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The BOK Center is making news across the country.
Over the past year, I’ve spent a good deal of time showing out-of-towners around downtown and telling them about my city. They usually arrive with little or no expectations, so it is fairly easy to impress them. And there is a satisfaction to be had when you can counter someone’s preconceived notions and send them away with an entirely different opinion than when they arrived.
A couple of weeks ago, on an unusually temperate December afternoon, I was performing tour-guide duties with an author from Provincetown, Mass. My plan was to show him the usual places that I feel make Tulsa unique. But just as we were headed north on Denver Avenue, the BOK Center appeared, reflecting rays from the late-afternoon sun.
“What’s that?” my guest asked.
But just as I saw an opening for my usual speech, my guest blurted out: “This is pretty new, right? I think I read about this.”
I was dumbfounded and completely unprepared. Apparently, he’d read one of those recent magazine articles proclaiming Tulsa as one of the “most livable” cities in America.
It wasn’t that he’d read the article that impressed me. It was that he retained some information from the article. OK, he didn’t know the name of the arena, but he knew it was a fairly recent and important addition to the downtown area. I talk about it a lot, and it is covered often in local publications, but this third-party affirmation was the first time I really thought that we may be slowly changing (or perhaps creating) our national reputation.
When someone from Massachusetts knows a thing or two about our city development, we are doing something right. We just have to keep it up.
