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 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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All that is left of the school is its very southern flank, which surely presents some difficulty for demo contractors, as it nearly abuts the historic church building that is part of the complex. The school building, damaged in a winter storm last December, framed a central plaza within the four-building church complex. The three other buildings of Sacred Heart, including the church and two dormitories for priests and nuns, remain standing. Considering they are now also vacant, one wonders for how long.

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