A 1929 proposal by the Larkin Company to establish a “Larkin Square” at the corner of Seneca and Swan streets was shelved by a reticent Common Council and assailed by the Socialist council president Frank C. Perkins as a corporate give-away that “smelled to the heavens.”
The public square proposal would have seen Van Rensselaer Street cut through Seneca Street to Swan Street to relieve traffic congestion (yes, there was traffic congestion!), setting aside a triangular plot of cleared land for a public space honoring the company’s late founder, John D. Larkin.
The Larkin Company at the time was running the Larkin Department Store and the Larkin Food Market at full tilt, filling the entire ground floor of its massive factory complex at 701 Seneca Street with a shopping wonderland for discount foods and household goods. The company desired to create the square to rationalize traffic flow that had been bottled up as a result of the store’s opening and to establish an attractive gateway at the front lawn of the Larkin District. Read the rest of this entry »
Today’s urban scene of the week (er, scene of the month?) brings us to 567 Exchange Street, an alluringly spare, rustic loft building at the banks of Buffalo’s most historic and longest-enduring rail line, the Buffalo & Attica, first built in 1843 and later subsumed into the New York Central rail empire that connected the city to New York, Chicago, and the vast reaches of the continent beyond.
The four-story structure was not constructed at this site in 1900 for no reason. The Buffalo Lounge Co., for which the building was erected, chose this precise location because of the geography of the Hydraulics at the intersection of several rail lines, including the Erie and New York Central. The Buffalo Lounge Co. was directly linked to both lines via a rail bed that once existed behind the building. Read the rest of this entry »
The Larkin Company’s corporate logo, emblazoned across the late mail-order company’s Larkin Terminal Warehouse for the past 97 years, is still a potent advertising vehicle for the heritage structure, now repurposed as Class-A office space.
The corporate logo (“LCo”) was actually obscured for years by another sign for Graphic Controls, which leased 4,000 sq. ft. space in the former warehouse in 1940 and later purchased the entire building from the Larkin Warehouse Co. in 1967, the likely year of the original sign’s concealment. (Graphic Controls expanded to the nearby Exchange Street Industrial Park in 2001.) When the mammoth 600,000 sq. ft. structure was purchased by investors Howard Zemsky, Bill Jones, Doug Swift, and Joe Petrella in 2002, the original Larkin sign was revealed, a highly-visible first step in the building’s rehabilitation. Read the rest of this entry »
A stream runs through the center of Seoul, dividing the city into North and South, but for three decades it was totally buried beneath a busy downtown highway. In 2003, as part of a vast urban renewal project, the highway was removed and the stream was recovered and turned into a beautiful 5.8 km urban park. Demolishing roads in favor of urban parks is is a development project we can really get behind.
The Cheonggyecheon stream was formed during the Joseon Dynasty in order to provide drainage for the city. It lasted for hundreds of years until the 1940s, when the city became so populated that a shanty town popped up around the stream and began polluting the area. The stream was gradually covered over with concrete, and by 1976 a 5.6 km elevated highway was built on top of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Today the publication place of the ideas competition for a new town office for Rotterdam. 5 winners from 104 entries were chosen, also the people of Rotterdam also had a voice in the appointment of an audience winner.
“The Butterfly”, Figure Sky
PHE N.Y. Lanin, Head of the city
The jury, consisting of Wiel Arets (Chairman), Stefan Behnisch, Adriaan Geuze, John Körmeling, Michelle Provoost and Harm Tilman, received 104 entries to judge. Besides its task to appoint five winners, the jury asked to select 25 plans for this exhibition.
The 5 winners are: PHENY N.Y. Nine of LA La Lidy Meijers and Helga Fast (Posterholt); Figure of Sky RV Ritoe Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure (Delft), The Butterfly Maarten van Tuijl, Tom Berg Foot, Naoko Hikami (Amsterdam), assisted by Peter Farmer, Head of the City of Fountain Head of Christian Müller and Forideas (Amsterdam). Read the rest of this entry »
