The Oklahoma Natural Gas Company Building is a historic building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at 624 South Boston Ave. It was one of the first local Art Deco buildings built in the new Art Deco style, along with the Public Service of Oklahoma Building. This choice by the relatively conservative utility companies made the style acceptable in the city, with many Art Deco buildings built subsequently in Tulsa. The building was designed by Frank V. Kirshner and Arthur M. Atkinson. It was built of reinforced concrete, and clad in buff brick, except for the lower two stories, which are clad in limestone. The verticalness of the building is emphasized by piers rising the entire height of the facade with windows placed between the piers.
This building was spared from demolition in 1982, when ONEOK (the successor to ONG) abandoned its plan to replace the structure with a new high-rise headquarters building. Instead, ONEOK took over a high-rise then under construction by Citgo at Fifth Street and Boulder Avenue. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 10, 1984, for architectural significance and as a representative of the tremendous growth Tulsa experienced during the 1920s.
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“I know only one person who ever crossed the ocean without feeling it, either spiritually or physically.... he went from Oklahoma to France and back again ... without ever getting off dry land. He remembers several places I remember too, and several French words, but he says firmly, “We must of went different ways. I don’t rightly recollect no water, ever.””
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“Papa died in the gas chamber,
slipping blue as an undressed minnow,
gulping in the shower to wash the Jew off him.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944)