Santa Fe Depot

After Amtrak pulled the plug on the Lone Star in 1979, Oklahoma City’s Art Deco Santa Fe Depot sat vacant for two decades, its rusted canopies staining the cream limestone facade. Then Jim Brewer, the developer behind nearby Bricktown, spent seven years negotiating to buy the abandoned station for $374,667. The 2017 restoration went so far as to source replacement stone from the same quarries used in 1934, when the depot cost $500,000 to build and Oklahoma City’s population had doubled in just ten years.

The depot that opened in September 1934 had been built to keep pace with that growth, from just over 90,000 residents in 1920 to more than 185,000 by 1930. It was a combination depot, freight and passengers under a single Art Deco roof, with the express section on the south end, baggage and mail in the middle, and passenger space on the north. The Santa Fe Railway’s own president showed up for the formal dedication that November, presumably to admire what half a million dollars and a decade of oil money could buy.

Brewer’s 1998 purchase didn’t restore the building so much as make it usable again. A $2 million ADA-compliance renovation got Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer running through it by 1999, twenty years after passenger service had stopped. The depot didn’t land on the National Register of Historic Places until 2015, and the full restoration, a project north of $24 million, wasn’t finished until 2017, when it reopened as an intermodal hub serving Amtrak, city buses, and a brand-new streetcar line. It took almost forty years and two separate renovations to get the building back to doing what it was built for in the first place.