TULSA’S COMMERCIAL AIRPORT: An aerial view of the runway at 61st and Yale Avenue looking northwest towards Tulsa’s skyline in the background. The north-south runway shown in this photo remains intact in Holiday Hills as Urbana Street, the widest residential street in the city.
Courtesy of Tulsa Air & Space Museum
Editors Note: This is the 15th article in a multi-part series about the growth of the aviation industry in greater Tulsa and throughout the region. The series explores the many unique contributions made by Tulsans to what has become a major aspect of the area economy. The editors of GTR Newspapers want to acknowledge and thank the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and the Tulsa Historical Society for research assistance and the use of many of the historic photos that accompany these articles.
In the late 1930s, or by some accounts the early 1940s, a young aviator by the name of Harvey Young set his plane down in a hay meadow outside the growing city of Tulsa somewhere around what is now 15th Street and South 135th East Avenue. He looked around and saw the relatively flat patch of tall grass prairie as a great place to fulfill his dream of owning an airport. He bought 92 acres and turned it into Harvey Young Airport, one of many to spring up around the city during the 1930s and 1940s, the golden era of Tulsa aviation. Time and circumstances have taken a heavy toll on those small, but important airports in and around early Tulsa.
In its prime, Harvey Young Airport boasted four runways, making the field operational from all directions, a necessity in Tulsa’s ever-changing wind patterns. During World War II, the East Tulsa airport partnered with the University of Tulsa to proudly serve the country by training thousands of cadets for the U.S. Army Air Corps, predecessor to the U.S. Air Force. The airport also occasionally served as an airfield for lighter-than-air craft such as the Goodyear and MetLife blimps when they came to town to hover over national golf tournaments like the PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club.
Today Harvey Young Airport is a Tulsa aviation landmark and the last VFR (visual flight rules) GA (general aviation) airport within easy driving distance from anywhere in Tulsa. It has avoided the fate of so many similar small airports in the area that have fallen victim to urban encroachment, consolidation and owner abandonment. It hosts mostly single engine, privately owned planes and has one surfaced landing strip in operation. Still it continues, but not so with so many others.
Sometime early in 1929 near 51st Street and Sheridan Road, Robert F. F. “Bob” Garland opened Garland Airport and shortly there after, Garland School of Aeronautics. An undated ad for the airport reads, “All direction field, 15 minute drive from Tulsa on the Broken Arrow Highway.” The name was later changed to Garland-Clevenger Airport. In October 1931, Garland-Clevenger merged with McIntyre Airport Company who owned and operated Tulsa’s first ever airport. The facility was renamed Tulsa Commercial Airport. Sometime between 1934-37 the airport was relocated a few miles to the southwest. Beginning in the 1950s, the airport name was changed to Brown Airport for the final time before it was absorbed by the rapid growth of suburban residential development in post war Tulsa.
Remnants of an old airport remain in a subdivision platted as Holiday Hills. Urbana Street, north of 61st Street is a portion of the former north/south runway of the airfield and East 58th Place sits atop the northwest/southwest runway. The developers apparently did not want the added expense of breaking up the old runway; consequently they left it as is. Evidence of this is the width of the street compared with surrounding streets. In addition there remains the former airport restaurant and office recycled and preserved as a private residence.
The residential absorption of the historic Brown Airport is a scenario often repeated in the history of Tulsa airports. Gone are the likes of Cherokee Airpark, Mayo Airport, Tulsa North Airport, 15th Street Airpark and Downtown Airpark. Situated as most were on the outer fringe of the growing city, the property on which each was located became increasingly valuable to commercial and residential developers, the exception being the enduring Harvey Young Airport. It was fortunately located over a solid limestone formation barely two feet below the topsoil, providing a major disincentive for the necessary infrastructure development that precedes residential or commercial construction. Limestone outcrops do not make for easy digging.
As Tulsa’s growth continued to swallow up smaller private airfields, Tulsa Municipal Airport grew to accommodate the ever-increasing commercial aviation needs of the city. In 1963 it was renamed Tulsa International Airport to better reflects its status in the aviation world. The added presence of Rockwell International, American Airlines and Boeing and the continued financial support of the city kept the facility growing and viable, so much so that in the early 1950s, the governing Tulsa Airport Board began a search to find a suitable location for an overflow airport to take the growing traffic pressure off of the city’s main airport.
On the Tulsa Airport Board at the time was a prominent citizen by the name of Richard Lloyd Jones, Jr., whose family owned and operated the Tulsa Tribune until it was dissolved in 1992. He led the way in securing a 700-acre tract of land on the west bank of the Arkansas River just south of 71st Street in Jenks. It first became known as Riverside Airport, boasting all weather approaches and a 5,101 ft. paved runway. Not only did the overflow airport achieve the goal of taking pressure off Tulsa International, but it also became the busiest airport in the state and one of the top ten busiest airports in the nation. According to the Web site, the airport recorded 375,000 take offs in 2005 alone. There are five flight training schools located on the airport grounds. On any given weekend of beautiful weather the bright blue sky above Jenks, Broken Arrow and south Tulsa is swarming with aircraft practicing touch and go landings.
Since the dawning of Tulsa aviation, airports have come and gone subject to circumstances inherent in a growing city in a growing industry. But the remaining airports have found their niche in the scheme of things. Harvey Young survives as a small privately owned airport catering to private smaller single engine airplanes. The very busy Riverside Airport, now known as Richard Lloyd Jones, Jr. Airport in honor of the airfield’s greatest proponent, hosts small to medium private and corporate single and twin-engine planes. Meanwhile Tulsa International Airport continues providing commercial and chartered airline service to the city and Northeast Oklahoma. All have played a vital role in the development of the aviation industry in Tulsa.
