24 hours in Tulsa

Oklahoma will always be a red state on the political map, but the colour goes deeper than that. Everything here was red: red earth, red brick, red dust, red rust. At Little Sahara State Park, 1,600 geologically anomalous acres of iron-rich sand dunes were pinky-orange, the colour of thousand-island dressing.

The sitcom Friends had a storyline in which a character accidentally went to Oklahoma, the implication being that that’s the only reason anyone would go there. The state’s position as an unfashionable backwater became a running joke over eight episodes, after which the Friend headed back to civilisation.

It was not always thus. So-called ‘wildcatters’ were poking around in the red dirt for black gold at the beginning of the last century. In November 1905, two such prospectors, chancing their arm on Indian land just south of Tulsa, hit the jackpot with what was at the time the world’s biggest oil strike. The city’s short-term prosperity and inevitable decline were guaranteed. The population rocketed, the business moved in, and for the next half-century, Tulsa could legitimately call itself the ‘Oil Capital of the World’.

Oil made millionaires out of corporate swells who relished the opportunity to raise an urban landscape from the prairie. Tulsa hit the big time when art deco was the thing: though the oil barons long ago moved on to Houston and Dallas, they left behind a downtown crammed with skyscrapers and architectural treasures.

The beauty of it is that most of them are public buildings now: anyone can wander into the spectacular lobbies for a gawk. Even in the Bank of Oklahoma, no one protested as I ran around taking photos.