I wasn't sure if this was the appropriate place for the article by Steve but it certainly is nostalgic for me since I remember most of these buildings very well.

Nine of the Most Beautiful Buildings We Ever Razed - OKC Edition | News OK (http://newsok.com/nine-of-the-most-beautiful-buildings-we-ever-razed-okc-edition/article/3935152)

I have the hardest time finding building pages on OKCTalk. I know they exist but searching for them is difficult.

Here's some quick links to building pages:

http://www.okctalk.com/general-civic-issues/25427-historical-buildings.html

Biltmore Hotel
Biltmore Hotel (Hotel Oklahoma)* - OKCTalk (http://www.okctalk.com/showwiki.php?title=Biltmore+Hotel+Hotel+Oklahoma)

These buildings were gone before I was even born. This is the OKC I never had a chance to know. Maybe it is better that way.

As somebody who cares a great deal about buildings, this was absolutely a tragedy.

Holy crap, that picture of the Biltmore Hotel, I guess I had never seen it before. What a loss.

I have the hardest time finding building pages on OKCTalk. I know they exist but searching for them is difficult.

Here's some quick links to building pages:

http://www.okctalk.com/general-civic-issues/25427-historical-buildings.html

Biltmore Hotel
Biltmore Hotel (Hotel Oklahoma)* - OKCTalk (http://www.okctalk.com/showwiki.php?title=Biltmore+Hotel+Hotel+Oklahoma)

We have threads on all these buildings but they have been temporarily put in a closed forum while we do some restructuring.

Can we charge the people responsible for this with murder? Maybe rape would be better lol

Seriously though, I never had a chance to see these buildings and wish I would've. Such beautiful peices of work and they truly don't make them like they used to. The Criterion has to be my fav. My that sucks thinking of where we could be if we still had our dense core. :(

I look at this post I did almost three years ago and compare these photos...

http://www.okctalk.com/general-civic-issues/25427-historical-buildings.html#post420888

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/ViewSouthonRobinsonfromMainJune1932.jpg

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Downtown%20OKC/MainRobinsonOKC4-8-11.jpg

I think about how there are hardly any fingerprints left in the city of the people who lived and built the original gritty Oklahoma City from the red dirt to what it was 80 years ago, and what these people would think today. What would they think about the "Main Street" we have today and all the lack of the lived-in feel the city had, to how vacant, open and sterilized it is today?

Is that older photo looking south on Robinson from just north of Main? That would make the cigar store the site of the much later Katz drug -- a truly historic site that we destroyed. And the three-story white building at the south end of the street would have to be the Tivoli...

I don't know what the people of the 1920s would feel like, but as a child of the 1940s I feel a terrible sense of loss -- and avoid the downtown area as much as I can, as a direct result!

Edit--used a magnifier to read the threater signs and sure enough my location was correct, with the State on the east side and the Liberty on the west. Anyone know when the cigar store gave way to Katz?

I look at this post I did almost three years ago and compare these photos...

http://www.okctalk.com/general-civic-issues/25427-historical-buildings.html#post420888

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/ViewSouthonRobinsonfromMainJune1932.jpg

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Downtown%20OKC/MainRobinsonOKC4-8-11.jpg

I think about how there are hardly any fingerprints left in the city of the people who lived and built the original gritty Oklahoma City from the red dirt to what it was 80 years ago, and what these people would think today. What would they think about the "Main Street" we have today and all the lack of the lived-in feel the city had, to how vacant, open and sterilized it is today?

What a comparison. From personality and activity in the first photo to a boring building surrounded by concrete pylons that say "you're not welcome here."

Now, just multiply that one north-south street of activity in the photo by several, lengthen them, and throw in the vital, busy east-west streets. Great city. Sad.

It's a goddamned shame what has happened to a lot of American cities.

It's a goddamned shame what has happened to a lot of American cities.

It helps if you don't think about it.

Jim, I think the Tivoli Inn is actually the larger building to the right of the three story. I don't recall off-hand what the smaller one was; I think it was a club of some sort..? The vista termination really created a sense of place. The insistence on "straightening out" Robinson was, in hindsight, a huge mistake. The Baum Building is on the east (left) side of Robinson.

In the original post, I named all the buildings in the photo. The taller building to the left of Colcord is the Oklahoma Club/Tivoli Inn.

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/Oklahoma%20Club-Tivoli%20Inn/oklahomaclubtivoli.jpg

Last days...

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/Myriad%20Gardens/workbegins2.jpg

The three story white building was the Farmers National Bank Building. Did you guys read the original thread?

http://www.okctalk.com/general-civic-issues/25427-historical-buildings-2.html#post422379

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/W%20Sheridan/grandrobinson.jpg
Oklahoma Club/Tivoli Inn is to the right

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/UnFrSaKn/Old%20Oklahoma%20City/Baum%20Building/ViewNorthonRobinsonfromCaliforniacearly1920s.jpg
This view is looking the opposite way, north, than in the original photo which was looking south on Robinson. The white building on the left is the Farmers National Bank Building. The white one in the background is the Baum Building. Both were demolished to "straighten" Robinson. When you went north and south on Robinson, motorists had to curve around the Baum Building because some streets were surveyed wrong and misaligned when the city was first built.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/DougLoudenback/citynational_8_21_1949_ohs.jpg

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/DougLoudenback/citynational_farmers_1923a_vsp2.jpg
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/DougLoudenback/citynational_farmers_1923b_vsp2.jpg

It makes you want to make the 1970's the first stop if they ever invent a time machine. The trip to slap Urban Renewal around would be well worth it even if you couldn't come back.

Steve Lackmeyer's article made me miss my Grandpa. He had such a fond love for Oklahoma City. We would spend hours on weekend driving around the city and he would tell me the history of each building. He would share memories of each place and show me picture of the old buildings and talk about how cool it was to ride the Interurban downtown for lunch at Katz and shopping at the various stores. From what he told me, going downtown meant something big. You put on your best clothes and carried yourself in upstanding manner.

RetroMetroOKC is always looking for old photos of downtown and Oklahoma City in general. We can come to a person's home and do a scanning session.

Retro Metro OKC | Education through preservation (http://www.retrometrookc.org/)

Vista termination = good thing. Always painful to look at a lot of those pics. It's not that leaders back then were bad folks; they were trying to fix real problems using what turned out to be the wrong solutions. Too much well-meaning ignorance.

I'd like a list of the beautiful buildings made ugly by silly cladding, paint, additions, and obsolete antennas.

It makes you want to make the 1970's the first stop if they ever invent a time machine. The trip to slap Urban Renewal around would be well worth it even if you couldn't come back.

Before you do that, go back to the time when they first built the city and laid out the streets wrong. Help that surveyor do it right. THEN go to the 70's and let the slapping commence ('cause straightening out Robinson really wouldn't have stopped the demo nonsense, eh?).

Stop posting these photos man, it's killing me!!! lol ;) j/k (I really like them, would be neat to travel into an alternate universe and see where OKC would be to day with its entire downtown still in tact).

I was thinking yesterday.. was it the Dust Bowl and the subsequent exodus of much of the population in the 30's, the caused so many buildings to become blighted by the 60's, when the population returned to the pre-Dust Bowl days?

I imagine it was a combination of sprawl and the automobile, white-flight and racial tension, the American ideal of manifest destiny, and the rise of American individualism.

The automobile in particular stretched resources particularly thin in the Western US because there just weren't the people around. But even if there were more people, it would not have entirely negated the impact the automobile had: just Compare Warsaw and Krakow or Berlin and Vienna, the former which were just obliterated by WWII and were redeveloped during the same time the Western US was developing, and then the latter which were relatively left alone.

Before you do that, go back to the time when they first built the city and laid out the streets wrong. Help that surveyor do it right.

Two surveyors. Two townships were established, on opposite sides of Clarke Street (later Grand Avenue, now Sheridan): Oklahoma, on the north side, and South Oklahoma, on the south. (The two were merged after about a year, but the street "jog" remained for rather a long time.)

I was thinking yesterday.. was it the Dust Bowl and the subsequent exodus of much of the population in the 30's, the caused so many buildings to become blighted by the 60's, when the population returned to the pre-Dust Bowl days?

The Dust Bowl had little impact on OKC. In fact, the 30s were a time of growth in OKC, whose economy seems to often run opposite of the rest of the U.S. Despite the "Okies" tag, the Dust Bowl more profoundly affected west Texas, Kansas and eastern Colorado than Oklahoma.

Teo had it about right on what hurt downtown OKC. Especially post-war suburbanism. Mayfair Shopping Center was a punch to the gut, for instance. Much of it happened in the 50s.

Two surveyors. Two townships were established, on opposite sides of Clarke Street (later Grand Avenue, now Sheridan): Oklahoma, on the north side, and South Oklahoma, on the south. (The two were merged after about a year, but the street "jog" remained for rather a long time.)Almost correct, but not quite. "South Oklahoma" was the area that became Capitol Hill; the areas both north and south of Clarke/Grand/Sheridan were both parts of the original Oklahoma, but were platted by two different surveyors. The surveyor working south of the dividing line had a slightly shorter chain, so his blocks were not quite as large as those to the north. Note that the jog affected only five north-south streets: Broadway, Robinson, Harvey, Hudson, and Walker -- and the amount of the offset increased slightly with each block as you move to the west from the tracks!

I believe that Doug has, on his web site, a copy of a very early history of OKC written by "Bunky" that details the whole thing...

The reason for the two townships was that the original legislation that authorized them linited a township to 320 acres. Once "Oklahoma" had reached that size, "South Oklahoma" came into existence to permit another 320 acres to be platted. Even in those days, sprawl was a significant factor!

Here is a full article by Steve based on his original blog.

Lost Treasures: Many Oklahoma City buildings have fallen for renewal | News OK (http://newsok.com/lost-treasures-many-oklahoma-city-buildings-have-fallen-for-renewal/article/3936286)

Developing history: 100-year-old photos of Oklahoma City seen for first time (http://m.newsok.com/developing-history-100-year-old-photos-of-oklahoma-city-seen-for-first-time/article/3936888)

I'd like a list of the beautiful buildings made ugly by silly cladding, paint, additions, and obsolete antennas.

It's not that OKC doesn't have some gems left - it is just that most of what is left is covered by a bunch of mid-century crap attached to the sides. The City IT building adjacent to the Main St parking garage is a perfect example. If they would just take off that siding, reopen the windows along Walker, restore the sidewalk retail space, and convert the upper floor to residential it would be one of the coolest building in downtown OKC. The part that makes it so sad is that this building is owned by the city and they could fix this problem with a simple vote.

That's hardly mid-century. It's an EIFS-based exterior renovation from the eighties or nineties; I don't recall which. Which of course makes it even more regrettable. True mid-century design is beautiful in its own right and much sought-after, the real problem is the re-skinning during any era of quality buildings from another. It is almost never an improvement.

That's hardly mid-century. It's an EIFS-based exterior renovation from the eighties or nineties; I don't recall which. Which of course makes it even more regrettable. True mid-century design is beautiful in its own right and much sought-after, the real problem is the re-skinning during any era of quality buildings from another. It is almost never an improvement.

I stand corrected then on the timing. I thought it had been done much earlier. Anyhow, I couldn't agree more with your last statement - it is almost never an improvement.

OK, I was irritated that I could not recall exactly, but the current EIFS cladding of that building went up in 1996. There was another abortion of a re-cladding performed in the late seventies which appears to have obliterated the original facade, and 1996 was apparently an attempt to fix that. You can read about it on Doug's blog: Doug Dawgz Blog: What Became of The Downtown USO? (http://dougdawg.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-became-of-downtown-uso.html)

Wanted to show you all what I've been working on the past few days.

A few years ago I modeled the Baum Building in SketchUp. I revisited it and decided to make a new, more accurate model.

Here, the old model is on the left, new on the right:
https://i.imgur.com/Kx1dtaE.png

Close-up of the new model (still a work in progress):
https://i.imgur.com/A6ohSZL.png

^

Awesome!