Hannah Middlebrook and her 4-year-old son, Elliot, along with her husband and two other sons, live in a home in the Buena Vista Park district of the Riverview Neighborhood, where four districts were listed in September in the National Register of Historic Places. Middlebrook’s house was built by her great-grandfather in 1913
The house was already listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and now the area it occupies and three other districts in the Riverview Neighborhood have received that distinction.
The home sits in Buena Vista Park, which joins Stonebraker Heights, Riverview and Carlton Place as the four districts listed in the National Register in September.
"My grandmother would be really, really pleased about this," Middlebrook said. "She really fought so hard to keep the Council Oak and to get people to appreciate the area as it was. I just think she would be so pleased to see it happen and see the neighborhood getting younger again and not dying."
She said her late grandmother, Mary Veasey Leech, helped preserve the Council Oak tree, which dates to the 1830s and sits in Creek Nation Council Oak Park, 18th Street and Cheyenne Avenue. Other historic features and structures can be found in the Riverview Neighborhood, established in 1905.
The neighborhood's unique composition created a challenge during the National Register application process, said Amanda DeCort, preservation planner with the City of Tulsa's Preservation Planning Commission.
"It is somewhat unusual to have multiple districts in one neighborhood," DeCort said. "There are such a variety of architectural styles within the neighborhood."
She said boundaries were cut out of the neighborhood to exclude newer architecture.
Other structures were deemed noncontributing due to alteration.