Bob Fleishman

My name is Bob Fleishman and I'm co-owner of Chrysalis Salon and Spa in the Brady Arts District and the president of Brady Arts district business association.

Well, we actually got here nine years ago and that's when we started our build out and what we've seen is just a tremendous amount of things happening. The lot across the street from us was of course a parking lot for a long time, now there's a four-story building over there with a 104 hotel rooms in it, so it's been quite a drastic change. Uh the parking lot across from that was of course recently became the Metro at the Brady, so there's been a lot going on... with the Guthrie Green opening last fall we've seen just a tremendous amount of people coming to the district that had never thought about coming downtown and it's fantastic.

It's picking up all the time uh our salon is open on Saturdays and Sundays and it wasn't unusual for us on a Saturday or Sunday to have the only people be on Brady St. between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. were our clients and that was it, but now there's tremendous amount of activity going on when the Green has activities you see people moving from one event to the other, uh the restaurants are now open on the weekends uh for lunch and for brunch on Sunday.

Some of it started when the ONEOK Field opened down the street with the Drillers and that promoted some activity of again, people that had never been uh downtown or certainly not the North side of downtown and they found all kinds of other things going on down here the restaurants, the bars, the clubs and uh my partner and I have lived in the district for 10 years now and so it was most convenient for us to open a business up down here so we can walk to work and we seldom have to leave, you know we really don't' have to get in the car for a week at a time if we don't want to.

Really Brady Arts District is about 30-35 square blocks, so you are never further than six blocks in any direction from anything that you want to take part in... all the sidewalks are being fixed up now, we are doing a lot of tree scaping, landscaping, streetscaping. In the springtime and summer and in the fall there's just been so much activity and with this very mild winter we've seen art crawls on the first Friday of the month where we have over 1000 people walking from one end of the district to the other and looking at various art exhibits and in the businesses as well as in different gallery spaces.

And really you can park once and walk to 4 or 5 different venues quite easily within 4 or 5 blocks of each other.

I'm always amazed that people from Tulsa like to go to a city like Paris or London and they talk about oh it was great and we could get on the Subway and go here or get a bus and go here or we could walk to this thing or walk to that thing and I say and you can do all that in Tulsa as well, in the downtown district there are plenty of things that you can walk to and you can certainly hop a bus and go to the Philbrook or some other venues that you might want to go to so uh it's an experience and it's a mindset that we have. There are many people that are moving into downtown because they like the urban setting. They like the idea that they are close to where they work, they can walk to where they work.

The business association right now has about 50 members.

Well we really are becoming a neighborhood in our own you know I guess we could be the Mayberry of Tulsa, because so many people live here and work here, the people that live here know who works here and vice versa - I guess that if we really sat down and talked about it for any of us that live here to know 150 or 200 people that are our neighbors and I don't think you can say that about a lot of communities. I don't think there are a lot of subdivisions or developments in the suburbs where for that matter south of 15th street that would say oh yeah, we know even 12 people on our block or 8 families or whatever it is. It definitely is something that because of the walkability and because we are all out moving around, we see each other, and we just acknowledge that and that helps promote such a great sense of community that we have down here.

According to Tulsa PD, within IDL is one of the safest areas in all of Tulsa, some of it I believe has to do with the amount of pedestrian traffic we have and that it's all in the streets it's in front of the businesses.

Once they find especially this area and the walkability the likability the community sense it does so much to sell the city of Tulsa.