About a year ago they opened Frank Lloyd Wright’s one and only skyscraper, The Price Tower to the public. This was met with a lot of media coverage and lots of excitement about this venerable old building that had been surrounded by a chain link fence for some time and left to rot. It is a small and claustrophobia inducing place. But I still like it.
I didn’t like the tour, which involved a lot of yelling not to touch the new drapes, not to step on the new carpet, and Don’t Take Any Photos! Not to mention that this highly promoted tour was limited to ten people, each tour took an hour, and there were only five tours a day. All that may have changed, but I doubt it.
It is still a damned cool building though. It has been converted into the most boring looking hotel rooms imaginable, which is funny since they should be stuffed to the gills with Frank Lloyd Wright stuff.
There is also a restaurant, The Copper, on the 14th and 15th floors near the top of The Price Tower. The Copper is an OK restaurant, but not exactly a great restaurant. It is Bartlesville, Oklahoma after all, so the bar is not really set all that high. There are lots of copper plates and interesting patterns from the original design, the newer additions try to look like Frank Lloyd Wright, but don’t quite make it. The chairs are actually comfortable one thing, something that could never be said for any of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original designs for the building. If you’ve ever watched Star Trek Deep Space Nine all of the Cardassian designs are lifted almost verbatim from The Price Tower. Nice friendly straight lines and hard angles.
To be honest I have never had dinner at The Copper, just lunch, which consists of overprice sandwiches and desserts. I had an eight dollar Angus hamburger with a side of baked potato salad, which was very good. The Wife had a tuna salad sandwich which was a disappointment after the sandwich she had the last time we were there. It is an unimaginative restaurant with black table clothes and square white plates. The waitstaff is dressed in all black as well. Again, there was a chance here to go all out and make it a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired restaurant, but I don’t know what the legalities of doing that would be. I’m sure that the people who own the rights to Frank Lloyd Wright don’t let just anyone crank out copies of his designs.
Still, The Copper at The Price Tower could be so much more than it is.
Having said that, I enjoyed riding up in the tiny Otis elevator that would have a hard time accommodating five people. The ride was smooth and silent, but it’s odd slanted hexagon shape did give it a kind of sci fi feeling. The building itself has all kinds of vanes and louvers protruding at odd places. All made of green stained copper of course. The windows are also tinted copper and when the light it right, the entire building seems to be made of metal, not metal and glass.
Bartlesville is an otherwise dull town, where The Price Tower stands out like the Pyramids at Giza. On our last visit to Bartlesville we passed a Long John Silvers restaurant, which proudly proclaimed on it’s markee, Voted The Best Seafood in Bartlesville. I think that says more about the town than anything else I can add.
