The smokestack…
‘Tis a poor drizzly morning, dark and sad.
The cloud has fallen, and filled with fold on fold
The chimneyed city; and the smoke is caught,
And spreads diluted in the cloud, and sinks,
A black precipitate, on miry streets.
And faces gray glide through the darkened fog.
- George MacDonald, “A Manchester Poem”
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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December 31st, 2009 at 8:04 am
Great story, I was the engineer at the old St. Marys hospital in Niagara Falls. Our 1912 building had a very similar smokestack and boiler house. Though converted to gas the remains of the coal silo, stokers, and ash pits was still in place. Few of these old time boiler houses are left and new HVAC systems just don’t inspire the same awe or respect.
Each summer hundreds of bats would take up residence in our chimmney and then head south in the fall just around the time we would first fire the boilers.
The building (and chimmney)still stand, vacant and abandoned at the corner of 6th and Ferry St.
January 27th, 2010 at 9:16 am
It would be great if the old Larkin powerhouse with its distinctive red brick smokestack could be successfully renovated and reused rather than remaining abandoned and unwanted like it is right now.