The vexed Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is now the subject of two lawsuits involving the current owners of the building, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and a Tulsa-based company that specialises in revitalising historic structures. As a result, an auction to sell Wright’s only skyscraper has been delayed until 18-20 November. The starting bid remains at $600,000, although local records indicate that the building is valued at $6.2m, according to Andy Dossett of the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.
The tower’s owners since March 2023 have been a local couple named Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard through their company Copper Tree. They bought it for a token $10, promising to pay down its $600,000 debt and invest $10m into restoring it and transforming it into a tech hub. Less than a year later, after the Blanchards’ blockchain-based, anti-ransomware and gold-backed crypto companies became insolvent, they started selling off the furniture that Wright had designed specifically for the Price Tower—going against an easement held by the architect’s conservancy. (The skyscraper’s debt has quadrupled to $2m since the Blanchards took over.)
The latest lawsuit, filed on 21 October by Cynthia Blanchard and Copper Tree against Wright’s conservancy, alleges that the easement has been void since 2023 and the conservancy’s meddling has affected the owners’ ability to sell the Price Tower. The suit seeks an injunction against the conservancy as well as at least $75,000 in damages. In response, Wright’s conservancy has said that it “strongly objects to the baseless claims of the lawsuit filed against it” and “stands by the terms of its easement”.
Coincidentally, less than a month prior, Anthem Blanchard had been charged with defrauding investors in his company Anthem Holdings of more than $5m. His wife was president of the company at the time, and the couple allegedly gave investors equity in the Price Tower to cover Anthem Holdings’ debt.
The second lawsuit related to the skyscraper, dating to 27 September, was filed against Copper Tree by the McFarlin Building company, alleging that Cynthia Blanchard had signed a contract selling the Price Tower to the company in May for $1.4m. McFarlin, which owns and has revitalised a number of historic properties in the region, has promised to invest $10m in restoring the Price Tower as its (potential) future owner.
The 19-storey Price Tower, located about 45 miles north of Tulsa, is one of three buildings the architect designed in Oklahoma. It was completed in 1956 as the corporate headquarters of the energy firm H.C. Price Company. It also included apartments, shops and other office spaces. The design was inspired by a lone tree, earning the tower the nickname “the tree that escaped the crowded forest”. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2007. A failed bid for Unesco World Heritage status in 2015 precipitated the building’s economic woes, ultimately leading to its sale to the Blanchards eight years later in hopes that they would restore it to its former glory.
The Price Tower has been empty since 1 September, after the last of its tenants vacated before the building could hit the auction block. Dossett, the local journalist, has estimated that the tower could sell at auction for $4m, netting the Blanchards a $2m profit.
