The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is supported by Brut Hotel, featuring a rooftop VIP after party for Tulsa Irish Fest on March 14.
When Tom McCarthy isn’t giving tours as a docent for the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture (TFA) or featuring in their new series of Instagram Reels documenting Tulsa buildings, he’s probably reading about Bruce Goff. The retired newsman who worked for the LA Times and Associated Press, among others, has recently been researching Goff for his volunteer work with TFA. “They asked me to dig into him and report back on what I found,” he told me, “And I’ve never been heard from since.” I met McCarthy in the Lobby of the Tulsa Club Hotel to learn what he had found.
Z.B. Reeves: What about the Tulsa Club makes it a Bruce Goff?
Tom McCarthy: Goff designed this building and it was completed at the end of 1927; it was a sensation. There was nothing in Tulsa like it. He designed it in a style that was very modern at the time.
It wasn’t a hotel at the time. It was the offices of the Chamber of Commerce and the Tulsa Club, which was a businessmens’ organization and athletic club, sort of like the Harvard Club in New York, you know, where men could sit around and smoke cigars.
If you look around Tulsa and look at most of the other buildings that were built in the mid-20s, those traditional classical and historical styles, [Tulsa Club] was one of the rare ones and the big ones that was not [done in that style]. It looked very different.
But in the 1950s, architectural tastes changed. Mid-century modern came roaring in. Everything that was designed in the style of the Roaring Twenties was considered old-fashioned, so [it] was redecorated. They completely changed it, but there were some facets of it that remained.