Journal Record - "These Walls" Historic Bldgs

[PonderInc]

The Journal Record has been doing a cool series called "These Walls" in which they focus on a different historic building each week or so.  They tell cool stories and give some interesting history of the buildings, etc.  Great job Journal Record!  (Thanks for noticing and appreciating the amazing buildings in downtown!)

Today's issue talks about the Reunion Center.  http://www.journalrecord.com/article.cfm?recid=88506

[TulsaSooner]

Good find, thanks!

Are there any archives of the previous articles?

[PonderInc]

They're archived, but you have to be a Journal Record subscriber to read them online.

[dsjeffries]

This week, McFarlin Library...

These Walls: TU's McFarlin Library
May 16, 2008 TULSA –

Mapping out their ideal campus, the University of Tulsa's founding fathers decided to build everything around a gothic library, making that storehouse of knowledge the new institution's physical, scholastic and cultural center.

Almost 80 years later, the 127,104-square-foot, 850,000-volume R.M. McFarlin Library remains not only the campus hub, but its tallest structure. Library Dean Adrian W. Alexander thinks an ongoing $9.5 million expansion and renovation will cement that role through the coming years. Built with a $280,000 gift from the R.M. McFarlin family, benefactors of Glenn Pool and Cushing Field oil, the library headed off the 1929 construction of TU's first three buildings, rising between the Waite Phillips Petroleum Engineering Building and the Tyrrell Fine Arts Building. All three boasted a brown and gray limestone skin around a thick concrete skeleton, the library capped by a seven-story tower.

"One of the things I like about this campus is that there has been a concerted effort to maintain the spirit of these three," said Alexander, who took his post last year. "Not the gothic architecture so much, but the limestone. You can see it carried through in nearly all the buildings across the campus."

Although the stock market crash rocked TU's development, the library building was completed and commissioned in 1930, soon serving not just as a quiet repose for study, but as locker rooms for student athletes, the city's only museum, and depository for the prized Solon Shedd geological collection, among other books in its growing shelves. One of four study areas, its Browsing Room featured a fireplace, leather chairs, and walls lined by windows and dark oak bookshelves, the exposed concrete ceiling supports painted to look like wood. Using the tower for its primary book depository, the closed-stack library was built with room for 140,000 volumes – a level that a 1929 Tulsa Tribune report boasted would make McFarlin the state's largest collection. A basement vault offered secure protection for up to 6,000.

As the inventory grew, McFarlin loaned its museum pieces to the Philbrook Art Center in 1942, and cannibalized the 540 underground lockers for additional space. When space tightened once more, officials turned to their longtime supporters, the James A. Chapman and Pauline Walter families, who donated $1.2 million for a 1965 addition at the east end. Fourteen years later they completed another expansion, adding three underground levels and a beautiful pavilion at McFarlin's western face, built with $3 million donated by those families. Both additions followed the library's architectural design, with subtle differences. The three floors of the first addition offset from the original, leading to elevation changes as visitors cross through. The second addition adopted lower ceilings to squeeze in three floors of bookshelf space and resources, built around a sunken green space.

Alexander expects the latest addition, started last year, to add still more character to the beloved structure. Renovation designs by the St. Louis architectural firm Hastings and Chivetta Architects, to be completed by September, will create a large common area around a new three-story staircase, anchored by the relocated circulation desk and a Starbucks Café. The original reading and faculty rooms have received new flooring, paint, furniture and fixtures, while the library's first main entrance, with its beautiful vista of downtown Tulsa, will reopen after years of disuse."The architect's doing a very fine job of keeping the old, but making it newer," Alexander said of the renovations. "With all the new tiles and colors, it's just going to be a much nicer, appealing space."The 12,000-square-foot addition by Lowry and Hemphill Construction Co. of Tulsa, coming online in early 2009, will provide a new northern entrance with a two-story atrium around four computer labs, two for instruction, two open."I think it's really going to change the dramatics of the interior," he said. "Everything's always been south-oriented, the interiors and access. We're going to change that to the west."Joyce, anyone?The McFarlin Library collection features several treasured items from early 20th century British literature, including a first-edition Ulysses and several other rare volumes, letters and manuscripts by James Joyce. "The English Department has really built its reputation around early modern British literature," said Alexander.

A wild and crazy visitAs Steve Martin struggled over his future in television writing and stand-up comedy, his late 1960s touring brought him to TU's McFarlin Library, where the budding art enthusiast got his hands on a rare and valuable copy of the Mabel Dodge Luhan book Taos and Its Artists. "I wondered if I could smuggle it past the low-tech librarian," the future film star, playwright and author wrote in his latest book, Born Standing Up. "But my better judgment prevailed, and I left it in place."

http://www.journalrecord.com/article.cfm?recid=88963

[PonderInc]

Back in the "good ol' days" students used to climb on the roof of the McFarlin tower.  You climbed up a little narrow staircase until you came upon a locked door.  Then you would stick a coat hanger through a little slot (that someone had conveniently carved in the door) to pull the "push bar" back and unlock the door.  Then you climbed more stairs and finally a ladder to the hatch that opened up to the roof.  The hatch was always chained...but not too tightly, and you could sort of slide it out of the way.

Beautiful views of downtown Tulsa skyline at night.  (Though not as exciting as getting locked in the tunnel system....) []

[TheArtist]

I have never been in that building. Does it have a nice looking reading room or main hall?

[tulsa1603]

I always thought it was interesting how the front plaza of the McFarlin Library is actually the roof of an additional underground space that was added in the 1970's...Glad they did that instead of just tacking onto it.  You walk up and look down into a courtyard...They did a similar addition to the capital building in Austin - tons of offices, underground, keep the original building intact.