Living in downtown Tulsa, the Huethers are avid walkers of the River Parks trails. Bob Huether called the pedestrian walkway that runs underneath the Cyrus Avery Bridge the best way to cross the river.
“You’ve got protection from the weather, and it takes you out by the Route 66 hotel signs that they have up there,” he said. “It’s kind of a nice trail for people to walk if they’re not familiar with Route 66.”
However, he thinks it could use significant graffiti and trash cleanup along with several new light fixtures. He reached out to the Flyer about the conditions last month.
“The walking trails — they are a big attraction for Tulsa. The rest of the River Parks trails and of course the Gathering Place are spotless,” Huether said. “You go into this one area and you go, ‘my God, this is terrible,’ you know?”
Jeff Edwards, executive director and CEO of the River Parks Authority, said RPA maintains the trails on either side of the bridge, but the City of Tulsa is responsible for the pedestrian bridge.
“I’ve asked to be in charge of maintaining it, because it’s in my mind kind of silly that we manage both assets on both sides of the river, and then not that one,” Edwards said. “It just kind of has a poor reflection upon the image of the trail network.”
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Edwards said RPA was tasked with bridge maintenance several years ago and received dedicated funding for it.
“This is before my time at River Parks, but River Parks gave it back to the city to maintain, and we have never since then been provided possession of maintenance of that,” he said.
Carson Colvin, a spokesman for the City of Tulsa, says it’s a challenge to maintain that piece of property because of the level of vandalism and graffiti and that will be true regardless of who maintains it.
“We’re committed to talking with partners and everybody else about what that could look like long-term,” Colvin said. “It’s just one of the hard ones for us.”
Colvin says the city would be happy to have conversations internally to see if they may be able to work something out with RPA.
Huether hopes someone steps in to clean up that part of the trail.
“They could fix that up and it would be really kind of nice. And if you’ve been down there, if you see the structures that they built, they put some money into that at one time,” Huether said. “Somebody wanted it to be nice.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story used images of graffiti on property adjacent to the pedestrian bridge. The current photo shows graffiti along the covered bridge.
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