The Skirvin Hotel, One Hundred Years of Oklahoma City in One Building
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
William Balser Skirvin made his money in the Oklahoma oil booms of the early nineteen hundreds and decided to spend some of it on the finest hotel between Dallas and Kansas City. The Skirvin Hotel opened on the northwest corner of Park Avenue and Broadway in nineteen eleven, a few years after Oklahoma statehood, and it immediately became the social center of a city that was still figuring out what kind of place it wanted to be. The building that opened in nineteen ten was ten stories of brick and terra cotta in a modified Renaissance Revival style.
Skirvin expanded it to thirteen stories in nineteen thirty and added a ballroom that could seat several hundred guests. The hotel hosted every Oklahoma governor from the statehood era onward, welcomed traveling presidents, housed the campaign headquarters of candidates passing through, and was for decades the venue where Oklahoma City's business and political class conducted the informal work of running the state. The lobbies and corridors accumulated their share of legend over the years, a ghost story attached to the hotel is among the most widely circulated in Oklahoma, involving a woman named Effie who figures in accounts that the management neither confirms nor denies.
The full historical record on this is thin, and the ghost story almost certainly owes more to atmosphere than to documentation. What is documented is the hotel's decline. By the nineteen seventies, as downtown Oklahoma City emptied out, the Skirvin could no longer fill its rooms.
It closed in nineteen eighty-eight after more than seven decades of continuous operation. For nearly twenty years it sat vacant in the center of the city, a hollow building on a prominent corner, its ornate facade slowly deteriorating. It reopened in two thousand seven after a renovation costing roughly fifty million dollars.
The ballroom had been restored, the terra cotta cleaned, the mechanical systems entirely replaced. On the night it reopened, the line stretched around the block. The building had outlasted the demolition campaigns, outlasted the lean years, outlasted its own abandonment.
It was, in that sense, a fair summary of the city around it.
