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 »

The NAI is July 3 to a exhibition on the work of architect AF Aalbers. Aalbers, born in Rotterdam, worked from 1924 to 1930 and from 1946 to 1961 in the Netherlands, in the intervening period (1930-1942) he worked in the Dutch East Indies. It was his Indian work Dorothee Segaar, curator and co-author of the same name, in 1977 inspired an investigation into the work of Aalbers. The lack of an archive was, however, that Segaar as a true Miss Marple had to work.  Another closet corrects the cry.

DENIS bank (De Nederlandsche first Indian Sparkasse), Braga, Bandung Jl (1935).

Armed with a keen eye to “Aalbers one”, a camera, an address book with names of former employees and residents and by technical illustrators, she asked over the years a work list together of 65 works: 22 Dutch, one Belgian Congolese (design competition) and 42 Indian. Most of the designs for the Dutch East Indies (27) was achieved in Bandung. This town, as envisaged in 1916 as the new home of central government in the Dutch East Indies, was the seat of the agency founded in 1931 been “Aalbers and De Waal, architects’. Read the rest of this entry »

TheHydraulics.com will feature an “urban scene of the week” of Hydraulics sights and scenes on a roughly weekly basis – weekly, meaning “whenever the inspiration and the camera intersect.”

This week, the highlight is the fence pier of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, built in 1904 and demolished in 1950, with the exception of this one lone artifact. The fence pier, on Swan Street, is all that remains of Wright’s masterpiece, what was considered by architecture critic Henry-Russel Hitchcock to be “the most important building ever demolished in the 20th century.” Read the rest of this entry »

The 1872 Hopkins map of Buffalo reveals fascinating insights into the Hydraulics during the last throes of the Hydraulic Canal (built 1827) and the district’s transition to a center for large-scale manufacturing, connected by rail to the farthest reaches of the continent.

The location of the Hydraulic Canal is indicated by the 1872 map: Read the rest of this entry »

The history of the Hydraulics, Buffalo’s earliest manufacturing district, is about to get some national attention. Yesterday the New York State Historic Preservation Office recommended two applications, including the individual listing of the Kamman Building and a Multiple Property Documentation Form (MPDF) on the Hydraulics neighborhood, for nomination by the National Parks Service for the National Register of Historic Places.

With the recent passage of New York State’s Enhanced Historic Tax Credit Program, providing tax credits of up to 40% of the costs of rehabilitating heritage structures, the event is a watershed moment in the ongoing development and economic revitalization of the Hydraulics.

The Kamman Building, 755-757 Seneca, is now well on its way to listing on the National Register of Historic Places, making it eligible for historic tax credits being sought by Chaintreuil | Jensen | Stark to transform the structure into apartments and office space to the tune of $1 million. The Hydraulics MPDF (check it out here), prepared by Jennifer Walkowski of the Read the rest of this entry »