510 Dewey Ave., Bartlesville, Oklahoma. County/parish: Washington.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places September 13, 1974. NRIS 74001670.
1 contributing building.
The Price Tower is a nineteen-story, 221-foot-high (67 m) tower at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States. One of the few skyscrapers designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Price Tower is derived from a 1929 proposal for apartment buildings in New York City. Harold C. Price Sr., the head of the pipeline-construction firm H. C. Price Company, commissioned the Price Tower. The building was widely discussed when it was completed in 1956. In addition, the Price Tower received the American Institute of Architects' Twenty-five Year Award in 1983, and it has also been designated as a National Historic Landmark.
By the 1950s, the H. C. Price Company wanted to develop a modern headquarters in Bartlesville, and Harold Price hired Wright to design a headquarters for his company in 1952. Groundbreaking took place on November 13, 1953, and a topping out ceremony took place in March 1955. The Price Tower opened on February 10, 1956, attracting thousands of sightseers. The Price Company sold the tower in 1981 to Phillips Petroleum, which occupied the tower's offices until the mid-1980s. Phillips donated the structure to the Price Tower Arts Center (PTAC) in 2001. The arts center subsequently converted part of the building into a museum, opening a boutique hotel and restaurant on the upper stories. The Price Tower was sold in 2023 and closed the next year following financial issues and legal disputes. It was resold in 2025 to McFarlin Building LLC.
As built, the Price Tower had about 42,000 square feet (3,900 m2) of rentable space, split across one residential and three office quadrants. The floor plan is laid out on a grid of parallelograms with 30-60-90 triangles, arranged around a pinwheel-shaped structural core with four piers. The facade includes embossed copper spandrels and louvers, tinted glass windows, and poured stucco surfaces. The reinforced-concrete floors are cantilevered outward from the structural core. Initially, the residential and office portions of the building were accessed by different lobbies and elevators. The top three stories originally functioned as a penthouse apartment and office for the Price family. Although the exterior has remained intact over the years, the apartments have been converted to offices.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/86512318