Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Larkin Company Administration Building in 1904, and it once stood in the parking area adjacent to the site. The building was converted into the Larkin Retail Store in 1939, after which the Larkin Company sold it to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contractor L.B. Smith. Smith abandoned the building, and the City of Buffalo took it through tax foreclosure in 1945. After various proposals failed to materialize, the City allowed the Western Trading Company to demolish the building in 1950. The company then abandoned plans to construct a new building there, and a parking facility was built over the debris field. Elements at the site preserve traces of the original structure: a glass, concrete, and brick fence pier stands on the original foundation and portions of the original pier's stone base, and within it are salvaged white bricks from the Chestnut Ridge White Brick Company that once lined the interior of the atrium. The sunken garden is the original garden that extended along the full front of the administration building, and the adjacent concrete sidewalk is the same sidewalk that paralleled the front and served as the exit from its corner staircases. Colored concrete sections on the public sidewalk beside Seneca Street indicate the relative locations of the building's atrium and main entrance. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Larkin Company was one of Buffalo's largest industrial complexes, with just under three million square feet of floor space and more than fifty thousand visitors each year on factory tours, at whose conclusion visitors received a complimentary aerial-view postcard of the facility to mail home; thousands of these cards were sent to cities and towns in every state of the union.

Buffalo, New York · United States