I took these photos of the 1920s vintage Tulsa Auto Hotel on a trip I made to Tulsa in 2004. Tulsa is a wonderful city to visit because of the large number of incredible buildings that survive from the prosperity of that city's 1920s oil boom.
Unfortunately, the Tulsa Auto Hotel is no longer one of those surviving buildings; when I visited the city again in 2007, it had been demolished and the site was an empty lot with machinery pushing dirt around. I was stunned to see it gone. It was the most unusual parking garage I had ever seen. It was built in an era when aesthetics counted for something.
The skyline in my hometown of Fort Worth is blighted by several tall parking structures that were put up with zero regard to aesthetics. Don't get me wrong - I like having plenty of parking and parking garages are a very necessary means of making such parking available. But why not make them look attractive? Sadly, for a while during the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of high profile buildings were built with the same disregard for aesthetics that goes into the typical parking garage. To be fair, there are a couple of parking structures that have been built in downtown Fort Worth in recent years that do take aesthetics into consideration. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos of them to post. Hopefully, they are the start of a trend and are not just happy exceptions.
My guess is the portion at the far right was added on sometime in the 1950s. The metal portion along the roof was also added on either at the time of the addition or even later.
I took a lot of photos of vintage buildings in Tulsa during my visits to the city. I will share some of them in future postings.
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