You gotta love the roaming bison, native plants blooming with golden flowers, wild gold that comes from oil and translates into realized fantasies – outlandish mansions, heavenly gardens, and spectacular museums. This is Oklahoma, where the prairie land meats the sky, and where there is enough space for everybody to grow and develop any which way.
Tulsa
A city of only about 400 000 population, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is not far behind New York and Miami in terms of the highest concentration of the Art Deco period buildings, erected in time of rapid gains associated with oil production.
Boston Avenue United Methodist Church is a National Historic Landmark, designed by a female architect, Dr. Adah Robinson, and built in downtown Tulsa in 1929.
The 15-story building is a poem in stone, filled with light streaming through its stained-glass windows. The sanctuary mosaic, installed in the early 1960s, consists of 750 000 glass tiles. The Great Hall mosaics from the 1990s, depicting scriptures in Hebrew and in Greek in Art Deco style, are made of pink and gold Venetian tiles.
http://www.bostonavenue.org/
The Philbrook Museum of Art, located in a 1926 Renaissance-style villa of oil baron Waite Phillips, is filled with exhibits ranging from Greek and Roman antiquities to Native American and Asian artifacts, and European Baroque and Impressionism masterpieces.
It is hard to distinguish between the art collection and the historic house’s exquisite décor.
La Villa restaurant on premises overlooks the landscaped gardens and serves gourmet lunches.
http://www.philbrook.org/
Gilcrease Museum is best known for its extensive collections of Native American art and the art of the American West, housed in a beautiful building surrounded by themed gardens. The former mansion of oil baron Thomas Gilcrease, it contains more than 10,000 paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell and George Catlin are among the famous American artists whose art is presented at Gilcrease. During my visit, a traveling exhibition To Capture the Sun: Gold of Ancient Panama was on display.
http://www.gilcrease.org/
The Linnaeus Teaching Gardens in Woodward Park with a beautifully preserved 1919 garden house (formerly a family home and a synagogue) serves as a public park and an educational institution. Numerous vegetables, annuals, perennials, woody plants and groundcovers are grown here with the use of the latest and most successful techniques. There is also a Victorian conservatory of flowers, an arboretum, and an ongoing exhibition of garden designs and outdoor architectural structures.
http://www.tulsagardencenter.com/
Hotel Ambassador is a luxury boutique hotel that offers a welcome retreat in a historic 1929 building, originally one of the first “extended stay” properties. It’s a ten-story Italianate structure with terra cotta relief panels and limestone cornices.
Spacious rooms, plush accommodations, and heart-warming details, like flowers and art pieces, open to the public Hurley Library, and coffee service in the lobby create a memorably comfortable place to spend a night in Tulsa.
http://www.hotelambassador-tulsa.com/
Black Alley Blues & BBQ is a funky little place in the Blue Dome entertainment district. It serves meaty classics accompanied by live music from local performers. Among the pork sandwiches and cheese-baked potato skins, there is a “Slice of salad” on the menu – a leaf of iceberg lettuce filled with bacon, barbecue sauce and ranch dressing.
Blue Dome Diner, which serves hearty breakfasts, including eggs with biscuits and gravy, is located nearby the real Blue Dome – a 1920s fancy gas station on Route 66.
http://www.visittulsa.com/
Bartlesville
The most important attraction in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is Price Tower – Frank Lloyd Wright's singular skyscraper – a National Historic Landmark.
Originally designed for New York City in 1929, right before the market crash, it was commissioned by oil baron Harold Price for his Price Pipeline company headquarters, and completed in 1956. Now, the 221-feet tower, which Wright poetically called his “tree that escaped the crowded forest” is home to the Art Center, Inn at Price Tower, and Copper Bar.
Chemically patinated copper panels on the exterior, green carpets and draperies, and orange upholstery define the great architect’s unique style – austere and elegant to a fault. In the “form over function” building there are jarring spiral staircases, tight claustrophobic elevators, triangular closets with tiny shelves, rigid chairs with very straight backs, and airplane-style bathrooms, where cabinets wouldn’t open, blocked by a toilet. Despite the minor inconveniences, a one-night stay here creates a lasting impression of being inside an architectural masterpiece, where every little thing, up to copper curtain holders and triangular light fixtures was designed by the genius artist. Referring to the Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright liked to say that “once in a blue moon a perfect architect and a perfect client together create a perfect building.”
http://www.pricetower.org/
Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve maintains its historic ambience with the original ranch established in 1925 by oil baron Frank Phillips, founder of Phillips Petroleum Company.
Woolaroc sits on 3 600 acres of prairie land, roamed by herds of bison, longhorn, and elk, with a grandiose museum dedicated to the American West and the history of Oklahoma at its center. Enormous collections of paintings, sculpture, dolls and Colt guns are on display as well as walls of the country home covered with taxidermies of hundreds of hunted animals, including an African elephant.
http://www.woolaroc.org/
Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is located in Pawhuska between Bartlesville and Ponca City in Osage County, Oklahoma.
This 39 000-acre preserve is the largest protected area of tallgrass prairie on Earth. Now managed by the Nature Conservancy, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is home to golden rod, broom weed, and yellow cone flowers, and to bobcat, badger, fox, deer, coyote, and bison.
www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/oklahoma/index.htm
Ponca City
Standing Bear Park, Museum, and Education Center is located in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and includes resource center, art gallery with Native American exhibits, education center, exhibit hall, observation area, and rotunda. At the center of the park stands the 22-feet bronze sculpture of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, surrounded by monuments honoring the six Native American tribes from around Ponca City: the Kaw, Osage, Otoe-Missouria, Pawnee, Ponca, and Tonkawa. Each September, on the last Friday and Saturday, the park is a site of the annual Standing Bear Pow Wow. Two miles of walking trails cross the park in all directions.
http://www.standingbearpark.com/
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