Milk Bottle Building will be restored

The historic Milk Bottle Building in Oklahoma City will be restored to close to its original appearance, reported The Oklahoman newspaper.

Catherine Montgomery, a preservation architect at Preservation & Design Studio who is helping with the project, told the newspaper the interior will be renovated for a new tenant.

After removing a sheet of plywood covering one of the building’s windows, owner Elise Kilpatrick discovered it had covered an original transom window dating to the 1930s with one pane of glass still intact.

“I said ‘we need to uncover this,’” Kilpatrick said. “We are trying to take the building back as close as we can to when it was first built.”

New windows, lights, awnings and a mahogany door are part of the makeover. Historic preservation tax credits will help pay for renovations.

Kilpatrick didn’t reveal the tenant, but said it would be “something really special and unique to Oklahoma City.”

The 11-foot-tall milk bottle on top of the building, made of sheet metal, was erected in 1948. The bottle advertised Townley’s Dairy from the 1950s until the 1980s, then Braum’s ice cream.

The National Park Service had this information about the Milk Bottle Building:

Constructed in 1930, the tiny, 350-square foot triangular commercial building of red brick is located on a speck of real estate smack in the right-of-way of a busy urban thoroughfare. It sits at an old streetcar stop along a line that ran diagonally across Classen Boulevard, which served as a segment of Route 66’s original Oklahoma City alignment. Subsequent realignments of the highway, first along Western Avenue and then on 23rd Street, remained only a stone’s throw from the site.

The NPS also said the building also became a cleaning service, a real-estate office, the Classen Fruit Market, a barbecue restaurant, a Vietnamese sandwich shop and the Triangle Grocery. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.

(Image from 2012 of the Milk Bottle Building by Travel Aficionado via Flickr)

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