YARD THE YARD THE

One of the state’s oldest destination districts, Stockyards City in Oklahoma City is home to famous restaurants, unbeatable shopping, wild history and, yes, one of the world’s highest-volume livestock auctions. If Oklahoma City is a cow town, this is city hall.

BY CAROL MOWDY BOND PHOTOGRAPHY BY LORI DUCKWORTH

THE CATWALK SWAYS in the wind as visitors mosey across its more than 937-foot reach about two stories off the ground, the vantage giving them a bird’s-eye view of cowboys on foot and horseback moving among hundreds of cattle in pens. Horses nicker, the beeves snort and moo, the cowhands call to each other. Dust catches the sunlight. The cowpunchers push livestock into the arena. Inside, a voice calls out in a rapid-fire staccato. It’s auction day, and the bidding crowd is arrayed in blue jeans, boots, and pearl-snap shirts—a ranchers’ uniform going back generations. But in this odd enclave just a couple miles downriver from downtown Oklahoma City, perhaps time is standing still. For more than a century, its businesses and faces have changed and weathered, but the neighborhood’s integrity, its rugged, rough-around-the-edges Western charm, has remained intact. This is Stockyards City.

AVILLAGE SOMEWHAT UNTO itself surrounded by urban sprawl, Stockyards City revolves around its own economic engine—the Oklahoma National Stockyards, known ’round these parts as simply the Yards. Here, forty-two acres of cattle pens stand among a labyrinth of passageways paved with the original bricks that first comprised the place. Still the world’s largest stocker and feeder market, the Yards holds auctions every Monday and Tuesday in its open-to-the-public arena.

Since 1910, more than a hundred million head of livestock have passed through these gates, fueling a major economic force in Oklahoma since before statehood. Originally known as Packingtown due to its high number of meatpacking plants, the area now officially is called the Stockyards City Historic District and appears on the National Register of Historic Places. Located spitting distance from Interstates 40 and 44, it’s a destination unto itself, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually from all over the world.

Though the tourist-to-cowboy ratio has changed over the years, this has always been a high-traffic area. The Yards’ origins reach back to Oklahoma City’s formative years, when the city created a public livestock market in 1910 in tandem with the nearby opening of several major meat processing and packing plants. A jumbled junction of a half-dozen railroads and a large livestock market spurred this master plan the same year the State Capitol moved from Guthrie to Oklahoma City.

Some stockmen moved their herds in by railroads, but for years, cowboys spurred their horses through swirling dust, driving sauntering cattle toward the livestock pens. At the time, Oklahoma City’s population stood at around 60,000, and the Yards and packing plants became the city’s first major industry, giving rise to 2,400 new jobs and remaining the area’s largest employer for years. Some housing sprung up nearby; other workers commuted via the city’s early streetcar system. With so many coming from far and near, a commercial district grew up with products and services to accommodate the constant stream of people. iconic sights and experiences. Here, for example, visitors find Oklahoma’s oldest continually operating restaurant, the famous Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, founded in 1910, the same year as the district. If by chance the neon sign out front doesn’t provide enough of a guiding star, visitors simply can follow the aroma of grilling steaks Cattlemen’s emits throughout the neighborhood.

But with increased human habitation came increased chances for misbehaving. From the outset, the Yards were a rambunctious place, the old rough-and-tumble lifestyle of the fading Wild West still very much alive here. Slaughterhouse employees and cowboys endured grueling work that wasn’t for the squeamish, and after long trips bringing cattle to market, everyone was tired and ready to blow off some steam. Of the innumerable two-story hotels, many were legitimate, with honorable customers and well-behaved patrons. Others rented rooms by the hour and were known as places to access disreputable services. But no matter their reputations, these buildings soon became landmarks.

Here, diners pack into vintage red booths to enjoy a famous menu of lamb fries, choice-grade steaks grilled to perfection, salads with that famous garlicky house dressing, and coconut cream pie with mile-high meringue.

But the place is as much a museum and living history venue as a gastronomic delight. Visitors gravitate here to see a slice of the West where people still live and work every day in cowboy hats, boots, and great big belt buckles.

“On any given day, it’s like running a restaurant in a museum,” says David Egan, the steakhouse’s director of operations. “Our walls are covered with tons of old photos and memorabilia that hark back to the day. People come here to see what the West was like.”

MANY OF THOSE landmarks remain more than a century later, some of Stockyards City’s buildings and businesses among the state’s most

Also founded with the neighborhood’s beginning, Exchange Pharmacy is the city’s oldest continually operated drugstore. Though the classic soda fountain is gone, the walls are peppered with historic mementos, and the window still reads “Soda Pop and Water 75¢.” Eric Coker’s parents bought the business in 1951, and he remembers what weekends were like in the district.

“On Friday nights, there were family-friendly events at the Yards,” he says. “Our soda fountain served ham- burgers. The lines of people waiting to order spilled out the door. There was a bar down the street, and the owner had a bear in a cage and a chimpanzee for entertainment.”

There aren’t any primates at Stockyards Sarsaparilla, but the sense of history manages to come through just fine anyway. Here, visitors can belly up to an eighteen-foot 1895 bar for a sip from more than two hundred varieties of ice-cold soda, forty kinds of root beer, and the famous Stockyards Sarsaparilla. All that glugging needs some solid bites, and Stockyards Sarsaparilla delivers with a smorgasbord of nostalgic candies and more than thirty-five varieties of handmade fudge. Assistant Manager Patty Buchholz says the Orange Cream fudge tastes like a Dreamsicle and pairs perfectly with an Orange Crush or Virgil’s Vanilla Cream Soda.

“It’s a lot of fun here,” she says. “I get to talk to people from all over the place—we get a lot of visitors, and tour buses come in. Just this week, we had visitors from Brazil, Italy, South Africa, various U.S. states, and places around the world. One time, the ambassador from Bangladesh came in.” ers’ tail, they were warned off by a local preacher and the sheriff.

STOCKYARDS CITY’S COLORFUL present comes from a colorful history, one that aligns with America’s. Its location caused U.S. highways to pop up nearby. And during the Prohibition era, the district offered everything a prosperous bootlegging operation might need.

Take, for example, P.C. and W.A. Camp, who owned Capitol City Barrel Company on Agnew Avenue. These enterprising gentlemen would leave the keys in a truck loaded with wooden barrels at a certain location. When they returned, they always found the truck empty and money on the seat. Their operation was so well known that, once when the authorities were on the broth-

During Prohibition, Hank Frey owned Cattlemen’s, and he and his wife lived upstairs from the restaurant with another couple—the four were bootleggers and gamblers. Savvy visitors knew they could buy “liquid delights” by going inside Cattlemen’s and heading discreetly up the stairs. For more than a decade after the end of Prohibition, Hank continued to run the restaurant—until he lost it in a game of craps in 1945.

Shenanigans aside, by the 1930s, cars, pickups, and big trucks idled and snaked through the streets as the livestock industry modernized. By 1961, the operation had grown big enough that it transitioned into a cattle auction. By the 1980s, it had become the largest cattle market in the nation and, in 1996, the largest in the world, feeding not only the state’s essential ranching industry but a wide range of