Oneok Plaza Houses Interesting History and Look
On Architecture
By ROGER COFFEY, AIA
The economics of corporate takeovers can have a powerful effect on building projects. A prime example of this effect is the outcome of the Oneok Building at 100 West Fifth Street in downtown Tulsa.
In the late 1970’s, Cities Service Oil Company acquired a full city block between Fifth and Sixth streets and Cheyenne and Boulder avenues.
At the time, this was the site of the former Halliburton-Abbot Department Store, now defunct. Cities had outgrown its current office space and plans were made to construct a $90 million corporate headquarters building. The new facility was to occupy the north half of the block at a tall, slender 52 stories.
The project got a green light from the Cities board, but no one anticipated multiple takeover attempts by Mesa Petroleum of Amarillo, Texas and earlier efforts by various Canadian firms. To avoid the takeover, Cities was sold to Occidental Petroleum Corporation. As part of this $4 billion dollar deal, Occidental began cutting up Cities to pay off debt. One of the first Cities items to be sold off was the new headquarters project. An affiliate of Albritton Development Company of Dallas, Texas bought the project as well as the adjacent block to the south between Sixth and Seventh streets where a parking garage was planned. (Cities, later to become CITGO, eventually moved to Houston in 2004.)
In an effort to make the project more economically desirable, Albritton reduced the planned height of the tower to 37 stories although the foundation structure and elevator core was already in place for the original 52 stories. Construction stopped in 1982 but resumed in 1983 with completion scheduled for 1984.
Coincidentally, at the same time, Oklahoma Natural Gas had outgrown its historic building at Sixth Street and Main Avenue (previously described in an earlier article) and was considering a new 350,000-square-foot facility. ONG struck a deal with Albritton and purchased the original Cities project.
The tower had reached 16 stories. ONG capped the building off at 17 stories. The building became the 495,000 square feet corporate office building called Oneok Plaza. The tower occupies the north half of the block. The south half, which is provided on grade access and some limited parking, received a $4.8 million facelift in 2008. Some internal remodeling of the tower was included. A tunnel under Sixth Street connects the full-block three-story parking garage to the headquarters building. A large employee and tenant cafeteria is also located on this lower level.
The exterior of the Oneok Building is sheathed in a striking dark red granite. The granite occurs in horizontal bands separated by dark gray glass bands. Although the building footprint is a simple rectangle, the east and west ends have a semi-circular extension creating a very simple, but dramatic shape. Oneok Plaza is an important asset to Tulsa, certainly worth seeing.
