My home state is quite flat. It boggles my mind that I can’t find a single folksy quote to serve here as testament to Oklahoma’s flatness, attributable to some author, poet, or cowboy. I even rooted around for one from one of our equally-flat neighbor states, expecting something like, “The best thing about Oklahoma is, you can see Texas from just about wherever you’re standing,” perhaps courtesy of some mischievous Houstonian writer from the early 1900s with a breezy Wikipedia page.
We can workshop the quote. The point is, Oklahoma is remarkably flat, and when people ask me what growing up in Oklahoma was like, I start with “flat” before launching into the conservatism or recent attempts to ban pornography, because the flatness is the first thing I reliably appreciate about it when stepping out at Will Rogers “International” Airport. The sky, unchallenged by topography or tall buildings, rules tyrant over the Great Plains, banishes the horizon; true, blue infinity. The feeling this induces is a body liberated from friction. It lasts but for a moment, before your eyes get used to it, before you encounter your first of many overpasses and attendant raccoon corpses, and remember to be bored.
But that first hit of blue in my lungs, it makes a man feel. It tingles my tailbone, riles me up, gets me thinking I can go anywhere, do anything. “Anywhere” and “anything” ends up being my parents’ house on the outskirts of Lawton, Oklahoma’s sixth-largest city, where I’m fated to spend the next few days driving a Jeep to and from the non-Starbucks coffee shop in town and fiddling with my laptop. I’m aware of this reality. But reality tends to fly from me and melt into that azure Forever domed over my head upon my every arrival. I have to imagine this not-not-libidinal experience, the ecstasy of wide open space, is what pioneers, settlers, and this land’s posterboy, the American cowboy, once felt when beholding it—the West, neverending.
Oklahoma City Reaches For The Heavens
Legends Tower, if built, would be the tallest skyscraper in the United States, overtaking One World Trade Center in New York City by 131 feet to stand at a dizzying 1,907. This would make it the tallest building in the western hemisphere, and sixth-largest in the world. It’s difficult to communicate just how dramatically its completion would transform the Oklahoma City skyline, but picture, if you would, a pancake with a yardstick plunged into it.
I was as intrigued as I was dubious when I caught wind of the proposed structure while sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn in June 2024. Legends Tower, developed by California-based Matteson Capital and designed by Cali-based architecture firm AO, had recently been approved for “unlimited height” by the Oklahoma City Council. It also sounded, apropos of its name, like it would never be built.
However, if all goes according to the plan, Legends Tower will have a glass facade and be accompanied by three equally new but altitudinally lesser towers. A spire will inch the Big Okla-huna over the finish line to achieve “tallest” status. There will be a hotel, offices, and an allotment of affordable housing. That last bit is crucial, and something to keep in mind. Rapidly-growing OKC is staring down a housing crisis with climbing homelessness and eviction rates. The city needs some 77,000 more rental units for low-income residents to compensate. There will also be a “lagoon.”