Downtown Elk City is a compact main street of restored brick-front commercial buildings from the early 20th century. The town grew rapidly after the first oil wells were drilled in the Anadarko Basin in the early 1900s, and the prosperity is visible in the scale and ambition of the commercial buildings from that era. Not everything has been restored, and some storefronts are empty, but the bones of a prosperous early oil town are clearly legible.
The downtown has a handful of local restaurants, a couple of antique shops, and the kind of small-town commercial strip that has become rare in the age of highway retail parks. It's worth a 30-minute walk even if you're just stopping for gas — the combination of Route 66 heritage and oil-boom architecture is more interesting than most of what you'll find on I-40.