This just in! Newsweek puts a spotlight on Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Administration Building in a recent May 2 online article, titled "The Goodbye Swirl: The Guggenheim was Wright's last great building. What happened to the first?" This latest exploration of the Wright masterwork, written by Cathleen McGuigan, can be read online here or in Newsweek's print edition dated May 18, 2009.

The article is a lucidly written, poignant piece expositing on the famed structure, built from 1904 to 1906 in the heart of the Hydraulics at 680 Seneca, and the clients who hired Wright to design it:
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, N. Y., made soap, but more than suds, the company helped invent modern marketing. In the late 19th century, Larkin began to sell mail-order products for the laundry and bath with elaborate premiums: lamps, music stands, rocking chairs. The business exploded and by the turn of the new century the company needed a new building to handle all the orders. John Larkin, the founder, wanted the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, who'd built the innovative steel-framed Guaranty Building in downtown Buffalo, to design it. But a Larkin lieutenant, Darwin Martin, had another idea. He wanted to hire a 35-year-old hotshot Sullivan protégé named Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was gaining fame in the Midwest for his radical "Prairie" houses, but he'd never built anything as ambitious as the Larkin Building -- and may have indulged in a little résumé inflation about his experience in commercial architecture. But he got the job in 1902 and began work on the design.
Read the rest here. Just one problem, or rather, two. Newsweek is factually incorrect on two fronts: the Larkin Company never went bankrupt, as the article states. The company managed to pay off its debts after a dramatic contraction of business in the latter half of the Depression, and it was successfully reorganized in 1945 as the Larkin Co. Inc., continuing a modest mail order business on a single floor of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse until 1962. Second, the City of Buffalo did not demolish the Larkin Administration Building, as the article also states incorrectly. That dubious honor falls to the Western Trading Corp., to whom the City agreed to sell the building (with Hunt Business Agency as an intermediary) in 1949 on the condition that the building be demolished and be replaced with taxable improvements costing not less than $100,000 within 18 months. The City granted a demolition permit for the famed structure on January 23, 1950, the building was destroyed by wreckers, and the promised improvements never came to pass. The Western Trading Corp., in 1951, backed off on plans to construct a $150,000 truck terminal at the site, citing a lack of parking.
Special thanks to Jerry Puma for bringing this Newsweek article to our attention.