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Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois to open for public tours

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When is a mansion more than just a mansion? Take a world-famous architect and throw in a juicy back story and you have what may turn out to be a bona-fide tourist attraction.

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that a 1900 mansion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is scheduled to open for public tours and will be turned into an arts education center.

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Located about 60 miles south of Chicago in the town of Kanakee, the B. Harley Bradley House has been purchased for $1.7 million by a group historic preservationists. According to the report, the purchase price is $200,000 less than the asking price of the owners -- Gaines Hall, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his wife, Sharon.

The house has seven bedrooms and features more than 100 of Wright’s art-glass windows. It is considered by some to be an example of Wright’s Prairie style. Elisabeth Dunbar, the preservationist group’s president, told the newspaper that it has a 30-year mortgage on the mansion. Tours are expected to begin this summer, with tickets costing $15 a person for a tour lasting just more than an hour, said the newspaper.

The mansion, which was renovated by the previous owners, comes with a lurid history involving a past resident, Stephen Small, who was a vice president of Mid-America Media. In 1987, kidnappers abducted Small from the house and and buried him alive in a box as part of a ransom scheme.

According to a report at the time, the box was equipped with a jug of water, candy bars, a battery-powered light and an air pipe. The kidnappers tried to extort $1 million from Small’s family, but the victim suffocated before being found.

Read the full story at the Chicago Tribune.

-- David Ng

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