Deep Deuce

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Deep Deuce Historic neighborhood is a district in Downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It consists mostly of low rise apartment buildings and various formerly vacant mixed-use buildings and shops.

Located a few blocks north of Bricktown, Deep Deuce was the largest African American downtown neighborhood in Oklahoma City in the 1940s and 1950s, and was a regional center of jazz music and black culture and commerce, however, today little of the neighborhood's original character remains. Much of the neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for I-235 in the 1960s, but the current downtown boom and renaissance has made the area attractive to developers once again.

It should be noted that African American writer Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, wrote a poem in tribute to the Deep Deuce (incidentally he held a great passion for it as it housed his first job) in 1953. The poem is entitled "Deep Second" and can be found in the posthumous book Trading Twelves.