Marathon Trip Around Tulsa

With no motorcycle at the moment and few other distractions to speak of, I decided to hit the road and try to make a sweeping roundup of Tulsa theaters.  Though I have visited Tulsa many times, I have no photos of Tulsa theaters.  This time I was on a mission, though.  The attempt was to make it to all theaters that I had an address for and hadn't confirmed as demolished.

Well, the trip started out a little later than I intended just from sheer laziness.  I began in Oklahoma City around 11 and took the turnpike to Sapulpa.  My first stop was at the Tee Pee Drive-In.  I already have a lot of photos of the Tee Pee, but I was mostly interested in making certain it was still there.  Sure enough, I made the left turn from OK 66 onto the Ozark Trail and there it was, looking not much different than it did on my last visit.  Surprisingly, the graffitti that had scarred the screen and projection booth had been painted over, returning the structures to their clean white finish.  The screen is so clean it looks like it could light up with a movie at any moment!  The rest of the theater, unfortunately, is pretty rough.  The rugged ticket booth stands firm with its brick construction, though vandals have smashed the windows.  The concession stand/projection booth is probably in the worst shape of everything.  With the door ajar, I squeezed inside to look around.  The place is in shambles, with the roof caved in and trash everywhere.  Before being escorted out by wasps, I had already determined this building was in dire need of repair.  A few more shots of the lot and I crawled back under the gate and headed for downtown Sapulpa.

I previously only had photos of two theaters in Sapulpa: the Sapulpa Cinema 8 and the State Theater.  I had an address and a couple of good historic photos of the Criterion, so that one was easy to find.  Had I not been armed with those tools, I would have driven right by it, though.  The Criterion doesn't even remotely resemble a theater anymore.  The Yale Theater was a bit harder to find.  For this theater, I only had a photo of the exterior and no address...not even an intersection.  I drove up and down streets until something caught my eye.  It actually wasn't the Yale that caught my eye, though.  It was the building next to it.  You could barely see the next door neighbor in the historic photo, but it was just enough with the unique architectural design, to make a positive ID.  There was the Yale, right there on Main Street.  The top of the building appeared to have been lopped off and replaced, but the bottom floor was original...at least on the outside.  After this find, I finished off Sapulpa with a few pics of the boring Creek Hills Cinema and moved on to Sand Springs.

I didn't have high hopes for Sand Springs as I was fairly certain that both older theaters had been demolished and I already had pictures of what was left of the drive-in.  Sure enough, both theaters were gone.  I snapped a few pics of the Sand Springs multiplex and continued to Tulsa.

In hind sight, I probably should have planned ahead a little for this trip and blocked the theaters off in sections.  The old Garmin does a pretty good job of auto-calculating routes, but you can only put so many locations in at a time.  As a result, I ended up criss-crossing Tulsa a bit.  Honestly, most of the photos I ended up with were of more modern theaters - twins and multiplexes.  Most of the downtown houses - like Oklahoma City - had been demolished to make way for newer buildings.  The Circle Cinema and Circle 2 were definitely my favorite locations of the day, and the street on which they sat was not busy at all, making for good photos.