Get My Kicks on Route 66

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Oklahoma City National Memorial

On April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City became the site of the largest domestic terrorist incident in United States history, when anti-government fanatic Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred Murah Federal Building downtown.

The blast killed 139 people, an eighth of them children at a day care center.

Events six and a half years later pushed this one to a footnote in public consciousness, but the hole in the city’s fabric still aches.

This morning I went and paid my respects.





The memorial is built on top of the actual building site and street.

Like most recent memorials, the sculpture is quite minimalist.

This type of memorial is often criticized as being too abstract to be effective, and this one has had its share (see JFK).

For me, parts were effective and others much less so.





The street in front of the building has been closed, and replaced by a long black reflecting pool surrounded by tan marble.

Two big black gates sit on either end.

Each one is marked with the time the bombing occurred.

A grassy area on the right occupies the location of the former building.

It contains 139 empty metal chairs, one for each person killed.

They are organized in rows based on where people were in the building at the time the bomb went off.





A green space on the other side of the pool holds the much more effective Children’s Memorial, a long tile wall.

One side contains tile hand prints, the type of artwork a grade school student makes with finger paint.

It has one for every death.

The other side contains memorial ceramic tiles sent by school groups from around the country.





The Park Service ranger hands out a brochure on the memorial, which attempts to explain the symbolism.

It also has a short history on the building and the bombing.

The Murrah Building was an utterly unremarkable white modernist office building, built in the 1960s.

It held regional offices for multiple federal departments, including the FBI.

The most chilling detail is how McVeigh pulled off the bomb; he simply rented a truck and filled it with fertilizer and other chemicals.

The resulting blast was strong enough to destroy a quarter of the building, shatter all windows in the buildings across the street, and cracked their walls.

The cracks are still there.





The two most emotionally effective tributes are outside the memorial proper.

First, a fence runs along the boundary next to the gates, and people have absolutely covered it in hand-made tributes.

They include pictures, wreaths, flags, T-shirts, and much else.

Most are dedicated to people who died, with the rest for the rescue workers who rushed to the site in the bombing’s aftermath.

Second, the site sits next to a church, which was heavily damaged in the blast.

They have their own memorial, a large statue of a weeping Christ facing a black brick wall with 139 holes in it.

Oklahoma City Art Museum

I wanted something a little lighter afterward, so I went to the Oklahoma City Art Museum.

The building was built around a beautiful art-deco movie palace, which is now the museum auditorium.

The single best work at the museum sits in the lobby, a three story high tower of plant forms in glass by David Chihuly (see Rainier is Shorthand for “Rains All Year”, Right?).

The museum holds an entire gallery of his work, but it was closed for renovation while I was there.





The remainder of the museum held a too-brief survey of European and American artwork.

Many major artists appeared with minor paintings.

No movement had more than four canvases.

It had nothing at all on work after 1945.

In a big surprise, the displays had no Native American artwork at all, in a state with a particularly deep heritage.

Even for a regional museum, the collection was quite small and left me wanting.

Route 66

Leaving Oklahoma City, I finally had another taste of that quintessential American road trip experience, driving route 66 (see Land of Lincoln).

The western portion gets more of the publicity (see The Other Air Festival), but the longest stretch was actually in Oklahoma.

The portion between Oklahoma City and Tulsa is still intact, the second longest remaining.

It runs parallel to the Interstate replacement, but far enough away the highway isn’t visible.

Driving it now closely replicates the experience of the Mother Road in its heyday.





Past city limits, the highway became a ribbon of pavement through rolling hills covered in trees with no leaves, alternating with open pastures.

Periodically, it passed through the center of small towns with brick buildings that look like they haven’t changed in fifty years plus.

Some of these used to be major attractions.

Multiple times, the route suddenly changed direction at some street crossing.





The state tourist board puts out an amazingly detailed guidebook to the highway, describing the different sights.

The first I saw was a gigantic metal Coke bottle in front of a gas station.

This one is relatively recent, built to catch some of the nostalgia for route 66.





The town of Arcadia holds the first attraction from the old days, a huge round red barn.

It’s one of only a few round barns in the country, and became famous thanks to its location along the highway.

Next is a hexagonal red brick building with a sign reading ‘DX’, the Seaba Station.

It’s one of the first filling stations along the highway, built in 1924.

Sadly, it hasn’t sold gas in decades.





Later on, the highway passes the Lincoln Motel, one of the first lodgings along the road still open for business.

In the early days of motor travel, lodgings consisted of groups of cabins around a courtyard, often called a ‘Motor Court’.

Here, they are all crammed together along the pavement.

The sign alone, added in the 1950s, is worth the stop, with the name inside a starburst.

The road then passes an even more historic former hotel, the St. Cloud Hotel in Chandler.

It was built of bricks in 1903 before route 66 even existed.





I stopped to eat at another landmark, the Rock Café.

The original building was built in the 1934, and named for the stone walls covering the exterior.

It burned down in 2008, and the owners replaced it with a near replica of the original.

The front lawn has two signboards of characters from the movie Cars; director John Lassiter did research here before filming.

The atmosphere was great; sadly the food was average.





Just before Tulsa, the pavement passes a landmark of highway engineering, the Rock Creek Bridge, an old iron truss bridge with a brick roadbed.

Nearly all bridges along route 66 in Oklahoma used to look like it; this is one of only two remaining.

The modern highway has bypassed it, but the bridge is still drivable.

It was narrow, slow, bumpy, and quite nostalgic.

Tulsa Art Deco

Until the mid 1920s, Tulsa was a pretty sleepy backwater of a town.

Then, prospectors discovered huge oil deposits in the surrounding countryside.

The city became the headquarters for companies working the area, and their wealth turned Tulsa into a major city practically overnight.

They filled downtown with office towers and other buildings, nearly all with then fashionable art deco architecture.

The city has the second largest group of such buildings in the country, after New York City.





I spent an enjoyable hour walking around downtown.

Art Deco design is based on the then-new world of machines, and emphasizes vertical lines and geometric patterns.

The buildings on the whole are smaller scale than the similarly designed ones I saw back in Detroit (see Children of the Night, Step Into the Light).

The masterpiece is the Boston Avenue Methodist Church on the south side of downtown which features an incredibly tall and thin tower instead of a steeple, striking geometric patterns over the windows, and subtle statues of saints over the doorways.

Almost a century later, it still looks groundbreaking.

Also worth noting are the Gillette-Tyrell Building, a classic of the office towers built in the 1920s, and the Mayo Motor Inn parking garage, one of the last Art Deco structures in the city, built in 1950.

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Photos

Route 66
Rock Creek Bridge along Route 66 in Oklahoma

Oklahoma City Memorial
Empty chairs at the site of the bombed Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City

Children's Memorial
Memorial to the 19 children who died in the bombing

Tributes
Memorial items left at the bombing site

Seaba Station
Famous former filling station on route 66

Rock Cafe
Legendary restaraunt on route 66. The building is a copy of the original

Boston Avenue Methodist Church
Impressive Art Deco church in Tulsa

Church Entrance
Detail of the entrance to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church