The lost twin
By: J. David Chapman/April 20, 2017
I wrote in this column several weeks ago about a trip to New York City and a special bond shared between the citizens of Oklahoma City and NYC.
As it turns out another Oklahoma city has something significant in common with NYC as well. I was born in Tulsa and was living there in 1976 when a 52-story building, 667 feet high, was erected. The building, built by the Williams Cos. and named One Williams Center, was the tallest building in any of the five Plains states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota as well as surrounding states of Missouri, Arkansas and New Mexico.
Recently I gave a tour of Tulsa to some European visitors and they immediately noticed what even some longtime Okies might miss. This tower, known now as the BOk Tower, looks eerily like the Twin Towers in NYC that were destroyed on 9/11. In fact, one commented that this is the triplet to the Twin Towers.
The reason for the resemblance is that all three buildings were designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki. One Williams Center was completed three years after the Twin Towers in NYC and was an imitation of the World Trade Center. For the One Williams Center (BOk Tower), Yamasaki reprised the scheme of the WTC at almost exactly half the scale: 52 stories and 667 feet tall, compared to the Twin Towers’ 110 floors (1,362 feet and 1,368 feet). The unmistakable vertical lines on each face of the towers are produced by steel perimeter columns: 31 per side in Tulsa and 59 per side in NYC.
One Williams Center was built when John Williams was CEO of the Williams Cos. It is reported that he was impressed by the Twin Towers and wanted to build four small-scale replicas of the towers in Tulsa. Prior to the actual construction, engineers convinced him of the inefficiencies of building the four smaller buildings and the plan for a quarter-scale replica was changed to a single tower with a quarter of the footprint of a WTC tower and half the height.
It is my hope that you will never look at the beautiful downtown Tulsa skyline again without noticing the BOk Tower and thinking about those twins and the loss of our brothers and sisters in NYC.
J. David Chapman is an associate professor of finance and real estate at the University of Central Oklahoma (jchapman7@uco.edu).