Greenwood: February 2025 Archives

This is the story of a building in Tulsa's Greenwood District that rose from the ashes of the Tulsa Race Massacre, housed a successful pharmacy, became a beloved malt shop, served briefly as a neighborhood co-op grocery, saw its share of burglaries, robberies, and violence, suffered an ignominious old age, and finished its life as a location in a beloved cult film based on a book by a local author, before its final destruction at the hands of city officials, backed by federal funds, after a mere six decades of existence.

Danny Boy O'Connor reports on the discovery of a foundation stone from a demolished commercial building on Greenwood Avenue. The building, on the southeast corner of Greenwood and Latimer Street, was used by director Francis Ford Coppola as the pet shop in the movie Rumble Fish, based on the novel by Tulsa's S. E. Hinton. The stone will be moved to the Outsiders House for preservation:

You're looking at an 8-foot concrete footing, left buried on Greenwood from the original buildings featured in Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, based on S.E. Hinton's classic novel and filmed in Tulsa in 1982. I discovered this hidden piece of history a few years ago while searching for historic filming locations. I immediately thought the site would be a perfect location for a future museum. As fate would have it, I later met with Kimberly Johnson, CEO of the Tulsa City-County Library. To my surprise, this very site was the planned location for her new library in North Tulsa. I shared the story with her, explaining that a piece of cinematic history lay buried beneath the surface. I asked for permission to recover it for a future exhibit or museum, and she graciously agreed to let The Outsiders House Museum preserve it. Today was a good day! I can't thank Nathan Tuell and the team at Nabholz Construction enough for carefully digging out the footing and loading it onto our trailer. Huge thanks as well to Gary Coulson from The Outsiders DX in Sperry, Oklahoma, for helping transport and store it. And, of course, my deepest gratitude to Kimberly Johnson for making this dream a reality--allowing us to save the last remaining piece of the Rumble Fish pet store location. P.S. Thank you, Patrick McNicholas, for the reference photos and the photo mashes.

Rumble Fish and its locations inspired Chilean author Alberto Fuguet to visit Tulsa and then to create a documentary about the experience: Locaciones: Buscando a Rusty James (Locations: Looking for Rusty James"), which was screened at Tulsa's Circle Cinema in 2014.

The pet store location was a two-story retail building on the southeast corner of Latimer St and Greenwood Ave. The 1957 Polk City Directory says that Kyle's Sundry was at 1023 N. Greenwood, and the Kyle Apartments were upstairs at 1023½. This was one of the last surviving bits of a commercial area on the north end of Greenwood Avenue between King Street and Pine Street. Sometimes called Upper Greenwood, the area was considered more family-friendly than Deep Greenwood, at Archer. Many of the buildings, like this one, were two stories, with rooms to rent on the 2nd floor. There were a number of churches here, a movie theater (the Rex, just two blocks away at 1135 N. Greenwood), groceries, cafes, barber shops, and pool halls. The area was cleared as part of the City of Tulsa's urban renewal program. This sort of retail building, and the idea of having retail next to residential, was considered "obsolete" and "blight" by urban planners of the day, so it was demolished at some point in the mid-1980s.