Architect: Gathering Place for Tulsa will be world-class park | Tulsa World

Michael Van Valkenburgh is coming to town.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, it will soon. Van Valkenburgh, president of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., and his team of landscape architects are about to transform the face of Tulsa with a world-class park along Riverside Drive.


It's called the Gathering Place for Tulsa, and Tuesday the public is invited to attend the unveiling of the final plan for the 55-acre park.

Van Valkenburgh will be there to share his vision.

"I think the park is remarkably diverse and the kind of place it is hard to imagine people won't come back to," Van Valkenburgh said. "I think the design is incredibly successful in connecting the Blair (Mansion) site to the Arkansas River."

The project is being funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation at an estimated cost of $100 million to $150 million.

Jeff Stava, who is overseeing the park project for the foundation, said Van Valkenburgh's team has addressed every design challenge thrown at it.

"The result is the creation of a new, dynamic public space capturing not only the city's physical beauty but civic spirit as well - a place all Tulsans will enjoy," Stava said.

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates was selected to design the park in July 2011, but it was months earlier, on a snowy February day, that Van Valkenburgh and his team first laid eyes on the park property.

"Our breath was taken away with the generosity and the feeling of the Blair site and the challenge of how the rest of the site - which is this wonderful river's edge - could somehow feel connected," Van Valkenburgh said, "because, if you go there now, they feel really separate."

Earlier versions of the park plan, which incorporates input gathered from five public meetings, call for ponds, playgrounds and land bridges connecting the Blair property to the River Parks trails.

The designers knew "that if we could figure out a way to tie that all together, we would have something much more powerful than what you have on the site today," Van Valkenburgh said.

Although the final design won't be made public until Tuesday, the 61-year-old native of upstate New York let it be known that the original design differs somewhat from the final design.

"I think that what we hadn't stressed at all in the early versions of the design was how much Tulsa is into eating outside - sort of the outdoor eating culture of the city," Van Valkenburgh said. "People were like, 'Oh, it would be great to go there and have places to get a beer, barbecue, stuff like that.' So that definitely changed the elements we included."

Van Valkenburgh may be best known for his design of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., with its magnificent views of New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

He lives just blocks from the park and never stays away long.

"It is just magnetic to go and to be around that many people having a good time - just having fun, kicking back," he said.

Van Valkenburgh expects the Gathering Place for Tulsa to have the same appeal - not simply because of its amenities, which will be numerous and varied, but because of its borrowed landscape.

"What a gift this site is - the site is incredible already," he said. "That is what reminds me of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

"In Tulsa, the context is different, but it is very powerful - just a great place for somebody to ask you to design a park because it is already so good."

The park, Van Valkenburgh believes, says a lot about the city.

"It is remarkably ambitious," he said. "This level of care and regard for the quality of life in the city is reflected by the magnitude of the project.

"In its own way, it is sort of like Tulsa trying to make its own version of New York's Central Park or San Francisco's Crissy Field."
Public meeting

What: Unveiling of Gathering Place for Tulsa final plans

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: TCC Center for Creativity, 910 S. Boston Ave.
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates projects

Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York

Teardrop Park, New York

Hudson River Parks, New York

George W. Bush Presidential Center, Dallas

Mill Race Park, Columbus, Ind.

North Grant Park, Chicago

Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh

Lower Don Lands, Toronto