Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper faces uncertain prospects
By Annie Aguiar
BARTLESVILLE, Okla. — Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper is just 19 stories, but even 70 years after it was built, Price Tower sits higher than most buildings in this city, and the view from the top still stretches to the horizon where the rolling prairie starts to take shape.
The tower is a landmark in Bartlesville, and a rarity in the architect’s portfolio. Designed by Wright to resemble a tree, with green, oxidized copper paneling, it’s featured on a mural nearby that depicts bison, an oil well and other anchors of the city’s heritage.
But the tower is now in trouble.
Once a buzzy hub of business life, and briefly occupied by Phillips Petroleum, the oil company that has long called Bartlesville home, it has struggled for many years to find an anchor tenant. It was reinvented as a nonprofit arts center in 2001 and soon added a boutique hotel and restaurant, but its major benefactor, former Phillips chief executive C.J. Silas, also known as Pete, died a decade ago.
Facing a financial crisis, the nonprofit organization turned last year to a married pair of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, who presented a bold plan to revive Wright’s masterwork. They proposed that a group led by Cynthia Blanchard would buy the building, renovate it and make it the launchpad for a rethinking of Bartlesville as “Silicon Ranch,” a new hub for technology startups drawn by Oklahoma’s lower cost of living.
“The vision was to hopefully create an incubator, similar to what Tulsa is doing, that used Price Tower as the apex of the attraction for young tech entrepreneurs,” said Blanchard, the chief executive of Copper Tree Group, the entity that bought the building through a subsidiary.
The sale price was only $10, but Bartlesville officials were enthused by Blanchard’s promise to settle the building’s outstanding debt and to spend $10 million on improvements to the building, a national historic landmark. There was even going to be a new upscale restaurant, called Sinatra’s.
“It seemed like there was a hero there,” said Scott Perkins, a former curator of Price Tower’s museum collection and now a official at Fallingwater, the home that is perhaps Wright’s most famous creation.
After nearly two years, though, the $10 million has not materialized. The new owners have sold some one-of-a-kind furnishings that Wright designed for the building. And the building itself is up for sale, listed on a commercial real estate auction website next to hollowed out strip malls and an empty Burger King.
Blanchard said she underestimated the challenge of profitably operating the tower and that selling some of the furnishings was necessary to meet expenses.
“We have done nothing illegal or nothing wrong,” she said of the Copper Tree Group’s handling of the building. “We’ve tried to do everything with the utmost transparency and professionalism.”
That rationale has done little to assuage preservationists who have worked for decades to protect the building as part of Wright’s legacy. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which has a preservation easement on the property, is working to block any further sale of the furnishings by filing liens against Blanchard’s company.
“Under the terms of the easement, they are not to sell easement-protected items without our consent,” said Barbara Gordon, the executive director of the conservancy.
For some Bartlesville residents who see the tower as the town’s centerpiece, it has been disappointing to watch a rescue effort unveiled with such optimism dissolve with such speed.
“My sweet, 88-year-old mom is like, ‘I wish I could win the lottery and buy the tower,’” said Maria Swindell Gus, the tourism director for Bartlesville. “I’ve heard that from a lot of people.”
‘Upraised hand’
Skyscrapers were never really a core part of Wright’s vision. For his mentor, Louis Sullivan? Yes. But Wright was known for low-lying houses that sunk into their natural environments.
His design for a skyscraper with copper panels and single-pane glass windows that maximize natural light was intended to be part of a series of towers to be built in New York in the 1920s. But the Depression intervened and the design lay dormant for decades until Wright was approached in 1952 by Harold Charles Price, a welder who had applied his skills to pipeline construction and rode them to success as Bartlesville’s oil fortunes bloomed.
Those oil fortunes began with the Phillips brothers, who drilled their first successful well outside the city in 1905. Their company would later become two companies, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, and each would move their headquarters to Houston. But enough business operations remained to make those two companies Bartlesville’s top employers, even today.
The idea to get Wright involved in a new office building for the H.C. Price Co. is credited to one of Price’s sons, Joe, who had studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma. He thought it would be great for Price to bring the one-of-a-kind Wright building to the city as a gesture that the company was giving something back.
Wright, then in his mid-80s, saw the project as an opportunity to express his mature architectural vision, David De Long, a Wright expert, wrote in a 1982 study of the tower’s interior.
Wright, holistic in his approach, viewed exterior and interior as a whole, and spent time designing the offices and other spaces as well as the furnishings. It made for an odd office building, with few right angles. Wright thought a variety of angles encouraged more flexible human movement. Some of Wright’s furniture — chairs, desks, stools and tables — took on the same angled forms as the building.
At the building’s 1956 dedication, Wright spoke of the tower as an “upraised hand on the prairie,” as “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.”
“Now the skyscraper comes into its own,” he said, “on the rolling plains of Oklahoma.”
When the Price company relocated to Dallas in 1981, the tower was sold to Phillips, which briefly used it for office space and storage. When the company’s need for it diminished, the building sat vacant for years before local organizers led by Silas, the former Phillips chief executive, and his wife, Theo, drove an effort to repurpose it as an arts hub for the city. Despite its small size, Bartlesville, population 37,795, has long had a certain cosmopolitan flair, with a ballet company and an annual Mozart festival, in addition to its highest-profile cultural icon, the Price Tower.
In 2001, the Phillips company donated the building to the nonprofit organization known as the Price Tower Arts Center and the building soon featured a 21-room boutique hotel and the Copper Restaurant + Bar. Guests at the hotel were invited to “spend a night with Frank Lloyd Wright” and take in art exhibitions and installations that discussed the architect’s vision for the building.
In 2011, during a period when the building was seeking recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Wright conservancy was given a preservation easement on the property, empowering it to review changes in the building’s design. And when the budget did not balance in a given year, the Silases were there to close the gaps.
But after Pete Silas died in 2014 and Theo Silas in 2017, the nonprofit lost a major source of revenue and had to dip deeper and deeper into its reserves. Brad Doenges, who became the chair of the organization in 2017, said that last year, when the building was sold to the group led by Cynthia Blanchard, the only other option beyond selling was bankruptcy.
‘History meets the future’
Cynthia Blanchard was raised in Dewey, Oklahoma, about a 10-minute drive down Route 123 to Bartlesville and remembers going to Price Tower on occasion while growing up. But she said she didn’t fully appreciate the building until she was an adult, visiting home.
“It’s just a special place,” she said. “People fall in love with it.”
Cynthia Blanchard and her husband, Anthem, met in New Orleans in 2004. She was working in music publishing and had once been a background singer on a Reba McEntire album. He had been raised in New Orleans, the son of James U. Blanchard III, a wealthy pioneering seller of gold and other precious metals.
Anthem Blanchard also went into the precious metals trade, then pivoted to cryptocurrency entrepreneurship with a series of companies he started that included HeraSoft, a blockchain-based cybersecurity technology company that he co-founded with Cynthia Blanchard. When the COVID lockdown began several years ago, the Blanchards relocated to Bartlesville to be closer to Cynthia Blanchard’s parents, and decided to anchor HeraSoft in Bartlesville’s old, historic Washington County Courthouse.
In 2023, as the tower’s woes deepened, they were encouraged by friends with an office in the building to consider acquiring it. The nonprofit was open to the idea.
Under the sale agreement, the real estate subsidiary company of the Copper Tree Group led by Cynthia Blanchard agreed to assume a standing $600,000 loan that had been taken out by a member of the nonprofit board to cover operating costs.
Blanchard said her husband helped her think through how to rejuvenate Price Tower but never had a formal role and is not part of the Copper Tree Group. The plan the company put forward included a suite of revenue-generating ideas, including a new restaurant, a private membership club and a line of marketable non-fungible tokens based on the tower.
The Bartlesville Development Authority chipped in, providing $88,000 to help kick-start the two restaurants — Sinatra’s, which changed its name to WrightSteak after a trademark dispute, and a downstairs spot called Love 66 Bistro.
The new plan also came with an inspiring motto: “Where History Meets the Future.”
Little of this would ultimately materialize.
Blanchard says the $10 million was always “more of a wish list,” a combination of an expected $5 million loan that fell through and theoretical funding from state tax credits. She argued that the nonprofit had pressured her into closing on the sale too soon, before the finances were fully set; Doenges denied that characterization.
For sale
In August, the Copper Tree Group laid off the majority of the building’s staff, closed it to the public and told tenants they needed to leave by the end of the month.
HeraSoft, the company the Blanchards founded and brought to Bartlesville, has shut down and Anthem Blanchard was recently accused in a civil case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors in the company of more than $5 million. He has denied wrongdoing.
Cynthia Blanchard said she is no longer affiliated with HeraSoft, and does not anticipate the case will have any effect on the sale of the building.
The tower, which was appraised to be worth $6.2 million last year, is now listed for sale on an online auction site. The starting bid is $600,000.