Tulsa first hit my radar when my local record store, Oak Cliff's Spinster Records, opened an outpost in Oklahoma's second-largest city last summer, just months after Dallas' Josey Records opened on Route 66 in Tulsa. Then a couple of trend-savvy friends spent a weekend in Tulsa and came back raving. Then I saw a guy in an Oak Cliff dive bar wearing a T-shirt that said:

Tulsa is the new

Tulsa.

OK, then. Tulsa it is. It's a 4 1/2-hour drive from Dallas, so my husband and I decided on a three-day weekend.

The verdict: Everything was a little better than we expected.

The pizza at Bohemian Pizza in the East Village was better than we expected. We caught a local band, Golden Ones, on the outdoor stage at Soul City Gastropub and Music House, and it was better than we expected, as were the tacos we ate there. A traveling exhibition of Cheech Marin's collection of Chicano art at the lovely Philbrook Museum of Art was an unexpected treat. (The museum's current exhibit is "Museum Confidential," a behind-the-scenes look at the museum, through May 6, 2018.) And we liked the city's vibe, which is equal parts cool and chill.

Even the kids dig it.

"One person I know moved to Hawaii and came back to Tulsa," says 22-year-old BB Conover, a clerk at Spinster Records, an attractive two-story shop in a burgeoning downtown historic district.

Boston Avenue United Methodist Church is one of Tulsa's best-known art deco buildings. (Sophia Dembling/Special Contributor)

Tulsa's historic buildings are among the city's attractions. Oil was discovered in Tulsa in 1901, and the city grew rich, fast. In the 1920s, moguls built magnificent art deco office buildings downtown that today are being restored and reborn, thanks to entrepreneurs and historic tax credits.

We checked into the Courtyard by Marriott in the 1922 Atlas Life Building. The building's namesake holds the globe atop the building's façade; on a neon sign; on a clock in the marble lobby; and on doorknobs on the seventh floor, which was preserved in its original state, with small offices converted to guest rooms. (Rooms on other floors are standard.)

Nearby, the opulent 1925 Mayo Hotel once hosted every celebrity who passed through Tulsa. But the hotel closed in 1981, and the building fell into dereliction and decay until 2001, when the Snyder family purchased it for $250,000. They refurbished the place from the ground up, rebuilding the grand staircase; refabricating exactly the elaborate details of the ballroom ("pigeons were living up here," says sales director Macy Synder-Amatucci); and restoring the building as a hotel and luxury residences, with a rooftop bar.

Both hotels are blocks from what until recently was called the Brady Arts District, after a prominent early businessman. But during recent controversies surrounding Confederate statues, business owners here rethought the name, since Wyatt Tate Brady was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1921, Tulsa experienced the worst racial violence in American history, which ultimately left 35 blocks of an affluent black neighborhood a charred ruins after looting and burning by white mobs. Historians believe nearly 300 people were killed.

The historic Cain's Ballroom dance hall and concert venue has walls lined with portraits of country greats, including Jimmy Dickens. (Sophia Dembling/Special Contributor)

Today, the newly renamed Tulsa Arts District is a compact, walkable district of restored buildings filled with shops and restaurants. We dined a couple of times at the spacious Prairie Brewpub, which has 20 of its own brews on tap, and treated ourselves to a jewel box of handcrafted chocolates at Glacier Confection. One night we caught some live music at Cain's Ballroom, a historic dance hall with walls lined with portraits of country greats. We didn't get to the Brady Theater, another historic downtown venue -- and yes, that name is under discussion, too. (Meanwhile, Brady Street was rebranded as M.B. Brady Street, after a Civil War photographer.)

We also spent hours at the Woody Guthrie Center, peering at all the artifacts and watching all the biographical videos about the iconic folk singer and activist. Look for the compilation of everyone from Annette Funicello to the Old Crow Medicine Show performing "This Land Is Your Land," to which an entire room is dedicated. (And good luck getting the song out of your head.)

The Tulsa Botanic Garden, which opened in 2015, is an opulent oasis on 170 acres. (Sophia Dembling/Special Contributor)

Across the street from the center, Guthrie Green hosts outdoor concerts and events. We didn't see a show there, but we did catch a bluegrass show at the spectacular Tulsa Botanic Garden, about 8 miles from downtown. This privately funded 170-acre oasis (60 acres of which will be formal gardens), which opened in 2015, suggests that Tulsa still has plenty of money and philanthropy.

And we explored the downtown architecture, admiring art deco details on buildings and popping in and out of opulent lobbies. The 1929 Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, perhaps Tulsa's best-known art deco masterpiece, is the thoroughly modern (for its time) vision of either architect Bruce Goff or his high school art teacher Adah Robinson, depending which side of a decades-long debate you fall on.

The Tulsa Foundation for Architecture has monthly walking tours of downtown; check out their new offices in a snazzy 1956 space pod of a building, formerly the Ponca City Savings and Loan. Tulsa's architecture bonanza didn't stop at the 1930s; there's lots of midcentury modern, and we also explored the kooky, modernistic 1960s campus of Oral Roberts University. Tulsa's most recent architectural coup is the gleaming BOK Center by prominent architect César Pelli.

We filled three days in Tulsa easily, and we expect we'll return sometime. We get it. Tulsa is cool, in its Oklahoma way. It's not Austin or Nashville, but it's definitely more than we expected.