Visited March 12 - 16, 2022
By Marty
Sorry in advance for the large number of photos! And for the delay in getting this post out. There is a lot to see and do in Tulsa and it took some time to put this together. In fact we didn't get to everything that we wanted to see so we hope to come back for another visit down the road!
Sunrise at the Will Rogers Downs KOA in Claremore, OK. The Beast is in the right foreground. The RV park is about 30 minutes east of Tulsa. Funny name for an RV park, right?
Well that's because the KOA is located within a racetrack and Indian casino complex! Will Rogers is from Claremore, OK which has a well regarded Will Rogers Museum. Alas, we did not have time to visit the museum. Next time!
Will Rogers Downs
On each of our six mornings at Will Rogers Downs we saw horses and jockeys training on the track. We were a tad early for the Spring thoroughbred season, which started just five days after we left.
On two evenings we walked across the parking lot to enjoy live Country Western music and dancing at the Cherokee Casino. I lived in Houston from 1981-1984, back in my bachelor days. I enjoyed going C&W clubs to watch the "kicker dancing", as it's known, but I never did get the hang of it!
As you would expect we were livin' on Tulsa time during our Tulsa visit:
Our first visit to downtown Tulsa took us to the Tulsa Arts District
Growing up in Oklahoma before moving to the Texas panhandle as a young adult, Woody's world view was greatly shaped by the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl portion of the museum includes a virtual reality experience that puts you on the porch of a cabin as the Black Sunday dust storm envelopes the region. It was quite powerful!
More on Woody and the Dust Bowl impact from biography.com:
The Great Depression hit the Guthrie family hard, and when the drought-stricken Great Plains transformed into the infamous Dust Bowl, Guthrie left his family in 1935 to join the thousands of "Okies" who were migrating west in search of work. Like many other "Dust Bowl refugees," Guthrie spent his time hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and when he could, quite literally singing for his supper.
With his guitar and harmonica, Guthrie sang in the hobo and migrant camps, developing into a musical spokesman for labor and other left-wing causes. These hardscrabble experiences would provide the bedrock for Guthrie's songs and stories, as well as fodder for his future autobiography, "Bound for Glory." It was also during these years that Guthrie developed a taste for the road that would never quite leave him.
Guthrie's most famous heir in the world of folk music, Bob Dylan, moved to New York City to seek out his idol and eventually Guthrie warmed to the young singer, who would later say of Guthrie's music, "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them".
"This Land is Your Land" exhibit. Woody's most famous song of the 3,000 that he wrote. The original lyrics are in the circular case in the center of the room. Note the guitar ring light fixture above it.
This is Marty being artsy. I set the camera on timer and placed the phone on the lyric case (sorry Woody) to capture the light fixture above it.
The Bakersfield sound was popularized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. This strain of country music was a byproduct of the Dust Bowl migrants ("Okies") bringing their musical traditions to California's central valley. I love this song by Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam:
"The Streets of Bakersfield"
Recognize the fellow in the door? The Tulsa Arts district will soon (in early May) open the Bob Dylan Center. It is on the same block as the Woody Guthrie Center and operated by the same organization. We were disappointed to learn that it wouldn't open until after we leave. Next time!
The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on the eastern edge of Tulsa is no small thing! It features almost 500 rooms and 2,600 slot machines in a 170,000 s.f. casino floor. We didn't make it inside. Next time!
The Hard Rock is owned by the Cherokee Nation. There are 13 Cherokee Nation casinos in Oklahoma. More about Oklahoma's Indian tribes and casinos below.
The River Parks bike trail runs between the River Spirit Casino resort and Arkansas River. Owned and operated by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation the resort is Oklahoma's third largest casino with over 200,000 s.f. of gaming floor and 3,100 gaming machines. The resort includes a 500 room hotel and concert venue featuring some big names this spring and summer (mostly from yesteryear: John Fogerty, Bonnie Raitt, Foreigner, Air Supply, and more.) We didn't have time to catch a show while in town. Next time!
As you'll see in the photos to follow Tulsa played an instrumental role in the creation of Route 66 and works hard to preserve and market that aspect of it's past.
From Wikipedia:
U.S. Route 66 or U.S. Highway 66, also known as the Will Rogers Highway, the Main Street of America or the Mother Road, was one of the original highways in the U.S. highway system. US 66 was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year. The highway, which became one of the most famous roads in the United States, originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before terminating in Santa Monica, California, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). It was recognized in popular culture by both the hit song "(Get your kicks on) Route 66" and the Route 66 television series, which aired on CBS from 1960 to 1964. In John Steinbeck's classic American novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the road "Highway 66" symbolized escape and loss.
US 66 served as a primary route for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and the road supported the economies of the communities
through which it passed. People doing business along the route became
prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same
people later fought to keep the highway alive in the face of the growing
threat of being bypassed by the new Interstate Highway System.
"East Meets West: Symbolic Route 66 Midpoint"
The Cyrus Avery Centennial Plaza is named for the Tulsa resident who is known as "The Father of Route 66". The sculpture shows the Avery family in their Model T surprising a horse-drawn oil field cart. It represents the use of automobiles and highways spreading across the country in the late 1920's and 30's. In the plaza, flags from Route 66 states flutter in the breeze.
The Mother Road runs through Tulsa because of this bridge over the Arkansas River. Cyrus Avery, the father of Route 66, convinced the highway commission to use the preexisting 11th Street bridge - now blocked off in disrepair - rather than build a new bridge in a different town.
Meet space cowboy Buck Atom, a 21-foot fiberglass statue. This new “muffler man” brings back nostalgia for
these roadside giants along old Route 66. Instead of a muffler, Buck
holds a gleaming rocket ship. He stands outside a 1950's service station
that’s now a Tulsa Route 66 souvenir shop.
This restored neon sign sits atop a brick pavilion with plaques about the sign’s history. From the 1930s to 70s, the Meadow Gold sign advertised smooth dairy products on a building on 11th Street (Route 66). When that building was torn down in 2004, the sign was saved and stored until being relit on its new perch in 2009.
This mural commemorates a bridge built over the Arkansas River in 1904. The bridge
wasn’t for rail traffic, so investors deemed it too risky. The
government wouldn’t pay for it either. Instead, three citizens formed a
toll company and paid for the bridge, a huge undertaking both
financially and logistically due to the shifting river bed. On the
bridge they hung a sign, “You Said We Couldn’t Do It, But We Did.” The bridge was a watershed moment for Tulsa in that it opened up access to the burgeoning oil field industry west of Tulsa.
Our bike ride on the River Parks trail took us through "The Gathering Place." As it was Spring break there were lots of families around and extra activities offered. We stumbled onto the Squonk Opera and the worlds largest puppet hands!
Check out the hands getting a manicure while the band plays:
The Gathering Place is an incredible 67 acre public park along the Arkansas River "designed to provide inclusive and engaging experiences for all Tulsans to come together to explore, learn, and play." Experiencing the park is FREE to all.
Incredibly, $465 million was raised to construct and operate the park, representing the largest private gift to a community park in U.S. history. The primary benefactor of the park is the George Kaiser Family Foundation (George is the second wealthiest Oklahoman at a net worth of $8B).
Because the photos above and below don't do justice to visualizing The Gathering Place check out this short video:
The "Cabinet of Wonder" in The Gathering Place. An incredible (there's that word again..) menagerie of collections (yes, that's redundant, but that's what it is!).
Every shelf and every drawer in the room had a different collection!
Check out this piece from a local TV station if you want to see and learn more about the Cabinet of Wonder
The 76' tall Golden Driller. For perspective, check out the 6'7" tall man sitting on his left boot...
From Tulsa Tours website:
Tulsa’s most iconic symbol, the Golden Driller is a giant statue of an oil rig worker, or roughneck. The first driller was a gold tone statue for the 1953 International Petroleum Exposition, a world famous trade show back when Tulsa was “Oil Capital of the World.” The temporary exhibit was so popular that a new one climbing a rig was shown at the 1959 show. A third and final driller for the 1966 show was built to last. His bones are steel rods said to withstand up to 200 mph winds. His skin is made of plaster and painted mustard yellow. One arm rests on a real oil derrick. At 76 feet, he’s one of the tallest free-standing statues in the world.
We went for a hike in the 300 acre Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area, part of the River Parks system, located just a few miles from downtown Tulsa. We didn't see anything unusual...
The single worst incident of racial violence in the U.S. occurred in Tulsa in 1921 in the Greenwood District. Known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, 35 blocks of the neighborhood, one of the wealthiest Black communities in the U.S., were burned and dozens of people, mostly black, were killed. In 2001 the Tulsa Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 people made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921.
The BOK tower (Bank of Oklahoma), Tulsa's tallest building at 52 stories, was built three years after New York's World Trade Center and designed by the same architect. It is strikingly similar to the Twin Towers in appearance and construction but is almost exactly half the size.
She's got the whole world in her hands, the whole wide world in her...
We strolled around downtown Tulsa. We had a vague idea that there was oil wealth in Oklahoma and Tulsa, but were surprised to learn the following:
For much of the 20th century Tulsa was known as the "Oil Capital of the World". The 1900 population of 1,300 exploded to 140,000 by 1930 due to the "black gold" oil strikes west of the city.
By 1930 Tulsa's airport was the busiest in the world, surpassing London and Paris... combined!
Highrise buildings were going up at a frantic pace of over a million dollars (in 1920's dollars) worth of construction per month. This explosive growth coincided with the heyday of Art Deco design, resulting in many beautiful Art Deco buildings in the downtown core.
I never knew Tulsa was so full of history! T
ReplyDelete& I love your artsty photo. (In truth, I love all of your photos.)
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