For the second month in a row, the sale of Price Tower, the only skyscraper Frank Lloyd Wright ever built, has been postponed days before it was due to go to auction.
The tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, had been scheduled for auction from November 18 to 20 on Ten-X, a digital real estate auction platform that specializes in commercial properties. It was pulled from the sale on November 16.
Price Tower’s listing has since been removed from the Ten-X website. The Oklahoma-based broker connected with the listing did not respond to a request to comment.
The property, which has a starting price of $600,000, had previously been withdrawn from an October 7 to 9 auction. In that instance, the McFarlin Building Company, a Tulsa-based property developer, intervened with a legal notice claiming it had signed a purchase agreement to buy the tower for $1.3 million.
The tower’s removal from the auction is the latest twist in a long running saga. For decades, the Bartlesville landmark had been run by the Price Tower Arts Center, a local nonprofit which sometimes had to rely on the largesse of its board members to cover maintenance and operating costs.
Frank Lloyd Wright with a model of the Price Tower in Oklahoma, 1953. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images.
In 2023, the nonprofit sold Price Tower to Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, blockchain entrepreneurs, for a nominal fee. The couple promised to resolve the property’s $600,000 debt and secure $10 million to restore the property. The vision was to turn the 19-story skyscraper into a destination complete with a boutique hotel and high-end restaurants, one that fed into a broader project to build what Cynthia Blanchard called “Silicon Ranch,” a tech hub in the Ozark foothills.
None of this has come to fruition. The two restaurants that used roughly $35,000 in public development funds shuttered, investments have never materialized, and in August the building was closed and its tenants forced to relocate.
Earlier in the year, in a bid to cover costs, the Blanchards had attempted to sell off some the building’s unique furnishings to a mid-century design dealer in Dallas, Texas, a move that is prohibited under the terms of Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy’s preservation easement.
In August, the Conservancy filed a claim against Price Tower’s owners and in October the Blanchards responded with a suit of their own. They claimed the easement, which was agreed with Price Tower Arts Center in 2011, ceased to exist after they had purchased the building. The suit is seeking $75,000 in actual damages for the conservancy’s interference which has hampered its ability to sell the building.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy has labelled the 1952 building as “Endangered” on its website.