Business owners along Route 66 near the Meadow Gold sign in Tulsa say homeless people camping there are creating a safety issue.
KJRH-TV in Tulsa talked to Quoc Vo, a mechanic at nearby Lazar Imports, about the problem:
He said they leave behind clothes, couches, recliner chairs and drug paraphernalia.
“We have a regular relationship with calling 911,” Vo said.
In the last couple of weeks, Vo said the homeless have been taking off their clothes and throwing them at passing cars.
“On one occasion I’ve had to kick a guy off of a car that I was getting ready to drive while he was smoking,” Vo said. “He was smoking something out of a beer can.”
Business owners said it is impacting their customers who are scared to walk past the homeless because they are being loud and acting erratically.
“It pains me to see that instead of attracting people it can turn them away,” Charlie Spears, owner of SoBoCo said.
And this isn’t the only instance reported by the local media. In a Tulsa World report less than a month ago about Mayor G.T. Bynum touring the city during 918 Day, there is this excerpt:
His stops along the way included a visit to the city’s new Sobering Center, a ride-along with Tulsa police, a reading session with students at Burroughs Elementary School and an ill-fated stop at the Meadow Gold Sign.
“We were supposed to do live TV interviews under the Meadow Gold sign at 5:45 in the morning and showed up (and) learned a valuable lesson, which is the Meadow Gold sign is not illuminated at 5:45 in the morning, so it was completely dark.” Bynum said. “And there were some folks who camped out under it who didn’t appreciate us disturbing their sleep and were throwing bottles around us.”
The homeless camp must be a recent addition, because Facebook photos and posts as recently as July — including an all-day stop there by the Preserve 66 tour — showed no sign of it.
Regardless, city law enforcement had better get a handle on the ne’er-do-wells there, or else it quickly will become a black eye for Tulsa’s Route 66.
The Meadow Gold sign originally stood at Lewis Avenue and 11th Street (aka Route 66) during the 1940s. The sign was dismantled in 2004, restored and reinstalled about a mile west near Peoria Avenue and 11th Street in 2009. Replicas of the long-lost clocks that once were on the sign were installed in 2016.
(Image of the Meadow Gold sign in Tulsa in 2009 by Kari Sullivan via Flickr)
I was through there 3 weeks ago and no one was there. There was some street construction and a nice couple running a food truck across the street. I bet they are gone. too bad.
Why not just fence it off with an 8′ barbed wire fence and leave the sign lit all the dark hours.
I passed by the Meadow God sign last June but saw no signs of homeless people camping there – curious since the presence of the homeless for even a short time tends to leave a place pretty trashed.
@ Ted: One problem is that, underneath the brick pavilion are informational plaques about the history of the Meadow Gold Dairy and the technology of neon lighting. It’s also a nice place to pause for a picnic lunch – or perhaps munchies from a local food-truck? To erect an 8-ft-tall fence would keep EVERYONE out, thus depriving legitimate Route 66 tourists and local visitors alike of an important part of that experience.
The only solution that is certain: establish a constant police presence in the park. In my hometown, when the homeless and drug problem got so bad, the police department started having their morning roll-call in the park. When the officers dispersed for their patrols, a two-man patrol remained in the park – all day long – until 11:00 p.m. The homeless people, made uncomfortable by the watchful eye of the police, quickly absquatulated.
A longer-term solution would mean addressing not only the homeless problem but also simultaneously tackling the several associated problems: joblessness, alcoholism & substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. That is beyond the scope here.
Thank you, Lane, for introducing me to the word “absquatulated”, if only to confirm that what gets called American English – what I call “Usan”, the main language spoken in Usa – is indeed not English English, maybe not even any sort of English. Thanks to the internet I have found this definition for absquatulate: “run away, make off,” 1840, earlier absquotilate (1837), “Facetious U.S. coinage” [Weekley], perhaps based on a mock-Latin negation of squat (v.) “to settle.” Said to have been used on the London stage in in the lines of rough, bragging, comical American character “Nimrod Wildfire” in the play “The Kentuckian” as re-written by British author William B. Bernard, perhaps it was in James K. Paulding’s American original, “The Lion of the West.” Civil War slang established skedaddle in its place. Related: Absquatulated; absquatulating; absquatulation.
Much shorter is to “flit”.
ABSQUATULATE – verb, Cowboy Latin, meaning “to go off and squat someplace else.”
There principal parts:
absquatulo – I go off and squat elsewhere;
absquatulare – to go of and squat elsewhere;
absquatulavi – i went off and squatted elsewhere;
absquatulatum – having gone off and squatted elsewhere.
It’s in Cicero, I’m absolutely certain of it, though the locus classicus escapes me at the moment.