Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City is the largest city of the State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, on the North Canadian River where the oak country of the cross timbers gives way to the open plains. It is not the State’s capital. The capital is Guthrie, thirty miles to the north, where it was entrenched in 1910 after an attempt to carry the State seal to a hotel in this city overnight.

The city was founded in a single afternoon. The unassigned land in the middle of the territory, ceded by the Muscogee and Seminole nations in the treaties of 1866, was opened to settlement at noon on 22 April 1889, and by nightfall about ten thousand people were camped on staked lots around the railway station. It holds about 700,000 people within a boundary of about 1,600 square kilometres, among the largest of any municipality in the Realm, and about 1.5 million in its metropolitan region.

It is the federal city of the plains. It holds Tinker, the Royal American Air Force’s great air depot; the headquarters and academy of the Civil Aviation Authority of America; one of the thirteen Houses of the Royal American Reserve; and the greater part of the State’s own civil service, which has drifted down from Guthrie over fifty years. The Severe Weather Service is at Norman, which adjoins it. An oil field lies under the city, struck in 1928, and a working cattle market has traded at its stockyards since 1910.

On the morning of 19 April 1995 a lorry bomb destroyed the Pershing Federal Building in the centre of the city and killed 168 people, nineteen of them children. The bombers were tried in the city’s own federal court. A federal bill for detention without charge, wider surveillance and the proscription of militia groups was drafted at the Home Office and never laid, and the law was barely changed. The restraint was unpopular at the time and is invoked across the Realm whenever emergency legislation is proposed. The memorial on the footprint of the building is kept by the State, and the anniversary is a State occasion rather than a national one.

The city is governed by a Mayor under a charter of 1968 and by a City Council of eight. The present Mayor is David Holt, a citizen of the Osage Nation and a member of the Conservative and Crown Union, in office since 2018. The city has the largest urban Native population in the Realm, with a joint service office of the thirteen nations and a museum built by them with their own money.

Six things are stated in this article as the city’s failings: its founding on land the nations had been promised in perpetuity; segregation, and the lunch counters that the sit-ins of 1958 had to open; the demolitions of the 1960s, which took most of the old centre and drove a motorway through the Black east side; a city built for the car; the attempt of 1910 to take the capital by stealing the seal; and the camps along the river and the city’s record of fatal police shootings.

Name

The city is named after the territory, and the territory after the Choctaw words okla, people, and humma, red. The railway that crossed the district in 1887 put a station on the north bank of the river and called it Oklahoma Station, and the town that grew round the station two years later took the name with the word City added to tell it from the territory. Its post office was called simply Oklahoma until 1923, which caused confusion for thirty years and was corrected only when the State’s own name made the confusion intolerable.

The city has never taken the second half of the State’s name, and there is no proposal that it should. It is called OKC in speech and in print, on its buses and on its basketball shirts, and the initials are now more common than the full name in everything except legislation.

History

The land before the run

The country round the city was the ground of the Wichita and Caddo before any of the names in this article existed, and lay on the edge of the hunting country of the plains nations to the west. When the Five Nations were removed in the 1830s it fell within the western part of the country assigned to the Muscogee and the Seminole, far from where either nation settled, and they held it until 1866.

In the treaties of that year the Realm required cessions from every nation in the territory, from those that had sided with the rebellion of 1861 and from those that had not, and the Muscogee and Seminole gave up the western half of their country. The land was meant for other nations to be settled on, and some were. The middle of it was never assigned to anyone, and for twenty years it was known simply as the Unassigned Lands, held by the Realm, closed to settlement, and grazed under lease by cattle companies driving herds from Texas.

From the late 1870s organised parties of would-be settlers, the Boomers, crossed into it repeatedly, were removed by soldiers, and came back. The railway came through in 1887 and built its station. By 1889 the pressure was too great for any ministry to resist, and the land was opened.

The run of 1889

The opening was done by proclamation. At noon on 22 April 1889 soldiers along the boundary fired their carbines, and the people waiting behind the line went in on horseback, in wagons, on foot and on the roofs of the trains, to claim homesteads in the country and lots in the towns that would be laid out on it.

Some were already there. The Sooners had gone in before the signal and hidden in the creek bottoms, and a good many of the best lots round the station were claimed by men who could not have reached them from the line in the time they claimed to have taken. The name was an insult for a generation and became a boast in the next, and the State’s regiment and its university now carry it.

By nightfall about ten thousand people were camped round Oklahoma Station. Two rival town companies surveyed the ground the same afternoon, each with its own grid, and the two grids did not meet. The streets of the old centre still jog where they join, and the jog is the oldest surviving artefact of the city’s founding.

The town had no law. The proclamation had opened the land before Parliament had provided a government for it, and for a year the city was run by a provisional council elected at a mass meeting, which settled lot disputes, raised a tax by subscription and kept order with a marshal it had no lawful authority to appoint. The territory was organised by Act in 1890, and the city was incorporated the same year.

The seal of the city still records the run. Its shield carried a hatchet driving a claim stake from 1965 until 2027, when the stake was removed.

Territory and statehood

The city grew faster than any other in the territory, and it grew on the railways. Four lines met there by the turn of the century, and the packing houses and stockyards that two Chicago firms opened beside the river in 1910 made it the cattle market of the southern plains.

It wanted to be the capital from the beginning, and it was not. The territory was governed from Guthrie, the State was admitted in 1907 with Guthrie as its seat under the terms of the compromise, and the compromise named Guthrie precisely because it was not either of the two cities that were already competing to dominate the new polity.

The seal of 1910

In 1910 the city’s interest in the legislature carried a snap resolution to move the seat of government to Oklahoma City. A secretary of the Governor took the State seal from the capitol at Guthrie that night and carried it to the Lee-Huckins Hotel in Oklahoma City, where it spent the night in a room on an upper floor while the Governor declared the hotel the capital.

The courts put the seal back within the month, holding that a seat of government fixed by the terms of admission could not be moved by a resolution and a journey. The following session entrenched the capital so that the attempt could not be repeated, and Guthrie has been the capital ever since because somebody tried to steal it.

The episode is now a joke that both cities tell. The Lee-Huckins was one of the few old buildings to survive the demolitions of the 1960s, and it keeps the room as it was, with a framed copy of the court’s order on the wall. Guthrie sends a delegation to stay in it on the anniversary.

The oil field

Oil was found under the city on 4 December 1928, and within two years the Oklahoma City field was one of the largest in the Realm. It lay beneath the south and east of the city, and it was drilled where it lay: derricks went up in back gardens, in residential streets and on the grounds of churches and schools, and the city’s ordinances on where a well might be drilled were rewritten every year for a decade and obeyed for about as long as it took to write them.

The field is remembered for one well. In March 1930 a well on the south side blew out of control and ran wild for eleven days, throwing oil and gas so high that the wind carried it across the southern suburbs and coated houses, washing and cars for miles downwind. Fire was the fear; every flame in the district was ordered out, and the city held its breath until the well was capped. Nobody died, and the well gave its nickname to the whole period.

Pumps still work inside the city, in yards and beside car parks, and in places the derricks were never taken down.

The Depression

The Depression reached the city late and stayed. The oil money kept it standing longer than the wheat counties to the west, but by 1932 there was a camp of several thousand people on the flats beside the river, in shacks of tin and packing cases, below the centre and in sight of it. It was the largest in the State and one of the largest in the Realm, and the city’s relief committees fed it while the council argued over whether to clear it.

The drought of the 1930s did not fall on the city as it did on the panhandle, but the people it ruined passed through on the roads west, and many stopped. The river camp was the first place a great many families from the western counties lived when they gave up their farms.

The east side

The Black population of the territory came for a place of its own, and in Oklahoma City it built one on the east side, along North-East Second Street, which its own residents called Deep Deuce. By the 1920s it had its own banks, newspapers, surgeries, hotels, churches, a hospital and a row of dance halls, and it was one of the centres from which territory jazz went out across the plains.

The bands that toured out of Deep Deuce in the 1920s and 1930s fed the music of the whole Realm. The Blue Devils, with Jimmy Rushing singing, came out of the city and supplied half the personnel of the great bands that followed. Charlie Christian learned to play in its clubs, and made the guitar a lead instrument by plugging it in. Ralph Ellison was born in the city in 1913, grew up on the east side, and wrote the single great novel about being unseen that is now taught everywhere in the Realm.

The east side existed because of segregation, and segregation was the law. The first legislature passed its laws in 1908, and they stopped at the treaty line; the city was not on treaty land, and they applied in full. Housing ordinances confined Black residents to the east side until the courts struck them down, and covenants in the deeds of the new suburbs did the same work after the ordinances had gone.

The sit-ins of 1958

On 19 August 1958 Clara Luper, a schoolteacher, took the children of her youth council, the youngest of them six, into the Katz drug store in the centre of the city and sat them at the lunch counter, which did not serve Black customers. They were refused, sat on, and came back.

It was among the first of the sit-ins anywhere in the Realm, and it went on for six years. The Katz counters were opened within days; the rest of the city’s restaurants, cafeterias and lunch counters were opened one by one, under boycott and sit-in, until the last of them gave way in 1964. Luper was arrested more than twenty times. The city did not open a single counter of its own accord.

The federal city

The modern city was made by federal money as much as by oil.

The air depot east of the city was built in 1941 and 1942 and named after Major-General Clarence Tinker of the Air Corps, a citizen of the Osage Nation and the first Native officer to reach that rank, who was lost leading a flight of bombers over the Pacific in June 1942. Tinker overhauls the Royal American Air Force’s heavy aircraft, is the largest single-site employer in the State, and has outlasted every oil bust since it opened.

The Civil Aviation Authority of America placed its headquarters and academy in the city in 1956, because the inherited airways service already had its training facilities there, and every air traffic controller in the Realm has been trained in the city since. One of the thirteen Houses of the Royal American Reserve was placed in the city when the Houses were settled in 1913, and it supervises the banks of the southern plains from the centre of the city. The Severe Weather Service is at Norman, which adjoins the city to the south, and writes the watches and warnings for the whole Realm.

The State’s own staff followed the federal agencies. The ministries’ operational work drifted south from Guthrie over fifty years, and most of the civil servants of Oklahoma-Sequoyah now live and work in the city while the capital keeps the legislature, the Governor and the address.

Annexation

In the 1950s and 1960s the city annexed ring after ring of the farmland round it, to stop the new suburbs from incorporating on its edges and enclosing it. It took in whole townships at a time, ran its boundary out along the main roads to claim the land beyond, and by the end of the 1960s had reached about 1,600 square kilometres across four counties.

It succeeded in its purpose. No ring of suburbs encloses Oklahoma City, and the suburbs that did incorporate in time, Edmond to the north, Moore and Norman to the south, Midwest City and Del City round Tinker, sit outside its boundary in the gaps it left. The cost is the city’s defining physical characteristic: a boundary enclosing wheat fields, pasture and lakes as well as streets, with very little density anywhere outside the rebuilt centre, and a municipal government responsible for roads it will never pave and services it can barely reach.

The demolitions

In 1964 the city adopted an urban renewal plan drawn by I. M. Pei, and over the following decade its appointed city manager carried it out. It cleared most of the old centre: the theatres, the hotels, the banks of the oil years and the brick commercial streets of the 1890s, some five hundred buildings in all, for a scheme of towers, plazas and a covered shopping street that was mostly never built.

The same plan drove a motorway through the east side, cutting Deep Deuce from the neighbourhoods it served and taking the dance halls and the commercial heart of the district for its route. The plan was carried out by an official nobody had elected, on a council vote taken before most of the city understood what had been approved, and when the city saw the cleared blocks of the centre it changed its charter. The strong-mayor charter of 1968 was the reaction: a mayor elected by the whole city and answerable to it would hold the executive power the manager had held.

The Lee-Huckins was spared because its owners refused to sell and the scheme ran out of money before it reached them.

The bust

The oil price collapsed in the early 1980s, and the city went down with it. The failure in 1982 of a bank operating from a shopping centre on the north side, whose oil loans had been sold on to larger banks across the Realm, brought down one of the largest banks in Chicago two years later, and is still taught in the Reserve’s own training as the case of what a small bank can do to a large system.

The centre emptied. The demolitions had already taken most of it, and through the 1980s the offices that remained moved out to the north side, and by the end of the decade the old centre was a district of surface car parks round a few towers that were mostly vacant after six in the evening.

The tax of 1993

In December 1993 the city’s voters approved a one-penny sales tax for five years to rebuild the centre, and to pay for it without borrowing a pound. It bought a canal through the old warehouse district at Bricktown, a ballpark, an arena, a new central library, the renovation of the music hall, improvements to the fairground, and a set of low dams and locks that turned the North Canadian through the city into a river that holds water all year.

The tax was renewed, and renewed again. Its renewals after the bombing paid for the rebuilding of the city’s schools and for the streets and buildings of the memorial district round the site; later ones paid for parks, for the river, for the convention centre, and for housing and mental health services. The reach of the river through the city was renamed the Oklahoma River in 2004, and remains the North Canadian above and below it.

The sequence of renewals is studied by municipal governments across the Realm, chiefly because nobody else has managed to get the voters to agree to it more than once.

After the bombing

The bombing of 1995 is described in its own section below.

The city that came out of it was the one the tax had begun to build. The canal opened in 1999 and the arena in 2002, and in 2008 a professional basketball club moved to the city from Seattle and became the Thunder. In 2012 an oil company finished Devon Tower, fifty storeys, the tallest building in the State, which is admired for its height and nobody calls architecture.

The tornadoes of 1999 and 2013 struck the southern edge of the metropolitan region and are described under Geography. The earthquakes of the 2010s, caused by the injection of oilfield wastewater, were felt in the city every few weeks for several years and cracked the plaster of houses all over the south side.

The Museum of the Thirteen Nations opened beside the river in the present century, built by the nations with their own money. David Holt was elected Mayor in 2018, the first citizen of a nation to hold the office, and re-elected in 2022 and 2026. In 2026 he set going a project to replace the city’s flag, and the new flag was adopted in 2027.

The bombing of 1995

The building

The Pershing Federal Building stood on the north side of Fifth Street in the centre of the city. It was opened in 1977, named after John J. Pershing, the Governor-General of the 1920s, and it housed the city’s offices of a dozen federal departments and agencies: pensions, veterans’ affairs, the recruiting offices of the armed forces, the housing administration, the federal law officers and others. On the second floor there was a nursery for the children of people who worked in the building and in the streets round it.

The morning

At 9.02 on the morning of Wednesday 19 April 1995 a hired lorry parked at the front of the building exploded. It carried a bomb of fertiliser and fuel oil weighing more than two tonnes.

The blast took off the front of the building from the roof to the ground. A third of it collapsed into the street, carrying the floors and the people on them down with it. 168 people were killed. Nineteen of them were children, most of them in the nursery on the second floor. More than six hundred were injured. Some three hundred buildings in the surrounding blocks were damaged, a church across the street lost its roof, and windows broke more than a mile away.

The date had been chosen. 19 April is the anniversary of the first shots of the Four-Year War, fired at Lexington in 1775, and the men who did it understood the anniversary as a licence. The Realm has had to live with the date ever since.

The rescue

The search of the ruin lasted sixteen days. Rescuers came from the city’s fire service, from every fire service in the State, from the nations’ own emergency services, and from across the Realm, and worked in the collapsed floors among loose slabs while engineers watched the remaining structure for movement.

Rebecca Anderson, a nurse who had come to help in the first hour, was struck on the head by falling masonry and died four days later. She is honoured at the memorial as the rescuer who died, outside the count of 168.

What the city did in those weeks gave it a phrase it still uses. People queued for hours to give blood until the blood banks asked them to stop. Strangers brought food to the rescuers in such quantity that the problem became where to put it. Nobody looted. Firms gave equipment, families gave rooms, and the city’s restaurants fed the rescue for the duration without sending a bill. The city calls this the Oklahoma Standard, and the phrase is used in the State whenever a disaster requires the same of somebody else.

The ruin was demolished on 23 May, and the site was fenced.

The arrest and the trials

Ninety minutes after the explosion a State trooper stopped a car on the motorway north of the city because it had no number plate. The driver was carrying a pistol, and was held at a county gaol on the weapons charge. Two days later, as he was about to be released, he was identified as the man the federal investigators were looking for. A second man surrendered in Kansas the same day.

They were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, militants who hated the Realm’s government in the abstract and had no demand to make of it beyond that. Their motive was a grievance against federal authority so general that the investigators could find nothing in it to negotiate with, and the trials made no attempt to give it more dignity than it had.

They were tried in the city, in the federal court a few streets from the site. The defence asked for the trials to be moved on the ground that no jury drawn from the city could be fair, and the court refused, holding that the city was entitled to try the men accused of attacking it and that its jurors were as capable of doing their duty as anybody else’s. The trials were ordinary criminal trials, in an ordinary courtroom, under the ordinary law of evidence. Both men were convicted in 1997 and sentenced to imprisonment for life, the Realm having abolished capital punishment in 1967. Both are still in prison.

The powers that were not taken

In the week after the bombing the Home Office drafted a bill. It would have allowed the detention of suspects without charge for an extended period, widened the powers of surveillance of the federal investigation service, and allowed ministers to proscribe militia groups and make membership an offence.

The Prime Minister, Bill Clinton of the Liberal Federal Democrats, declined to lay it. The Premier of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, Frank Keating of the Conservative and Crown Union, declined to ask for it or for any emergency powers of the State’s own. The two men were of opposite parties and agreed on almost nothing else, and they were both accused of weakness for it, in the Commons, in the House of the People and in every newspaper in the State.

The law was barely changed at all. The investigators used the powers they already had, the prosecutors the law that already existed, and the courts the procedure they used for every other murder. The restraint was deeply unpopular. It is better regarded now, and the decision of 1995 is cited whenever emergency legislation is proposed anywhere in the Realm, by people who generally do not mention how unpopular it was.

The prayer service

On the Sunday after, 23 April 1995, a service of prayer was held at the State Fair Arena, and the arena was filled. Billy Graham preached. The King, Ernest V, came to the city for it and spoke there, beside the Prime Minister. He named no one, spoke for a few minutes of the children, and left the city that evening.

It was the one national moment of the occasion. Every observance since has been the State’s.

The memorial

The memorial stands on the footprint of the building and was dedicated on the fifth anniversary, in 2000. It is kept by the State, through its own memorials office, with no federal role.

Where the building stood there is a lawn, and on it 168 empty chairs of bronze and glass, in nine rows for the nine floors of the building, each standing where its owner was when the bomb went off. Nineteen of them are smaller, for the children. At either end of the street that ran in front of the building stands a gate: the eastern one is marked 9.01, the last minute before, and the western 9.03, the first minute after. Between them, where the street was, is a long shallow pool.

On the slope above stands an American elm that grew in the car park across the street and was expected to be felled after the blast stripped it and scorched it black. It came into leaf that summer. Its seeds are gathered every year and grown on, and the seedlings are given away every spring, so that there are now descendants of the tree in gardens across the State and the Realm.

Along one side the chain-link fence that surrounded the site in 1995 has been kept. Visitors leave things on it: toys, notes, licence plates, badges, keys, flowers, photographs. The State’s memorials office gathers them periodically and keeps them, and the fence fills again.

The anniversary is kept quietly at the memorial at the hour. At 9.02 on 19 April the city keeps 168 seconds of silence, and the names are read.

The new building

The federal government built its replacement a few streets away and opened it in 2004. The Home Office asked for the security of the new building to be designed in from the start: setbacks from the street, barriers against vehicles, a single guarded entrance. The city and the State objected, and the building that was built is an ordinary office building on an ordinary street, with its front door on the pavement, like the building it replaced.

Two years later the Realm was attacked on a far larger scale on May Day, and declined to rebuild its public places round visible security. The building in Oklahoma City had been the first place to make that decision, and it was made by a city that had more reason than anywhere else in the Realm to make the other one.

Government

The charter

The city was governed from 1927 by a council and an appointed city manager, on the model then fashionable across the Realm, which placed the executive in the hands of a professional administrator answerable to the council rather than the voters. The demolitions of the 1960s were carried out under that arrangement, and the city’s reaction to them was to abolish it.

The charter of 1968 gives the Mayor the executive: the preparation of the budget, the appointment and dismissal of department heads, the veto over council ordinances, and command of the city’s police and fire services through their chiefs. The Mayor is elected by the whole city for four years. The City Council has eight members, each elected by one of eight wards, and may override the Mayor’s veto by six votes.

City elections are held without party labels on the ballot. Everyone knows the parties of the candidates anyway, and the arrangement survives because neither great party has been sure it would win the city if they were added.

The Mayor

The present Mayor is David Holt, a citizen of the Osage Nation and a member of the Conservative and Crown Union. He was elected in 2018, the first citizen of a nation to be Mayor, and re-elected in 2022 and 2026.

The city and Guthrie

The relationship with the capital is unusual. Guthrie holds the legislature, the Governor’s residence, the Premier’s office, the Supreme Court and the State archives; Oklahoma City holds most of the people who do the State’s work. Senior officials commute thirty miles up the motorway, and the fear in Guthrie that the capital will become a ceremonial address is permanent and frequently debated.

The city no longer asks for the capital. It has the civil service, which is what it wanted the capital for, and the matter is treated by both cities as a joke about the seal. The room at the Lee-Huckins is the punchline.

The city and the nations

The city stands on land that was ceded in 1866, not on treaty land, and no part of it is under the jurisdiction of a nation. The House of Nations has no consent over the city’s land, and the city’s own government is a settler government in the plainest sense.

It has nonetheless the largest urban Native population in the Realm, drawn from all thirteen nations of the State and from many outside it: people whose families came to the city for work at Tinker, in the oil years, in the federal agencies, and in the great movement into the cities after the second war. They live a long way from the territory they are citizens of, and the nations came to them.

The Nations’ House, opened in the 1970s, is a joint service office of all thirteen nations. A citizen living in the city can enrol there, vote in a nation election, see a nation clinic, and deal with a clerk of a nation court, without going home to Tahlequah or Ada or Pawhuska to do it. It is the only office of its kind in the Realm, and it was opened by the generation of the revival, who argued that a nation that could not reach its citizens in the city was losing them.

The Museum of the Thirteen Nations stands beside the river. It was built in the present century by the nations with their own money, it is run by them, and it tells the history of the State from their side, beginning with the removal and the treaties of 1866 that gave up the ground the city stands on. It is the most visited museum in the State. It is the counterpart of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum on the north-east side, and the two institutions have a cordial and slightly wary relationship.

The nations’ flags fly level with the State’s and the city’s at every public building in the city, under the State’s flag rule.

Founders’ and Nations’ Day

The anniversary of the run, 22 April, was kept in the city as Run Day for most of a century, with a re-enactment of the start at the line, a parade and a picnic. At the centenary in 1989 the city invited the nations to take part in a re-enactment, and they declined, in writing, saying that they would attend a commemoration of the treaties of 1866 but not a celebration of what had been done with them.

The city renamed the day. Since 1989 it has been Founders’ and Nations’ Day, with no re-enactment: the treaties of 1866 are read aloud, the nations’ delegations are received at City Hall, and the descendants of the families who made the run are received in the same room on the same morning. It is an awkward occasion and both sides know it, and it is the only place in the State where the founding is kept in a form the nations will attend.

April therefore holds the city’s two anniversaries three days apart, the nineteenth and the twenty-second, and the city keeps them in very different ways.

Representation

The city returns the Commons member for Oklahoma City, one of the State’s four constituencies. The present member is Stephanie Bice of the Conservative and Crown Union. In the State’s House of the People the city and its suburbs return about a third of the members, and the city is the reason the Senate is weighted towards the rural west.

The city swings. It has returned members of both great parties within the same decade, and its wards on the north and the south vote differently enough that the Mayor’s office is the only office anyone wins across the whole of it.

Police

The city is policed by its own police department, under a chief appointed by the Mayor, with the State constabulary and the federal Royal American Constabulary present for their own business and the nations’ police present for their citizens’ affairs under the State’s cross-deputation compact.

The department’s record of fatal shootings was among the worst of any city in the Realm for a generation, and no ministry and no council acted on it. A civilian review board was created only after a ruling of the courts required the city to provide some independent means of examining complaints, and the board’s powers were drawn as narrowly as the ruling permitted.

Geography

Site

The city stands on the North Canadian River, at about 370 metres, in the belt of country where the blackjack and post oak of the cross timbers thin out into tallgrass prairie and the prairie into wheat. The earth is red, and the river runs red after rain. The land is nearly flat and rises gently to the north, and from the top of Devon Tower the whole of the city’s enormous boundary can be seen without seeing its edge.

The boundary takes in parts of four counties and three large lakes, Hefner, Overholser and Draper, which hold the city’s water and are surrounded by parkland, sailing clubs and, on the far side of Draper, wheat. Agricultural land inside the city is farmed under the city’s own zoning, and the city’s planners point out that its boundary contains more cattle than some of the Realm’s smaller polities.

Districts

The centre is the area the tax of 1993 rebuilt. Bricktown, the old warehouse district east of the railway, is now a district of restaurants and bars along the canal, with the ballpark at one end. Automobile Alley, north of the centre, was the street of car showrooms of the 1920s and keeps their buildings. Deep Deuce, cut off by the motorway, has been rebuilt as flats along its old line, and a plaque on North-East Second Street lists the clubs that stood there.

The Asian District, along Classen Boulevard north-west of the centre, is the Vietnamese quarter, settled by refugees who came to the city in 1975 and the years after, and is now the commercial heart of that side of the city. The Plaza District and the Paseo, in the older streets of the north-west, are the artists’ districts, of galleries, small shops and a monthly evening when they are open late.

South of the river lies Capitol Hill, the Mexican district of the city. It was laid out in 1904 by a town company that expected the State capitol to be built on the hill, and named in anticipation. The capitol never came, and the district has enjoyed the joke for a century.

West of the centre is Stockyards City, round the cattle market, where the weekly auctions still run, the saddlers and boot makers still trade, and a steakhouse has served the yards since 1910.

Climate and storms

The climate is continental and violent. Summers are long and hot, winters short and broken by ice storms, and spring is the dangerous season.

The city lies near the centre of the Realm’s tornado country. On 3 May 1999 a tornado crossed the south-western edge of the metropolitan region through Bridge Creek and Moore, with the highest wind speeds ever measured in a tornado, and killed thirty-six people. On 20 May 2013 another crossed Moore, south of the city, and killed twenty-four.

Seven of the dead in 2013 were children at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore. The State’s storm-cellar law had required every school to keep a shelter since 1947. Plaza Towers had never built one. The inquiry that followed found that the State’s inspections of school shelters had lapsed decades earlier, that nobody had noticed, and that the school had been certified each year on a form that asked whether a shelter existed and was answered by the school. The law was not changed, because it did not need to be. The inspections were restored.

The earthquakes of the 2010s, from the injection of oilfield wastewater into deep formations, shook the city several times a month at their peak. The largest were centred in the countryside to the east and north, but their effect was felt in cracked plaster and stopped clocks across the south side, and the city was a party to the litigation that followed.

Economy

The federal floor

The city’s economy has a floor under it that Tulsa’s does not. Tinker, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Reserve House and the State’s own civil service together make public employment the largest single sector in the city, and they did not leave in the oil busts of the 1980s or the 2010s. The city grew steadily through both, while Tulsa, which had the oil and not the agencies, was flattened by each. In the bust of the 1930s, before any of them existed, the city had only the stockyards and the railways to fall back on, and it fell a long way.

Aerospace maintenance and contracting has grown up round Tinker, including firms owned by nations with federal contracts of their own.

Oil and gas

The field under the city is old and its yield is small, but the city remains the headquarters of a good part of the State’s oil and gas industry, which is now chiefly a gas industry. Devon Tower belongs to one of those companies. The industry’s grip on the city’s politics is weaker than on Tulsa’s, because it is not the largest employer and has not been for fifty years.

The stockyards

The Oklahoma National Stockyards are not a heritage attraction. They are a working cattle market, among the largest in the Realm, with auctions running weekly and the trade round them intact: buyers, commission houses, saddlers and the steakhouse. The packing houses that opened beside them in 1910 closed in the 1960s, and the yards outlived them.

The centre

The rebuilt centre is the city’s service economy: hotels, conventions, the arena, restaurants and the offices that came back after 1993. The tax that built it is a sales tax, so it is paid in part by every visitor who eats in Bricktown, and the city has never been embarrassed about that.

Transport

Air

Will Rogers World Airport, on the south-west side, is the State’s principal airport, named for the Cherokee citizen who was the most famous American of his generation. Royal American Air Force flights bring Prime Ministers to it when they go out to Blackjacks, thirty miles to the north. The Civil Aviation Authority’s academy is on the airport’s edge.

Roads

The city is built for the car. The State’s turnpikes and the federal motorways meet in it, the main roads run out along the section lines for miles in straight grids, and there is almost nowhere in the city that can be reached comfortably without one. The rebuilt centre is walkable; nothing outside it is.

Rail and buses

The freight railways that made the city still cross it. Passenger service in the State is down to one line, and it runs from the city: a daily train to Fort Worth, south across the Red River, which leaves in the morning and comes back at night, and whose survival is argued over at every budget. There is no other passenger train.

The city runs a bus service across its boundary, which is so large that the buses are infrequent everywhere except the centre. There is no tram and no metro.

Demographics and society

Population

About 700,000 people live inside the boundary and about 1.5 million in the metropolitan region, which is growing, while the rural counties round it empty.

The city is majority white, with substantial Black, Mexican, Native and Vietnamese populations. The Black population is concentrated on the east side, where it has been since segregation put it there. The Mexican population, several generations settled, is concentrated on the south side round Capitol Hill. The Vietnamese community came after 1975 and is centred on the Asian District.

Native citizens

The city has the largest urban Native population in the Realm, and the rolls are growing as enrolment reaches families that lost touch with their nations when they moved to the city. Citizens of all thirteen of the State’s nations live in the city, as do citizens of nations from across the Realm. They are served by the Nations’ House and by the clinics of several nations, and the nations’ language programmes run evening classes in the city for adults who grew up without their language.

Religion

The weight of religious practice is Baptist and Methodist, in congregations of every size, with the large churches of the north-side suburbs at one end. The established Church of America has a cathedral in the city, one of two in the State. The Catholic church across Fifth Street from the Pershing Building was badly damaged in the bombing, and its people put up a statue of Christ beside it, turned away from the site with his face in his hands.

Homelessness

There are camps along the river below the rebuilt centre, in the stretches between the locks, under the motorway bridges and in the scrub at the edge of the parkland. The police clear them every spring, before the rowing regattas and the tourist season, and they are back by the summer. The later renewals of the sales tax paid for housing and mental health services, and the camps are smaller than they were. They have not gone.

Culture

Music

Territory jazz came out of Deep Deuce, and the city remembers it better than it protected it. The Blue Devils and Jimmy Rushing are commemorated on the street where they played, and Charlie Christian has a festival and a plaque. The clubs themselves are gone.

The city’s present music is a mixture: red dirt and country in the bars of Bricktown and the north side, a large church music tradition, and the hymn singing in Muscogee and Cherokee that the nations’ congregations in the city keep up.

Writing

Ralph Ellison is the city’s writer, and the city has come to him slowly. His novel was about a man nobody saw; the city that produced him did not see him either for most of his life, and named its east-side library after him only after his death.

Museums

The Museum of the Thirteen Nations and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum are the two largest in the city, and they tell the same century from opposite ends. The memorial has its own museum, in the newspaper building that survived across the street from the site. The city’s art museum holds a large collection of glass.

Sport

The Thunder came to the city from Seattle in 2008, and the whole State adopted them with an intensity that surprised a league that had assumed a plains polity cared only for gridiron football. They won the championship of their league in 2025, and the city closed for the parade.

The ballpark in Bricktown has a minor league club. The Oklahoma River is the Realm’s principal rowing course outside the universities, with the national training centre on its bank. And the city holds the national college softball championship every year, which the State, being disproportionately good at the game, regards as only natural.

Food

Onion-fried burgers, from the depression town of El Reno west of the city; chicken-fried steak; the steakhouse at the stockyards; pho on Classen and Mexican cooking on Capitol Hill, which have been the city’s ordinary food for a generation; and frybread at the Museum of the Thirteen Nations, which serves it with a printed note on the counter about where it came from.

Media

The Oklahoman is the city’s daily, one of three rival metropolitan papers in the State, and it dislikes the papers of Guthrie and Tulsa in the traditional manner. The Realm’s broadcaster runs ABC Oklahoma-Sequoyah from the city.

Failings

The land. The city was founded on land ceded in 1866 by nations that had been promised it in perpetuity in the 1830s, and ceded as a penalty that fell on nations which had not sided with the rebellion as heavily as on those that had. The run of 1889 took that land in an afternoon. The city kept the anniversary as a celebration for a century, and changed it only when the nations refused to attend.

Segregation. The city was segregated by law from 1908, by ordinance on the east side, by covenant in the suburbs, and by custom at every lunch counter. It did not open a single counter until children sat at one, and the last did not open until 1964.

The demolitions. An appointed official carried out a plan that cleared about five hundred buildings of the old centre for a scheme that was mostly never built, and drove a motorway through the Black east side and the jazz district. The east side was not consulted. The centre was a car park for twenty years.

The car. The city annexed sixteen hundred square kilometres to stop its suburbs from enclosing it and then built nothing in most of them but roads. It has one passenger train, no tram, buses that run infrequently everywhere outside the centre, and a population that cannot reach work, school or a clinic without a car.

The seal. In 1910 the city’s interest in the legislature tried to take the State’s capital by a snap resolution and a night journey, against the terms on which the State had been admitted. It failed only because the courts put the seal back.

The camps and the shootings. The camps along the river are cleared each spring for the visitors and come back each summer. The police department’s record of fatal shootings was among the worst in the Realm for a generation, and the city created a civilian review board only when a court required it.

Symbols

The flag

The flag adopted in 2027 is white, with a single green elm leaf at the centre and a red border. The leaf is the tree that survived the bombing. The white field and the red border are kept from the flag it replaced.

It was chosen through a project that Mayor Holt set going in 2026 to replace the flag of 1994, which had been criticised for most of its life in the usual terms, as a seal on a sheet. The new flag drops the city seal.

Earlier flags

The city’s first flag, of 1965, was a banner of the arms of the new seal, made for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the city’s incorporation.

The flag of 1994 came about because of a sister city. Mayor Ron Norick, who would be Mayor on the morning of the bombing a year later, learned that people in Taipei, in the Empire of China, could not recognise Oklahoma City’s flag when it was flown there, and asked for a new one. It was designed by Mark McFarland, a resident of the city with cerebral palsy, who gave the design to the city: the city seal on a white field with a red border. The council gave him a standing ovation at the session at which it was adopted.

The seal

The seal of 1965 is a quartered shield on a blue field within a wreath of oak leaves, with the city’s name round it. Its quarters carried a plough, for the farms of 1889; a hatchet driving a claim stake, for the run; an atom, for what the city expected of the second half of the century; and a peace pipe, for the councils of the nations.

The claim stake was argued over every time the seal was reprinted from 1989 onwards. It was removed in 2027, when the new flag dropped the seal, and the quarter now carries the hatchet alone.

Assessment

Oklahoma City is the city where the Realm decided, once, not to change its law after an atrocity, and the decision is the thing most of the Realm knows about it.

The decision was not obvious and was not popular. A Prime Minister and a Premier of opposite parties declined a bill that the Home Office had drafted in a week and that a frightened public would have welcomed, and were called weak for it in every chamber they answered to. The trials were held in the city, before juries drawn from the city, under the ordinary law. The replacement building was put on an ordinary street with its door on the pavement. None of these things was a statement of principle at the time. Each was a refusal to do something that would have been easy, and the city’s pride in them has grown as the years have shown what the alternative looks like.

The city is also more than that morning, and the rest of it is not flattering in the same way. It was founded on land taken from people who had been promised it, kept the founding as a celebration for a century, segregated its own citizens until children sat down at a lunch counter, and let an official nobody had elected tear out its centre and its east side. Its restraint in 1995 was the restraint of a government towards suspects; it has not always shown the same restraint towards the people camped by its river or stopped by its police.

What it cannot settle is whether the restraint of 1995 was a policy or a mood. Eleven years later the Realm was attacked again, on May Day, and Parliament passed the Security of the Realm Act within weeks, at emergency pace, with little scrutiny, and built a signals directorate in the name of never again. It also declined to build checkpoints, and kept the doors of its public buildings on the pavement as Oklahoma City had kept its own. The Realm has drawn on both precedents since, and nobody can say with confidence which of the two was the exception.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah
• Blackjacks
• Civil Aviation Authority of America
• Royal American Reserve
• The May Day bombings
• Ernest V
• Bill Clinton
• John J. Pershing
• The Four-Year War

Categories

Cities · Oklahoma-Sequoyah · The Great Plains · Terrorism · Federal Establishments · Civil Rights