The Outsiders House Museum

Susan Eloise Hinton was 15 years old and a sophomore at Tulsa's Will Rogers High School when she began writing The Outsiders. She wrote in response to what she saw as a real social split at her school between the wealthy kids who lived in southeast Tulsa's old-money neighborhoods and the working-class kids from the west side and north Tulsa. The split was visible in clothing, cars, hair, language, and after-school activities, and the novel describes it with the precision of a participant-observer.

Hinton finished the manuscript at 16 and her best friend's mother — a literary agent's wife in New York — read it and helped get it to the agent. Viking Press published it in 1967 with Hinton's name printed as S.E. Hinton (her publishers reportedly suggested initials so male readers would not dismiss a book about teenage gang violence written by a teenage girl). She was 18. The book became an instant national success and is widely credited with founding the young-adult literary genre as a serious commercial category.

Hinton went on to write four more YA novels — That Was Then, This Is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), Tex (1979), and Taming the Star Runner (1988) — and several adult and children's books. All five YA novels are set in Tulsa and draw on the same urban geography that shaped The Outsiders. Hinton has lived almost her entire life in Tulsa and still resides in the city.

A librarian at the Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California wrote to Francis Ford Coppola in early 1980 to ask if he would consider directing a film of The Outsiders. The book was already a fifteen-year staple of California middle-school English curricula and her students were reportedly obsessed with it. Coppola, fresh off Apocalypse Now and looking for a smaller, character-driven project, said yes. He flew to Tulsa to scout locations with Hinton herself and committed to shooting the film entirely on location in the city.

Filming took place in spring 1982 over six weeks, with locations including the Curtis house (now the museum), the actual Will Rogers High School where Hinton had written the novel, multiple Tulsa neighborhoods, and Crutchfield Park (where the rumble scene was shot). The young cast — most of them between 17 and 23 at the time — lived in the Tulsa Excelsior Hotel during production and reportedly spent off-set hours in greaser-style gang roles to stay in character.

The film was released in March 1983 to mixed reviews but strong box office, particularly with the young-adult audience the novel had cultivated. It introduced essentially the entire "Brat Pack" generation of 1980s American film stars in a single cast. Multiple cast members — Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane — went on to careers that defined the next decade of American film.

By 2008, the actual Curtis brothers' house at 731 North St. Louis Avenue was condemned, weeds were growing through the porch, and the City of Tulsa had a demolition order pending. The lot had been bought and resold several times since the 1982 filming, and the building had not been seriously maintained for decades. North Tulsa had been struggling with disinvestment since the 1970s, and the immediate neighborhood around the house was full of similar vacant or condemned bungalows.

Danny Boy O'Connor — a founding member of the hip-hop group House of Pain ("Jump Around") and a longtime Outsiders fan — visited Tulsa in 2009 specifically to photograph the house and discovered it was about to be demolished. He committed on the spot to buying and restoring it. The purchase closed in 2016 after several years of negotiation and code work, and O'Connor and a small team began restoring the house to its 1982 film-set appearance.

The restoration was substantially complete in 2019. O'Connor sourced period-appropriate furniture and fixtures (some of it actually from the 1982 production, some of it carefully sourced from contemporaneous sources), refinished the original wood floors, and consulted with Coppola's production team for set photos to match the rooms exactly. Several cast members donated personal memorabilia from the production. The museum opened that year and operates as a nonprofit; O'Connor remains the curator.

The museum is small — the entire house is roughly 1,100 square feet — and is organized to walk visitors through the rooms exactly as they appear in the film. The kitchen, the brothers' bedroom, and the living room with the famous TV are the centerpiece spaces, each restored to the film-set state. Wall displays in each room include behind-the-scenes photographs, screenplay excerpts, and quotes from cast interviews about the specific scenes that were shot in that room.

Memorabilia displays include original screenplay copies (some annotated by cast members), costumes from the film, S.E. Hinton novel first editions (including a signed first edition), and donated personal items from cast and crew. A side room displays photographs of the entire cast and crew during production, organized by the Tulsa locations where the photos were taken.

The museum bookstore sells novel editions, the film's screenplay in book form, Outsiders-themed merchandise, and a small selection of related Tulsa books (S.E. Hinton's other novels, books on the 1980s Brat Pack era, Tulsa history). Profits from the bookstore go entirely back into museum operations.

The museum is open every Saturday from noon to 6pm with regular drop-in tours. Visits at other times are by appointment — contact the museum through outsidershouse.com. Admission is $10 for adults; kids under 12 are free. A full visit including the bookstore and reading the wall displays takes 45 to 75 minutes. Plan to spend time talking with O'Connor or other docents who staff the museum on Saturdays — they are uniformly enthusiastic and informative.

The house sits in a residential north Tulsa neighborhood and street parking is available. The neighborhood is not a tourist district — most visitors drive directly to the museum and leave — but the immediate block is safe and quiet. The museum has expanded onto adjacent lots with a small outdoor seating area and is planning additional buildings; the larger campus is intended to host pop-culture events and conferences in future years.

If you have time, several other Tulsa Outsiders filming locations are within a 10-minute drive: the actual Will Rogers High School where Hinton wrote the novel (which makes a brief appearance in the film), Crutchfield Park where the rumble scene was shot, and the Dingo Bar (now the Crystal Palace) where the cast's social scenes were filmed. The museum bookstore sells a free self-guided walking-tour map of all Tulsa Outsiders locations.