The building is part of a church complex that once housed the German congregation of the Church of the Sacred Heart, founded in 1875 in the Hydraulics and moved in 1915 to this site, proximate to Clinton Street only a few blocks north of the Hydraulics neighborhood. The construction of the 1915 complex was underwritten by the Larkin Company, which purchased the congregation’s original Seneca Street buildings, then adjacent to the Larkin Administration Building, to make way for future plant expansion. In the early 1980s, the Buffalo Diocese closed the Emslie Street complex in the church’s first region-wide deaccessioning, commencing its spiral of decline.

The church’s school building, a handsome load-bearing brick structure with a classic 1910s-era parapet, is now in the late (and possibly final) stage of “demolition by neglect.” Its owners, the Witness Cathedral Church of God in Christ, reportedly abandoned the complex a year ago, suspending church services in the late summer of 2007. According to an official at Buffalo’s Department of Permit & Inspection Services, a demolition permit for the school building was issued one month ago, part of a housing court case dating to 2001. This morning’s partial collapse of the school building facade, imperiling the life and safety of neighbors and pedestrians nearby, adds another frustrating chapter to the ongoing deterioration of the historic church complex.

It is uncertain what, if anything, the current owners intend to do to secure the landmark buidling or mitigate the danger it now poses to the public. Nothing, perhaps – which means you the taxpayer may be left with the tab. What is certain is the demise of the school building, beginning with the callous disposition of the church complex in the early 1980s, was preventable.

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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.”

The pier was an obscure piece of urban archaeology until local Larkin buffs, among them Jerry Puma, succeeded in 2003 in seeing the pier restored to some semblance of its original state. Prior to the restoration, the few Wright experts in the know were chipping away at the pier to get their own souvenir of the Wright icon. The fence pier, not actually a pier of the building, but a pier of the fence that surrounded it, was perhaps a tangible enough connection to the complex to merit, in their minds, such incremental acts of destruction.

Here’s a ponderous thought for our readers: Why was this fragment spared? When everything else was smashed and pummeled, why was this left behind? One wonders… did the demolition contractors step back, after destroying a world-significant artwork, and seeing that all that was left was part of a fence, decide to keep this solitary remnant for future generations to rediscover? Is this the only evidence of their sense of guilt?

Or are these questions too charitable? Is the real story that the contractors simply ran out of money after expending far more than they ever imagined to demolish what was meant to last for centuries, and said “the hell with it” when the job was nearly finished?

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The location of the Hydraulic Canal is indicated by the 1872 map:

The same year the map was published, water reportedly stopped flowing altogether through the canal, a victim of technological change and two decades of neglect by the Buffalo Hydraulic Association. The canal was filled by 1882, closing an early chapter in the city’s manufacturing history. The stone walls of the canal may still exist, buried under a few layers of dirt and awaiting rediscovery.

One chapter was closing while another was being written. The Larkin Company built a small soap plant at 667 Seneca Street in 1876. By 1900 the firm was the third largest mail-order company in the world, occupying a sprawling factory complex of nearly two million square feet. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the the company’s Administration Building, one of Wright’s most influential works, in 1904. By 1915 an extensive ecology of rail-connected industries and warehouses had emerged adjacent to a convergence of three different rail corridors, present in the 1870s but not yet fully tapped by industry. In the forty years after the 1872 map was published, the Hydraulics had become an imposing capital of Machine Age architecture and technology.

The 1872 map communicates an embryo of a modern industrial precinct. (Visit this Flickr image to show a full map, courtesy of the New York Public Library, with added details and commentary.) The old water-powered mill district, Buffalo’s first manufacturing area, was dead or dying – only Noah H. Gardner’s tannery, the largest of the original water-powered mills built in the 1830s, is known to still have been operating. Tanneries, two breweries, a soap and potash factory, a steam forge, a slaughter house, and a fledgling retail corridor marked this peripheral district of post-Civil War Buffalo, but nothing yet on a monumental scale. The presence of a vast and growing rail network at the Hydraulics portended the developments to come.

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