Auctioning Off Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower

The auction scheduled to take place in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma in Tulsa on May 6 will hopefully be an end in the ongoing drama over the ownership and stewardship of the iconic Price Tower. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the 19-story tower with a tree-like structure, in which reinforced-concrete floors cantilever from a central service “trunk,” and wrapped it in copper louvers, copper parapets, and gold-tinted glass. Designed in 1952 for the oil company of Harold C. Price, Sr., the tower was completed in February 1956.

The drama over Price Tower began many decades later, in 2023, when Anthem and Cynthia Blanchard bought the building from its previous owner, the Price Tower Arts Center, for a token fee of just $10. Under their companies Copper Tree Inc. and Green Copper Holdings LLC, the Blanchards promised to invest $10 million to maintain and improve the building, a promise they failed to keep. Incurring around $2 million in debt, the Blanchards started selling off the Wright-designed furniture and other interior pieces in the building, which led the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy to sue the owners.

When we learned last August about the irresponsible actions of the Blanchards, who closed the hotel and office space in the building at the end of that month, the tower was set to go on the auction block in early October. We did not know at the time that McFarlin Building LLC, a Tulsa-based property developer, had agreed to buy the building from the Blanchards ahead of the auction. The company was able to stop the auction, and then in January of this year a county judge ruled that the $1.4 million sale of the building to McFarlin would go forward. With McFarlin's proven track record in the adaptive reuse of historic buildings and the law on its side, it seemed that the Price Tower would have a happy ending. But one day after the judge's ruling in January, Copper Tree and Green Copper Holdings filed for bankruptcy, effectively holding up the property in bankruptcy court. 

Now, qualified bidders have until April 28 to submit bids for all real estate, assets, and personal property associated with Price Tower, for the auction taking place on May 6. McFarlin Building placed a stalking horse bid of $1.4 million, matching their previous purchase price, though Cushman & Wakefield/Commercial Oklahoma, Inc., the broker for the auction, has placed a minimum bid of $1,539,286.04 and contends “the sale is expected to attract significant interest.”