Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of downtown Tulsa. Years ago I did a self-guided Art Deco tour of the fabulous lobbies and the like constructed in downtown Tulsa in the roaring 1920s, when it truly was the Oil Capital of the World.

A 2009 survey identified 23 Art Deco ZigZag, 13 Art Deco PWA, and 7 Art Deco Streamline buildings. Below I have tried to identify the major buildings in the 1940 postcard.

Many of those survive, although the Hotel Tulsa at the right center was demolished in 1973 to be replaced by the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

The above image from Google Earth only renders some of the buildings in 3D, exaggerating the issue, but a reality is that 50% of all the surface area of downtown Tulsa is now streets or surface parking. Streetsblog and other publications have named it one of the worst downtown “parking craters” in the country. A lot of low buildings and trees were wiped out in the past 65 years.

The tallest building is now the BOK Tower, which has 52 stories in its 667 feet. Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, originally proposed a pair of small towers for John Williams’ corporate headquarters in Tulsa. Williams famously grabbed one of the model towers and put it atop the other. That led to a building almost precisely half the scale of one of the World Trade Center towers, interrupting Boston Avenue.

• Tom McCarthy’s reel about the BOK Tower

It opened as One Williams Center in 1976 but became known as the BOK Tower in the 1980s thanks to the bank being the primary tenant and signage holder. It was the tallest building in Oklahoma until the Devon Tower in Oklahoma City surpassed it in 2011 on its way to topping out at 844 feet.

In 2001, Williams Communications built a 15-story glass office building just to the east of the BOK Tower. It was designed to use about half of the energy for a building of its size. However, a telecom bubble burst and took down the company. Tulsa leaders opted to buy it for $52 million and consolidated 940 city employees into their new City Hall at One Technology Center.

The Mid-Continent building is an engineering marvel. Josh Cosden built a refinery on the west side of river in Tulsa, and in 1918 his neogothic 16-story building was completed downtown. In the oil boom of the 1980s, a twin building was added to the side, and an amazing 20-story addition was built atop the new building, cantilevered above the original building with a 10-inch gap separating them. Tom McCarthy’s great short reel about it is a treat.

A Bartlesville Connection

110 W 7th was constructed in the early 1970s as the new national headquarters for Cities Service. I was familiar with it as a kid because my father worked for Cities Service Gas in Oklahoma City, and when Cities Service Oil moved its headquarters out of Bartlesville in the late 1960s, its corporate headquarters moved to the new building in Tulsa. My father would point it out to me when we drove through Tulsa on our way to visit relatives up in Independence, Kansas.

Additional Bartlesville connections are the Philtower and the Philcade, which were both built by Waite Phillips, the brother of Bartlesville’s own oil tycoon, Frank Phillips. Waite sold his oil company for $25 million in 1925, and beginning that year, he and his wife Genevieve gave away half of everything that they earned.

He built the 24-story Philtower in 1928, with a mix of Gothic Revival and Arto Deco stylings. The marble lobby has an impressive English fan-vaulted ceiling and bronze chandeliers.

• Tom McCarthy reel on the Philtower

A church across the street moved, and Phillips bought that property and had the Philcade constructed, with his plans becoming increasingly ambitious. It scaled up from six stories to thirteen by its completion in 1931. In 1937, it became the first fully air-conditioned office building in Tulsa and gained a penthouse on a 14th floor. Its lobby was the city’s first indoor shopping mall. The lobby ceiling was originally painted with classical designs, and when Phillips walked in upon completion he ordered it redone in gold leaf with a glazed overlay of Art Deco designs.

In 1938, he donated his 72-room Villa Philbrook mansion in Tulsa to the city, and it became the Philbrook Museum of Art. Waite and his wife Genevieve moved into the 23-room 3,000 square foot penthouse atop the Philcade. A popular attraction on architectural tours is the 80-foot tunnel under 5th Street connecting the Philtower and the Philcade. Phillips brought in miners to dig it in secret as a safe way for him to go between his residence atop the Philcade and his offices in the Philtower in a time when some wealthy people had been kidnapped for ransom.

In 1938 and 1941, he donated 127,000 acres of his ranch in New Mexico to the Boy Scouts and threw in the Philtower as an endowment. Waite and Genevieve moved to the Bel Air neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, where he died in 1964, with the University of Southern California as a primary beneficiary of his estate.

There are lots of other fascinating buildings in downtown Tulsa, even with all of its parking lots. Take a look at the reels by the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture.

Symbols of Merger Mania

My view of downtown Tulsa, bracketed by the former Williams and Cities Service towers, is colored by the petroleum industry merger mania of the early 1980s. I knew about Cities Service Oil in Bartlesville and Tulsa, but over three decades my father had risen to lead Gas Measurement for Cities Service Gas in Oklahoma City.

In June 1982, the corporate raider T. Boone Pickens made an offer to take over all of Cities Service. Cities announced it planned to resist, and then Gulf Oil entered the bidding war. The companies battled until August, when Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum entered the fray and took on sizable debt to take over Cities.

Hammer sold off many of the old company’s assets, and that included Cities Service Gas, which was sold in September 1982 to Northwest Energy of Salt Lake City. My father flew out to Utah many times as the companies merged their operations. However, in August 1983 Allen & Co. began talking of merging with Northwest Energy, prompting the Williams Companies of Tulsa to take over Northwest Energy, and thus the former Cities Service Gas.

Williams reneged on promises and announced that the Oklahoma City offices would be closed and the remaining employees transferred to its headquarters in Tulsa. When I was a high school senior, my father took an incentive retirement package offered to all employees age 55+ and thus ended his career at age 58 after 32 years with Cities Service Gas and a couple of years with Skelly.

My own career would be indirectly impacted by the petroleum industry’s periodic convulsions. T. Boone Pickens would go on to attack Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville in 1984, followed by Carl Icahn, and the company’s successful defense against those takeover attempts led to an immense amount of debt and restructuring. Phillips finally fell victim to another era of consolidation when it merged with Conoco in 2002, changing the demographics of Bartlesville. Those rippled along, finally leading me to leave the classroom in 2017 and spend almost a decade in administration before my own retirement at the end of June 2026.

Tulsa lost its “Oil Capital of the World” claim to Houston by 1980, and since then over 100 energy companies relocated their corporate headquarters or established major operations centers in Houston, including Oklahoma’s Chesapeake/Expand, Devon, ConocoPhillips, Kerr-McGee, CITGO, and Halliburton. Texas now has a stronger association with oil than does Oklahoma, but the Sooner State will always retain its association with First Peoples. Tomorrow’s postcard will remind us that a large part of Oklahoma was once Indian Territory.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Fort Gibson, which is across the Arkansas River from Muskogee in the east central part of the state.

I’ve never been particularly interested in old forts. Years ago my father and I took a summer trip out west in his Volkswagen camper. He took me to various places he had previously visited. I especially liked the Durango-Silverton train and the Grand Canyon. However, I vetoed two potential stops. I refused to spend any time at Canyon de Chelly, as I felt it would pale in comparison with our earlier visit to Mesa Verde, and I also vetoed stopping to tour Bent’s Old Fort.

So I’ve never toured, just driven past, Fort Gibson. The postcard was correct to put “Jefferson Davis House” in quotes since any claim that Jefferson Davis had occupied that building is false. Davis and over 100 other West Point cadets were stationed at the fort from 1833 to 1835, but his regiment actually stayed in tents about a half-mile from the fort’s location.

Established as Cantonment Gibson in 1824, the young nation’s westernmost military post at the time, it became a fort in 1832 to deal with First Peoples forcibly removed from eastern states to Indian Territory as well as the indigenous plains tribes.

A series of expeditions marched west in search of nomadic plains tribes which endangered traders on the Santa Fe trail, but the first two in 1832 and 1833 had no success. Author Washington Irving accompanied the troops in 1832, and he wrote A Tour of the Prairies in 1835 from his experiences. It wasn’t until 1834 that a dragoon expedition finally made contact. Many of the soldiers on those various expeditions became ill, with a high mortality rate.

The original 1824 cantonment was 222 by 238 feet and all structures were of wood, inside and out, except for a stone powder house and a water well. By 1835, those log structures were decaying from periodic floods from the river. In 1845 the fort was shifted uphill to the northeast.

The Army would occupy and abandon the fort multiple times, finally departing for good in 1890. The civilian town of the same name which had developed in the area then expanded into the former military grounds.

A Bartlesville Connection

Bartlesville is situated right on the border between the Cherokee and Osage nations and is the headquarters for the Delaware, so its initial developments in the 1870s and its oil-driven settlement in the 1900s were made possible by the eventual peace between those groups of First Peoples.

As the Osage and Cherokee were forced westward, they came into conflict over hunting lands. In 1817, a group of Cherokees, Shawnees, and Delawares ambushed an Osage village near present-day Claremore. That led the U.S. government to establish Fort Smith. A peace pact in 1818 was quickly breached, and hostilities continued. The army moved from Fort Smith to Cantonment Gibson in 1824, and in 1825 a treaty shifted the seat of the Osage Nation from within the drainage area of the Missouri River to that of the Arkansas River.

Delawares and Osages still fought and killed each other until they joined the Choctaw, Kickapoo, and Shawnee in a mutual peace agreement in late 1827. The Cherokee refused to participate, having had multiple deadly disagreements with the Osage since the Cherokee had first been forced into the region. In 1831 an unratified treaty between the Cherokee, Western Creek, and Osage was agreed upon at Cantonment Gibson, which marked the end of major inter-tribal hostilities among those groups.

The Osage still attacked the Pawnee in 1833, leading to a loss of federal aid, and Missouri conducted an Osage War in 1837 that expelled them from that state. The Claremore Band of the Osage, which had refused to comply with the 1825 treaty, dwelled near Three Forks until the Treaty of 1839 at Fort Gibson led most of the Osage to remove to Kansas, alleviating tensions with the flood of Cherokees arriving in its Trail of Tears.

The Osage finally signed a treaty in Montgomery County, Kansas in 1870 in which they sold their lands in Kansas, and in 1872 they purchased their own reservation in Indian Territory, just west of the Cherokee Nation, which became Osage County west of Bartlesville.

The Caney River which runs through Bartlesville was once called the Little Verdigris and it feeds into the Verdigris River. Both the Verdigris and the Neosho feed into the Arkansas River at Fort Gibson.

In the 1930s, the Works Project Administration reconstructed several of the buildings, so that explains why a postcard of it made it into the 1940 souvenir pack. It is now operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society, and there are stone barracks, a dogtrot cabin, a sutler store, mess hall, commissary, garden, bakehouse, and a palisade with barracks, a cannon, and a blockhouse.

Grants are currently funding restoration of the 1840s barracks, with repairs also slated for the commissary, ammunition storage building, blacksmith shop, and bake house.

The commissary was built in 1845 by Seminoles and slaves, and it is the oldest stone military building still standing in Oklahoma. The 1,000-square-foot building is now the Visitor Center.

The misnamed Jefferson Davis House was gone in 1919, with only two mounds of stone and earth that marked where its two large chimneys had stood.

The WPA rebuilt the chimneys and recreated the log building between them, but now only the chimneys remain, with a misleading plaque in one of them repeating the false claim that Jefferson Davis once occupied the building.

There is a small recreated log cabin on the property that was also sometimes incorrectly associated with Davis, when that location actually had a cabin used by General Zachary Taylor for a few weeks in the summer of 1841. He was the 12th President of the U.S. from March 1849 to July 1850.

When I was a kid, the Oklahoma City fairgrounds had a fake stockade which was named Cottonwood Post. It endured long enough for me to spend one afternoon there in high school selling Neapolitan ice cream tacos (don’t ask), but about a decade later it was destroyed by winds. The stockade at Fort Gibson was reconstructed by the Works Progress Administration on new foundations at a slightly different location than the 1824 original, using a map from 1835.

Well, that’s about all the patience I have for an old fort. Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to something of far greater interest to this city boy: downtown Tulsa.