin Richard Lloyd Jones in 1929. (Click link for an outside link to its fascinating history.) The house is one of many of Tulsa’s Art Deco treasures, but nestled in a residential neighborhood, it is often overlooked. Although the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Tulsa has not given the area any protection beyond a routine RS-1 zoning. The house itself is safe, but we should be wary of encroachment.