A massive Tulsa park with dream playground is the envy of the world — and it’s all free
As Wichita tries to decide how to develop the east bank of the Arkansas River, there’s a neighbor to the south that’s filled the east bank of its piece of the Arkansas River with something pretty spectacular.
It’s called Gathering Place, and it’s a dreamy, almost 100-acre public park in Tulsa that opened a year ago and has since become known as one of the country’s top attractions, earning a nod as one of the World’s Greatest Places from Time Magazine and being named America’s Best New Attraction by USA Today.
The $465 million park at the moment features 66 near-downtown acres filled with 160 interactive play structures straight out of a child’s fantasy, a boat house with a fancy restaurant and giant patio upstairs and free kayak, canoe and paddle boat rentals downstairs during warmer months, a main building described as a “ski lodge on steroids” with wood ceilings and funky furniture and fireplaces, an outdoor concert venue, a skate park, and acres of gardens featuring $1.2 million worth of well-manicured plants and shrubs.
And it’s not even finished yet. By 2021, the park will add a 50,000-square-foot children’s museum, and there are also plans for a massive steel arched pedestrian bridge that will connect the park to the riverbank, which will boast two great lawns on three acres of waterfront land.
In its first 12 months open, the park has attracted 2.9 million visitors, including plenty from neighboring cities like Wichita, said the park’s executive director Tony Moore.
The best part: It costs nothing to get in.
“We’re trying to make the Midwest no longer a flyover,” Moore said.
A billionaire’s gift
It would be difficult for most cities to replicate Gathering Place, Moore said, because most cities don’t have a George Kaiser.
A Tulsa-born billionaire who made his money in oil and banking, Kaiser is also a progressive philanthropist whose mission has been addressing poverty and cultural division in Tulsa. His George Kaiser Family Foundation gave the first $200 million for the project, and businesses and private donors financed most of the rest. The city of Tulsa contributed another $65 million in infrastructure upgrades for the park.
The gift, which included a $100 million endowment to maintain the park and put on programming, represents the largest onetime private donation to a community park in U.S. history.
Kaiser, who at age 77 is worth an estimated $7.1 billion, was inspired to act, Moore said, after Tulsa started losing some of its major corporations to nearby cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin.
He decided that a magnificent park could help contribute to the Tulsa’s quality of life and desirability, and he also wanted to address growing racial division in the city. He saw the park as a way to unify people, a place where Tulsa residents from all parts of town would gather.
“He saw the park as just a really iconic place that would make Tulsa a more vibrant place to live and work and play,” Moore said.
The Kaiser Foundation first bought the property, which had included a couple of apartment complexes and the historic Blair Mansion, all of which was razed. The foundation gifted the property to River Parks Authority, a city/county trust whose role is maintaining and developing the Arkansas River and the areas around it.
In 2010, the foundation put on a design competition, looking for a firm that could draw up a plan to make the project special. They received 36 submissions from firms around the world but finally chose landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates out of New York City, who were responsible for designing, among other high-profile projects, Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York and Maggie Daley Park in Chicago.
Crews broke ground in 2014, and in September of last year, the park officially opened to huge crowds that haven’t let up.
“It’s starting to be an economic driver,” Moore said.
A Midwest destination
Gathering Place has a long list of attractions, but its marquee might be its five acres of playground, whose structures are the stuff of childhood dreams.
Indeed, the equipment is so plentiful, so big and so imaginative that parents have often expressed the desire to play on it themselves. They can, but the park’s staff has arranged a few “parents only” nights to fulfill that wish.
The centerpiece of the playground is a three-story wooden castle that kids must climb to reach the lookout point at the top. It’s connected by a netted bridges to several more tall, climbable, castle-like structures. Kids could climb around, up and through it all day long.
Nearby is another section of playground with two giant great blue herons whose bodies kids can climb inside and whose wings they can slide down. There’s another section of climbing gear that looks straight off the set of “Star Wars,” with angular metal pods set up high off the ground and connected by slides and metal bridges
There’s a zip line, an elephant whose trunk is a slide, a garden of fruits where a banana doubles as a slide, and a big wooden boat that rocks. There’s a hill covered in swings and several sections of climbing mazes made out of polished, twisty tree trunks.
If they can get the kids away from the playground — and it will likely take hours — parents can cross a bridge and check out a two-story boathouse with a dramatic canopy roof. Upstairs is a fine dining restaurant called Vista at the Boathouse and a giant covered outdoor patio filled with tables and rocking chairs where people can sit and watch the kayaks and canoes launching into the park’s pond. The patio has its own outdoor bar, where grownups can get adult refreshments.
Beyond the gardens is a walkable area of gardens featuring all those plants and shrubs, then a maze of stacked stone walls that replicates the feeling of a mountain hike. On the north end of the park is the lodge, whose highlight is a giant living room with a fireplace and a ceiling covered with planks of cedar and maple. The lodge also includes an indoor cafe, and just outside is a burgers-and-nachos concession area where lines can get pretty long. People are also allowed to bring their own food into the park.
Besides offering facilities that will bring people back, Moore said, the park also is focused on providing a slate of programs that will attract different groups of people year round. There are story times, dog play days, nature walks, family wellness days, movie nights, exercise classes and holiday activities. The park’s Winter Wonderland, which runs Dec. 18-Jan. 1, will include lights, caroling, food and drink, a train and photos with Santa.
There’s also a giant sloped lawn that has room for about 7,000 to gather and watch concerts on a stage the park can take up and down, and live music is a frequent offering there. The Roots performed at the park’s opening day celebrations, and the park held a big gospel concert in October.
Gathering Place also hosts cultural events, like the Oklahoma Tribal Celebration that happened earlier this month and Celebration Asia, which was staged in October. It also is home to food-and-drink events, like the recent Tulsa Beer & Wine Festival or the Riverside Ribfest, which happened in August.
“We are intentional with our programming,” Moore said. “It’s geared to authentically draw a diverse demographic.”
Moore said that in the year since it opened, locals have embraced Gathering Place as their park — “built by Tulsans for Tulsans.”
But that doesn’t mean out-of-town visitors aren’t welcome. Moore said that the park is getting lots of people who travel from places like Wichita, Dallas and Oklahoma City, especially during the holiday weekends.
They’ve also received many requests from other cities who want to see Gathering Place and determine if they could do something similar. Moore says that he’s open with such visitors and will answer all their questions. But the reality, he said, is that without a donor like Kaiser, Gathering Place would be difficult to replicate.
One of the most frequent comments he gets from visitors, Moore said, is that they can’t believe it’s all free. Is he sure, they ask, that they don’t need to pay something?
He tells them about Kaiser and the private donors and assures them that it’s all already been paid for.
“We’re operating a free experience as if it’s a paid experience,” he said.
Gathering Place
What: A 100-acre public park, 66 acres of which is open and functioning, built largely with private donations
Where: 2650 S. John Williams Way East, Tulsa, 918-779-1000
Admission: Free
Hours: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays; 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays
More information: https://www.gatheringplace.org/
This story was originally published November 16, 2019 at 5:01 AM.
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