COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Wright masterpiece, the Larkin building, was a victim of the times
You can’t retrofit the past to suit you. Or, as L. P. Hartley so beautifully put it, “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” It’s natural to apply today’s standards to past events, but it isn’t right.
I took the Darwin Martin House tour with some friends, and all I could think about afterward was the 1950 demolition of the house’s big brother in Wright’s oeuvre, the 1904 Larkin Administration Building, often taken to be one of Wright’s great early masterpieces.
Here, at Seneca and Swan, was the ultimate modern office building of its time, with everything from air conditioning to free-standing toilets (making it easy to mop underneath). An architectural masterwork demolished a mere 46 years after it was built.
That, assuredly, was one of the major philistine tragedies in a city that has had more than its share of them.
Demolition of the Larkin Administration Building was begun in 1950. It took until July to complete because, it’s said, “the building was built to last forever.” Wright was still alive when it came down. He was 83.
By the time it was demolished, the building had been decisively looted and allowed to fall into premature decrepitude. Among the major villains in its disappearance was the Larkin Company itself, which suffered failing fortunes and then collapse. What was once one of the most futuristic office buildings in the world was transformed into a store for Larkin products before the company gave out.
And that’s where our natural temptation to retrofit the past with our modern preservationist standards comes in.
It’s not as if there weren’t architects who raised a hue and cry to rescue the building at the time (it was an architect named Sebastian Tauriello who saved the Martin house from demolition).
It’s just that the Larkin building became a ward of the city for back taxes. And after that, it was subject to the Truman era’s politics and business mores.
The mayor of Buffalo in 1950 was Republican Joseph Mruk. But the course of the building’s destruction seemed to have been determined during the regime of his Republican predecessor, Bernard Dowd.
Buffalo was a very different city in 1950—big (over half a million people), expansive, suffering a housing shortage and mass transit problems. It wasn’t the wounded Rust Belt gem it became.
But, most importantly, we didn’t routinely expect our governments, city and otherwise, back then to have overriding aesthetic concerns. It’s not that such concerns were nonexistent, of course, they weren’t yet high on the list of things we expect our governments to do.
John F. Kennedy hadn’t happened yet, to routinely entertain writers, poets and painters in the White House and have concerts by Pablo Casals. The New York State governor wasn’t yet a Rockefeller heir who collected modern art.
As late as the mayoral administration of Stanley Makowski, no one of decisive clout was giving a thought to the aesthetics of Delaware Avenue, so that four of the most beautiful blocks in the city are now blighted by commercial boxes dumped onto the street with no ceremony and no concern whatsoever with aesthetics, much less compatibility with everything else.
It would be nice to go back to 1950 and imbue all the powers that be with all the knowledge of 21st century Buffalo they’d need. But then it would be even better to go back to Germany in the ’30s and advise one and all just where the Nazis would lead them— and everyone else.
But it’s the stuff of science fiction. In the real world, Wright’s classic building was a monument to an aesthetic urban consciousness in politics and society that was crying out to be born.
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