History

William Balser Skirvin struck oil and cattle money at the convergence of Oklahoma Territory’s twin economies and chose to make a hotel in downtown Oklahoma City the monument to that wealth. The commission went to Solomon Andrew Layton, the most prominent architect working in Oklahoma at statehood, and the ten-story building that opened in 1910 was the largest hotel between Dallas and Kansas City. Its public rooms—ballrooms, a rooftop garden, dining rooms—established the Skirvin as the social center of a city that had reached its current scale in barely twenty years of existence.

The 1929 expansion added a tower section that pushed the hotel to fourteen stories and accommodated the demand generated by the Oklahoma oil boom that had made Oklahoma City one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. The architectural language of the 1929 wing—simplified classical pilasters, geometric ornamental detail at the upper stories—occupies the transitional moment between Beaux-Arts formalism and the Art Deco economy of means that would define the decade to come. The complete Skirvin, as built by 1930, presented a unified brick mass that anchored the Park Avenue block.

The hotel declined through the postwar decades as suburban growth and the energy industry’s cycles restructured downtown Oklahoma City. The Skirvin closed in 1988. A twenty-year closure left the building mothballed in a downtown that had itself hollowed out. The 2007 restoration—part of a broader downtown revitalization investment by the city—stripped out accumulated deferred maintenance, restored the lobby and ballroom plasterwork, and reopened the hotel under the Hilton flag. The Skirvin Hilton has since hosted NBA playoff series (the Oklahoma City Thunder plays at the adjacent Paycom Center) and serves as a primary event hotel for the city.