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.
The LCo signs are lit brilliantly at night, particularly at its south facade. Any guess at why? The south side of the building, now dubbed Larkin at Exchange, faces a very large audience: the tens of thousands of vehicles that pass every day on the Niagara Thruway (I-190). The heritage symbols, the most conspicuous aspect of the otherwise spare concrete structure that so elicited the admiration of early Modernist architects, now serve as veritable billboards advertising office space at the building, which identifies closely with its Larkin history.
The project, which essentially saved what many economic development officials believed would become a real estate “white elephant” for the city when Graphic Controls announced its departure from the building in the mid-1990s, is now nearly 100% occupied. History really does sell.
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