Oklahoma City

• 1. Introduction

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  Oklahoma City came into being in a single afternoon. On the 22nd of April 1889, the federal government opened a stretch of unoccupied land called the Unassigned Lands to settlement, and within hours some 10,000 homesteaders had staked their claims where there had been nothing but grass. The event was called the Land Run, and it is one of the most compressed acts of city-founding in American history. Four days later, on the 26th of April, those same settlers elected their first mayor, a man named William Couch. By 1907, when Oklahoma joined the Union, Oklahoma City had already eclipsed Guthrie as the state's population center, and the capital soon followed the people south. Today the city holds 681,054 residents and sits at the center of a metropolitan area of roughly 1.49 million people, making it the 20th most populous city in the United States. What made this place grow so fast, and what has tested it so severely? The answer involves oil beneath the statehouse lawn, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history, and tornadoes that broke wind-speed records for the entire planet.

• 2. Oil Under the Capitol

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  In 1928, drillers found oil inside the Oklahoma City city limits, including beneath the grounds of the State Capitol itself. That discovery turned the city from a regional administrative center into a serious energy hub. Oil derricks rose on the capitol grounds and have remained a feature of the skyline, one of the stranger sights in any American capital. The economy built on that foundation grew large enough that by 2005 the gross metropolitan product reached $43.1 billion, climbing to $61.1 billion by 2009 and $73.8 billion by 2016. Two Fortune 500 companies, Expand Energy and Devon Energy, keep their headquarters in the city. The tallest building in the state, the Devon Energy Center, was completed in 2012 at 844 feet. Mayor Mick Cornett attended the opening and described its visual impact as striking and identifiable. The city's dependence on energy has also brought pain. The bankruptcy of Penn Square Bank in 1982, followed by the oil price collapse after 1985, left Oklahoma City with one of the worst job and housing markets in the country during the early 1980s. The downtown core was nearly deserted by the end of that decade, dotted with vacant lots repurposed as parking. Recovery came slowly, then in a rush, driven by a citizen-approved redevelopment package called MAPS that passed in 1993 and eventually generated more than $3 billion in private investment by 2010.

• 3. The 1995 Bombing

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  the 19th of April 1995 is the date most associated with Oklahoma City outside the state. Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that morning, collapsing the structure and killing 168 people. More than 680 others were injured. The blast shock-wave destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 340-meter radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. Estimated damage reached at least $652 million. The building's remnants had to be removed by controlled demolition later that same year. McVeigh was convicted and executed by lethal injection on the 11th of June 2001. The site was remade as the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, which opened in 2000. Its eastern gate carries an inscription dedicating the memorial to the victims, survivors, rescuers, and all who were changed forever on the 19th of April 1995. The outdoor portion can be visited around the clock at no charge. By the time the source was written, more than three million people had made the visit. The bombing drove home how vulnerable a mid-sized American city could be, and it left a mark on civic culture that shaped subsequent decisions about public investment, downtown revitalization, and the kind of place Oklahoma City wanted to become.

• 4. Tornado Country

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  Since weather records began in 1890, Oklahoma City has been struck by 13 violent tornadoes; 11 of those were rated F4 or EF4, and two reached the top of both the original Fujita and Enhanced Fujita scales. The metropolitan area has recorded roughly 150 tornadoes within city limits since 1890, a concentration that ranks it among the most tornado-prone major cities on earth. On the 3rd of May 1999, a tornado near Bridge Creek reached wind speeds estimated by mobile Doppler radar at the highest ever recorded on Earth at that time. That storm was the last in the United States to receive a rating of F5 under the original Fujita scale before the Enhanced Fujita scale replaced it in 2007. Fourteen years later, on the 20th of May 2013, an EF5 tornado struck parts of South Oklahoma City, Newcastle, and Moore, killing 23 people, including eight children at an elementary school. Less than two weeks after that, on the 31st of May 2013, another outbreak produced an EF3 tornado near El Reno, west of the city. That storm reached a width that made it the widest tornado ever recorded. May 2015 added another superlative: it became Oklahoma City's record-wettest month since record-keeping started in 1890. The city's severe weather season runs from March through June, with a secondary peak in October, and the risks include not just tornadoes but severe hailstorms, derechoes, flash floods, and ice storms.

• 5. Rebuilding Downtown

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  In 1993, Oklahoma City voters approved the Metropolitan Area Projects, known as MAPS, a redevelopment package aimed at reviving a core that the Oil Bust had hollowed out. The projects included a new baseball park, a central library, renovations to the civic center, the convention center, and the fairgrounds, and a water canal in the Bricktown entertainment district where water taxis now carry passengers. MAPS proved so successful that the city followed it with additional rounds. MAPS 3, approved by voters in late 2009, authorized $777 million through a seven-year, one-cent sales tax. That round funded the Oklahoma City Streetcar system, which opened in December 2018 and connects Bricktown, Midtown, and the central business district using low-floor modern cars. A federal TIGER grant of $13.8 million, announced in September 2013, helped finance the Amtrak station's conversion into an intermodal hub. The Skirvin Hotel was restored in 2007, and the First National Center was undergoing renovation when the source was written. Downtown now has 7,600 residents, a figure that had grown exponentially since the MAPS projects were completed. The Myriad Botanical Gardens and its Crystal Bridge conservatory, designed by I. M. Pei, survived the clearances of the 1970s and became the centerpiece of the revived core. Patience Latting, elected mayor in 1971 as the first woman to lead Oklahoma City and the first female mayor of any U.S. city with more than 350,000 residents, had watched earlier urban renewal efforts remove historic buildings without producing the promised growth.

• 6. A City of Extremes and Records

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  Oklahoma City holds an unusual number of records for a city most people outside the South would struggle to place on a map. Its area is among the largest of any American city; it ranks second-largest among state capitals by land, trailing only Juneau, Alaska. In 1959, the city launched what it called the Great Annexation Drive, expanding its footprint enough by the end of 1961 to make it the largest U.S. city by land mass at the time. The city is also the second-largest when consolidated city-counties are excluded from comparisons nationwide. Oklahoma City's livestock market is one of the largest in the world. WKY Radio, licensed in 1921 and continuously broadcasting under the same call letters since 1922, was the first radio station transmitting west of the Mississippi River and the third in the United States. In 1949, WKY-TV became the first independently owned television station in the country to broadcast in color. Florence's Restaurant was named one of America's Classics by the James Beard Foundation in 2022, the first James Beard recognition for any Oklahoma entity. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art holds what is described as the most comprehensive collection of Chihuly glass in the world, anchored by the 55-foot Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower. Two venues in the city are set to host events during the 2028 Summer Olympics, primarily held in Los Angeles: Riversport OKC for canoe slalom and Devon Park for softball, chosen because Los Angeles lacked suitable facilities for those sports.

• 7. The Thunder and the City's Identity

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  Clay Bennett relocated the NBA franchise from Seattle, Washington to Oklahoma City for the 2008-09 season, bringing the city its first permanent major-league sports team outside the now-defunct AFL Oklahoma Wranglers. The team arrived as one of the youngest rosters in the league. By the 2009-10 season it had posted its first 50-win season and earned the eighth playoff seed, beating the Los Angeles Lakers in two games before falling. In 2012 the Thunder reached the NBA Finals, losing to the Miami Heat in five games. The team won Northwest Division titles every year from 2011 to 2014 and again in 2016. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, acquired from the Los Angeles Clippers in the summer of 2019, anchored a rebuild under third-year head coach Mark Daigneault. The Thunder returned to the NBA Finals in 2025 and defeated the Indiana Pacers in seven games to win the franchise's first championship since arriving in Oklahoma City. Before the Thunder's permanent arrival, the NBA's New Orleans Hornets played the majority of their home games at the Ford Center during the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, becoming the first NBA franchise to play regular-season games in Oklahoma. The Hornets played their final Oklahoma City game on the 9th of October 2007, an exhibition against the Houston Rockets. The city is also set to become the home of the Legends Tower, planned as the tallest building in the United States upon completion.