Some Stories Are Too Big for a Blog Post
Most event venues have an About page. A paragraph or two about their philosophy. Maybe a photo of the space.
We built something different.
This week, we published a dedicated history page for Founders Tower — not a blog post, not a sidebar footnote, but a full-length, permanent piece of the Slate website. Because this building has earned it.
Founders Tower · Oklahoma City · Mid-1960s
Founders Tower opened in 1964 as one of Oklahoma City's most ambitious architectural statements — a cylindrical glass-and-concrete tower designed by Hudgins, Thompson, Ball & Associates, rising twenty stories above the northwest corridor. From the moment the construction cranes came down, it drew the city's most prominent businesses, its most memorable evenings, and its most important moments.
What waited on the twentieth floor made it legendary.
The Chandelle Club was only the fourth revolving restaurant in the world, and the second in the United States — behind Seattle's Space Needle. Power dinners. Proposals. Prom nights. Anniversary celebrations. For decades, if something mattered in Oklahoma City, it happened up here. The Chandelle Club became the Eagle's Nest, which became Nikz at the Top, which became The George, which became 3Sixty. Six names. One room. Sixty years of this city's most storied evenings.
The Chandelle Club · One of Four Revolving Restaurants in the World · 1964
But here's what makes the page worth your time: the building's story is Oklahoma City's story. Founders Tower stood through the oil boom and the bust that followed. It was standing in April 1995, when this city endured the unthinkable and answered it with a strength the world is still trying to understand. It watched Route 66 — the Mother Road, turning one hundred years old in 2026 — carry generations past its doors. It watched the Hornets arrive after Katrina and grow into the Thunder, and the Thunder grow into champions now chasing a dynasty.
That history deserves more than a footnote.
A blog post gets pushed down the feed. It gets buried under the next thing we write. But the story of Founders Tower — the Chandelle Club's rotating floor, the Eagle's Nest era, the National Register of Historic Places designation in 2003 — that story doesn't go stale. It doesn't move. It belongs in the permanent architecture of this site, the way the building belongs in the permanent architecture of this city's skyline.
Founders Tower · Oklahoma City · Tonight
If you've ever been to the Chandelle Club. If your parents had their anniversary dinner at the Eagle's Nest. If you've driven past Founders Tower your entire life and never known the full story of what happened on that twentieth floor — this page is for you.
We aren't the first chapter. We intend to be worthy of every one that came before.
