Old World Oklahoma City

[Laramie]

What do you think of the guy narrating this video? Amazing architecture of historic demolished buildings.

[Snowman]

He is way too conspiratorial for his own good, with many of those topics things that have far more reasonable answers for what actually happened than he floats as concept, and probably is easier to find today than decades ago if you do not start going down a rabbit hole of conspiracy fallacies. Sure he may have some type of experience in building industry in modern era, but ~125 years is a long time for change to happen in an industry. The amount of safety rules to protect workers is night and day different. Labor cost, tradesmen availability, hiring requirements, training process, management practices, and construction materials industries are also very different between now and then. There is also things like planning codes were almost non existent at the time in the US, air conditioning was decades away, sound proofing and energy efficiency were not exactly where clients would want today. So he is pretty much comparing apples and oranges on build timelines, and thinking it is odd people were able to do things faster in the past.

There also is also much more documented answers to why they were demolished 50s/60s/70s, partially since it being more recent and OKC was a larger city at that time, so had a spectrum of records of what and how that happened. Coming from a range of opinions on should that happen or not, which even the same individuals can vary by building and what is to replace it. Plus it is not like it is unique to OKC, but while seems to have found some information on it, but not fitting what he seems to want to believe dismissed.

It is also kind of comical to be questioning why a state with a booming budget/population would be building government buildings, as one of the newest states the pattern for capitals was pretty well established. On top of which like many people seems either unware or forgets that States will be territories for some period before statehood, sure that is only around twenty years in Oklahoma's case (as the Territory of Oklahoma, there also was some other government institutions for decades mostly relating to the tribes, and not in OKC region), but the thirty years alone growth rate in early Oklahoma likely would have necessitated replacing the original Guthrie buildings had they stayed there. Which the relocation of state capital to OKC gave even more reason why they need a new set of buildings.

Of the frontier territories of the era, we had some of the best infrastructure coming right up to the border, along with farmland verses desert territories west of us. When you look at the competition for where people might go to a new territory around 1889: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona. Even today ground transportation to/from Oklahoma is likely easier for most of US population and US production to get to from any on that list. With Washington's ease of access to suppliers largest shift as a result of more production outsourced to Asia.

I am not even sure where to go on him questioning if OKC existed longer before records indicate, unless they are proposing something like we were a sort of 1800s version of area 51 research there would be little reason to do that either, and if that were true we probably would have had way more of something like defense research worth keeping secret here around the start of statehood.

Ironically some of his questions on why we can not duplicate some of the things in modern times has been a constant discussion in architecture and city planner circles, since a non-trivial amount have had to fight through decades of building codes and being outside lending classifications, mostly made post WW2 so legally/funding wise somewhere between promote suburban construction to outright make traditional building patterns illegal, which then gets compounded by decades of building industry not geared to do that either. With it kind of funny that he almost seems shocked that OKC was following the traditional building patterns that were wide spread before that time, even if somewhat accelerated timeline. Which they also seems to have oddly contradicting tones, throughout most of that seeming like wants to see more of that style kept around or even new versions of traditional style built, but then is snarky about OU having buildings that are a built/remodeled in a high end retro style.

There can be error in records intentional or unintentional, along with PR spin on why things happen in some sources. However a conspiracy on how large multiple multiple US cities were or when they were founded is pretty out there, so really needs more prove than conventional views on what was happening does. It would not be a shock if different dates on the same building for post cards or photos could be people referring to different things, like structural completion or opening for business, or that even researching those dates was more cumbersome to do properly pre internet (so might be best recollections if all it is for is a post card or had been a personal photo later donated to a collection). Then on the destruction, not all projects come to fruition, we even have a recent example of Mummers Theater / Stage Center destroyed for basically nothing to happen there. Sure it may not have been in good condition at the time (which several of those destroyed for Pei plan were not either), or what many considered as nice and worth renovating as other buildings we lost in Pei plan. However 50s/60s/70s was an era most metro cores had been hemorrhaging citizens and business, and by extension taxes, so were open to taking desperate steps.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

The ‘Mud Flood’ and the Tartarian Empire bring their conspiracy eyes to Oklahoma City. Don’t get too bent out of shape about this look at Oklahoma City, as they do it to just about every city in the Americas and beyond. It’s a big tent conspiracy theory that allows for many different conclusions, but in a nutshell, the purists believe that our cites hold secrets about a once thriving and advanced empire that was here long before us, and after an apocalypse it was all buried in mud. Those ‘old’ buildings you see today? Many of them were really underground and part of that ancient civilization merely excavated to the surface in modern times. Really. That’s the belief. And all history is basically fake.