The Larkin Power House is an endlessly fascinating structure, and forms the background for this “urban scene of the week,” this blog’s periodical commentary on particular vantage points in the Hydraulics. The view is found at the nexus of yesterday and tomorrow, communicating history and possibility.

The scene, taken a few dozen feet from the New York Central tracks south of Swan Street, is archetypal of Buffalo’s industrial landscape, with its massive factory buildings rising over the urban prairie. The Power House is part of a composition of industrial structures undoubtedly taken into consideration by Frank Lloyd Wright when he designed the Larkin Administration Building, which broke ground only two years after the Power House began construction in 1902.
Though only a fence pier remains of the Administration Building, demolished in 1950, it is perhaps particularly apt that a vantage point reminiscent of the Midwest prairie today acts as a foreground to a complex to which Frank Lloyd Wright, author of the Prairie School of Architecture, made an important contribution. The inspiration of the Prairie School, which grew out of appreciation for America’s vast horizontal landscape (think the endless prairie of the Midwest) and emphasized the relationship of buildings to nature, is brought into focus at industrial sights of the Larkin District.

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The Larkin Power House smokestack is one of the obelisks of industrial Buffalo. It is one among these quickly-disappearing landmarks that define the city’s character and place in time, in many ways more than the buildings to which they are connected. The smokestack, as symbol of the Machine Age, is fading from memory – and skylines. In December 2006, the Buffalo region lost one of its mighty stacks at Tonawanda’s Spaulding Fibre plant, which at 250 feet could be seen for miles around and was probably the single most important connector to the history of the suburban municipality. The smokestack of the Larkin Power House survives, defying its obsolescence.

Like American industry itself, the stack is not at the high and mighty status of its youth, having been halved by a lightning strike some decades ago. It’s miraculous the stack exists long after it has lost its purpose and when, seemingly, any one of its owners over time could have rid themselves of it. Its current owners maintain the stack rather well, to the benefit of the public memory.

When the Power House was built in 1902, the smokestack was the tallest in the city, at 275 feet. It rivaled the tallest stacks in the country. (Guess where the tallest stack in the world is today.) The Larkin Company boasted of the Power House in its promotional literature. With 50,000 tourists visiting the plant every year, it was a highlight of the plant tour schedule. The 1906 edition of its tour pamphlet, Home of the Larkin Idea, fills the reader in on the Power House better than any ancillary description:

The Larkin Power-House is equipped to furnish 10,000 horse-power. The stack is the highest in Buffalo, being 275 feet above bed-rock. The power by which the Larkin Factories are run is applied electrically, enough current being generated in the Power House to furnish light for a city of 25,000 inhabitants. There are 20 safety boilers of 500 horse-power each, and 125 tons of coal are consumed every twenty-four hours. So complete are the mechanical devices that the work of handling this immense quantity of coal and the cinders resulting from its consumption, is done by two men. One operates the great crane that lifts the coal from the pit into which it is dumped from the coal-cars and conveys it to a bin at the rear of the Power-House. From the bin the coal passes automatically into a trolley-car that runs to the different furnaces. This car’s capacity is 2 1/2 tons. The furnaces are stoked automatically and as the coal is consumed, the cinders drop into a car that runs to the cinder pit. When the pit becomes full, it is emptied by the electric crane. A little steam engine attached to each furnace keeps the grate-bars gently rocking. This movement feeds coal into the fire from a magazine above the furnaces and dumps the cinders into cars in the basement. The scoop picks up a ton of coal at a time and makes the trip in a minute. Sixty tons of coal can be delivered into the Power-House every hour.

The Power House today is still occupied by vast, 1950s-era HVAC systems provided for the Seneca Industrial & Warehouse Complex, connected to the Power House by an underground tunnel across Larkin Street. The ground floor of the Power House, stripped entirely of its original power generation-related machinery, is used for automobile and boat storage. While the upper floors of the building remain vacant and windows are filled with cinder block, the opportunity for adaptive reuse of the building remains. A symbol of the structure’s industrial might endures – the smokestack stands tall.

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The Larkin Terminal Warehouse was a center of attention on December 5, 1933, the day the Prohibition Amendment was repealed and this, the city’s only bonded warehouse, was expected to release 10,000 cases of imported whiskey and gin to Buffalo hotels and restaurants to mark the first night of legal liquor. Repeal Day, now celebrated in bars across the United States and undoubtedly in Hydraulics taverns like Sharkey’s and the Swan Lounge tonight, was anticipated to be a day of celebration, and commerce, in Larkinland in 1933, as well.

But there was a hick-up: Utah, the only state that was yet needed to ratify the amendment, delayed its vote until after 5 o’clock, meaning the flow of sweet goodness from the Larkin Terminal Warehouse would be held back until the next day. Doh!

A December 6, 1933, article from the Buffalo Evening News has the story:

Large supply of liquor held until today: Larkin Warehouse closes few minutes before word comes from Utah of the official end of the 18th Amendment

Possibility of release of a part of the flood of legal liquor stored in the Larkin company bonded warehouse in time to stock hotels, restaurants and clubs for sale tonight vanished when Utah delayed its vote until after 5 p.m. The warehouse closed sharp at 4:45 p.m. in accordance with usual custom. More than 10,000 cases of choice whiskeys and gin are reposing in the warehouse. The McKesson-Buffalo Drug company, which has a federal license, pro-rated its entire supply of liquor among licensed hotels downtown. The supply which was shipped to each hotel within a half-hour after ratification was described by executives of the McKesson company as “reasonable.”
Nearly fourteen years of Prohibition may have been bad enough, but yet another day without fine, legal Canadian liquor must have been intolerable.

The news was probably of no note to the owners of “soda bars” throughout the Hydraulics. Dozens of these “soda bars” operated in the neighborhood in former taverns as speakeasies, and likely continued business as usual that night, as they did all over the city… But the fine hotels, restaurants and night clubs of Buffalo appear to have lost out, at least until the evening of December 6th, which must have been some party night!

So next time you’re in Sharkey’s or the Swan Lounge, look out the bar window, raise a jigger of Seagrams, and cheer the Larkin Terminal Warehouse and its role on a day the following became the law: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”

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Looking to the east, one first witnesses the impressive profile (above) of the Larkin Power House and its smokestack – one of the steeples of industrial Buffalo. The peak of the smokestack marks the highest point in the Hydraulics and at one time reached much higher, that is, before the stack was damaged in a lightning strike some decades ago. To the south of the Power House is the Larkin L/M Warehouse, where the Larkin Company stored much of its raw materials (think hundreds of tons of animal fat for soap production, as only one example) and which has the highest floor load capacity (230 lbs./sq.ft.) of all the Larkin District structures, a higher load capacity than even the more advanced Larkin Terminal Warehouse constructed eight years later in 1912.

Looking north from the same position (below), the bakery and refrigeration warehouse of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (anyone remember A & P grocery?) forms another nice urban profile. The bakery was closed in 1975, resulting in the layoff of 100 workers. The building complex is a very important example of steel-reinforced concrete construction.

What ties all these buildings together, and the reason they form a pod of industrial structures around a single site, is their location abutting the New York Central Belt Line, a loop rail that connected Buffalo’s disparate industrial neighborhoods and helped transform the Hydraulics into a hotbed of steam-powered manufacturing by the late nineteenth century. The rail line incorporates the original eastbound rail corridor constructed through the district in 1843, the Buffalo & Attica, a line that crossed through the estate of the Hydraulics founder, Reuben Heacock, whose stone mansion was located adjacent to where the Seneca bridge now touches down in the Larkin District. The railroad became such a dominant force in the neighborhood that by the end of the Civil War, the Heacock Mansion – the single greatest link to the area’s early mill period – was demolished to make way for a rail car repair shop. So far removed had the development of the neighborhood been from its original purpose that, in 1894, Heacock Street was renamed Larkin Street. The car repair shop persisted as a use at the site, on the old Heacock plot north of where Larkin Street intersects with Seneca, into the second half of 20th century.

This rail line that was constructed in 1843 is still part of one of the most frequently used freight lines in New York State. The corridor once consisted of dozens of spurs; now only two spurs run through the neighborhood, and they split into two separate spurs one block south of the Seneca bridge at Exchange Street. Despite the diminished importance of rail traffic in the economy of Buffalo, the constancy of rail infrastructure in defining its geography and character is a fascinating subject of study.

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Elbert Hubbard, the former Larkin Co. executive, marketing guru, and founder of the Roycroft Arts & Crafts Movement, was the originator of the direct-to-consumer “Factory to Family Idea” that helped transform the Larkin Co. into one of the country’s largest mail order firms and the Hydraulics into one of its premier Machine Age industrial precincts. From PBS:

The dawn of the 20th century was a fluid time in America. Mass production was at a fever pitch, traditional values were in flux, the roles of men and women were changing, and America’s consumer culture was emerging. A new aesthetic was also entering the vernacular – Arts and Crafts. It evolved out of a socialist movement in England that rejected the dehumanizing effect of mechanization in favor of honest craftsmanship. Elbert Hubbard was one of the most influential forces in American business as the new century opened and the Roycroft artisan community that he founded in East Aurora, New York was the first and most successful purveyor of Arts and Crafts in the nation.

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