Crutchfield
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Caleb Freeman

One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders was still in pre-production, Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s director, rode double on a bicycle down North Tulsa’s side streets. More than 60 pounds of film equipment sat in their handlebar basket, so they had to stop periodically to keep from falling onto the pavement. Their route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. They rode past houses in various states of disrepair, many of them built shortly after the city was incorporated in 1898, as well as industrial sites and manufacturing plants, some empty and derelict, abandoned in the years of suburban sprawl.

Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. Louis Ave. in the Crutchfield neighborhood. With its rusted chain-link fence and overgrown lawn, it was a promising candidate for the Curtis house, where Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, the orphaned protagonists of The Outsiders, would live. Hinton agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it.

Hinton’s novel of warring teenage gangs, written fifteen years earlier when she was a student at Will Rogers High School, has a complicated relationship with Tulsa. Hinton is from Tulsa, and by all accounts set the story here too, but chose not to include any real names or landmarks in order to, as she told the local newspaper, “protect the guilty.” When she wrote The Outsiders, Hinton was bearing witness to teenage alienation and violent socioeconomic segregation, and these weren’t Tulsa problems; they were everywhere.

The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in Tulsa. In March 1982, Zoetrope Studios moved into Crutchfield, setting up their production team in the former Lowell Elementary School building, which had been closed four years prior. In a type of method acting, the young cast members haunted the city as greasers, stealing from local drug stores, staying out all night, and sometimes sleeping in the Curtis house, which didn’t have any heat. Local markers — the Oklahoma Steel Castings Company, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, the Art Deco architecture of Will Rogers High School and Boston Avenue Methodist Church — appear in the film. Hinton and Coppola even revised the story so that the Greasers would live on the north side instead of the east, a more accurate geographic representation of Tulsa’s class and racial divide. When the filming was done, Coppola threw a party in Crutchfield Park, complete with carnival rides, an abundance of food and beer, and an ice sculpture. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association.

Then he left. The film came out in 1983, and members of the Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force, which had lobbied hard for Coppola to film in Tulsa, relished their success. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory.

The neighborhood is still here, though, just north of the historic “Frisco” Railway, which once brought hopeful settlers and cutthroat opportunists to Tulsa back when the area was still known as Indian Territory. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. By 2007, approximately one-third of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. Rates of violent crime rose to become the highest in Tulsa.

The neighborhood association, led by longtime residents — truck drivers, store owners, church leaders — advocated tirelessly for Crutchfield. They organized neighborhood cleanups, met with city officials, and developed a revitalization plan which called in part for better infrastructure and more public facilities, including a new school. Although the City of Tulsa approved the plan in 2004, little has changed. In 2006, Tulsa Public Schools spent $3.3 million converting the old Lowell Elementary building, the former production site for The Outsiders, into a four-and-a-half acre “state-of-the-art” ropes course. Although it was touted as a boon to the community, the course was fenced off and inaccessible to the neighborhood’s residents. The course was later closed in 2017 due to budget cuts, and the site once again sits abandoned.

Today, Crutchfield is still without a school or a grocery store. Its predominately Hispanic population experiences some of the worst health outcomes and rates of poverty in the city. Although the neighborhood is one of Tulsa’s oldest, the City has never treated it with the same significance as its other historic neighborhoods.

As my girlfriend and I drive through Crutchfield in the winter of 2021, I wonder about the decision to bring The Outsiders film to Tulsa. When the novel was released, local media was quick to absolve the city. The Tulsa World suggested that, although the setting was Tulsa, “it could be any city.” After watching the film, though, I wonder if Hinton might say otherwise.

The Outsiders is a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate. It’s a fitting story for Tulsa, a city whose inclination towards boosterism — as the self-proclaimed “Magic City” and “Oil Capital of the World” — frequently has sanitized and distorted its history, almost always at the expense of its marginalized communities.

Crutchfield sits just north of the line that divided Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, one of the lines established by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The neighborhood was named after Vinita Crutchfield, who was allotted the land after the General Allotment Act. She appears on the Dawes Roll as a nine-year-old Cherokee girl living with her mother. Growing up, Crutchfield would have lived on the dividing line much like the characters in Hinton’s novel.

One mile to the east of Crutchfield is Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was once 40 square blocks of Black-owned land known as “Black Wall Street.” Born of entrepreneurship, Greenwood was a precarious haven for Black Oklahomans during a time when the state adopted strict Jim Crow laws. Local newspapermen disparaged Greenwood as “Little Africa,” and the growth of the KKK in Tulsa posed an increasing threat. In May 1921, a white mob invaded, razed, and, in the end, partially annexed Greenwood, killing its residents in a state-sanctioned slaughter. For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre, as it would come to be known, remained a secret, a part of Tulsa’s history hidden from people like me who never learned about it in school. From Crutchfield, just beyond the borderlines of Lansing Ave. and the Midland Valley railway tracks, you would have been able to see the smoke of Greenwood’s burning buildings.

When we arrive at the Curtis home, which was purchased in 2016 and converted into a small museum dedicated to The Outsiders, I think about the people of Crutchfield. Surrounding the home are boarded-up houses flying tattered American flags. Stray dogs roam the area. Less than a block away from the house is an auto shop, the same type of place where Ponyboy might have worked. We stay for a little while, driving around the neighborhood. When we leave, I think about the tyranny of boundaries and the exorbitant privilege of being able to cross them.

Caleb Freeman was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a freelance writer, an adjunct English instructor, and a part-time librarian. When he is not working with words, he is more than likely annoying his cats. Follow him on Twitter @calebdfreeman. 

 

Photograph by Megan Hosmer, an artist, teacher, and Tulsa transplant. Her work primarily centers around feminist questions of identity and community through photographic portraiture. Check out her artwork at https://www.meganhosmer.com/.

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