On the last day of April 1917, a pair of real-estate developers paid $52,400 at an auction for 120 acres of a Creek Nation allotment just south of what was then the Tulsa city limits.
In reporting this bit of news, the old Tulsa Democrat mentioned that âthe new owners,â Lionel Aaronson and M.M. Travis, âexpect to make this a most excellent residential districtâ modeled after the famous Country Club District in Kansas City. In fact, they even planned to use the same landscape architect to lay out part of the area we now call south Maple Ridge.
The Country Club District had seemed revolutionary when its first subdivision opened in Kansas City in 1906, making it one of the first large-scale planned suburban communities ever built, designed from the start to accommodate widespread use of automobiles. Aaronson and Travis wanted to bring the concept to Tulsa.