Owen Park: Tulsa's First Neighborhood and Its Oil-Boom Bungalows
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
The neighborhood spreading out around you is where Tulsa learned to live with its own wealth.
Owen Park takes its name from Chauncey and Mary Owen, a ranching couple who sold twenty-four acres of their land to the City of Tulsa in nineteen oh nine. The following June, on the eighth of June nineteen ten, the city opened what it called its first municipal park on the site. The neighborhood platted around it at the same time, and for the next two decades it filled with the houses of the people who ran the oil industry.
Tulsa's oil discovery had come in nineteen oh one at Red Fork, and the city grew with a speed that strained belief. In a single generation it transformed from a small Creek Nation river crossing into the self-declared Oil Capital of the World. The men who managed that transformation needed somewhere to live, and Owen Park became one of their answers. The streetcar line on Archer Street carried workers in from downtown and brought residents out for Sunday afternoons in the park. Developers platted lots, and builders filled them with the Craftsman bungalows and Mission Revival houses that were fashionable in the nineteen tens. By the end of the twenties, larger estates had appeared among the bungalows, their owners the oil executives and financiers who had turned a geographic accident into industrial empire.
The district covers nearly one hundred sixty-four acres and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-nine. What makes it unusual in Tulsa's story is its continuity. Other neighborhoods from the oil boom era were demolished or rezoned as the city changed around them. Owen Park held. The streetcars are long gone, but the houses remained, and the architectural range they represent, from modest worker bungalows to the occasional stone manor, is a compressed record of who built Tulsa and what they thought a home should look like when they finally had the money to decide.
The park itself, the original twenty-four acres the Owens sold the city, still anchors the east side of the neighborhood.
