Look for the tall, tan-brick high-rise with a bright, ornate white strip of decoration running up the left front corner, plus a black metal fire escape zigzagging down the darker side wall.
You’re standing by the Mincks-Adams Hotel, a 13-story blast from Tulsa’s boom days at 403 Cheyenne. Back in 1927 and 1928, businessman I. S. “Ike” Mincks built this place as the Mincks Hotel-pure luxury, meant to pull in traveling oil men with heavy briefcases and heavier confidence. The timing was no accident: it opened in time for the first International Petroleum Exposition, when Tulsa was eager to show off and sell the dream.
Architect Alfred C. Fabry gave the building a mash-up of Gothic, Italian Renaissance, and Baroque flair-because why choose just one personality? Up close, that creamy, patterned skin isn’t stone at all; it’s glazed terra cotta, inside and out, made by the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company. Even the lobby and stairwells got the same treatment, like the building was dressed for dinner at all hours.
Mincks spent about $802,800 to build it-around $14 million in today’s money-and for a while, it worked. Then the Great Depression had other plans. Mincks went bankrupt in 1935, and the hotel was sold off and reborn as the Adams Hotel. Later, in the early 1980s, it swapped room keys for office keys as the Adams Office Tower.
It’s handsome enough to land on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and stubborn enough to keep reinventing itself-developers bought it in 2017 aiming to turn it into apartments.
When you’re set, Tulsa City-County Library is a 4-minute walk heading southeast.
