Districts in the National Register of Historic Places

Carlton Place Historic District

Primary Residential Construction: 1909-1923

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The Carlton Place Historic District is a small residential district which covers one-and-one-half blocks of the original three block Carlton Place Addition. The historic buildings in the east half of the original addition have been demolished. However, the remaining part of the neighborhood forms a cohesive group of predominately Prairie School and Bungalow/Craftsman style homes, built between 1910 and 1915.

On September 13, 1909, the Carlton Place Addition plat was filed at the Tulsa County Courthouse by the Magee Investment Company. As president of the development company and namesake of the addition, Carl C. Magee was the apparent primary in the development of the Carlton Place Addition. In his business transactions, Magee preferred to use “Carl” rather than his full given name of “Carlton.” Magee had previously placed at least the 1907 Owen Addition, located northwest of the original townsite, on the Tulsa real estate market.

Born in Iowa in 1873, Magee moved to Tulsa in about 1903. He remained in the community until 1919 when his wife’s health required a move to New Mexico. Magee then became a newspaper man, an occupation he maintained for several years and which was responsible for his first rise to national prominence. Magee returned to Oklahoma, this time Oklahoma City, in 1927 and became editor of The Oklahoma News.

In about 1933, Magee began work on a solution to the parking problem in Oklahoma City which he had been studying as chairman of the traffic committee of the Chamber of Commerce. With technical assistance provided by the engineering department at Oklahoma State University, the first parking meter was invented with Magee being given inventor status. The first meter was installed in Oklahoma City in July 1935 and quickly spread nationwide. Returning to the newspaper business for various periods, Magee was also president of both the Dual Parking Meter Company and Magee-Hale Park-O-Meter Company from 1935 to 1946. Magee died at the end of January 1946 at the age of 73.

The entrances to the Carlton Place addition from the north originally had large, red brick entry gates. Only one entry gate remains, located just off Fourteenth Street and Carson Avenue. The upper tablet on both sides of each marker has a centrally located “M” which likely stands for Magee. The lower tablet reads “09,” representing the year the addition was platted. Extending off the side of the markers and over the sidewalk on both sides of the street are decorative, black, wrought iron arches, held aloft by shorter, slender, red brick columns.

The dominant street in the district is the north-south South Carson Avenue. Notably, Carson Avenue begins only at 11th Street; as such, unlike the majority of surrounding streets, it does not continue north into downtown Tulsa. Originally, the other north-south street in the district, Carthage Avenue, was named Perryman Avenue, after the Perryman family that owned much of the surrounding land prior to its development as part of the city of Tulsa. The name of the street was changed in about 1930 to Carthage Avenue.

The Carlton Place Historic District is significant as an excellent example of a small, upper middle class neighborhood that developed during an important period in Tulsa’s history. Tulsa’s development during the first half of the twentieth century relied on the nearby discovery of oil and the location of many oil-related industries and businesses in the community. Although Carlton Place does not contain any of the mansions of the oil barons, it is an excellent example of the close-in upper middle class neighborhoods that developed in response to the booming economic conditions in Tulsa during the 1910s.

Carlton Place was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on September 6, 2007 under National Register criteria A. Its NRIS number is 07000907.

Representation in Existing Surveys
National Register of Historic Places — September 6, 2007
Intensive Level Survey — September 2005
Reconnaissance Survey — June 1978; June 1991; May 2004