CityBeat
THEN AND NOW
Sign of the times BY JOY JENKINS
FOR MORE THAN 60 YEARS,
the Meadow Gold sign shone
down over midtown from its
rooftop perch at East 11th Street
and South Lewis Avenue. Although essentially an advertisement for a milk and ice cream
home delivery service, to many
Tulsans, the 50-foot-by-60-foot
double-sided neon billboard represented something more. It was a
bright, glowing reminder of a time
gone by.
Erected circa 1941, the sign remained in good condition when a
local car dealer made plans to buy
the vacant one-story brick building on which the sign sat. Both
were set to be demolished in June
2004 when representatives from
the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture convinced the car dealer to
let them dismantle the sign for
restoration in another location.
It was during this process that
Tulsans’ true love for the Route
66 relic was evidenced. The cost of
dismantling, labeling and storing
the sign and its framework
amounted to a hefty $35,000, says
Lee Anne Zeigler, executive director of the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture. To help defray these
costs, the TFA received a $15,000
grant from the National Park Service for the sign’s restoration.
Then, as word of the sign’s plight
surfaced, Tulsans chipped in another $9,473.
Last year, the Vision 2025 Route
66 Design Review Committee
voted to spend $35,000 to move
the sign and has allocated another
$250,000 to relocate it to a new
Photo courtesy of Tulsa Foundation for Architecture.
home: donated land at East 11th
Street and South Quaker Avenue.
There it will sit on a new brick
structure, designed by Dewberry
Design Group, again overlooking
Route 66.
Now fully restored, the sign is
being stored at Claude Neon Federal Sign Co., where it will be held
through the bidding process to
build the structure. Zeigler anticipates that the sign will be shining
again by the end of 2007.
And after working to keep this
piece of history in Tulsa for more
than four years, that’s good news
for Zeigler.
“I am very pleased that it is going to come back,” she says. ■
The Meadow Gold sign, manufactured in the early 1940s,
shined down on midtown until 2004. Above, the corner of
11th Street and Lewis Avenue as it appears today.
OVERHEARD
“We dawdled while Oklahoma City built
a river, even though we already had one. Now is the
time. Let’s make the river happen.”
— Ken Levit, executive director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, who spoke at a July 19 riverside meeting of city leaders, according to the Journal
Record. The leaders called for an October vote approving a new $380 million river development package.
