BACK to TULSA
An SL63 AMG proves the perfect modern vehicle
for a road trip back fifty years
ARTICLE GARY & GENIE ANDERSON
PHOTOGRAPHY GARY ANDERSON
From 1905 when oil was discovered in the huge Glenn Pool field south of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the “Beeline Highway” connected Tulsa with the oil field and extended 250 miles south to Dallas, Texas. After graduating from high school in Tulsa in 1963, I drove that route to Dallas – now U.S. highways 75 and 69 – on my way to college. I never returned until this June, on a road trip from Dallas to Tulsa with my wife Genie, traveling in a 2013 SL63 AMG to attend my 50th high school reunion.
As the miles passed, 1960s hit tunes still popular today played on the satellite audio system; on that trip 50 years ago, those same tunes blared out from the AM radio on my car’s dashboard. This started me thinking about all of the changes that have taken place in the past five decades – from automotive design to overall social and economic conditions – and reflecting on what is lasting and what is transient in our world.
The first signs of permanence and change appear along the highway. The route through the gentle green hills of Oklahoma that rise from the Texas grasslands hasn’t changed; in some places we could still drive the old two-lane roads. Back then, I thought the handling of my two-seat sports car was pretty great, but now, driving an SL63 with its automatic stability controls, the slowest I wanted to go on the curves was faster than any 230SL of the 1960s could have managed. The 75-mile-per-hour speed limit on the Indian Nations Turnpike allowed us to explore a dimension of the AMG roadster that a 230SL couldn’t possibly have entered given the technologies of 50 years ago.
Just as the flood-control dams the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built along Oklahoma rivers have permanently changed the region’s climate, so too has the arrival of turnpikes changed the region’s economics. Where small agricultural towns named for Native American tribes once thrived across the landscape, places such as Caddo, Oklahoma, now barely exist, marketing the quaintness of their old buildings along the main street in competition with the casinos next to the freeway interchanges owned by those same tribes.
On a stretch of the old two-lane road to Tulsa listening to “60s on 6,” it could be 50 years ago.
Genie Anderson enjoyed the smooth acceleration from the SL63 on the faster stretches.
Oklahoma takes pride in its heritage, now most often manifested in Indian casinos.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Red River to form Lake Texoma.
Caddo, named for a Native American tribe, advertises its quaint downtown. 
Much of the route is now limited-access freeway, efficient but boring.
The Tulsa skyline has gaps where buildings have been demolished.
Tulsa has also changed. By the time I left in 1963, its title as “Oil Capital of the World” was slipping away. With oil production moving to the more prolific East Texas Oilfield, oil companies moved from Tulsa to Houston, leaving downtown offices nearly deserted and the city deteriorating at its core, with only characterless suburbs continuing to grow.
We could see the changes as we crossed the Arkansas River, past the site of the massive oil refinery that had been the backdrop of postcards from Tulsa in the 1950s. The city’s skyline, once a mass of tall buildings, now had large gaps among the few buildings remaining.
Following the GPS directions to our reunion-headquarters hotel, we found ourselves in an area literally on the other side of the railroad tracks from downtown that we would never have ventured into 50 years ago. This area became a largely vacant slum after the last passenger train left Tulsa Union Depot in 1967 and trucks traveling the new interstate system had replaced the railroads’ freight business. By the 1980s, it had gone to seed, becoming a dilapidated area of mostly abandoned buildings populated only by drug users and the down-and-out.
Happily, we knew from reunion publicity that the hotel was brand new, and the area around it has revived and is alive and vibrant once again. “Brady Arts District” is now painted on one of the old red brick buildings that were built during the 1930s as part of a healthy warehouse and small manufacturing district that relied on the nearby railroad tracks. Signs on other buildings herald the newly opened Woody Guthrie Center and Philbrook Museum of Art extension, as well as the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Art Center and the University of Tulsa’s Zarrow Arts and Education center. Guthrie Green, an outdoor performance venue, is within sight of the city’s new minor league baseball park. All of these institutions have recently opened within the past few years.
During the weekend Genie and I were in Tulsa, a major regional bicycle-racing event was coursing through Brady District streets, the “Lion King” was playing at the Civic Auditorium, and Sarah Lee Guthrie was singing her grandfather’s songs on Guthrie Green.
Things could have been a lot different. As the downtown area began to deteriorate in the 1980s, the City of Tulsa began demolishing the unused buildings, starting with the cheap and easy-to-remove structures. When the dust settled, the only buildings left were the classic old art-deco buildings built by companies such as Phillips Petroleum and Skelly Oil and the architecturally impressive downtown churches built in the 1920s and 1930s, the brick warehouses, and a few large faceless office towers constructed with cheap money and cheaper architecture fees after I left Tulsa.
The Woody Guthrie Center, an art gallery, and the University of Tulsa Arts Center share a repurposed warehouse.
Art deco buildings still grace the Tulsa skyline.
The Tulsa Tough bicycle races coursed through the Brady District during the weekend
A rolling mill in the Brady District is being renovated for reuse as artist studios.
A decorative overpass bridge shows Tulsa’s distinct heritage.
The new Tavern Restaurant, in the old Hotel Fox building, is typical of the Brady Arts District.
Even the art deco buildings – the quality and variety rivaled only by New York City and Miami Beach – were threatened by the wrecking ball until a concerned group of women from the Junior League banded together in 1979 to publish a book of photographs of existing and already-destroyed treasures, helping the city to recognize what was in danger of being lost forever. As the city’s economic growth began to return, remaining buildings were restored for use as condominiums; some offices and buildings have even been expanded in their original style.
With its cultural icons such as the Brady Theater that dates from 1914, the solid red-brick warehouses in the Brady Arts District – once very abandoned – are now being repurposed into artist studios, condos, clubs, museums, restaurants, cafés, and shops. With the support of local philanthropists, including the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the district is emerging as the entertainment and artistic heart of the new Tulsa. Moreover, the brand-new Fairfield Hotel in the Brady District was built in the same red-brick style to blend with the neighborhood; we only had to walk across the street to The Tavern, once the lobby of an old hotel, to enjoy a four-star dining experience.
On Saturday night our reunion was held at Cain’s Ballroom a few blocks away, in continuous operation since it was built as a dance hall in 1924. There, behind the white-painted and glass-brick façade and on the fabled dance floor built for resilience on old bedsprings, a quintessential American honky-tonk atmosphere has been maintained. Old posters on the Cain’s walls were reminders of how music continues to evolve without losing connection with its roots. A “Top 50” list of music from 1963 played by the band at our reunion took us back to when we were dancing to western swing and humming to folk artists before they were replaced by anti-war songs and the Beatles-led British Invasion.
I had a great time driving classmates around downtown with the SL’s hardtop folded into the trunk. It was the perfect way to view the area. The sleek lines and period styling cues of the SL63 nicely counterpointed with the excellent examples of good architecture from each of Tulsa’s golden periods – the 1930s Art Deco oil-company buildings, the now-repurposed solid warehouses of the 1940s, a few good surviving examples of 1950s modernism, and the postmodern architecture of the city’s new BOK Center.
My reunion weekend in Tulsa and my experience in the SL63 reminded me: Good design and solid quality will survive long after trendiness and short-term strategies have died. Those are the attitudes on which Tulsa is being rebuilt – and on which the best or nothing products are still being built by Mercedes-Benz today.
The Cain’s Ballroom has been operating continuously as a dance club in this building since 1924. 
A flyer from local radio station KAKC lists the popular songs that were on the AM band when I left for college in 1963. 
BOK Center with its postmodern architecture hosts popular artists like Paul McCartney. 
The engine badge on the SL63 AMG is illustrative of the pride in classic quality, and design that is emblematic of the Mercedes-Benz heritage.