Wright House in Phoenix Is Sold After Fight for Preservation

The deal closed after at least one offer to buy the property had fallen through. Its former owners, Steve Sells and John Hoffman, principals at 8081 Meridian, a local development company, bought the property for $1.8 million in June and several times raised the price as the controversy over the potential demolition intensified.

The buyer’s identity has not been revealed; he requested anonymity as part of the transaction. He paid $2.387 million for the house, which Wright built in 1952 for his son and daughter-in-law, David and Gladys, according to Robert Joffe of Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty, who represented the sellers in the transaction.

Its latest asking price was $2.51 million. The owners said they had raised the price to offset the mounting costs of fighting attempts to have the house declared a landmark, which, in Arizona, would delay any demolition for three years.

A victory for preservationists around the country, the sale came about through the intercession of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a group that works to preserve the architect’s legacy. The sale unfolded in virtual secret; few people beyond the sellers, their agent, the buyer and officials at the conservancy were aware of its details.

The fight to save the house had galvanized preservationists and stirred spirited debates among City Council members over the value of preserving historically relevant structures versus the need to safeguard homeowners’ property rights.

The conservancy and other organizations petitioned the city in June to consider giving the house landmark status, after they learned of the former owners’ plans to split the lot to build the new homes. Three local government bodies approved the landmark designation, but the Council, which has the final say, postponed its vote twice, in part to give the parties more time to strike some type of compromise. There was also uncertainty over how some of its members would vote, given the homeowners’ lack of consent for the landmark process.

“If ever there was a case to balance private property rights versus the public good, to save something historically important to the cultural legacy of the city, this was it,” Larry Woodin, the president of the conservancy, said in an interview.

The latest agreement materialized over the span of two weeks, part of an effort by the conservancy to find a buyer or group of buyers for the property — and after the sellers had rejected prior offers.

Mayor Greg Stanton, who was among the most vocal proponents of landmark designation for the home, called the sale “an early Christmas present for the people of Phoenix and for the world.”

“This is a great piece of architecture, and we’re so proud and honored that it will be preserved for generations to come,” he added.

The house sits in the Arcadia neighborhood, in a lot overlooking Phoenix’s picturesque Camelback Mountains, which can be seen from most of its rooms. Its coiled design is similar to the one Wright used for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Though little known before this, it is regarded among experts as one of the most significant of Wright’s later works.

Four years ago, Wright’s granddaughters sold the house for $2.8 million to a buyer they thought would keep it and preserve it. In June, though, the house was sold again to 8081 Meridian. An appraisal ordered by the city estimated the home needed about $300,000 worth of restoration work.

A petition started by the conservancy gathered more than 28,000 signatures from supporters around the world, calling for the house to be saved.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Joffe said it was “the most fulfilling deal of my 28 years in real estate” because of the significance of the house.

An Arizona-based nonprofit organization being established with help from the conservancy will maintain and operate the house and oversee its restoration. The new owner will also ask the City Council to grant landmark status, said the conservancy’s executive director, Janet Halstead.

The goal is to make the house available for educational purposes on a limited basis — ushering in what Mr. Woodin described as “a new chapter in the life of this important and unique Frank Lloyd Wright building.”

About one in five buildings designed by Wright have been lost to natural disasters, neglect or the pressures of development. Since its incorporation in 1989, the conservancy has helped rescue a number of them.

Included are the Burton J. Westcott House in Springfield, Ohio, which Wright designed in 1906; the Goestsch-Winckler House, built in 1940 as part of an uncompleted cooperative community in Okemos, Mich.; and the Ennis House in Los Angeles, which Wright designed in 1923 and which was extensively damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

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Legislative Handcuffs Limit A.T.F.’s Ability to Fight Gun Crime

For example, under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. So while detectives on television tap a serial number into a computer and instantly identify the buyer of a firearm, the reality could not be more different.

When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens.

Advocates for increased gun regulation, however, contend that in a country plagued by gun violence, a central registry could help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and allow law enforcement officials to act more effectively to prevent gun crime.

As has been the case for decades, the A.T.F., the federal agency charged with enforcing gun laws and regulating the gun industry, is caught in the middle.

Law enforcement officials say that in theory, the A.T.F. could take a lead role in setting a national agenda for reducing gun crime, a goal that has gained renewed urgency with the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. But it is hampered, they say, by politically driven laws that make its job harder and by the ferocity of the debate over gun regulation.

“I think that they’ve really been muzzled over the last several years, at least, from doing their job effectively,” said Frederick H. Bealefeld III, a former police commissioner in Baltimore. “They’ve really kind of been the whipping agency, caught in the political turmoil of Washington on the gun issue.”

The bureau’s struggles are epitomized by its lack of a full-time director since Congress, prodded by the N.R.A., decided that the position should require Senate confirmation. That leadership vacuum, Mr. Bealefeld and others said, has inevitably depleted morale and kept the agency from developing a coherent agenda.

At a news conference last Wednesday, Mr. Obama called on the Senate to confirm a permanent director, saying lawmakers should “make this a priority early in the year.” But given the complicated politics, it may be difficult for the White House to get a director confirmed. Mr. Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, was unable to do so.

In 2010, Mr. Obama nominated Andrew Traver, who is now the head of the bureau’s Denver division, for the post. But Mr. Traver, whose candidacy is opposed by the N.R.A., has yet to have a hearing, and his nomination has languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senior Republican on the panel, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, has raised questions about Mr. Traver’s nomination, and his prospects for confirmation looked so dim that the White House told Democrats on the committee to make nominations for other posts a higher priority, according to a Senate Democratic aide.

Erica Goode reported from Martinsburg, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington. Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington.

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Bloomberg Vows Stiffer Fight to Overhaul U.S. Gun Laws

The message is inevitably the same: A police officer has been shot on the streets of New York.

“I just gag,” Mr. Bloomberg said, recalling his feeling of dread. “Chances are I’m out of bed, into the bathroom, get some clothes on and off to a hospital.”

He races to get there, determined to arrive ahead of the family, he said, “so I can tell them that their son or daughter is not coming home.”

Ask Mr. Bloomberg about firearms, and his usual stoic facade falls away, revealing anger and exasperation born of years of witnessing the blood and tears that can flow from gun violence.

Now, furious at the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and frustrated by inaction in Congress, Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview this week that he would ratchet up his fight to overhaul gun laws, drawing on his considerable political and finance resources to bring about change.

One of the world’s wealthiest men, Mr. Bloomberg plans to spend millions of dollars over the next two years to aid political candidates willing to oppose the gun lobby. He said he would not wait until 2014: the mayor’s “super PAC” is already looking at special elections next year, including governor’s races and an open House seat in Illinois.

Within days of the Newtown shootings, Mr. Bloomberg was on the phone with conservative senators, urging them to change their views. To his surprise, he said, some were willing to consider it.

“You could hear in their voice, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” he said.

The mayor plans an advertising campaign featuring Hollywood stars. And he has spoken with the White House, conferring with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. about the presidential task force on gun policy that Mr. Biden will lead.

“I’m in the enviable position of knowing there’s a need and having the wherewithal to do things, and the credibility to get other people to do it, as well,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Even so, the mayor is looking to move fast, aware that public outrage can fade quickly. “Whether this lasts or not, I don’t know,” he conceded, referring to the mood for change. “Some of my friends say, ‘You’re not going to get this done.’ ”

The latest chapter in the mayor’s gun crusade began a few minutes before 11 a.m. last Friday, when Mr. Bloomberg, leaving a meeting with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Manhattan, glanced at his iPhone. A CNN news alert flashed across the screen: Students at an elementary school in Connecticut had been shot.

“Another disaster,” Mr. Bloomberg remembered thinking.

Three miles downtown, at City Hall, the mayor’s advisers began drafting a statement, but decided to delay its release until after President Obama had spoken. Mr. Bloomberg, aides said, wanted to see if the president would call for action — and to criticize him if he did not.

The mayor’s statement, issued just after 4 p.m., was blunt. “President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote, adding, “What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress.”

The goal was to put immediate pressure on Washington for change. “The Democrats were unwilling to do it, and the Republicans didn’t want to,” said Howard Wolfson, the mayor’s chief communications strategist.

Mr. Bloomberg, meanwhile, took to the phones, calling members of Congress to urge the passage of an assault-weapons ban. To prepare his pitch, he instructed aides to find out how many Americans had been killed by guns since the Arizona shootings in 2011, when Mr. Obama last promised changes in the firearm laws. By Saturday, the mayor was on his private jet to Washington to push his case in an interview on “Meet the Press.”

It was a hectic weekend, and the culmination of six years of work by Mr. Bloomberg, who founded his national coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in 2006, galvanized by a series of grisly police shootings in New York.

In 2005, weeks after being elected to a second term, the mayor found himself waiting for hours in an emergency room as doctors tried in vain to save the life of a police officer, Dillon Stewart, who had been shot in a car chase in Brooklyn.

Officer Stewart had been wearing a gun-resistant vest, but the bullet pierced his skin a few millimeters from the armor. At the hospital, detectives examined the vest in front of the mayor; when they pressed the vest with their hands, Mr. Bloomberg could see blood rise to the surface.

The mayor was angry that New York’s gun laws, among the strictest in the country, did little to protect against the use of guns bought illegally in other states. In his inaugural speech on New Year’s Day 2006, he pledged to curb “these instruments of death,” although, at the time, the gun-control movement was at a standstill.

“Virtually nothing was being said in Congress by some of the strongest allies; they basically had walked away from the issue,” said Robert Walker, who served as president of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the forerunner to the Brady Center, in the late 1990s. Mr. Bloomberg, he said, “filled the void at a time when it really needed to be filled.”

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