Catherine Roberts

A project long in the making comes into being. The Shoppes on Peoria, north of the Gateway Market at Pine and North Peoria, will have a grand opening Saturday.

Six businesses have opened there this year with more to come. One of them is the Tropical Smoothie Café.

Tim Smallwood is the owner of the café, his second in Tulsa. The first location is in South Tulsa, at the Tulsa Hills shopping center.

The North Tulsa store is only about two months old. He says part of the motivation for selecting the new location was his memory of growing up in the area.

A shopping and entertainment district popped up for a day on the corner of 36th Street North and North Peoria Saturday.

Tulsa’s Young Professionals hosted Street CReD to highlight business and development opportunities in the area.

Tracie Chandler is President of the North Star Neighborhood Association. She says that the event is on target, because it’s business development, not charitable institutions, that will fuel improvement in the area.

“We need money in this area,” she said. “We have money to spend, but, spend it on what?”

Tulsa’s Young Professionals Urbanist Crew will host its annual event—Street CReD—this Saturday.

It’s designed to highlight business and development opportunities in overlooked areas of town. The first event—two years ago—was in the Pearl District, followed last year by the Red Fork Main Street in West Tulsa.

This year the site will be 36th Street North and North Peoria.

Past Success

Letter carriers across the country work to “Stamp Out Hunger.”

You can leave nonperishable food for your letter carrier on Saturday—in Tulsa the food drive will benefit the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

Dawna Hurst is coordinator of the letter carrier’s food drive for this area.

She says last year carriers collected around 80,000 pounds of food for the Tulsa area.

Stamp Out Hunger is part of the Food Bank’s current Food for Families and Letter Carriers Food Drive.

University of Tulsa engineering students present two new projects to the Little Lighthouse.

One is a slide made out of conveyor rollers that can be converted into a table and a seesaw. It’s called the Surfin’ Tubes.

The other is a remote controlled vehicle that the children can drive. It’s called the Magic Rider.

The devices are the results of the TU students’ senior design projects.

Therapists say projects like these help the special needs students develop cognitive and speech skills—and help them have fun.

First District Congressman Jim Bridenstine is in town this week. In a town hall, he leaves constituents with no doubt about where he stands on an impending debt ceiling battle.

“I am not against raising the debt limit,” he said. “I’m against raising the debt limit when we don’t have a solution to the trillion dollar deficits. We have to have a plan in place that gets us to a balanced budget, and apart from that, I won’t be voting to raise the debt limit.”

Planners hope success in the Brady Arts District will continue this summer with the new Center of the Universe Festival, happening July 19th and 20th.

The festival will feature around 70 bands at various locations in the district.

Organizer Chris Lieberman says big acts will be on stages at Guthrie Green and outside Cain’s Ballroom, with smaller ones inside local venues.

Headliners will include OneRepublic and Neon Trees. Regional emerging bands can apply to perform on the smaller stages. The deadline to apply to perform is June 10th.

To recognize National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the Tulsa Health Department will host a free workshop: Dress for the Occasion.

It’s for both teens and parents, and the goal is to facilitate discussions about sexual health and preventing teen pregnancy.

The Health Department’s Coordinator of Teen Pregnancy Prevention, Annette Leon, says that’s important, because Oklahoma is fifth in the nation in teen births.

“These births are costing us millions of dollars, over $192 million in 2008, to take care of teen pregnancy and the spinoffs thereof,” Leon said.

Each free screening for former patients of Scott Harrington costs about $195, according to the Tulsa Health Department’s Kaitlin Snider.

She says the expense isn’t causing problems for the Health Department right now.

“This is a representative of public health in action,” Snider said, “so we do consider this a core public health service, and we will adjust our budgets as necessary to accommodate whatever we need to as part of this investigation.”

She says over 3500 people have been tested so far.

The site of the former Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences and Barnard Elementary will not be sold to a nursing home and rehab facility.

Tulsa Public Schools’ Chris Payne says that’s after some emphatic opposition from neighbors in last week’s public meeting. He says that opposition prompt the school district to take the proposal off the table.

He says it will take more public input to decide what to do with the property, and the School Board won’t be making a decision in the next few weeks, as it had originally planned.