The Boston Avenue Methodist Church

At the corner of Boston and Thirteenth, there is a church that was designed, in part, by a woman who was not an architect. Adah Robinson was a drawing teacher at Tulsa Central High School. She had a vision of what a truly modern church might look like, a building that combined Christian symbolism with the vertical ambition of the Art Deco movement and the organic forms of the American prairie. She brought that vision to Bruce Goff, one of her former students and a young architect just starting his practice. The Boston Avenue Methodist Church was the result.

The building opened in nineteen twenty-nine, the same year the oil boom gave way to the crash. It rises well over two hundred feet. The exterior is covered in terra cotta panels in shades of cream and gold, sculpted with praying hands, wheat stalks, and stylized flames. The tower is flanked by figures representing the Methodist faith, and the sanctuary inside is lit by windows of amber and rose glass that make the interior glow like a lit lantern at dusk.

The American Institute of Architects has recognized it as one of the outstanding examples of Art Deco religious architecture in the United States. Architectural historians note that it represents an unusual convergence: the commission was driven by a woman's vision in an era when women were rarely credited with design; the architect was twenty-three years old; and the building they produced together is, by most accounts, a masterpiece.

Adah Robinson received limited formal credit during her lifetime. Bruce Goff went on to become one of the most influential American architects of the mid-twentieth century, known for buildings that refused to look like anything else. The church they started together looks like nothing else in Tulsa, or much of anywhere.