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This is Convo By Design with a two part special about The Magic City\u2026Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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\nIn the 1920\u2019s, Tulsa Oklahoma was called the \u2018magic city\u2019 because of the things that were happening as a result of the oil boom. The Cushing Field was discovered at the beginning of the 1900\u2019s which saw the population explode from\xa0 just over 7,000 in 1907 to over 72,000 in 1920. Names like Waite Phillips, J. Paul, Getty, Henry Sinclair\xa0 and John D. Rockefeller came to Tulsa and built a world-class city around the oil industry, and creating companies like Texaco and Phillips 66. With the influx of money and came high-society, culture and the arts along side extraordinary architecture and design.\xa0
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\nIt wasn\u2019t just rich white money. Black Wall Street was within the highly successful, self-contained black community of Greenwood. This is a success story with a horrific ending that resulted in the Greenwood Massacre. To understand how this happened, one needs to fully understand that Black Wall Street, as it was called, wasn\u2019t isolated, it was a community crafted out of necessity and developed into a highly functioning community of black-owned, black-run businesses, by design. O.W. Gurley, a wealthy man of color bought 40 acres of land and called it Greenwood. He and others created a center of commerce built by and for the black community and it is a success story with a tragic ending. After years of success, and years of publicly, well documented jealousy, the result was the Black Wall Street Massacre which saw the entire community destroyed by a white mob. 36 Greenwood residents lost their lives, 800 were injured, 6,000 were held unlawfully and the entire community was burned to the ground.\xa0 If interested in the whole story, which is an incredible and tragic story will be linked here. And today, you can find influences of Black Wall Street imbued within the city itself through design and architecture. \xa0
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\nThis is not the end of the story and there is so much to explore in how Tulsans have respected the Black Wall Street story and are making sure it is told to future generations much of which can be seen through the design and architecture. Speaking of architecture, this AMAZING art deco and mid-century modern, the gothic cathedrals and a city plan straight out of mid-town Manhattan.\xa0This is part of the story of Tulsa, an amazing story and one I wanted to share with you from the architecture, design and city planning perspective. To understand the origin and evolution of Tulsa, I spoke with two community experts, Grant Bumgarner with an organization called Tulsa Remote and architect Ted Reeds, both of whom know this city and her history intimately.\xa0
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\nGrant Bumgarner is Community Manager with Tulsa Remote. If not familiar, Tulsa Remote is a community development program designed to bring talented people to Tulsa, Oklahoma. People who work remotely that can bring a fresh perspective to the city. This two-year old initiative will be further explained by Grant. This is a story about regrowing a (formerly) modern city, city planning with people at the center of moving forward smartly into the future.\xa0 I love studying American cities. I am a huge fan of cities like Austin, Texas\u2026Memphis, Tennessee and yes, Tulsa, Oklahoma. You can learn a lot about how cities respect their past and nurture their future. Some of the most successful cities are those that respect their past and keep an eye on ever moving forward and Tulsa is one of those. You have no doubt heard about Tulsa recently, and for all the wrong reasons. The Trail of Tears, the destruction of Black Wall and massacre of its residents. This city has a mixed past and you are going to hear about much of it. You are also going to hear about a city that was built on some of the countries best architecture.\xa0
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\nYou heard me correctly, some of America\u2019s best Art Deco architecture is in Tulsa,