The Fool: Boston Avenue

What The Fool means

The Fool is the beginning of the journey. He takes the step before he knows where it lands. Sometimes because he has never made the trip. Sometimes because he has been all the way to The World, finished a whole cycle, and found himself standing at the start again. The card is numbered zero for that reason: it is not the first stop on the road so much as the decision to be on one.

In a reading, The Fool sits beside a beginning you have not fully planned. A move, a new practice, a first day at something. It does not promise the outcome. It asks whether you are willing to start without one, and it tends to favor the person who says yes with their eyes open. A question it fits well: what would I do here if I stopped waiting to feel ready?

This is the one card in this series I read for myself. In thirty-three years I have lived a few lives: the would-be missionary, the scholar and teacher, the writer who never quite started, the young husband building a family. I met a good many of the Major Arcana on the way, and eventually The Tower. Three years on, a divorce is nearly final, and the strange thing is that closing that long chapter has me feeling like The Fool again. I grew up in Tulsa County, left for college in 2011, lived in Chicago and then Muskogee, Broken Arrow, and Wagoner, and this year I came back. Where I live was, for the first time in a long time, entirely my decision.

Boston Avenue

Boston Avenue is the spine of downtown Tulsa, and you can read most of the city's story by walking it south. At the north end stands the BOK Tower, finished in 1976 as One Williams Center: 52 stories and 667 feet, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of New York's original World Trade Center, for the Williams Companies. Pedestrian walkways tie its plaza into the blocks around it, and it is on one of those walkways that this photograph was taken, looking south down the avenue.

The blocks that follow were built on oil money in a fifteen-year burst. The 320 South Boston Building went up at Third and Boston in 1917 as a ten-story headquarters for the Exchange National Bank, then grew in 1929 to 22 stories and 400 feet, the tallest building in Oklahoma until 1931 and the tallest in Tulsa until 1967. Across from it, the Atlas Life Building of 1922, by Rush, Endacott and Rush, carries the four-story neon sign added in 1946; it has been a hotel since 2010. Waite Phillips built the two that most people picture when they think of Tulsa deco: the Philtower of 1928, 323 feet with its lit, sloping tiled roof, which he gave to the Boy Scouts in 1941 to fund Philmont Scout Ranch, and the Philcade of 1929 to 1931, with its Egyptian columns and gold-leaf lobby. An 80-foot tunnel built in 1929 still runs between them under Fifth Street.

The Philcade stands on the original site of Boston Avenue Methodist Church, which outgrew the corner and moved in 1929 to Thirteenth and Boston, where its 225-foot tower closes the avenue's view to the south. The design is credited to Adah Robinson and Bruce Goff, and the church was named a National Historic Landmark in 1999. The Philtower and the 320 South Boston Building are part of the Oil Capital Historic District, and the street's tunnels, once a private convenience for oilmen, are now open for tours.

Why this pairing

The Fool stands at an edge with everything he owns on his back, looking out at ground he has not covered. The walkway off the BOK Tower is the newest end of downtown, 1970s glass and granite, and from it Boston Avenue runs south through fifty years of the city's history in about a dozen blocks: the bank tower, the neon sign, the two Phillips buildings, the church closing the view. To stand there is to stand at the new end and look down at everything that came before you.

That is where I was. I have known this skyline my whole life and never once walked the street with the intention of looking at it. I had a tarot deck and a crystal ball in the bag over my shoulder, and I will admit it felt strange to carry them down Boston Avenue past the 5 p.m. getting-off-work crowds, the way a first day at anything feels strange. The Fool does not know what he is doing either. He goes anyway. This series is the walk that starts on that bridge.

Visiting

The walkways around the BOK Tower plaza, at Second Street and Boston Avenue, are public and free. Walk south from there to Thirteenth Street for the full avenue. The downtown tunnels connecting several of the buildings are open for guided tours.