Gathering Place is Tulsa, Oklahoma’s favorite park. During a recent visit, I toured the area while paddling a kayak around Peggy’s Pond. I spotted red-eared slider turtles basking on a log and people unwinding on benches beneath weeping willows and a huge deck overlooking the pond. The park lives up to its name by gathering friends and families to enjoy the great outdoors. Add in some incredible amenities (even the kayak rentals are free), and it’s no wonder Gathering Place has won so many awards. Last month, it won first place in the Best City Park category in a USA Today readers’ poll.
Let’s take a look at what makes this destination so special.
Attractions
Gathering Place is a kid magnet, with various themed playgrounds. The park’s Laredo Slide Vale boasts a series of slides, while the Murphy Family Swing Hill is for swinging.
But many of the other areas aren’t so straightforward. There are connecting tunnels, a pirate ship, and, my favorite, a climbing structure shaped like two blue herons.
“This is actually based on animals that you might find in the Arkansas River,” Sydney Brown, marketing specialist at Gathering Place, told me as she gestured at the herons and an immense paddlefish. She added that the grounds are “designed for kids to play through journey and experimentation and risk. So there’s just all these different levels and layers to the playground, which is very exciting.”
A company based in Germany and the Netherlands designed the impressive themed playgrounds. People often call them the “Disneyworld of playgrounds,” Brown said. Some structures have surprising interactive aspects. “On this tower there is a water play feature that takes 20-25 kids to fully activate,” Brown said, noting that it only operates in the warmer season.
We pass a small zipline. “Any time there’s not a line, I try to hop on,” Brown said, laughing. “Quality control.”
For older kids and adults, Gathering Place offers sports courts, including basketball and pickleball. There’s also a skate park and BMX tracks. A big lawn hosts movie nights and free fitness classes like yoga and Zumba.
Brown pointed out a secluded area with seats in a circle. Called a Unity Circle, the area functions as a classroom where teachers can bring their students for outdoor learning.
Gathering Place also has covered spaces and Williams Lodge, a gorgeous room that’s all wood and windows. I know where I’d be setting up my remote office if I lived in Tulsa.
Gathering Place history
Gathering Place is a gift to Tulsa from the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The nearly 100-acre park broke ground in 2014 and opened to its first guests in 2018. This public park is privately run.
“We are kind of a part of the River Parks Authority, though we have our own board and our own LLC,” Brown explained.
During my long weekend in Tulsa, I saw the name of the Kaiser Family Foundation everywhere. George Bruce Kaiser is the chairman of BOK Financial Corporation. In 2021, he was deemed the 476th richest person in the world.
“Tulsa is very lucky to have such a strong philanthropist community,” Brown said. “I don’t feel that that’s something that that many cities have that in the same way.”
Sustainability at Gathering Place
Some trees were lost when building Gathering Place. But since opening, the park has tried to rectify this by planting 6,000 more. It retained 300 big legacy trees and repurposed those it cut down. Former trees are now picnic tables, benches, and an upside-down tree play structure.
J.R. Brown, who works in operations, told me about the employee sustainability committee he serves on while we kayaked around Peggy’s Pond. “We have a sustainability station where we will have bins for people who work here to leave hard-to-recycle things like batteries, plastic bags, things like that,” he said. “We take them once a month to different places that take that sort of thing.”
There’s a free table where staff can trade usable stuff and swap seeds. One staff member gathers organic waste from the employee break rooms and donates it to his daughter’s school gardening program for compost. “When horticulture prunes stuff, we give it to people to use,” J.R. Brown told me. “I just took a bunch of bamboo that was cut down right up here by Water Mountain and turned it into little bee homes in our yard.”
Overall, Gathering Place is a massive asset for the Tulsa community. And it’s nice to know that the staff is stewarding the land, right down to its discarded branches.
