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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Port Strike Averted After Partial Deal With Dockworkers Union

The mediator said the two sides had agreed to extend the existing contract by 30 days, to Jan. 28, to give them time to try to reach an agreement on the remaining issues, including what the companies say are antiquated work rules. Late Friday, the two sides issued a new announcement, saying they had agreed to extend the contract an additional week, to Feb. 6, creating a new potential strike deadline.

The partial agreement means that the union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, will not carry out its threat to have 14,500 dockworkers go on strike this Sunday at 14 ports along the East and Gulf Coasts.

In a statement on Friday, George H. Cohen, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, said the two sides had reached an agreement in principle on a particularly contentious issue, known as container royalty payments.

The shipping companies share those payments with union members for each ton of cargo handled.

The union had for months denounced the companies’ proposal to freeze those payments for current longshoremen and eliminate them for future employees. No details about the agreement were disclosed.

“What I can report is that the agreement on this important subject represents a major positive step toward achieving an overall collective bargaining agreement,” Mr. Cohen said. “While some significant issues remain, I am cautiously optimistic that they can be resolved in the 30-day extension period.”

After the talks broke off on Dec. 18, Mr. Cohen persuaded the two sides to return this week for a last-minute round of bargaining. They have been negotiating on and off since March.

The United States Maritime Alliance, a group of shipping companies and terminal owners, said it paid $211 million in container royalties to the dockworkers last year, averaging $15,500 for each eligible union member.

James A. Capo, the alliance’s chairman, said the royalty payments amounted to $10 an hour on top of what he said were already generous wages. “This issue seems to have dwarfed anything else,” Mr. Capo said in an interview this week.

But in the days before the strike deadline, Harold J. Daggett, the union’s president, said, “We have repeatedly asked them to leave this item alone.”

The maritime alliance, known as USMX, said the longshoremen earned $124,000 a year on average in wages and benefits, including the royalty payments. Union officials said those figures were exaggerated and put average annual wages at $75,000 before benefits, for what they described as dangerous jobs moving heavy cargo. Under the current contract, most longshoremen earn $32 an hour.

The container payments were created in the 1960s to compensate the longshoremen because many were losing their jobs as seaports embraced automation and the use of standardized, 40-foot-long containers to ship goods.

Largely as a result of those trends, the number of longshoremen employed in the Port of New York and New Jersey, the busiest East Coast port, has dropped to 3,500 from 35,000 in the 1960s.

The shipping companies view the royalty payments as a relic of decades past, intended for longshoremen who worked in the 1960s and 1970s. But the union still sees the payments as a core part of wages and as an important way to share productivity gains with members. The payments come to $4.85 a ton, the union said.

As the strike deadline approached, Mr. Daggett said, “USMX seems intent on gutting a provision of our master contract that I.L.A. members fought and sacrificed for years to achieve.”

Representatives of the maritime alliance and shipping companies declined to discuss the agreement on the royalty payments or other aspects of the talks, saying that Mr. Cohen had urged the two sides not to talk to the news media.

Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, applauded the announcement but said a contract extension did not provide the level of certainty that retailers and other industries were looking for to ensure that their goods would continue to pass through the ports. “We welcome today’s news that a contract extension has been reached,” he said in a statement. “However, we continue to urge both parties to remain at the negotiating table until a long-term contract agreement is finalized.”

Mr. Shay’s federation and more than 100 other business groups wrote to President Obama last week, urging him to invoke his emergency powers under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to prevent a strike. Labor experts said Mr. Obama would have been caught between fears that a strike would damage the already-fragile economy and worries that blocking it would anger allies in the labor movement.

In addition to reaching a master contract for the 14 ports, the two sides need to negotiate individual agreements for the ports, many of which involve work rules that the shipping companies are eager to change, calling them inefficient and costly.

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Ravens 33, Giants 14: After Another Blowout, Giants’ Playoff Hopes Teeter

Coughlin surely was not alone Sunday. Three weeks ago, the Giants (8-7) were a first-place team. They were a force in the N.F.C. They were a legitimate threat to repeat as Super Bowl champions.

Now, after another disastrous performance and another blowout loss, they are on the verge of being irrelevant. The Ravens (10-5) throttled them, 33-14, embarrassing the Giants and sending them to the precipice of elimination. If the Giants sneak into the postseason, they will need a victory next week against Philadelphia and help from a handful of other hopefuls.

Of course, at this point it is difficult to imagine the Giants beating the sad-sack Eagles anyway — and Coughlin described the playoffs as “very remote right now.”Over the last two weeks, the Giants’ offense has been nonexistent, their defense has been constantly punctured and they have been outscored by 67-14.

“What has happened over the last couple of weeks has been very difficult to explain,” Coughlin said. “I have no explanation for why we’re in the position we’re in.”

Through it all, the Giants’ players and coaches have frequently talked about how they are reassured by the fact that they have been here before, ostensibly referring to their late-season resurgence in 2011 and subsequent run to the Super Bowl title. In truth, Sunday’s performance was more reminiscent of 2004 — when the Giants were also blasted by the Ravens here, 37-14, on their way to a 6-10 record.

That season was Coughlin’s first with the Giants and it seems difficult to think of a more disappointing sequence for the Giants since then. Yes, there have been swoons — with Coughlin’s teams, that happens often — but the Giants have bordered on noncompetitive the last two games, a damning reality considering the circumstances and the stakes.

“We knew we had to play our best football at the end of the season to get into the playoffs and we haven’t done that,” said Eli Manning, the team’s beleaguered quarterback.

He added: “I think it’s shocking. It’s one thing to lose. To not give yourself a chance” can “be confusing.”

On Sunday, the Giants allowed the Ravens to rack up 533 total yards. Flacco passed for 309 yards and 2 touchdowns, while Ray Rice and Bernard Pierce combined to rush for 230 yards. Baltimore converted on a staggering 11 of 18 third downs, many of them seemingly by using a simple strategy: find cornerback Corey Webster and throw in his direction.

Webster, an eight-year veteran, has had an erratic season but has never been exposed quite as badly as he was on Sunday. Flacco burned him for a 43-yard pass to Torrey Smith and a 36-yard pass to Pitta, not to mention two other downfield plays in which Webster was called for pass interference. At times, it seemed like he could do nothing right.

That was a common problem for the Giants, though. Manning led them on their December run last season with pinpoint passing in high-pressure moments, but he has been inconsistent — if not downright awful — in this season’s collapse. One week after passing for just 161 yards (to go with two interceptions), he mustered just 150 and a quarterback rating of 78.0. To be fair, Manning also spent much of his time trying to avoid the Ravens’ behemoth linemen, who were constantly chasing him in the backfield. Manning was sacked three times and knocked down nine times, leaving his uniform streaked with mud.

Flacco’s jersey, on the other hand, looked as if it was still starched from the dry cleaner’s. Perry Fewell, the Giants’ defensive coordinator, often had the Giants in a new 4-4-3 formation, with four linebackers and three defensive backs on the field, and it was wholly ineffective. If 16 weeks into the season seemed like an odd time to go with an unfamiliar strategy, it was, perhaps, mitigated by the fact that the Giants were battling injuries; both defensive end Justin Tuck and safety Kenny Phillips were inactive for the game.

Still, words to describe this season’s swoon were hard to come by. “It’s kind of hard for me to describe anything right now,” Chris Canty said. “I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how we got here.”

Whatever formation a team uses, the importance of tackling remains a basic skill in the N.F.L., and the Giants continued to be poor at bringing down ball carriers. In the days leading up to the game, the players and coaches bemoaned 18 missed tackles against the Falcons and vowed things would be different this week. When Will Hill and Stevie Brown both dived — and came up empty — as Rice zoomed past them for a 27-yard touchdown late in the second quarter, it seemed as if the only difference was that this week the black jerseys that the Giants couldn’t tackle had purple piping instead of red.

There were other mental miscues, too. Penalties doomed the Giants in a bad loss to the Redskins earlier this month and Coughlin hammered his players afterward about how costly unforced errors can be.

One can only imagine what Coughlin said at halftime Sunday, then, after watching his team have Ahmad Bradshaw’s 13-yard run brought back because of a hold on Chris Snee, and Domenik Hixon’s long completion negated because Hixon blatantly pushed off before catching the pass. In a fitting ignominy, the Giants couldn’t even defend a kneel-down cleanly; they were flagged for having 12 men on the field on the final play of the first half when the Ravens were simply trying to run out the clock.

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White House Memo: President Obama Facing Critical Choice After Newtown Shooting

Should he invest his energy and the stature he won with his re-election last month in a fight he may believe in but is not sure he can actually win? And with his last election now behind him, is he willing or even able to shift the dynamics in Washington to make such fights winnable?

To his core supporters, this is a moment that will define what a second-term Obama presidency will look like — whether it will be closer to the soaring aspirations that set liberal hearts aflutter in 2008 or more like the back-room deal making that characterized the four years that followed. Advocates on the left have long lamented that Mr. Obama was too quick to compromise, even as those on the right see him as a champion of a radical agenda.

From his point of view, Mr. Obama has been pragmatic, making cleareyed if cold assessments about when the votes were there and when they were not. Mr. Obama does not accept the notion that he has not pursued goals that seemed hard to achieve, most notably the historic health care program he pushed through. The economic crisis invariably forced other priorities onto the shelf.

But with the election over, outside events have now presented Mr. Obama with a series of decisions. Vote counts might suggest that he is still a long way from passing significant legislation on climate change, immigration and gun control. But Hurricane Sandy, last month’s Latino turnout for Democrats and now the Newtown shootings have also given him openings to make new arguments.

The developments in his fiscal negotiations with Republicans, overshadowed momentarily by the gun control debate, underscore the same tension. After agreeing to renew Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy in his first term, Mr. Obama has stood firm against it on the eve of his second and forced Republicans to accept raising rates on high income. But he compromised this week by agreeing to exempt many of those he has deemed wealthy and faces a test on whether he will stick to that even as House Republicans readied an alternative proposal.

Although he has spoken out for gun control without putting muscle into it before, his emotional speech at a memorial service in Newtown on Sunday declaring that there was no longer any “excuse for inaction” suggested that this time may be different. The pressure is high from pundits who compared the speech to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and suggested that Newtown may be what Birmingham was to John F. Kennedy in inspiring civil rights action.

“This moment is so pain-filled and there is such a desire — I think you can feel it building — to move forward in a common-sense way that he sees the imperative,” said Melody Barnes, the president’s former domestic policy adviser. “I’ve looked at the pictures of his face, and I think he sees that there’s no other course than to move forward. The situation demands it.”

Yet the normally sure-footed White House has seemed uncertain how far the president intends to go. Aides who normally offer expansive explanations of Mr. Obama’s thinking have declined to return phone calls. On Monday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, generally stuck to repeating the president’s words from his speech to avoid boxing him in, and he tamped down expectations of instant action by using the phrase “in coming weeks” 16 times.

Then, later in the day, the White House confirmed that Mr. Obama had met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and three cabinet secretaries to discuss gun control and other responses to the tragedy, but declined to provide details. Even the simple question of whether the president put Mr. Biden in charge of developing a response went unanswered by a half-dozen White House aides questioned on Tuesday. (The president planned to announce Mr. Biden's assignment on Wednesday morning.)

The White House opened the window a little on Tuesday, hinting at the kinds of gun measures Mr. Obama would embrace. In the past, he has endorsed the reinstatement of an expired ban on assault weapons, but this time, Mr. Carney said the president would be “actively supportive” of a new legislative effort. The president will also support reversing the exemption from background checks for gun show purchases in certain circumstances and “potentially” limits on high-capacity ammunition clips of the sort used in Newtown, Mr. Carney said.

But Mr. Carney said the president hoped to forge a broader response, including looking at mental health, education and cultural issues.

These decisions are made on a scale of trade-offs that may be unique to the White House. President Bill Clinton made big pushes in his early days for priorities that did not have the votes, or that helped cost Democrats control of Congress in his first midterm election, including the assault weapon ban that later expired and left the party feeling burned for nearly two decades. Then Mr. Clinton adjusted and focused more on making incremental progress toward his goals.

President George W. Bush scorned what he considered Mr. Clinton’s “small ball” approach and prided himself on bold initiatives like cutting taxes, remaking education, expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs and combating AIDS in Africa. But by his second term, he pursued big goals like overhauling Social Security and immigration only to lose.

“There certainly can be a cost to it,” said Peter Wehner, an adviser to Mr. Bush who worked for Mitt Romney this year. “You can fight for something and lose and be a weakened figure. On the other hand, sometimes there’s honor in loss. You may lose but in the process you advance a cause in the eyes of history.”

Mr. Wehner and other conservatives consider the groundswell for gun control to be understandable but more a symbolic gesture than an effective response. But he said Mr. Obama had been smart about picking the terrain he fought on. “He has waited until the stars aligned before he acted,” he said.

In the end, the stars have not aligned before for Obama priorities like legislation on climate change and immigration. He took office amid the worst economic crisis in generations and pursued a historic health coverage expansion that had eluded his predecessors. By the time he pushed that through, enacted a stimulus package, toughened Wall Street regulations and lifted limits on gays in the military, he had lost the House and did not think the new Republican majority would agree to gun legislation.

“The president always had a personal commitment to the issue,” said Phil Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama’s first legislative affairs director. “But given the crisis he faced when he first took office, there’s only so much capacity in the system to move his agenda.”

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Memo From Washington: After School Tragedy, Partisanship Cools in Washington

While seemingly unrelated — the emotionally wrenching holiday-season massacre of 20 first graders and six of their guardians, and Washington’s mind-numbing fiscal fight to reduce deficits — the first cannot fail to have a salutary effect on the latter, say veterans of Washington’s partisan wars from both parties.

“Members of Congress, when you get down to it, are just people,” said Mickey Edwards, a former House Republican leader. “There are those things that, at least momentarily, trump ideology.”

“I think, at least for a while, it’s going to soften people’s hearts to each other and make people think, we’re a team, we’re all Americans,” said Mr. Edwards, whose new book is called “The Parties Versus the People.” “The greatest problem is that neither side trusts the other side. And that being the case, this could help.”

Many Republicans and Democrats see cause for optimism for reasons that are both personal and political for the players in the White House and the lame-duck Congress. For all their dissimilarities, past horrors — like the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, the 1998 killings of two Capitol policemen, the Columbine school murders the following year in Colorado and certainly the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — at least for a time cooled partisan passions that had been high beforehand, and in some cases prompted bipartisan actions on unrelated matters.

Even the usual Washington metaphors about legislative debates — like fights, battles and wars — seem out of place given their association with violence.

President Obama, back from his Sunday night meeting with bereaved parents in Newtown, resumed talks on Monday with Speaker John A. Boehner to meet a year-end deadline for a deal. The two met at the White House for 45 minutes, and by evening the shape of a potential deal had emerged.

In deflecting attention from the fiscal dispute, the impact of the shooting could give the party leaders a little more room to maneuver.

“It takes the fire out of the belly of partisans, just kind of puts everything in perspective and makes people question, well, everything,” said John Feehery, a former adviser to three House Republican leaders. “What’s the point?”

On that, there is bipartisan agreement.

“The American people are going to be sharing in the grief of Connecticut families and will have little patience for political games and finger-pointing,” said Steve Elmendorf, a former top adviser to House Democratic leaders. “I suspect both sides realize that they should tone down the fighting and move to a deal.”

On Friday, after news of the shooting broke, Mr. Obama spoke by phone with Mr. Boehner; the evening before, they had met alone for only the second time since the November election. Reports through the weekend suggested that Mr. Boehner had offered for the first time to support raising the tax rate on high incomes and include an increase in the nation’s debt limit, if the president agreed to more long-term reductions in entitlement programs.

Perhaps only Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner know whether that small progress was influenced by their emotions, both as national leaders and as fathers. Or was it simply the typical eleventh-hour movement of politicians, who must reach an agreement this week if they have any hope of getting a deal passed by Congress before huge automatic tax increases and spending cuts take effect in January?

“This is something that can’t be overstated: This isn’t just about politics with these guys,” Mr. Feehery said. “Psychologically this puts them in kind of a depressed mood, and so it’s not so much that they’re reacting to what the people think, but that they’re reacting to their own personal experiences. Look, if Obama was crying, you can only imagine what Boehner was doing. Psychologically they have to take it very personally, and I think that has an impact on how they negotiate.”

Tom Daschle, a Democrat and former Senate majority leader, was initially a skeptic among the Democrats and Republicans interviewed, who generally saw a chance for some breakthrough or at least a softening in the bitter budget talks. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will have a catalytic effect on the fiscal negotiations,” he said. “We are still not at the eleventh hour and 59th minute. That is when a deal is likely to be struck.”

But in a follow-up exchange of e-mails, Mr. Daschle acknowledged some moderating effect. “There might have been some genuine movement over the weekend,” he said.

Mr. Feehery emphasized that lawmakers’ own moods since the school shooting could be an important factor in influencing the debate.

The prospect of party leaders having to call lawmakers back to the Capitol between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to finish the work on the deficit, never a popular move, becomes all but impossible now that members of Congress are likely to value time at home with their own children and grandchildren all the more.

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