An Oklahoma city dressed in Art Deco splendor, sitting where the old Route 66 rolls through and the Arkansas River curves past a dazzling new park. We came for the oil-boom architecture and found a place wrestling honestly with its history, generous with strangers, and far more beautiful than anyone warned us.
Tulsa took me completely by surprise, and I love it when a city does that. We’d stopped mostly to break up a long drive, and I expected flat, forgettable prairie. Instead we drove into a downtown of astonishing Art Deco towers — the wealth of the 1920s oil boom frozen in stone and terracotta, zigzags and sunbursts and gilded doorways on nearly every block. Lia, who studied a little design once, walked around with her head tipped back the whole first afternoon, muttering the names of buildings. The Boston Avenue Methodist Church alone, a soaring spire of Deco geometry, stopped us both in the street.
Route 66 and the Mother Road
Tulsa wears its Route 66 heritage with real affection. The old highway cuts right through town, and along it we found neon signs restored to full glow, a giant blue whale sitting in a roadside pond just east of the city, and the Buck Atom cowboy statue towering over a curio shop. We drove a slow stretch of the road at dusk with the windows down, and it felt like traveling through a memory that wasn’t even mine. At Cyrus Avery Plaza, on the bridge over the river, a bronze sculpture marks the spot where the man who dreamed up the route once lived.
Greenwood and Reckoning
You cannot come to Tulsa and not go to Greenwood. This was Black Wall Street, one of the wealthiest Black communities in America, and in 1921 a white mob burned it to the ground and killed hundreds. The Greenwood Rising history center tells the story with courage and care, and walking the district afterward, past the sidewalk plaques naming the businesses that once stood there, undid me. Lia and I sat on a bench outside for a long while. A local man saw our faces and simply said, “It matters that you came.” I have thought about that many times since.
The Gathering Place
On our last afternoon we went to the Gathering Place, a riverfront park that has to be seen to be believed — a philanthropist poured a fortune into it, and the result is a vast, dreamlike playground of boat-shaped climbing structures, water gardens, and paths winding down to the Arkansas River. It doesn’t feel like a rich man’s monument; it feels like a gift. Children shrieked with joy on the towers, families spread blankets on the grass, and Lia and I ate ice cream on a bench watching the river go by. A generous ending to a generous city.
Getting There
Tulsa International Airport lies just northeast of downtown, with connections through the big central hubs. Most people arrive by car, and rightly so — Tulsa is a Route 66 town at heart, and rolling in along the old highway is half the pleasure. It sits just off the interstate roughly halfway between Oklahoma City and the Ozarks. Give it two full days. Do Greenwood with time and attention, and save the Gathering Place for a golden late afternoon.
Keep exploring
More of Oklahoma