Not only does the Oklahoma County Courthouse command reverence with its imposing form – loosely abstracted from stepped-back Mayan temples - the 1937 art deco colossus begs to be "read."

Some messages, such as the phrases of revered men chiseled into the sandy-brown Indiana limestone, are direct: "Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political. - Thomas Jefferson."

Other readings require interpretation. From the vantage point of dark-gray Minnesota granite that makes up the courthouse's southern steps, between large, cast-aluminum light standards reminiscent of director Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a carved, horizontal mural depicts a scene of Oklahoma friendship. On the left, a Native American man stands with a slain deer curved over his right shoulder. Buffalo heads and a tree, a bow and arrows, a clay pot and other elements trail off behind a standing male Native American at the mural's center. He offers a peace pipe to a mountain man in a leather, fringed coat - the first figure on the "white people's" side. Icons abound here, too: homesteaders, a grazing cow, a farmer with a pitchfork, a boy clutching a fruit and a sheaf of wheat.

Although the history is somewhat fanciful, the mural conveys the meeting of the two cultures in Oklahoma. Inside the courthouse, similar symbols of local commerce and ideals abound: frieze bands of cow skulls beside bushels of corn line a hallway's barrel-vault ceiling; other plaster walls hold classical symbols, such as the Scales of Justice.

Architect Solomon Layton, Oklahoma's foremost at the time, and a team at Layton and Forsyth deliberately left those messages for posterity and for the building's first users, which included, the Daily Oklahoman reported, a dozen people who slipped on the newly polished terrazzo flooring.

But today, more than five decades after the "Civic Center Courthouse" was opened, the courthouse has another story that can be read with the help of someone like Jim Gabbert, an architectural historian who administers the National Register of Historic Places program at the State Historic Preservation Office, or architect Harold A. Hite, who restored the building in the 1990s.

Although the 13-story courthouse exudes history and a period style, specifically "PWA (the federal Public Works Administration) art deco," its design was not called art deco at the time. It was simply the modern, futuristic style, Gabbert said. The new and expensive inlaid aluminum and cast pieces reflected the Machine Age; rounded, aerodynamic forms curved under the pressure of invisible momentum. The classical column-and-stone style - and its ability to evoke solidity and stability - only survived in the form of abstracted bas-relief columns (inside the grand entry portal and on the exterior), he notes.

When it was built, the courthouse sent the message of a new government unafraid of progress, but respectful of the ideals of the past and the visions of the nation's forebears, as expressed by exterior reliefs of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

"This is the first time when government really started to have a hand in everyday people's lives," Gabbert said. "Before that, the federal government was always something far away that you got involved in with wars and laws on occasion. But during the New Deal, the government started to touch everybody's life. And I think you see that reflected in the reinforcement of government ideals and the government of the people, for the people, by the people."

The courthouse at 321 Park Avenue was built for $1.5 million with a bond issue passed by county voters and money from the PWA, a federal program to create jobs in the Depression. It was part of the Civic Center plan to build the city's focal point. Along with the courthouse, that was to be a new City Hall, municipal auditorium and a police station/jail.

The person most knowledgeable about the building, which was added in 1992 to the National Register of Historic Places, is Hite. He spent most of the 1990s heading up an exhaustive restoration that included figuring out how to remove hair oil left on walls by courtroom observers leaning back their heads.

Hite said the finely proportioned and precisely detailed building is a piece of art.

"An institutional message comes through in the dignity and substance of the structure, but also in the materials and their discriminating selection," he said. "How many, for example, notice the subtle graduation of marble in the building's lobbies - every floor different, shading light to dark? Or that the terrazzo lobby floor's patterns are never, from first floor to top, repeated?

"The building's ultimate message - thanks to the significant investment of those 1930 voters and taxpayers and thanks to the genius of architect Solomon Layton - was that Oklahoma, and particularly Oklahoma County, was a serious player."

The courthouse is unique among its art deco rivals downtown, he said.

"There are many art deco structures, but none with a space to match the two-story lobby with its third-floor overlooks, its terrazzo compass in the floor or marvelous abstracted wagon wheel chandeliers. And none with the whimseyed art deco meets American West ornament," he said.

In his 1991 Historic Register nomination, Hite wrote: "The Oklahoma County Courthouse - is one of the best examples of a PWA art deco courthouse in the state of Oklahoma. Aside from the Oklahoma County facility, nine of Oklahoma's 77 county courthouses were designed in the art deco style. Only the Pottawatomie County Courthouse and, to a lesser extent, the Cleveland County Courthouse and the Grady County Courthouse compare in the richness of detail.

"None is as monumental nor as outstanding an example of PWA art deco architecture."

Editor's note: Historical sources included the 1991 National Register nomination material by architect Harold A. Hite and Marsha Weisiger, an architectural historian at the State Historic Preservation Office; the Daily Oklahoman; and Oklahoma County records

This article was originally published in the June 2004 issue of Oklahoma City Downtown Monthly.
Story © Mattison Avenue Publishing Corp. Photographs © photoart.com.