District
JOHN CLANTON, TULSA WORLD
People gather in the Tulsa Arts District on a Friday that had the First Friday Art Crawl and the first night of Mayfest in May.
ALL ABOUT THE
ART
I
JAMES D. WATTS JR. Tulsa World Magazine
t’s been a “village.” It’s been a “belt.” It’s been a bowery. It’s been a boomtown. It’s watched over by an artificial cloud, and it’s right next door to the center of the universe. It’s a place where a king once reigned, and weekly encouraged his faithful subjects to dance. It’s home to an “old lady” who for a century has welcomed the finest performers, the greatest shows. And it has tried for years to present itself as artful. But it didn’t really grow into its full potential until it learned how to crawl. The Tulsa Arts District has been
58 Tulsa World Magazine
Tulsa Arts District evolves into one of city’s premier destinations
many things to many people through the years, but geographically it’s always been centered around what is now called Reconciliation Way. Its westernmost edge takes in the venue now known as the Tulsa Theatre, and it extends north to encompass the Cain’s Ballroom, which for several years in the 1940s was the home of Bob Wills, the king of Western Swing. Archer Street serves as the southern boundary, with Living Arts of Tulsa at the corner of Detroit and Reconciliation Way as the eastern outpost. It is one of the oldest areas in the city, with some of its signature red-brick buildings dating back to statehood in 1907, and for the past dozen years, the neighborhood has been the site of
continuous evolution. And, as with any entity that’s been around for a long time, it has more than a few unsavory aspects to its history, beginning with what for many years was the neighborhood’s namesake. Reconciliation Way started out as Brady Street, named for Wyatt Tate Brady, an early Tulsa businessman who was one of the founders of the city. In 2013, revelations that Brady had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan led to an effort to rename the street, as well as the other places around the city that had “Brady” in their names. The name was altered in 2013 to “M.B. Brady St.,” after the Civil War-era photographer Matthew Brady, before in 2019 being officially changed to TULSAWORLDMAGAZINE.COM
