What used to be in that large industrial style building at Reno and Council? It has a smokestack in the back. It's now got a paper company as well as a number of other businesses in it. I'm just curious because it looks like it was once one big industrial facility.

I used to be a Lucent plant.

Lucent pulled out in 2001.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Western_Electric_logo%2C_1969-1984.jpg
My mother worked there in the late 70s when it was Western Electric (Oklahoma City Works) before becoming AT&T Technologies; then Lucent.

Oklahoma City produced 40% of the landline telephone equipment used in the United States.

My Dad was a charter member of the the group of Western Electric employees that came down from Chicago, after which that plant was built.

I had an aunt work at the Chicago plant.

I had an aunt work at the Chicago plant.

The Hawthorne plant in Cicero?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Western_Electric_logo%2C_1969-1984.jpg
My mother worked there in the late 70s when it was Western Electric (Oklahoma City Works) before becoming AT&T Technologies; then Lucent.

Oklahoma City produced 40% of the landline telephone equipment used in the United States.

Laramie, chances are your mom could have known any one of three of my family that worked there at the same time.

My mom, father, and uncle all worked at Western Electric -> ATT ->Lucent over the years, going back to the late 60's/early 70's. My uncle was an electrical engineer, and my mom started out as an admin/secretary and moved up to a planning engineer before she retired. My father, last I heard, was a mechanical engineer - don't know the details of his retirement as we lost touch when he chose to abandon the family back in 79.

One of the big highlights of the year for me as a kid was when they'd hav their Engineering Open House and you could tour the place, and they usually had some displays of internal technology that weren't yet available to the public. One was a "rolodex" of electronic cards that contained phone numbers; you put a card in a slot, pressed a button, and the phone read the card and dialed the number.

IT would be completely bizarre to most readers here to know that in the heyday of the Bell System era you did not own your own phone; they were the property of the phone company. You had only a few basic phone types; a standard desk phone, a more sleek "princess" phone, and a wall phone. Heck, these days, fewer and fewer people even have a dedicated house line anymore.

The building opened in 1961 IIRC. My dad moved the family down in 1958, and worked out of Western Electric's plant on the south side of 39th St. between Portland and Tulsa before moving to the new plant when completed. WeOkie Credit Union also started out inside the Western Electric plant and was originally for WE employees and their family members only, ... hence the name WE Okie.... before opening their first branch southwest of the corner of Reno & Council.

It's now known as OKCWorks and is a multi-tenant office campus. The name stems from the name each of the Lucent plants were referred to, ie OKC Works, Omaha Works, etc. I'm not sure how many of them still exist. I THINK Omaha's survived as well, but i want to say that several of the others were demolished.

Progrexion Services opened there in May with 69000sf. They are a Salt Lake City based credit repair company.

They recently passed out a directory map. Intermedix is about to gobble up the rest of the "red" building (110/420). There's a portion of State Farm in the Orange section and i'm not sure why they weren't listed.

It's pretty amazing to think how much of the place is full now considering how much of it was empty just a few short years ago.

12804

Back when it was built, it was originally something like 1.2 million sq ft. ... Big Place.