During the end of the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth-century, the Hydraulics neighborhood was a thriving, self-sufficient community within the larger City of Buffalo. The area had a unique identity and culture and offered all available public, religious and community services to its residents. Although the neighborhood had lost its namesake, the Hydraulic Canal, the community continued to have a strong self-sufficient identity within the larger city of Buffalo. The Larkin Company, manufacturer of soaps and toiletries, was certainly the most notable business which originated in the Hydraulics neighborhood.
The Decline of the Larkin Company and the Demolition of the Administration Building
The Larkin Company was once one of the largest and most recognizable companies in the country. Soon after the company reached its largest and most influential phase in the 1920s, the company began suffering from both internal and external pressures. Many of the issues and obstacles faced by Buffalo, and specifically the Hydraulics neighborhood, in the mid-twentieth-century also led to the demise of the Larkin Company empire by the 1950s.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Buffalo's position as the most vital Great Lakes port and railroad city began to weaken. This was due in part to the increasing number of cross-country highways being constructed in the period and the rise of the trucking industry. Also, the creation of new shipping lanes including the Welland Canal through Ontario, Canada (significantly expanded between 1912 and 1932) also helped traffic circumvent the Buffalo and Niagara Falls area. Both of these conditions helped to undermine Buffalo's historic geographical advantage at the confluence of the Great Lakes and the East Coast.
Consumer culture also began to change during the interwar period as well. The popularity of mail-order catalog business, which had been the backbone of the Larkin Company's sales strategy from its inception in the 1870s, began to wane as chain stores proliferated across the nation's small towns, allowing the consumer to view, sample and directly purchase their goods. The increasing popularity of the automobile allowed for greater mobility of small town residents, who could come into the urban centers to visit stores which offered cut-price items with which the fixed-price Larkin products could not compete. In addition to these factors, women, who had been the primary Larkin sales force through the turn of the century, now had increasing opportunities in business and industry after World War I and were no longer drawn by the additional meager incomes which the Larkin "Clubs of Ten" could bring.
The Larkin Company attempted to change with the times and stay afloat in the changing business climate of the post-war era. The first of over several hundred "Larkin Economy Stores" opened in 1918 as a means to compete with the chain stores. The company itself reorganized, selling off subsidiary manufacturers and closing some of the branch offices in the 1920s.
In additional to these external pressures, internal problems also became more serious in this period. John D. Larkin regarded the company as a family-run operation, to be continued by his sons and sons-in-law. Larkin's oldest son, Charles joined the company in the 1890s, but he lacked a passion for his father's company and retired in 1920. Other family members were made executives in the early 1900s, including John D. Larkin, Jr., who in 1915 began taking an active role in company policy making, setting the stage for his eventual takeover in 1926. William Heath, Larkin Office Manager since 1902, abruptly retired from the Larkin Company in 1924, and Darwin Martin soon followed, retiring in 1925 after butting heads with John D. Larkin, Jr. The loss of these critical members of the Larkin Company core led to a wave of other sudden retirements, including three key members of the Secretary's Department. The increasing prominence of John D. Larkin, Jr. in the Larkin Company brought about the retirement of most of the men who had built the company in its earliest mail-order days. Following the death of Larkin Sr. in 1926, his son John D. Larkin, Jr. controlled the fate of the struggling company.
Mirroring his disregard for the loyal and experienced executive core of the Larkin Company, Larkin, Jr. had little regard for the stately architecture of his father's Administration Building. Despite the on-site protests of Frank Lloyd Wright, the younger John Larkin authorized the cutting of large windows into the fifth story of the building. The Larkin Auditorium building, which had played a role entertaining the throngs of Larkin Company employees for many years, was demolished in the 1936 to make way for a parking lot. He relocated the mail-order business from the symbolic place of honor on the main floor of the light court to the fifth floor, dryly renaming it the "Buying Department." Various other departments were relocated and rearranged in the various factory buildings, often with detrimental effects on workflow and productivity.
During John D. Larkin, Jr.'s tenure as President of the Larkin Company, between 1926 and 1940, the company struggled with increasing indebtedness. The younger Larkin continued to push for maintaining the large, diverse premium catalog despite the changing marketplace and in the face of new competition. During this period the Larkin Company faced shrinking sales revenues and the increased strain of the Great Depression. By 1939 the situation was so dire that the company's Board of Directors was forced to take action to avoid bankruptcy. As part of a restructuring deal, the board separated the Larkin Co. Inc. (the company's official name at the time) from the company's real estate holdings, selling off properties whenever possible in order to help pay off the debt. In the same year Harry Larkin replaced John D. Larkin, Jr. as president, and Larkin, Jr. soon resigned from the Board of Directors as well. This same year saw the sale of the Larkin Administration Building to the Larkin Co. Inc., which moved the Larkin department store into the first three floors of the building. The much smaller mail-order department was housed in the fourth and fifth floors. These moves taken by the Larkin Company were unsuccessful in preventing the collapse of the company, however, and in 1941 additional corporations were created in order to allow stock-holders to salvage portions of the business. By 1943, a creditor's committee was formed, most of the company's assets were liquidated, and the creditors were all paid off. As a result, the Larkin Company was left with no assets other than the Administration Building, on which they owed $85,000 in back taxes.
The Larkin Company and the Administration Building was purchased in 1943 by a contractor from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, under the belief that the taxes owed would help offset large profits he was realizing from laying a transcontinental pipeline. When the Federal Government denied the tax break, he abandoned the building, which stood unheated and unmaintained. In 1945 the City of Buffalo took over the Administration Building in a $104,616 tax foreclosure proceeding. The specificity of the design of the Administration Building with its central court and open plan, coupled with the fact it had no in-house heating facility, made its reuse difficult. The building's location in the Hydraulics neighborhood, removed from the downtown core, was also seen as an impediment to reuse. In 1946 an offer of $26,000 for the decaying building was made by an anonymous buyer, but the Common Council sought a national advertising campaign as a way to increase the attention on the sale of the building. This plan never materialized, however, once a potential housing project for the building was studied and ultimately deemed unfeasible.
Further attempts to stimulate a high selling price for the Administration Building failed, and it continued to decompose. According to accounts, everything from lighting fixtures, knobs, plumbing and even the copper roofs had been stripped from the building. The iron fencing of the low brick wall which surrounded the building was removed for a wartime scrap collection.
The last attempt to reuse and save the festering Administration Building was made by councilman Joseph F. Dudzick on April 18th, 1949. Dudzick cried out against the treatment of such a world-renowned building, and announced plans to include the building in the program for city improvements. Ultimately, Dudzick's attempts to save the building also failed. On August 20, 1949 the Western Trading Corporation offered the Common Council $5,000 to demolish the Larkin Administration Building and replace it with new developments which were claimed to provide the city with more tax income. While the sale of the building was met with some public outcry, the sale and impending demolition of the building was seen as a relief to some area residents.
Demolition of the building began in February of 1950, undertaken by the firm of Morris & Reimann. Due to the complex nature of the building's construction, the Administration Building was taken apart almost by hand. In May 1951 the Western Trading Corporation had plans to build a trucking terminal on the site, but by November they proposed to the Common Council relocating their facility. Their relocation was approved, thus the Larkin Administration Building was demolished to make way for what amounted to a paved parking lot.
Frank Lloyd Wright, upon hearing of the demolition of one of his earliest and most significant buildings, reportedly stated that the building had "served its purpose and deserved a decent burial." He had been aware of the disfiguring alterations which the building had suffered under John D. Larkin, Jr. as well as its final decay in the 1940s. In his autobiography he commented, "They [the Larkins] never realized the place their building took in the thought of the world - for they never hesitated to make senseless changes in it in after years." Today, all that remains of the once-glorious triumph of modern office design is a portion of the brick and sandstone wall which surrounded the site, located near the Swan Street subway.
The creation of the Larkin Administration Building and its ultimate demise and demolition in many ways mirrored the situation of the Hydraulics neighborhood as a whole. The building's construction at the dawn of the twentieth-century was an era of great prosperity and success in the thriving industrial and commercial neighborhood. The Larkin Company itself had been a product of all the features which had given rise and made the Hydraulics area a successful place to do business including its proximity to the nationwide network of rail lines, access to raw materials and the availability of a vast immigrant labor pool. Ultimately, the decay and demolition of the landmark building paralleled the downturn the Hydraulics neighborhood took in the mid-twentieth century, facing population and business loss and the demolition of much of the urban architectural fabric of the neighborhood. Much of the original architectural fabric of the Hydraulics neighborhood has been either altered beyond recognition or demolished all together. Those rare buildings which do remain intact are remnants of the past history of the Hydraulics and survive to tell the neighborhood's story. Today, both the glorious Larkin Administration Building and the thriving Hydraulics neighborhood are faded memories, relayed solely by the few remaining buildings which bear evidence of the past.
Source: National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form prepared by Architectural Historian Jennifer Walkowski of Clinton Brown Company Architecture.
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Part One: MPDF Document Assists Hydraulics Rdevelopment Efforts
Part Two: Origins of the Hydraulics District
Part Three: Rise of Larkin
Next: What Remains
Above photo from the Daniel Larkin Collection at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society
Excellent, excellent article.