Last week S-L and I were in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a couple days. We drove there from Bentonville and got there by noon, checking into the Mayo, a historic hotel that has played a big role in the early days of the Tulsa oil industry.
We walked over to the Tulsa Art Deco Museum in The Philcade Building at 5th and Boston Avenue in the heart of Downtown Tulsa.
The museum consists of a set of windows in the arcade cued up by topic, and it has a very hand-made feel.
Here’s how they explain on the collection on their About page:
The largest contributors to this collection are Debby Kelsey “Deco Debby” and the artist himself “William A Franklin” otherwise known as “The Wizard of DECOPOLIS”! Numerous other Tulsa individuals and groups have also contributed to making the DECOPOLIS Tulsa Art Deco Museum a more wonderful experience for everyone.
The displays have clever essays, super-detailed collections, and— probably my fave— custom fashion pieces created by “Local Sewist Sigrid Hinkle”
Downtown wasn’t jazzing us up too much so we got back in the car and went to Utica Square, an outdoor shopping mall from the early 1950s. The place feels self-consciously “new urbanist” / village-y style, with hundreds of trees, faux sidewalks with overhangs, a number of squares, and low-slung, multi-use buildings.
We also snaked through the surrounding neighborhoods, looking at house styles and seeing what’s up., as is often our wont. We saw the Gillette Historic District and
On the way back S-L spied a building she saw referenced in a book she picked up at Decoplois— the Public Market. She called out the three-dimensional nature of the design of the polychrome terra cotta here— we hadn’t seen that much.
When we looked up the place in the Tulsa Art Deco book, we saw that this was taken directly from a building we already knew— 10 West Elm in Chicago. You can see it there on Google Maps:
Next we snaked around Boston Avenue to get to the curious high-rise building:
The Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. We have never seen a place that was more complete, more faithful to its design, than here.
For dinner, it was Juniper restaurant. and a nightcap at Hodges Bend — a great place that understands the value of coffee in a bar. Pride of place espresso machines. We eyeballed Tulsa Jazz, but it seemed like an early scene— shows at 6:30PM.
The next morning was wintry chill-cold. We drove out to the Golden Driller. An odd beauty, an American human monument to taking from Earth for us.
Then we went to the Gilcrease Museum/ Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. What an amazing story of municipal stewardship and civic generosity.
They are very anti-photography there, but I got a good shot of this mega-couch in the lobby:
Here’s a book we got— The Art of the Old West (From the Collection of the Gilcrease Institute)— definitely read more about this place.
Went to Cherry Street for lunch. Spied a cool apartment building with Chicago windows.
Then went to the Philbrook Museum, near where we wandered yesterday.
What a great permanent collection.
And a beautiful setting.
And I felt holiness.
Their Museum Confidential, designed to was designed to turn the Museum “inside out, revealing practices, archives, stories, and an unprecedented number of never-before-seen works of art” ended up being boring and self-indulgent.
The Rotunda Series: Rachel Hayes was kinda nbd.
When we were at dinner, I googled “why are there so many empty buildings in downtown Tulsa” and it lead me to Westhope Frank Lloyd Wright home, a mile away from dinner:
We went there immediately. Stunning.
If you dig Art Deco architecture, you can’t beat Tulsa— it rose fast and went hard.