Oklahoma became a state in 1907. Within two decades, its two largest cities were competing to build the tallest buildings in the region, financing them with oil money that arrived faster than anyone had planned for. The skylines that resulted, particularly in Tulsa, produced one of the most concentrated collections of Art Deco architecture in the United States.
The elevators inside those buildings are part of the same story. They were installed during a boom, maintained through busts, updated during renovations, and in some cases preserved with the same care given to the ornate lobbies and bronze detailing that surround them. This article covers that history, along with the more recent towers that have pushed Oklahoma’s skylines into the modern era.
A Boom Built in Decades, Not Centuries
Most cities that develop significant skylines do so over a long period. Oklahoma did not have that luxury. Tulsa had 1,390 residents in 1900. By 1920 that number was 72,075. The reason was oil. The Red Fork discovery of 1901 and the Glenn Pool strike of 1905 turned a small Creek Nation town into one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the country. Tulsa eventually claimed the title of Oil Capital of the World, and the oilmen who made their fortunes there spent heavily on the buildings that would house their companies and proclaim their success.
Oklahoma City developed along a parallel track, though its oil boom came slightly later. The massive Oklahoma City Oil Field, discovered in 1928, turned the state capital into a second center of energy wealth. That money arrived just as construction technology, elevator systems, and the Art Deco architectural movement were all hitting their stride simultaneously. The result was a wave of ambitious downtown towers built in a short window of time, many of them still standing today.
Both cities have continued growing, though the pace is steadier now than it was a century ago. Oklahoma City’s metropolitan population has crossed 1.4 million. Tulsa’s metro sits around 1 million. Healthcare, aerospace, energy, and logistics all drive the current economy, and each of those sectors generates demand for commercial real estate, hospitals, and the vertical infrastructure required to make those buildings work.
When Elevators Came to Oklahoma
Oklahoma’s oil prosperity arrived just as electric traction elevators were becoming the standard for commercial construction. The hydraulic lifts that had been the state of the art in the 1890s were giving way to cable-and-motor systems capable of reaching much greater heights, and the
developers financing Oklahoma’s first wave of tall buildings had both the money and the access to technology to install them properly.
By the early 1920s, elevator operators were a regular presence in Tulsa’s downtown office buildings. A 1921 account of the Drexel Building at Third and Main in Tulsa describes an elevator operator as part of the building staff, suggesting that powered vertical transportation was already established enough in the city to be unremarkable. What was coming in the years ahead would be considerably more elaborate.
The oil booms of the 1920s created pressure to build quickly and conspicuously. Oilmen were competing not just for leases and production but for status, and a prominent downtown tower with a well-appointed lobby was a visible expression of that status. The elevators inside those buildings were part of the statement: ornate brass doors, polished interiors, and the kind of careful detailing that told a visitor they were in a serious building.
Five Buildings Worth Knowing
Skirvin Hotel, Oklahoma City (1911)
The Skirvin is the oldest hotel in Oklahoma City, and its construction timeline reflects the city’s early growth pattern. It opened in 1911 as a ten-story building with 224 rooms, the project of oilman and developer W.B. Skirvin. A third wing was added in 1925, and by 1930 all three wings had been raised to thirteen floors. At that point the hotel had 525 rooms and was the premier lodging address in the city.
The Skirvin closed in 1988 after decades of declining occupancy and deferred maintenance. It sat empty for nearly twenty years before a $51 million renovation reopened it in 2007 as a Hilton property. The renovation is a good example of what historic elevator work requires: the project added new guest elevators to handle modern traffic patterns while restoring the building’s original finishes, windows, and public spaces. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been recognized by Historic Hotels of America.
Quick facts: Opened: 1911 | Floors: 13 | Rooms: 225 (post-renovation) | Renovation: 2007, approximately $51 million | Oklahoma City’s oldest operating hotel, National Register of Historic Places
Philtower, Tulsa (1928)
The Philtower was commissioned by Waite Phillips, one of the most prominent oilmen in Tulsa’s early history, and designed by architect Edward Buehler Delk. When it opened in 1928, the 24-story tower was the tallest building in Oklahoma. Its’ style is a hybrid of Gothic Revival and Art Deco: pointed arched windows and a tiered crown give it a cathedral-like profile, while the interiors are finished in the polished metals and geometric ornament that define the Art Deco period. A 40-foot pyramid at the top is covered in 16,000 clay tiles and topped by a copper lantern lit with colored neon.
Three elevators serve the building’s upper floors, their doors embossed with the W.P. seal of Waite Phillips. The brass doors and glass accents in the lobby remain among the more intact examples of 1920s elevator finish work in the region. Below the building, an 80-foot tunnel under 5th Street connects the Philtower to the adjacent Philcade building, which Phillips also developed. He used the tunnel to move between his Philcade residence and his Philtower offices without going outside, a practical arrangement that also says something about the scale of his investment in the city block.
Quick facts: Year: 1928 | Floors: 24 | Architect: Edward Buehler Delk | Developer: Waite Phillips | Elevators: 3, with brass W.P.-embossed doors | Tallest building in Oklahoma at completion | Connected by underground tunnel to the Philcade building
First National Center, Oklahoma City (1931)
The First National Center was built in 1931, the middle of the Great Depression, by the First National Bank and Trust Company of Oklahoma City. That timing is worth noting: the oil wealth that had accumulated in Oklahoma through the 1920s was substantial enough that a major institution could finance a 33-story Art Deco tower even as the national economy was contracting sharply. The building was the largest in the state at the time, rising 406 feet to the roof and 446 feet to its spire.
The interiors were built to impress. The main banking hall rose nearly three stories, with marble Corinthian columns, an ornately painted ceiling, and four murals of Oklahoma history by painter Edgar Spier Cameron. The main entry featured elaborate aluminum sculptures of swans, peacocks, and cherubs rising five stories high.
The building sat largely vacant for years before a $275 million renovation converted it into a hotel, apartments, retail space, and offices. The elevator work on that project was carefully handled: the building’s ten elevators were fitted with modern drive and control systems capable of running at 800 feet per minute, but the cabs were finished to match the original 1931 aesthetic. A visitor riding one of those elevators today is in a cab that appears to be ninety years old and moves at the speed of a current commercial installation.
Quick facts: Year: 1931 | Floors: 33 | Height: 406 ft (446 ft to spire) | Style: Art Deco / Neoclassical | Elevators: 10, modernized to 800 fpm with period-accurate cab finishes | Renovation cost: approximately $275 million
BOK Tower (One Williams Center), Tulsa (1976)
BOK Tower is the work of Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the World Trade Center towers in New York. The Tulsa tower, completed in 1976, is a 52-story steel-and-glass structure that held the title of tallest building in Oklahoma for 35 years, until the Devon Energy Center surpassed it in 2011. At 667 feet it is a clean, modernist contrast to the ornate Art Deco towers that had defined Tulsa’s skyline for the previous four decades.
The building has 24 high-speed passenger elevators and 2 freight elevators, all of which have been modernized since original construction. The elevator system serves floor plates of roughly 23,000 to 25,000 square feet per level. The building shares a plaza with the Williams Resource
Center and overlooks the Williams Center Green, a 2.5-acre landscaped park in downtown Tulsa. Yamasaki’s Tulsa tower is significantly less famous than his New York work, but the building has aged well and remains a major presence on the Tulsa skyline.
Quick facts: Year: 1976 | Floors: 52 | Height: 667 ft | Architect: Minoru Yamasaki | Elevators: 24 high-speed passenger + 2 freight | Tallest building in Oklahoma from 1976 to 2011
Devon Energy Center, Oklahoma City (2012)
The Devon Energy Center opened in 2012 and took the title of tallest building in Oklahoma from BOK Tower, where it had sat for 35 years. At 50 stories and 844 feet, the tower was designed by Jon Pickard of Pickard Chilton and built at an estimated cost of $800 million. It holds a LEED Gold certification and houses a public restaurant called Vast on its 49th and 50th floors.
The tower is the clearest example in Oklahoma of how modern high-rise construction approaches elevator planning. At 844 feet, the building needs enough cab capacity to move the full tenant population efficiently across 50 floors during morning arrival and evening departure peaks, while also handling mid-day traffic, service deliveries, and the public elevator traffic generated by the Vast restaurant. Systems at this scale use destination dispatch technology, where riders select their floor at a lobby panel before entering a cab, allowing the controller to group passengers headed to adjacent floors and reduce the total number of stops each elevator makes.
Quick facts: Year: 2012 | Floors: 50 | Height: 844 ft | Architect: Jon Pickard / Pickard Chilton | Cost: approximately $800 million | LEED Gold certified | Tallest building in Oklahoma | Public restaurant (Vast) on floors 49-50
Oil Money, Art Deco, and What They Left Behind
The timing of Oklahoma’s oil booms shaped the state’s architecture in a very specific way. When Tulsa’s oilmen started building in earnest in the 1920s, Art Deco was the dominant commercial style. The movement’s emphasis on vertical lines, geometric ornament, and expensive materials, including polished metals, terra cotta, and exotic stone, suited both the ambitions of oil-wealth clients and the technical capabilities of the period. Elevators were part of that aesthetic program: brass doors, ornate surrounds, and attendant-operated cabs were design elements as much as mechanical ones.
The result is that Tulsa today has more than 75 documented Art Deco buildings and structures from this period, giving it one of the most concentrated Art Deco collections in the country. More than a third of those properties have been demolished or significantly altered, but what remains is substantial. The Philtower, the Philcade, the Boston Avenue United Methodist Church (a National Historic Landmark), and dozens of smaller commercial buildings form a coherent architectural record of what oil money looked like when it was expressed in stone and steel.
Oklahoma City’s oil-era buildings tell a similar story, though the timeline shifted somewhat. The First National Center, built in 1931 at the Depression’s depths, is the most dramatic example: a project of considerable ambition, financed with accumulated oil capital, completed during a period when most American cities had stopped building altogether. It stood as the largest building in the state for decades and its recent renovation returned it to active use after years of vacancy.
The state’s oil history also shapes the elevator service market in a less obvious way. Industrial facilities, including refineries, petrochemical plants, and manufacturing operations, are major users of freight elevators, personnel lifts, and other vertical transportation equipment outside the commercial office context. Oklahoma’s energy economy creates demand for that kind of work alongside the more visible commercial and residential elevator market.
Preservation, Modernization, and Current Work
The First National Center renovation offers a useful template for how historic elevator work gets done when preservation is a priority. The goal on that project was to keep the visual character of the cabs consistent with the 1931 building while completely replacing the mechanical and control systems underneath. The technical side of a modern installation, including variable-frequency drives, digital controllers, and updated safety systems, is largely invisible to a passenger. What they see and touch is the cab finish: the paneling, the door hardware, the indicator displays. Matching 1930s-era design details while meeting current ADA and code requirements is specialized work, and projects like the First National Center have become reference points for how to approach it.
Tulsa’s Art Deco inventory presents ongoing preservation questions. The buildings that have been well maintained or carefully renovated tend to retain their original elevator lobbies and door surrounds, even when the mechanical systems have been updated. Buildings that sat vacant or were converted without preservation guidance often lost those details. For any property owner considering a renovation of one of Tulsa’s historic towers, the elevator work is one of the more visible places where the difference between a careful restoration and a generic upgrade shows up in the finished building.
On the new construction side, the Devon Energy Center represents the current standard for major commercial towers in the state. Buildings of that height and tenant density require elevator planning from the earliest design stages, with consultants running traffic simulations to determine how many banks are needed and what cab speeds are appropriate before the structural drawings are finalized. That approach has become standard across Oklahoma’s commercial real estate market as developers and property managers have gotten more sophisticated about the long-term operating costs of elevator infrastructure.
For building owners in Oklahoma: Oklahoma elevator safety inspections fall under the jurisdiction of the Oklahoma Department of Labor. State law requires periodic inspections and certificates of operation for most commercial and multi-family residential elevators.
Qualified elevator contractors handle inspection coordination, code repairs, and full modernization projects covering everything from cab refurbishment to complete drive and controller replacement.
A Short History, Built Fast
Oklahoma went from territory to state to oil capital in a single generation. The buildings that went up during that period, particularly in Tulsa, are among the more architecturally distinctive in the region. The elevators inside them were built to match: brass doors, ornate finishes, and mechanical systems that were state of the art when they were installed.
Keeping those systems running, and keeping the buildings around them viable, has required steady maintenance and periodic modernization for nearly a century. The work continues across Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and the many smaller cities across the state with commercial buildings that need reliable vertical transportation, whether the building is a century-old Art Deco tower or a glass-curtain-wall office built last year.
Looking for elevator installation, modernization, or service in Oklahoma? Southwest Cabs and Interiors team has been working with commercial, residential, and institutional clients across the state since 1984. Click here or reach out at (972) 974-7005 or Derald@swcabs.com to get started today.