AA-2026-D063B7
On the image
Sometime in the early 1960s, a street running straight into downtown Oklahoma City still carried streetcar tracks down its center, which was either an act of civic optimism or a failure to update the pavement after the last trolley had already quit. The gleaming curtain-wall tower rising above the older masonry skyline is the First National Center annex or a peer of its generation — the kind of glass-and-steel slab that every mid-size American city acquired in the postwar decade to signal that it had arrived, right around the moment the downtown it was built to crown began emptying out for the suburbs. On the right, a cleared lot holds a rubble pile where something older used to be, which was the standard urban-renewal argument in those years: the best thing you could do with a building was remove it to make room for a parking structure. The bus stop sign at the curb represents the transit system that was replacing the streetcar rails still embedded in the asphalt beneath it, a transition that planners of the era described as modernisation and that later generations would spend fifty years and several billion dollars trying to reverse.
Visually related — by likeness
Downtown Oklahoma City Skyline from Street-Level, circa 1960s. 1958–1967. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-D063B7. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/downtown-oklahoma-city-skyline-from-street-level-circa-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026D063B7,
title = {Downtown Oklahoma City Skyline from Street-Level, circa 1960s},
year = {1958–1967},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-D063B7},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/downtown-oklahoma-city-skyline-from-street-level-circa-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Downtown Oklahoma City Skyline from Street-Level, circa 1960s PY - 1958–1967 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-D063B7 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/downtown-oklahoma-city-skyline-from-street-level-circa-1960s ER -
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