A“skyscraper” was a fitting accessory for Amarillo’s 1920s ambitions.
A century ago, Amarillo was experiencing an oil boom. But at the beginning of 1925, Polk Street, the showplace of the city’s ambitions in those days, looked largely the same as it had a decade before.
That wasn’t the case outside of town. The continued development of enormous reserves of natural gas that were first tapped in Potter County in 1918, combined with 1923’s big oil strikes in nearby Carson and Hutchinson counties, was transforming the scrubby ranch land that once surrounded the city like an ocean of grass…