Boston Avenue Methodist Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma

The much-touted Boston Avenue Methodist Church, sometimes called the biggest Deco church in the world.

Source: Beryl Ford Collection / Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society

About These Tulsa Photos

With the number of pics I’m going to be posting from this archive, you might be thinking “Wait, is this the Deco TULSA blog?” The answer is no, it’s not, but with Tulsa having been such a hotbed of Deco & Streamline and this archive being SO incredible, I can’t help but want to share. In fact I have never even BEEN to Tulsa but simply know it from all the photos I’ve seen. I know it ever better now, having gone through over 10,000 of this archive’s 22,000 photo collection. (Yes, I can be quite single-minded.) Tulsa went from being a frontier town to being a boom town, fed by the oil industry in the 1920s and 1930s. Seeing the transformation in pictures is pretty amazing. These Deco pictures capture Tulsa pretty much at its peak.

Credit: “You are free to distribute this photo provided the content is left unchanged. Photo credit should be given to the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.” Further: “Preservation and archiving of this significant Tulsa treasure of photographs and artifacts was made possible through the Tulsa City-County Library and the Tulsa Historical Society, and the generosity of Tulsa World/Lorton Family, Chester Cadieux, the Rotary Club of Tulsa, and many other community-minded corporations, institutions, and individuals.”