Districts in the National Register of Historic Places
Stonebraker Heights Historic District
Significance
The Stonebraker Heights Historic District is an excellent collection of period houses constructed during the district’s period of significance from 1910 through 1922. The district is dominated by Bungalow/Craftsman, Prairie School and Colonial Revival style houses. Representing eighty percent of the housing in the district, all three of these styles enjoyed widespread popularity at the time of the neighborhood’s development. While Bungalow/Craftsman style homes continued to be built throughout Tulsa’s historic neighborhoods through the 1920s, the Prairie School style fell out of popular favor by the early 1920s and the Colonial Revival style was overwhelmingly eclipsed by the Tudor Revival style in Tulsa beginning in the mid to late 1920s.
As reflected in its architectural styles, Stonebraker Heights Historic District developed rapidly in the teens and early twenties. The neighborhood was auspiciously situated about a mile directly south of downtown Tulsa. Also aiding in the addition’s desirability was the ready views of the Arkansas River, then and now and picturesque draw. Reflective of the explosive growth of Tulsa during the period, numerous additions were platted and added to the original townsite in the late 1900s and early 1910s. According to the city directories, in 1909 Tulsa’s Original Townsite had been expanded in all directions by forty-four additions. The 1911 Tulsa City Directory, the first one to include the Stonebraker Heights Addition, records a total of sixty-four additions to the townsite. However, not all of these additions developed as quickly as the Stonebraker Heights Addition. For example, the Orcutt Addition, platted in 1908 and now part of the Swan Lake and Yorktown historic districts, did not experience significant development until the 1920s.
The large number of two-story houses indicate that the Stonebraker Heights Addition was indeed one of “Tulsa’s most exclusive residential developments.” Including just the buildings along the main roads, nearly three-fourths of the homes in the district were two-stories with four more resources being half or a full-story above this. The two-story homes, along with the oversize, elegant houses constructed by the neighborhood’s oil elite, were more commodious than the one-story Bungalows that proliferated in Tulsa’s middle class neighborhoods such as Yorktown and Swan Lake.
Additionally, several advertisements for homes in the Stonebraker Heights area in the late teens and early twenties make reference to available “modern servants quarters,” as well as note the presence of garages. Also noteworthy is that the garages in the neighborhood were not just single car edifices. A house advertised by the firm of Jenkins & Terwilleger in 1918 featured a two car garage and an advertisement run by the Blair Brothers in 1921 for a “…beautiful east front home…” noted the three car garage among the houses amenities.
All of the north-south streets (Cheyenne, Carson, Denver and Elwood) and three of the east-west streets (15th, 16th and 17th) in the district are as they were originally named. West 16th Place, the only block-long street in the district, was originally named Naharky Place. The 1915 Sanborn Map recorded the name of the street as Harkey Place, which was probably a misspelling of Naharky. The subsequent 1939 Sanborn Map notes the change of name to West 16th Place while also incorrectly recording the former name of the street as “Naharkey.”