History

Oklahoma City’s ambition for a civic centre complex dates to the early 1930s. Federal PWA funding, available from 1933 under Harold Ickes’s administration of the programme, made the realisation of this ambition financially viable. Local architects Hawk & Parr were engaged to design the Music Hall as a component of a broader civic complex that would include municipal offices, a convention facility, and a performing arts venue. The result, completed in 1937, was a PWA Moderne building whose limestone exterior and interior auditorium placed it among the most ambitious New Deal civic projects in Oklahoma.

The Music Hall opened in 1937 and became the principal venue for major cultural events in Oklahoma City through the mid-twentieth century. The Oklahoma City Philharmonic, founded in 1988, established the hall as its permanent home; the orchestra’s growing ambitions made clear that the mid-century interior required significant investment. A $53 million renovation project, the largest public arts investment in Oklahoma history at the time, was completed in 2001. The renovation restored and upgraded the auditorium’s acoustic properties, modernised the stage machinery and backstage facilities, and brought the limestone exterior back to its 1937 condition. The restored hall has become one of the best mid-size performing arts venues in the American south.

The building gained wider public recognition during the period of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and its aftermath. Located within walking distance of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building site on NW 5th Street — the target of the 1995 bombing — the Civic Center Music Hall became associated with the city’s processes of mourning and cultural renewal in the years following the attack. The memorial concerts held in the hall in the late 1990s, and the physical evidence of the building’s proximity to the site, gave it a significance beyond its architectural and cultural history.