Swan Lake's historic district covers 127 acres of Tulsa. Its borders are plain to read on any map: 15th Street to the North, Utica Street to the East, 21st Street to the South, and Peoria Avenue on the West. The neighborhood you’re in was developed in the early 20th century as a middle-class residential area of single-family homes, with some duplexes and apartment buildings filling in the blocks.
Today the district covers about 127 acres (51 ha) and includes 415 contributing resources and 148 non-contributing resources. Once, in the early Twentieth Century, this was the site of an amusement park; later the area became notable for the number and architectural variety of houses and apartment buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of that same century, spring-fed Orcutt Lake served as the watering hole for a ranch owned by Colonel Adolphus D. Orcutt, a native of Kentucky and a Civil War veteran who moved his family from Kentucky to Indian Territory in 1870.
In recognition of its strengths, the American Planning Association named Swan Lake a Top Ten Great Neighborhood in 2011. Picture Colonel Orcutt's spring-fed lake once watering his ranch here, long before these homes and apartments rose.