Tulsa: Fire, Oil, Music, and the River
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa sits in a bend of the Arkansas River in a landscape of low hills, red clay, and cross-timbers forest, where the eastern Oklahoma oak country gives way to the flatter prairie to the west. It is not a city that looks like it should be there, until you understand the history, and then it looks like exactly the kind of place it would have to be.
The Muscogee Creek brought their fire here after the removal. The cattle drives came through. The railroads arrived in the eighteen eighties. Oil came in nineteen oh five, and with it a speed of money that few American cities have experienced: from frontier trading post to one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the nation within less than a decade.
That speed produced the Art Deco skyline, the mansions on the ridges, the museums endowed by men who had more money than they knew how to spend carefully. It produced, on the north side of the Frisco tracks, the community that called itself Black Wall Street, built by Black Tulsans who had created something extraordinary by any measure. And it produced, in May of nineteen twenty-one, the destruction of that community in an event the city suppressed for fifty years and is still excavating, literally, today.
The oil depleted. The bust came in the nineteen eighties. Tulsa reinvented itself more quietly: museums, music, a restored Route Sixty-Six corridor, a Gathering Place park on the Arkansas River that opened in twenty eighteen and became the most visited park in Oklahoma within its first year.
The Golden Driller still stands at the fairgrounds. The Council Oak still stands at Eighteenth and Cheyenne. Cain's Ballroom is still open. The spring floor still bounces. Tulsa remains, as it has been for more than a century, a city that built itself out of whatever was underneath it.
