The $1.6 billion quest to build America’s tallest skyscraper in…Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY—Scot Matteson’s team came before this city’s planning commission last week seeking to tweak a development he plans to build in a parking lot hard up against a railroad track and wrapped around two sides of a U-Haul storage facility. Instead of capping the buildings at the Boardwalk at Bricktown at 345 feet, he’s now thinking one should top out at 1,907—more than twice the height of the tallest building in town, and the biggest in the U.S. “We figure it would be iconic," said Matteson, a California-based developer who briefly made tabloid news by dating one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Oklahomans tend to admire Matteson’s bold vision, but many question whether the supertall building, higher than New York’s 1,776-foot One World Trade Center, would ever be built in a stretch of America better known as the place “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain." “If you talk to 1,000 Americans and say, ‘Where do you think the tallest building in America should be?’ I don’t think anyone would pick Oklahoma City," he said. “It would pencil out in New York, it would pencil out in Chicago," he said, “but statistically I can’t see it penciling out in Oklahoma City."