Now tragically synonymous with the terrorist bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh in 1995, Oklahoma City (pop. 506,132) has long been one of the primary stops along the Mother Road. In the Bobby Troup song, it was the only place along the route he singled out for praise, no doubt more for the easy rhyme (“Oklahoma City is mighty pretty”) than for its less obvious visual charms. The city was the biggest boomtown of the 1889 Land Rush, when Oklahoma was opened for white settlement after being set aside “for eternity” as Indian Territory. Between noon and sundown on April 22, over 10,000 people flocked here to claim the new lands—many of them having illegally camped out beforehand, earning the nickname “Sooner,” which is still applied to the state’s college football team.
A second boom took place during the Depression years, when oil was struck; there are still producing wells in the center of the city, including some on the grounds of the state capitol. The collapse of the oil industry in the 1980s hit hard, but the shock of the 1995 bombing galvanized the city, which has since revitalized itself with a gorgeous new baseball stadium, a concert arena, and canal-side cafés in the “Bricktown” warehouse district south of downtown.
Right on old Route 66 across from the capitol, a good first stop is the Oklahoma Museum of History (closed Sun.; free; 405/521-2491), at 2100 Lincoln Boulevard, which has exhibits tracing the state’s history, with special collections on the Native American presence, on pioneers, and on the oil industry. There’s also a wide-ranging oral history of the Mother Road.
It can be hard to go about your nostalgic Route 66 tour in the aftermath of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 men, women, and children were killed. Between the capitol and Bricktown, the site of the bombing has been preserved as a memorial park (open 24 hours; free), landscaped with a shallow pool around which are arrayed a series of 168 sculpted chairs. Each chair represents a person killed in the blast, and the chairs range from very small to full-sized, marking the varying ages of the dead (who included 19 kids from the building’s daycare center.) An adjacent museum (daily; $7; 405/235-3313) tells the story of the bombing, its perpetrators, and its victims.
