Wine of the day

White - Yellow Tail Chardonay

Red - Ruffino Chanti

Sand Springs Station Story

On June 6, 2006, the Sand Springs Station Restaurant House opened at 28 E. Broadway to serve contemporary Italian cuisine with a “fresh twist” in an ambiance recalling the history of the McKinley Street corner of the Charles Page Memorial Triangle in downtown Sand Springs. The Kachel family had purchased the equipment from a previous restaurant there shortly after it closed in July 2005, and then went on to buy this historic two story 12,000 square feet building from the Sand Springs Home Trust in November 2005.

We then learned that Charles Page, oilman, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder of Sand Springs, built this building to house the offices of the Sand Springs Railway in 1925. Since he died in 1926 it would be one of the last buildings he constructed in this city. It not only housed his railroad’s office, but the space our restaurant now occupies was the Interurban Trolley Waiting Station and Soda Shoppe from early after its inception in 1912 to its final run to Tulsa in 1955.

Although many other businesses, such as a flower shop, a pool hall, clothing store, and an insurance office had existed in this building by 2006, we wished to restore a suggestion of the trolley’s waiting station as our decorative theme. Therefore, we stripped the newer ceilings away to reveal the original stamped tin-plated coverings and used them also as the facing on our new bar area near the back of the front dinning room. In there also around the walls we hung enlarged photographs of the trolley’s last trip with Sand Spring’s dignitaries and other pictures of that colorful trolley and of other old railroad trains. Continuing this motif in the second dining room we added a wooden curved and lighted structure overhead, paneled walls on both sides with paintings of Oklahoma countryside, and floor treatments painted and wallpapered to hint a wooden deck and a rug aisle way, all, to help diners imagine they are enjoying their meal while traveling on an antique railroad dinning car.

Fortunately, through a matching grant program from the Vision 2025 funds that the city was given to restore building facades, we were able to begin renovating the outsides of our building. We redid the brick pointing, replaced some windows, and purchased new awnings, all designed to recapture the earlier look and feel of the architecture. As we continue to develop other businesses and to restore the whole structure of this grand old building, both inside and outside, we hope to do it so that the Sand Springs Station adds aesthetic and historic appeal to the Charles Page Memorial Triangle area.