The 320 South Boston Building, formerly known as the National Bank of Tulsa Building, is a 22-story highrise building located in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was originally constructed at the corner of Third Street and Boston Avenue as a ten-story headquarters building for the Exchange National Bank of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1917, and expanded to its present dimensions in 1929. The addition brought the building's height to 400 feet (122 m), making it the tallest building in Oklahoma. It lost this distinction in 1931, but remained the tallest building in Tulsa until Fourth National Bank (today Bank of America Center) was completed in 1967.
In 1933, Exchange National Bank reorganized and renamed itself as the National Bank of Tulsa. Thereafter, the building was known as the National Bank of Tulsa Building (or NBT Building), until the bank renamed itself as Bank of Oklahoma (BOK). The BOK moved to its newly-constructed BOK Tower in 1977. The NBT Building reverted to its former 320 South Boston Building name and became a general office building.
Like the Empire State Building, the pinnacle of 320 South Boston was designed as a Zeppelin mooring. This was used at least once when a U.S. Navy Zeppelin moored there in the 1930s. The top of the building was illuminated for weather alerts, with flashing red lights in the event of an approaching storm.
The architect was George Winkler, who also designed the Mayo Hotel.
Famous quotes containing the words south, boston and/or building:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children’s and our own needs, works only for a time—because, as one father says, “It’s a new ball game just about every week.” So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion, Dennie, and Palmer Wolf. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)