Bartlesville,Oklahoma doesn't have much going for it these days. A few Sonic drive thrus, a mall housing fifteen or so chain stores, and a Walmart with an extensive gun department.
But that wasn't always so. Bartlesville was a booming oil town back in the day thanks to Frank Phillips, a barber turned oil industrialist, who set up the headquarters of Phillips 66 Petroleum in this small ranching town north of Tulsa. My father and his six brothers and sisters grew up in Bartlesville where their father was a geologist at Phillips. That is why I visit this town of 30,000 people in the middle of the country at least once a year.
This past New Year's we stayed in a hotel downtown and it was the first time I really took note of what a ghost town Bartlesville really is. Most of the storefront windows were vacant, boarded up, or had a 'for sale' sign slapped on the door. Even the Phillips (now Conoco-Phillips) buildings seemed half in use.
But one building does stand out and that is the Price Tower designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's one and only skyscraper was commission by Harold C. Price (another oil industrialist who owned a pipeline business). The tower was completed in 1956 intended for mixed use as office space and residential apartments. Shooting up to the sky with green-tinted copper planes glittering in the sun, a lonesome vertical masterpiece among the flat prairie lands of Oklahoma, Wright called it "the tree that escaped the crowded forest".
If for some reason you are ever passing through Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the Price Tower is a sight worth seeing. It is also worth a look inside the building and meandering around the arts center located on the lower floors. Bartlesville has the highest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in the country as he designed several homes for the Price family in addition to the tower. Bartlesville, though a dying oil town, certainly has a unique place in the architectural history of America.
No comments:
Post a Comment