Work Underway To Restore Historic Past Of Downtown Tulsa Building

By Rick Wells, The News On 6 

TULSA, OK -- There's some historic conservation detective work going on in Tulsa's Brady District.

Two men, three stories up on a scaffold, looking for the historic beginnings of an old building.

Rick Parker and Robert Pennick are doing a little conservation detective work on an old building at Cincinnati and Brady north of downtown Tulsa.

"I've been able to track at least 8 layers where the sign has been over painted and over painted and primed," Parker said.

Their task is to get layers of old paint off to reveal, then preserve the building's original signage.  You could see places where removal compounds had been tested, but their job was to preserve the Tulsa Paper Company signs.

They have an historic picture as a guide. They took scrapings of paint, analyzed them under a microscope and created a compound that would remove surface paint but not the original painted sign.

They roll it on wait and wash it off square foot by square foot until they find what they're looking for. This is just the beginning but what they found is exciting.

That old picture taken sometime after the building was built in 1922 showed a black sign with white letters. What they uncovered was even older.

"This is 1st generation," Parker said.  "We don't even have a picture of that, this is generation number one."

And that's the joy, they said, finding something even better than what they were looking for.

They'll continue work on uncovering the signs until they've found them all. The completed repurposing of the old paper company building will take another year to complete.