Mid-Continent Tower
Tulsa’s tallest building tells a century in two acts: a 1918 oil-trade tower extended in 1984 with a deliberate Art Déco crown that quotes the city’s 1920s heritage in terracotta and limestone, reaching 513 feet above downtown.
At a glance
At 513 feet (156 m) and 36 storeys, the Mid-Continent Tower is the fourth-tallest building in Tulsa and one of the tallest structures in Oklahoma. Its history is bifurcated: the base dates to 1918, built as the Cosden Building for oil entrepreneur Joshua Cosden, and represents Tulsa’s first generation of high-rise commercial construction. In 1984, the tower was transformed by the addition of 20 upper floors designed by HTB, Inc. in an explicit Neo-Gothic revival vocabulary — terracotta detailing, setback crown, pointed ornament — conceived as a deliberate homage to the 1920s buildings that define Tulsa’s urban character.
Key facts
- Original architect: Henry F. Hoit / Hoit, Price & Barnes (1918 Cosden Building)
- 1984 addition: HTB, Inc.
- Original completion: 1918
- Renovation/addition: 1984
- Height: 513 ft (156 m)
- Floors: 36
- Style: 1918 Classical base; 1984 Neo-Gothic revival crown
- Original name: Cosden Building
- Address: 401 S. Boston Ave., Tulsa, OK 74103
History
Joshua Cosden (1881–1940) arrived in Tulsa in 1912 and built one of the largest independent oil refining operations in the United States within a decade. In 1918, at the height of his prosperity, he commissioned Henry F. Hoit / Hoit, Price & Barnes to design a sixteen-storey office tower on South Boston Avenue — then the address of Tulsa’s commercial and financial power. The Cosden Building, as it was originally known, was clad in classical terra cotta and stood as a symbol of the city’s oil-driven confidence.
Cosden lost his fortune in the 1920s crash, and the building passed through several owners before being renamed the Mid-Continent Building in the 1950s, reflecting its principal tenant. By the 1970s the structure was considered for demolition as Tulsa’s commercial core shifted. Instead, the energy company Mid-Continent Life underwrote a dramatic reinvention: HTB, Inc. designed a twenty-storey addition that would nearly triple the building’s height and, deliberately, clothe it in Art Déco ornament matching the 1920s towers surrounding it.
The 1984 project is unusual in postwar American architecture for its explicit historicism at a time when glass-box modernism still dominated commercial construction. The architects added setback upper floors, terracotta spandrel panels with geometric chevron ornament, and a stepped crown that echoes — in scale if not in decade — the Philtower and Philcade one block south.
What you see
From street level, the Mid-Continent Tower presents a complex vertical narrative. The lower sixteen floors of the 1918 base are visible in the buff classical terracotta and double-height banking-room windows of the ground floor — restrained, civic, and clearly pre-Depression in character. Above the 1984 transition zone, the building becomes something else: denser ornament, deeper setbacks, and a crown that borrows the stepped pyramidal form of New York’s Chrysler Building while adapting it to Tulsa’s scale and materials.
The lobby retains elements from both building phases. A 1984 renovation introduced polished granite floors and bronze detailing in the Art Déco mode, creating a coherent ground-floor experience that reads as period even though it is partly contemporary. The elevator bank, with its geometric bronze surrounds and back-lit ceiling grid, is the building’s most explicitly Déco interior element and one of the finest examples of 1980s Art Déco revival craftsmanship in the region.
Practical information
- Address: 401 S. Boston Avenue, Tulsa, OK 74103
- GPS: 36.152603, -95.989006
- Lobby: Open during business hours
- Time needed: 20 minutes for exterior and lobby
- Déco walk: Philtower and Philcade are one block south; Boston Avenue Methodist Church is 10 minutes south on foot
Getting there
The Mid-Continent Tower stands at Fourth Street and Boston Avenue in downtown Tulsa. Parking is available in the building’s own garage (access from Fourth Street) and in surrounding surface lots. The BOK Center arena is a 5-minute walk west. Tulsa International Airport is 8 miles northeast, approximately 20 minutes by car.
Nearby
- Philtower (1928) — one block south, authentic 1920s Déco tower
- Philcade Building (1931) — retail arcade, same block as Philtower
- Boston Avenue Methodist Church (1929) — 10 min walk south, National Historic Landmark
Photo gallery
Sources
- Wikidata entity Q6840691 — GPS, year, identifiers
- Wikipedia EN — Mid-Continent Tower, Tulsa
- Tulsa Preservation Commission — Cosden Building / Mid-Continent Tower historical survey
- Oklahoma Historical Society — Cosden Building (CO065), Henry F. Hoit, Hoit, Price & Barnes
- BDC Network / AIA Eastern Oklahoma award — HTB, Inc. (Dewberry) as 1984 addition architect
- Emporis / SkyscraperPage — height and floor data
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