Tarot Reader in Sand Springs, Oklahoma

Along the old Katy line

Downtown Tulsa to downtown Sand Springs is about seven miles, a quarter of an hour outside rush hour, on US-412, the Keystone Expressway. It was built in the late 1960s on the route of the old M.K.&T. railroad, and it cost the town its name. Clear, sandy springs used to run out of the banks of Home Hill, north of the Arkansas River, and they were lost in the construction. A small fountain by the Katy Trail, south of the expressway near Adams Road, is what remains.

West of town is Keystone Dam, with State Highway 151 running across the top. The Corps of Engineers started the dam in January 1957 and had it holding back floodwater by September 1964. The lake behind it covers 23,600 acres and drowned the place it was named for: Keystone, a town that stood from 1900 to 1962.

Where the table travels

Private sittings stay in Tulsa, in a coworking room a short run east on 412; see private readings. A party runs the other way, and so does the kit: cloth, deck, lamp, and sign go west to a pavilion on Shell Lake, a cabin above Keystone, a barn off 145th West Avenue, or a conference room on Wekiwa Road. None of that adds a travel fee. The first two hours are $300, and each hour beyond them is $125.

A Triangle instead of a square

Charles Page made his money in oil and spent a good deal of it on a town. In 1908 he bought 160 acres west of Tulsa for the Sand Springs Home, for children with no one to raise them and for widows and their families. A planned industrial city grew up beside it to pay its way, with free land for settlers and a cash bonus and free utilities for any company that moved in. He built the Sand Springs Railway, an interurban to Tulsa, in 1911, and the city was incorporated the next year. The Home still runs, and the old widows' colony, now the Charles Page Family Village, houses 110 mothers and their children without rent.

Most towns are built around a square. Sand Springs has a Triangle, and the streetcar is the reason: the interurban could follow a curve but could not turn a corner, so downtown was laid out around the bend in the track. The last cars paraded through town on January 5, 1955. Page's bronze statue, by the Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, has stood at the tip of the Triangle since 1929. Facing it is the art deco Page Memorial Library, built in his memory and now the city museum. His widow asked that its center window never be draped, so the light from inside would fall on the statue at night. Downtown became the Box District in late 2023, named for the longtime volunteer Montie Box, but the Triangle kept its name.