Empty Midtown Office Buildings Get New Life, Tulsa Non-Profits Get New Home

Construction crews are hard at work and employees are moving into their new spaces in what is now called Legacy Plaza on 31st Street.

For years, the former Hertz Thrifty buildings have sat empty along 31st Street, but soon the 274,000 square foot campus, being developed by the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation, will be full again with some of the largest non-profits in Tulsa.

In the next few months, Rainey Talbot and 150 other employees of CAP Tulsa will take up five floors of Legacy Plaza.

“It is really awesome that the Zarrow Foundation found these buildings and turned them into something great for the City of Tulsa,” said Talbot.

From old to new again and fully renovated from top to bottom – brand new windows, offices, meeting spaces, and state of the art conference rooms.  When finished, it will be a hub of non-profit activity.

“They are very compatible and any time you can be in the same buildings, the services are just naturally going to blend over a period of time,” said Bill Major with the Zarrow Foundation.

“Where we came from, although we loved our Boulder office, it wasn’t this and I think the morale is better here and people get to see each other,” said Wendi Fralick with the Mental Health Association of Oklahoma.

The Mental Health Association of Oklahoma already moved close to 100 employees into their brand new space.

Next door, the Assistance League has three times as much space as before and a flea market where 100 percent of the donations go to providing clothes for children in need – fully utilizing space that otherwise would have sat unused.

“In this neighborhood, it would’ve been tragic for the neighborhood for these buildings to be empty for a period of time,” said Major.

He says the Foundation felt a need to refurbish these buildings and make them visible and viable for the future.

“And what better way than to gather all the non-profits together,” declared Major.

“Once we get the building fully occupied,” said Fralick, “we’re expecting that efficiency will magnify once we get all the non-profits in here.”

A number of other large non-profits are moving in, but they haven’t all been announced yet.