The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. 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. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. 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. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in 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. 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 agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it. 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. Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. 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 route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. 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. 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. One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E.