Oklahoma: Whiting’s Toughest Neighborhood
By John Hmurovic
August 2019
In the history of Whiting, there is no place more notorious than the neighborhood that was called Oklahoma. It had a reputation for drunken brawls, murders and a variety of other crimes and vices. Mostly, that reputation was well deserved.
Look for the “1” in the bottom right corner of this 1896 map of Whiting. That is where the Oklahoma neighborhood was located. It was just a little east of Front Street. At that time, the Standard Oil refinery was to its north, south, and east, and Standard was wanting to expand. In just a few years, the refinery would buy up all the land that was Oklahoma. Today, all of what was Oklahoma is within the refinery’s boundaries.
Unless you work at the BP Refinery in Whiting, you can’t set foot on the ground where Oklahoma once stood. Using current day landmarks, it was located slightly south and slightly east of the intersection of 121st and Front Streets. If you go about a quarter of a mile directly south of the Mascot Museum, you would be at the western edge of Oklahoma. That would put it within the current boundary of the refinery.
Oklahoma sprang into existence in 1889, the year construction began on the Whiting refinery. The name was probably inspired by the news headlines of the day. In April of that year, over 50,000 people stood behind a line in the territory of Oklahoma, which did not become a state until 1907, waiting for the firing of a gun at twelve noon. When that gun sounded, the 50,000, riding horses and pulling wagons, rushed forward to stake their claims on two million acres of land. As could be expected, the Oklahoma Land Rush was chaotic. It also created boom towns. Guthrie, Oklahoma, did not even exist the morning of the rush. By the end of the day, over 10,000 people lived there.
All of America read about the Land Rush of 1889, when the federal government said “first come, first served” to those who wanted free land in what was the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Thousands rushed into the state on horse or in wagons, and the word “Oklahoma” became synonymous with “chaotic.” So when a wild, chaotic area grew up outside the western gate of the newly built Whiting Refinery in 1889, naturally, people called it “Oklahoma.”
Standard Oil created its own boom town when it located its refinery here. Whiting had 200 people in 1890, when Standard Oil came to town, and grew to almost 4,000 by 1900. That’s a growth of 1,892-percent. Within Whiting, no place resembled a chaotic, Wild West boom town more than the neighborhood of Oklahoma.
It was a community of men. According to the 1900 census, seventy-five percent of those living on Oklahoma’s main street were men, and seventy-two percent were single. They were also young, and they were far from home. Only twenty-one percent were born in the United States. Of the foreign born, nearly ninety percent were from Eastern Europe: Slovaks, Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Serbs, Lithuanians, Russians and Hungarians.
Nothing about Oklahoma had the feel of permanence. There were a few homes, but many boarding houses. The men who came here didn’t necessarily want to stay here. Its population, according to one anti-immigrant writer in a February 1896 issue of the Whiting Democrat newspaper, consists of “those who don’t come to America with the intention of becoming citizens, or learning the language or habits of the country, but those who come to get all the money they can, live as they like without reference to anyone’s feelings, and return to their own country in due time.”
This 1896 map was drawn by the Sanborn-Perris, a company which drew maps in 12,000 U.S. communities to help fire insurance companies assess their liability. They drew this map of Whiting’s Oklahoma neighborhood in 1896. The rectangular images on the map are buildings. Those marked with a “D” were dwellings, and those with an “S” were stores, or shops, of some sort. Most of the dwellings in Oklahoma were boarding houses, and many of the shops were saloons. On the far left of this map, just below center, is where the school was located. To get your bearings, the right end of this map is north.
Yet, there were some attempts to make it a community. Oklahoma had a school. Built in 1889, it was Whiting’s third schoolhouse. It had two classrooms, one on each of its two floors. First through seventh grades were taught there. Miss Winslow taught the lower grades and Mr. Meyers the upper.
Inside that school building, Catholics held services. But even the church didn’t stay long. Services moved to the upstairs of a tavern in the main part of Whiting, and then a permanent church was established to serve the needs of nineteen immigrant Catholic families and over one hundred young, unmarried men who worked at the refinery. The church was called Sacred Heart, which still serves some of the Catholic community in Whiting.
Almost every man living in Oklahoma worked in the refinery, most as laborers, doing the hard, dirty work that Americans didn’t want to do. When their shift ended, they got together in saloons. That same writer of the 1896 article in the Whiting Democrat, claimed that “all the inhabitants of Oklahoma drank every pay day and as long as the money lasted, men, women, and children alike.”
In the 1890s, work in the Standard Oil Refinery was hard. Immigrants, in particular, had to work the hardest and dirtiest jobs in the refinery, jobs that many native-born Americans of the time didn’t want. Two-thirds of the men who lived in the Oklahoma neighborhood of Whiting were foreign born, most were single, and most were young. For them, one of the few places they could socialize and relax were the numerous saloons in Oklahoma.
They drank. They got drunk. They fought. Late on a Thursday night in May of 1900, for instance, Frances Stepich, who ran a boarding house, asked Officer Freel of the Whiting Police for help. Philip Levine, one of the boarders was drunk, and had threatened to kill her and her husband. Freel and three others came to the boarding house to arrest Levine. It wasn’t easy. When Freel tried to subdue Levine by hitting him on the head with a blackjack, the only impact of the blow was that it made Levine angrier. He fought off all four men and escaped, but not before Freel fired two shots at him. It wasn’t until morning that the police felt safe enough to enter the boarding house, where they found Levine, still alive, but with two bullets in his left thigh.
Fights were common, even among the handful of women who lived there. The newspapers told one story of several Oklahoma women who got into a fight over the killing of a chicken. The newspapers, probably reflecting the viewpoints of that era, were quick to criticize or mock the foreigners who lived in Oklahoma. “One of our most industrious women lives in Oklahoma,” a Whiting paper said in 1903. “She frequently carries a wash boiler of water on her head and a pail of water in each hand. She is Oklahoma’s pride.” In 1899, the Whiting Sun reported on the attempted murder of Ignas Raguffsky by “two gentlemen of unpronounceable names.”
The reputation of Oklahoma was dragged down with every report of a crime. “These people,” the Sun said about the residents of that area, “live in constant fear of their lives,” and stated that some residents asked for a police escort to help them get home safely at night.
Arson fires were also a problem. Saloon-keeper John Cheselski was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary for setting his own saloon on fire. The blaze killed a woman and her two children who lived upstairs. Crime was so bad in Oklahoma, that the government of Austria-Hungary sent an attaché to Whiting in 1897 to find out why two natives of that country were murdered in Oklahoma, and no one was ever convicted.
Although much of the violence in Oklahoma was fueled by too much liquor, it also stemmed from centuries of Old World hatreds between different ethnic groups. In 1903, Nora Harsek, a young Serbian girl was in love with Steven Pull, described as a Hungarian, although he could have been an ethnic Croatian, Slovak, or any of the other nationalities who were under the control of Hungary in those years. Harsek heard that some of the Serbians planned to attack Pull and his Hungarian friends. She ran out to the Whiting Cemetery, which was close to the Oklahoma neighborhood, where Pull and his friends had congregated. The Serbian attack failed, after a bloody fight, because Harsek’s warning gave the Hungarians time to get reinforcements. But Harsek was spotted among the Hungarians by one of the Serb attackers. In retaliation, she was severely beaten by a group of Serbian men.
In 1896, newspapers across America ran stories about the shooting at the Maovitik Saloon in Whiting’s Oklahoma neighborhood. Martha Maovitik, the wife of the bar owner, drew most of the attention. In this set of headlines, the Inter-Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, called the young woman a “Pretty Terror,” and compared her skills with a gun to those of Annie Oakley.
Another woman in Oklahoma made national headlines in February 1896. Martha Maovitik, a Croatian, was described by the newspapers of the time as “A Pretty Terror,” and “A Hungarian edition of Calamity Jane.” Martha was the wife of Joseph Maovitik, who owned a saloon in Oklahoma at the corner of its two major streets, Whiting Road and Adams Street. The Maovitiks were at the center of an hour-long riot at their saloon, where twenty shots were fired, and many knives were used.
The newspaper reports were not consistent. They were in agreement that for over an hour on a Thursday afternoon, the saloon was crowded with drunken Hungarians and Poles. Some reports say a group of Hungarians entered the saloon looking for a fight. They hurled insults at the Maovitiks, and some of Maovitik’s Polish friends came to their defense, striking a Hungarian. Other reports said that two Hungarians shot out the tavern’s windows, and Joseph threw them out. Friends of the men who were thrown out, according to this report, felt the need to retaliate. Two hundred men rose up, saying they would “clean out” the saloon for what Maovitik had done. Maovitik was not about to be cleaned out. He drew his revolver and fired in the air. Most of the crowd got out of the tavern, but once outside they pelted Maovitik’s business with bricks, stones, and chunks of early February ice.
Maovitik fired again, but as he reloaded his revolver, the mob of two hundred crashed through the door. More shots were fired from both sides. Maovitik retreated, running to the stairs that led to his upstairs apartment. It was at about this time that Martha Maovitik appeared with a gun in her hands. The men in the mob hesitated, and satisfied themselves, for the time being, by destroying everything they could get their hands on inside the saloon. But when there was nothing left to destroy, they charged up the stairs after Maovitik, yelling “Lynch him.”
Maovitik had barricaded himself inside his apartment and fired several shots through the door as the mob tried to break it down. They succeeded when he stopped again to reload. As Maovitik ran to another room, behind another door, his wife stood her ground at the stairs, firing dozens of shots at the attackers.
Three men died from the bullets fired by the Maovitiks: John Matji, Steve Szanyo, and Emil Mucha. Jacob Gladstone, a cigar manufacturer from Chicago, was one of the two injured by bullets. He was in the saloon trying to sell cigars, when a stray bullet hit him just over the heart. He said he would have died, if the bullet had not been partially blocked by a matchbox in his vest pocket.
The deaths and injuries were blamed on Martha. “This woman,” the Inter-Ocean (a Chicago newspaper) said, “is a dead shot.” The paper described her as “small, pretty, speaks English well, but with a slight foreign accent.” The paper also said that regular customers of the bar “recalled the fact that she could shoot the foam off a glass of beer…from the top of the barroom stove.” Martha Maovitik was arrested and tried for murder, but at her trial she was acquitted.
The Maovitik Saloon incident increased calls from “proper Whiting” to shut down Oklahoma. Standard Oil was happy to help, probably not out of civic responsibility, as much as out of a business need. Standard wanted the land. The original refinery was on the shore of Lake Michigan and was just a fraction of its current size. Oklahoma was right on its western border, and the company needed more land for expansion. The community was about a mile long, and just two or three blocks wide. Standard Oil wanted all of it. One by one, landowners were approached by the company.
The southern side of Steiber Street, and parts of New York Avenue and Indianapolis Boulevard, consisted of lots which Standard Oil bought to lure property owners away from the Oklahoma neighborhood. In exchange for their land in Oklahoma, located on the western edge of the refinery, the company gave these lots, on Steiber and adjacent streets, to those property owners. They called this area New Oklahoma.
Jim Kuffner was one of those. He was born in Austria-Hungary, came to Oklahoma and owned two lots on the main street, Whiting Road. He sold them to Standard Oil in 1903 for $3,750. Albert Poppen, a shoemaker from Germany, lived in the vicinity before the refinery arrived. When Oklahoma and the refinery grew up around him, he sold his three-and-a-half acres to the oil company for $7,450 in 1902. Pante Haralovich owned a saloon in Oklahoma, but sold the land to Standard Oil in 1902, leaving “the once flourishing vicinity with but three saloons,” a newspaper reported.
In all, Standard Oil spent over $90,000 on its land purchases in the early 1900s. While Oklahoma was a major part of that, it also wanted adjacent lands, including the land where Whiting’s only cemetery once stood. Part of the company’s costs also included the 1905 purchase of fifteen acres of land in what became known as the New Oklahoma section of Whiting.
Harry Gordon was one of Whiting’s most successful early businessmen. The sign on front of his 119th Street store read: “H. Gordon & Sons - Whiting’s Leading Department Store.” But before that store opened, Gordon was a tavern owner in the Oklahoma neighborhood of Whiting. He is said to be the last resident of Oklahoma. When he finally accepted Standard Oil’s offer to buy his tavern and land, he declared, “We’re going from wet goods to dry goods.” He used the money from Standard Oil to open his first store on New York Avenue, south of Fischrupp. In 1914, he built a new store on 119th Street, and expanded it in 1920. His building later became Newberry’s, one of the buildings that burned down in a huge 1980 fire. Gordon, born in Lithuania, also opened a store in downtown Gary. He passed away in 1947, at the age of 82.
New Oklahoma was on the western edge of Whiting, and Steiber Street was the heart of this new neighborhood. In exchange for moving out of Oklahoma, many of the property owners were given land in New Oklahoma to build a home. The New Oklahoma area had Indianapolis Boulevard as it western boundary; White Oak Avenue as its eastern boundary; Steiber Street as its northern boundary; and a set of railroad tracks as its southern boundary. Those tracks basically followed the course of the current day bicycle and pedestrian trail, and the overpass at Indianapolis Boulevard and New York Avenue.
While some Oklahoma residents moved to New Oklahoma, a few had their entire houses moved. Some of those houses were moved to Schrage Avenue, south of Indianapolis Boulevard, in 1899.
Property by property, Standard Oil took over Oklahoma. Saloonkeeper Harry Gordon, a native of Lithuania, was said to be the last holdout. Company executive William Burton, and real estate agent Charles Davidson, presented Gordon with a $4,000 check for his land. Paulina Gordon, Harry’s wife, backed out of the deal before the papers were signed. She had never seen a check before and didn’t believe it had any value. Burton sent Davidson to the bank. He returned with four thousand one dollar bills. Seeing the stack of cash, the Gordons readily signed. And with that, the colorful, violent, interesting, and dangerous neighborhood of Oklahoma, was no more.