Travel Article on Tulsa in Pittsburgh paper

[Kenosha]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05191/534534.stm

Living on Tulsa time
Hidden treasures make 'middle-America' city a tourist's delight
Sunday, July 10, 2005

By Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette



TULSA, Okla. -- Many in this great land get a kick out of Route 66. Many are aficionados of native American history. Beautiful buildings have their buffs, and culture gets at least lip service from nearly everyone.

 
Stephen Holman, Associated Press
A jet flies underneath clouds as they roll over downtown Tulsa, Okla., last month.
Click photo for larger image.

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So why do so many people laugh when I say, "Ya gotta see Tulsa"?

Drawing out the first syllable -- "Tuuuul...?" they stop mid-thought to suggest -- because surely I must have misspoken -- "Tucson?" Somewhere out West, starts with Tu ... that's as far as most people get.

A five-day prize package to northeast Oklahoma sounds like a punch line, but if you were to win such a prize, five days wouldn't be enough to see Green Country. (This is only true if hipness and coolness are not among your criteria for destinations.)

I lived in Tulsa for 5 1/2 years in the '80s and still feel a little homesick. I've often wondered whether I could relay my love for this under-known city into relevance for a tourist. But I have realized that, Tulsa, once the oil capital of the world, is its own best advocate.

Of the three most compelling reasons to visit Tulsa for the first time -- architecture, Route 66 and American Indians -- its architecture leads the list.

Art Deco buildings alone make Tulsa worth the trip. The city has some of this country's richest examples, on both grand and small scales. David Halpern spent an intensive half-year in 1979 photographing upward of 60 Art deco buildings in Tulsa for a Junior League project that became the book "Tulsa Art Deco."

"The Boston Avenue United Methodist Church is my all-time favorite," he said. "When I made my first trip inside, I sat in a pew about five rows back and spent 20 minutes just looking around, up one wall and down the other. I was mesmerized."

 
Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette
Boston Avenue Methodist Church, built in 1928-29, is one of Tulsa's best-known structures and the largest Art Deco church in the world. A classic example of Zigzag style, the church was designed by Adah Robinson and Bruce Goff.
Click photo for larger image.

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Interior named the Boston Avenue church a national landmark.

"It is considered worldwide to be a masterwork of the Art Deco period," said Rex Ball, a longtime Tulsa architect and outgoing president of the International Coalition of Art Deco Society.

Tulsa's building collection is special, he said, because every type of Art Deco design is represented in both buildings and residences: the Jazz Age Zigzag; the more stripped down Public Works Administration style; and the Streamlined style that's reminiscent of steamboats, trains and cars with lines that indicate movement, portholes and rounded corners.

"Usually residences get torn down first," said Ball, "but these were high end," commissioned during the oil boom, "and still have panache."

One reason for the number of Art Deco structures is that two of the leading architects in Tulsa during that time -- Leon B. Senter and Joseph R. Koberling -- both lived to be old and built in the Art Deco style into the '40s.

"There were huge huge fortunes," said Ball. "Architects didn't have to go anyplace else."

Because Art Deco was so new when Tulsa started its building frenzy, many of the local architects borrowed from designs they were familiar with. Ball points out that the Zigzag designs in the lobby of the Pythian Building resemble the geometric patterns of Indian blankets, thus tying together two of Tulsa's most compelling legacies.

Today, the American Indian presence and influence is pervasive, but muted. Throughout Green Country, members of the Five Civilized Tribes perpetuate their cultures with authentic powwows and celebrations. They have established museums, and their representatives present their histories at schools. One point of particular interest is that some street and building signs in the town of Tahlequah are written in Cherokee.

Route 66, which has enthusiasts all over the world, rolled right through Tulsa. Historic markers today line 11th Street, and some original commercial signage remains, harking to the days when the Mother Road stretched uninterrupted through towns and cities from Chicago to Los Angeles. Today where remnants of the original route exist, most run parallel to interstates or are incorporated by them.

 
Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette
The Blue Whale has become a popular Route 66 tourist destination in Catoosa, Okla. The site was closed to swimmers in 1988, but the whale's paint has since been restored.
Click photo for larger image.

Thanks to its Route 66 history, Tulsa has a lot of great kitsch. Fans of giant hamburgers and animal statues will love the biggest, most unique examples of unintended novelty: the humongous Praying Hands monument at the entrance to Oral Roberts University and the Golden Driller, a 76-foot-tall statue of an oil man that was erected in 1966 for the International Petroleum Exposition at the Tulsa State Fairground.

More modest, the H.L. Moss Co., which sharpens shears on 15th Street, has small statues of a cow and a sheep on its roof.

For more traditional sight-seers, the Brookside neighborhood not only has outstanding Art Deco buildings, especially of the P.W.A. and Streamlined styles, but many restaurants, bars and one-of-a-kind shops.

A visitor's itinerary should also include the Tulsa Rose Garden, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Gilcrease Museum of the Americas, the Council Oak -- the original tree where the Creek Nation ended its Trail of Tears -- and the Tulsa Zoo and Living Museum.


The boomtown


Before it was Tulsa, it was Tulasi, or Tallahassee -- reports differ -- and Tulsey Town, named by the American Indians who had been forcibly removed from their lush, productive lands throughout the South by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. The government had promised they would find lush, productive lands full of game in their new home. Indian Territory, as it was called then, was instead mostly parched prairie; the native peoples discovered this after weeks of walking that left many dead.

In 1859, these tribes -- the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw -- formed an alliance, the Five Civilized Tribes, but maintained autonomous nations. The U.S. government's other promise was that the land would belong to them in perpetuity.

In 1889, after railroad lines had been established and town sectors were surveyed, the government announced that some land was still "unassigned" and that anyone who wanted "free" land could grab it in Indian Territory. Hundreds of thousands of people swarmed to the borders to wait for the bugle call at noon on April 22. Many others sneaked across the border to claim land early, thus the nickname "Sooners."

Some towns were literally built in a day, and, of course, the native peoples were eventually relegated to smaller reservations.

Tulsa was incorporated in 1898, but three years later oil was discovered nearby, and by 1910, it had grown into a full-blown boomtown. It was a rowdy and manly place that became home to more than 400 oil companies by the 1920s.

The wealth was staggering. Influenced by the likes of J. Paul Getty, William Skelly, Charles Page and Waite and Frank Phillips, Tulsa strove to create the look and feel of a place much more refined than an Oklahoma frontier town. Oil barons began commissioning the work of some of the most notable architects, many from the East Coast.

Many oil families later would will their manors, villas and lands for public projects. Waite Phillips' Italian Renaissance villa is now the Philbrook Museum of Art, between the fashionable neighborhoods of Brookside and Swan Lake. The Gilcrease Museum of the Americas, the largest receptacle of art of the American West, is on Thomas Gilcrease's land, just two miles northwest of downtown.

 
Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette
At Tulsa's Philcade Building (1931), pilasters of fluted and polished St. Genevieve marble support an ornamental plaster frieze covered with gold leaf at the mezzanine level. Its first owner was oilman Waite Phillips, founder of Phillips 66.
Click photo for larger image.

Unlike much of Oklahoma, Tulsa is neither flat nor dry. Besides being a sunset-junkie's dream, it is loaded with trees and parks, azaleas that bloom in March and fall color that goes from exhausted gray-green in the August heat to copper and yellow in the fall. The Ozark Mountains extend just far enough into eastern Oklahoma to give Tulsa rolling hills, especially in its southern neighborhoods.

Tulsa has been described as a great place to live, an example of middle-America in the middle of America. It also has some terrible marks on its past, notably the race riots in 1921 that killed anywhere from 30 to hundreds of black residents and left a once-thriving part of the city, Greenwood, in ruin. For progressive people, of which Tulsa has many, a recent ruling by the Tulsa Parks and Recreation Board -- that the Tulsa Zoo display the story of creationism -- causes embarrassment and perpetuates a reputation that places like this are backward.

Without oil gushing the way it once did, Tulsa has been searching for a new niche. Its movers and shakers speak of a burgeoning high-tech industry. Its dilemmas are similar to those of post-steel Pittsburgh, searching for something to recast its reputation positively in the national consciousness.

Maybe Pittsburgh and Tulsa will both find the nirvana of cool someday. But something might be lost if they do. Cities that aren't cool always hold the element of surprise and serendipity.



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(Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.)