Watch Now: City begins demolishing Gilcrease Museum

Demolition of the old Gilcrease Museum building began early Wednesday.

The museum, which opened in 1949, is being taken down to clear the way for a new $83.6 million state-of-the-art facility. The groundbreaking ceremony for the new Gilcrease Museum building is scheduled for May 3, 73 years to the day after the original opened.

The city expects to complete the project by late 2024 or early 2025.

Susan Neal, executive director of the museum, said early Wednesday, before the demolition started, that she was “so excited.”

“This is long awaited for by so many, and it’s going to be such a wonderful gift to Tulsa. I just can’t wait.”

Tulsa voters approved $65 million to renovate and expand the museum as part of the 2016 Vision Tulsa sales tax package. The mayor’s Gilcrease Museum Vision Task Force later voted unanimously to recommend building a new facility after it was determined that rebuilding the existing one to modern standards would be too expensive.

Additional funding for the project is being provided by the A.R. and Marylouise Tandy Foundation, which provided a gift of $10 million. The remaining $8.6 million is coming from other city capital improvement packages.

Neal, who was married in the museum’s Vista Room, said she understands that many Tulsans have an emotional attachment to the building — herself included.

But the structure was showing its age. The oldest part, the Carriage House, dates back to 1913. Over the next seven decades four buildings were added — the most recent in 1987 — making for a rambling, ranch-style structure.

None of the buildings is up to current museum construction standards.

“These buildings don’t speak well with one another, and (they) have about 36 different separate roofs, and all of them can decide to leak on any given day,” Neal said in a news conference Tuesday. “So once we learned everything we needed to learn, it wasn’t as hard a decision as I thought it would be.

“But do I think we will lose its charm? I think it will make the visitor experience for Tulsans dramatically improved.”

Neal said the city’s primary obligation is to take care of the hundreds of thousands of valuable pieces in the museum’s collection.

“And if you cannot deliver on that promise and that commitment, you have got to do something to make sure that you can,” she said.

The new 91,340-square-foot museum will be thinner and taller and will be built on the north side of the parking lot between the Helmerich Center for American Research and the old museum site.

The Thomas Gilcrease House and the Helmerich Center are not part of the demolition, which started Wednesday with the museum's north entrance near the restaurant.

The internationally renowned SmithGroup is partnering with 1Architecture of Tulsa to design the new museum.

Neal said the new museum will provide great views of the Osage Hills and downtown Tulsa and that private dollars are being raised to construct a trail system and amphitheater on the picturesque 460-acre property.

Gilcrease Museum is home to more than 350 years of American painting, sculpture, and works on paper, including the world’s largest public holding of art of the American West, according to the city.

The collection also includes a substantial number of Indigenous works from 12,000 BCE to the 21st century and more than 100,000 manuscripts, photographs, maps, rare books, and other material related to the history of the Americas from the 15th to 20th centuries as part of the Helmerich Center.

The city is spending slightly more than $1 million in preparing the Gilcrease for demolition and demolishing it. That includes $553,900 for DT Specialized Services to take down the building and $485,385 to disassemble and make safe the museum’s mechanical, electrical and fire protection systems, according to city records.

The museum is owned by the city of Tulsa and managed by the University of Tulsa.

Featured video: Plans revealed for new Gilcrease Museum, with concept of reconnecting to nature