The Daycare at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building: What Remains of April 19

The America's Kids Daycare occupied the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb detonated outside the building at 9:02 a.m., killing 168 people, including 19 children in the daycare. Understanding what happened to that space, and what exists there now, requires distinguishing between the building's physical destruction and the institutional memory that replaced it.

The daycare itself did not survive as a historical site. The entire north face of the nine-story building collapsed inward. The daycare room, designed to hold up to 30 children, was on the second floor directly above the blast zone. Rescue workers recovered 15 of the 19 children who died in the daycare; four remain unaccounted for in the rubble. The children who survived were in other parts of the building or had been picked up by parents earlier that morning. This detail matters for visitors trying to understand the spatial relationship between the blast site and where harm occurred.

The Murrah Building itself was demolished in July 1995, 79 days after the bombing. The demolition was not incidental. It became a deliberate act of closure, attended by survivors and families of the deceased. The rubble was treated as evidence and carefully removed. No daycare building remains to visit.

What exists in its place is the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, which opened in April 2000. The memorial occupies the city block where the Murrah Building stood, bounded by NW 5th Street to the north, NW 6th Street to the south, Robinson Avenue to the east, and Harvey Avenue to the west. This is the actual footprint.

The memorial's design encodes the daycare's presence. The Reflecting Pool occupies the space where the building stood. On the south side, 168 empty bronze and glass chairs sit on a field of black granite. The 19 smallest chairs represent the children killed in the daycare, arranged in the same row. The chairs are not arranged by age or alphabetically but spatially, corresponding roughly to where victims were when the blast occurred. A visitor walking through the chairs encounters the physical scale of loss; each chair has a name engraved on its base. The children's names are: Brandon Bayless (age 2), Tevin Bradford (age 2), Gabreon Bruce (age 3), Jaci Rae Coyne (age 2), Kasandra Diane Gist (age 4), Ceara Nicole Gist (age 9 months), Alicia Chambers (age 3), Colton Wade Glover (age 3), Chase Smith (age 3), Clinton Wade Glover (age 3), Skylar Kaufman (age 3), Cooper Salvatore Props (age 3), Jill Marie Randolph (age 2), Kelcey Wafer (age 3), and Briana Nicole Williams (age 2). The four children whose remains were not recovered are also represented.

The museum, a separate structure on the eastern edge of the memorial grounds, operates daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with extended hours during summer. Admission is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and military, $10 for ages 6-17, and free for children under 6. The museum does not glorify or aestheticize the bombing. Its exhibits are archival: personal effects, news footage, audio recordings of survivors and first responders, medical records from the hospitals that received victims, and photographs of the building before and after the blast. One section reconstructs the daycare room itself, showing where toys, cribs, and teaching materials were positioned. This reconstruction is historically significant because it demonstrates how an ordinary institutional space became a crime scene. The daycare was not a special facility; it was a contracted federal employee benefit located in a federal building, serving families who worked downtown.

The memorial grounds include the Survivor Tree, an American elm that stood near the building and was scorched by the blast but survived. It has become a symbol of recovery within Oklahoma City's collective memory, though historians note that assigning metaphorical meaning to a tree can obscure the historical fact of the bombing itself. The tree is there; the metaphor is optional.

Several neighborhoods shape how visitors approach the memorial. Bricktown, immediately south and east, is a commercial district of restaurants and bars frequented by tourists. Many people visit the memorial as part of a downtown trip rather than as a pilgrimage. The Plaza District, to the northwest on NW 23rd Street, is where much of the city's creative class works; some galleries and studios opened after 1995 in deliberate acts of cultural recovery. Midtown, further north, contains museums and cultural institutions unrelated to the bombing but part of Oklahoma City's post-1995 reconstruction.

What distinguishes Oklahoma City's approach to the daycare's destruction is its refusal to leave the site as a ruin. The building was removed not to erase what happened but to make room for a design that honors specificity. The 19 smallest chairs exist because visitors should know that children died and should know their names. The museum's price point ($15) makes it accessible but not free; the paid admission signals that this is not entertainment.

A practical consideration for anyone visiting: the memorial is outdoors and unsheltered. The chairs and reflecting pool are exposed. Visitors should plan for weather, especially heat. The museum building itself is air-conditioned. The site's emotional intensity is not hypothetical; many visitors spend hours here. If you are visiting with young children, the smallest chairs may prompt questions. There is no standard answer to those questions; the memorial is built for families to make their own meaning.

The daycare itself is gone. What remains is a national memorial that chose to document loss precisely rather than abstractly. That choice is the historical inheritance of April 19.