A three-layered memory of Woodward’s Historic States Hotel
WOODWARD, Okla. (KFOR) – The city and its population of 12,000, even on a bleary day can still hum with life.
Car traffic and pedestrians alike, at times, bustle among century old buildings conducting their business.
Artist and framer Larry K. Hill has a gallery and shop in one old building, but he can still recall the morning of April 27, 2023, when another structure like it burned to the ground.
“I was taking someone to work,” he recalls of that morning. “By the time I came back down Main Street 15 minutes later, fire was shooting out the front door.”
Pictures and video he took from that morning prove it didn’t take long for the fire to spread.
“I’m afraid of old hotels,” he ruminates. “Once they catch, that’s it.”
The old States Hotel, named for its 48 rooms upstairs and a series of businesses on street level, was a railroad era establishment.
During the oil boom 70s it became infamous as a brothel.
A police raid in 1983 put an end to the party, closing the States permanently.
Hill says, “An old cowboy used to come in here and tell me stories about the place when he was a young man. I won’t go into any more detail.”
After the fire, residents wondered what to do.
Larry saved some the bricks to build a patio in the alley outside his studio.
Another local artist, Jeremy Zeller, sifted through the ashes looking for vintage glass, especially, thick, red glass to use in a time of memorial he thought might be fitting.
“Working with it,” he says while polishing, “I knew I was touching history too.”
Zeller, Hill, and another local artist, Amber Anderson, put their skills together.
Anderson produced a watercolor painting based on an old photograph.
“Three layers,” she smiles, “and then we’ll frame it. When it’s done it will look absolutely spectacular.”
Zeller added a layer of stained glass to frame the structure.
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Hill promised a proper wooden frame for the work, and the memory of a landmark took shape.
All three artists used the annual Woodward Main Street banquet as a deadline to finish their portrait of the States so they could auction it off.
There are still people who remember the States Hotel in its wilder days, others years later as a chiropractic office, and a uniform store after that.
The Main Street corner lot is vacant now, but a new work of art, and the artists who created it, insist the finished work is proper monument to history.
“We are the sum of our parts,” says Hill, “and that’s part of the total right there.”
The Main Street banquet is scheduled for March 8 at the Woodward Convention Center.
For more information go to their Facebook page here.
To see more art from Larry K. Hill go to www.larrykhill.com.
To see more art from Jeremy Zeller, visit his Facebook page.
To see more art from Amber Anderson, visit her Facebook page.
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