A project to create an online map and timeline of the historic Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, OK
The Tulsa Historical Society, the McFarlain Library at TU, the OSU-Tulsa Library, the Tulsa Central Library, the Hardesty Genealogical Center, city & county court case files, census data, fire insurance maps, city directories, etc. exist, but these resources are quite literally scattered throughout the city. There is no one comprehensive place that one can view Greenwood’s breadth/scope, and certainly no place where one can get a sense of Greenwood’s growth, destruction, and rebuilding, over a span of time.
The lack of a comprehensive visual tool leaves many people—especially in Greenwood—with a missing sense of what this community consisted of. A comprehensive map, showing neighborhood change over time, would answer the questions: Just how large was Greenwood? How fast did it grow between 1905 and 1921? What was destroyed in 1921? What came back? How quickly did Greenwood recover from its destruction?
We speak of Greenwood’s destruction in specifics. We speak of its successes in the abstract because they’ve never been compiled and curated.
Throughout the two-year research process of writing the book, The Victory of Greenwood, Carlos Moreno and his team of researchers uncovered several data sources which included land deeds, addresses of families and businesses, census data, business directory data, municipal land records, and other sources of information that have never been corroborated and displayed together in one place. Tri-City Collective has received an accelerator grant from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to help support the creation of an online map of Greenwood that would be interactive—showing Greenwood’s growth from 1905 to 1921, and its rebuilding after the Tulsa Race Massacre.
- Website of old street grid, showing outline of buildings, and have the ability to scroll through time (1920, then 1921, 1922). Click/hover to show historical details (name of the business / name of the resident, address).
- Demo goal is CfA Brigade Congress in October, and presentation at Thunderplains. We will use the grant funding received to build this demo and “launch” the project.
- A future feature (phase 2?) might be to add links to any historical photos or historical information (such as an article about the business or family), as available.
- The vision for future development of this project is to collect data and add to the map+timeline for previous years, going back to when the land was native-owned, and then go forward in time showing the growth of Greenwood through the 1940s-1960s, and then its decline again during Urban Renewal, the building of the IDL, and the building of UCAT (OSU-Tulsa).