http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/re.../31scapes.html
Two Also-Rans of the Great Skyscraper Race
John A. Larkin, a developer and architect, in 1926 proposed a 110-story building, Larkin Tower, for West 42nd Street.
In 1952 Mr. Larkin announced plans for another skyscraper, 2,000 feet high, to be built between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.
The rest of the city is hazily suggested in the rendering, except for the McGraw-Hill Building, built on the site he had hoped
would house the Larkin Tower.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
January 28, 2010
THE new Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 160 stories and 2,717 feet high, makes the 102-story Empire State Building into a pipsqueak, and indeed the urge to build the tallest structure in the world is an infectious one. Within that aspirational tradition John A. Larkin bears the mantle of two attempts. He proposed the boxy 110-story “Larkin Tower” in 1926, and reprised it in 1952 with a plan for the “World Trade Building” — 132 stories, 2,000 feet high.
Mr. Larkin was born in 1870, one of 10 children of Felix Larkin, a tavern owner. The son did not care for the family business, “because he saw so many patrons spend their paychecks on whiskey,” says his grandson, also John A. Larkin, a retired W. R. Grace executive who lives in Wyomissing, Pa.
Before he decided to challenge the clouds, Mr. Larkin sold fruit and ran a stable. His grandson describes him as a driven man who “worked like a madman until he died” in 1959.
By 1914, his brother Edward was operating as an architect, and he was working in real estate. Together in 1915 they built the massive 15-story loft building at 406 West 31st Street. The following year they put up the formidable 22-story Printing Crafts Building, the block-front on Eighth Avenue directly north of the General Post Office.
Both are big brutes without a shred of grace, but they worked, and over the next 10 years the brothers built other commercial structures. John Larkin owned for a time the block-front on which the Carlyle Hotel now stands, at 76th and Madison.
He definitely had a broad vision, and in 1924 he sued the Pennsylvania Railroad for $1 million, saying it had stolen his structural design for the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Penn Station. It is not clear how that case turned out, but around this time Mr. Larkin began describing himself as an architect.
Mr. Larkin announced plans for his record-breaking 110-story Larkin Tower, sometimes described as 108 stories, during Christmas week of 1926. It was to rise on the midblock lot now occupied by the old McGraw-Hill Building at 330 West 42nd Street, stretching back to 41st. The Real Estate Record and Guide reported that the tower would be 1,208 feet tall, with just short of a million square rentable feet, generating $3 million per year.
The Record and Guide, The New York Times and other journals were skeptical that such a tall building could be made to pay, a Times editorial pointing out that the upper floors would shrink to “playhouse dimensions.” For buildings of great height, limiting factors include the elevator cable, which can snap under its own weight if too long, and the decrease in rentable floor area as the tower rises.
For all its ambition, the design of the Larkin Tower is not much to look at, just one telescoping box set on top of another. Both John and Edward were listed as the architects, and the building was an early entry in the late 1920s race for the title of the tallest in the world.
The Chrysler Building was filed at the Department of Buildings as 63 stories in 1928, the Empire State as 55 stories in 1929. Both were later increased in height, and by the end of 1930 plans had been filed for 11 buildings of more than 60 floors. But none were higher than the Larkins’ project.
Although John Larkin said he had construction financing lined up, the Larkin Tower never went ahead; the site was soon acquired by McGraw-Hill. Mr. Larkin’s grandson says that he “lost his shirt in the Depression and started all over at age 60.” Nevertheless, in 1934, Mr. Larkin owned and occupied the apartment house at 1070 Madison Avenue, later took a co-op at 1105 Park and then moved to Larchmont, N.Y.
Mr. Larkin’s last filing at the Department of Buildings, in 1936, was for a one-story freight storage shed. But he bounced back big-time in 1952, when he announced plans for a 2,000-foot-high World Trade Building, 132 stories topped by a 300-foot-high TV mast. This was pie in the sky: Tower No. 1 of the World Trade Center, built in 1974 with 110 stories, was only 1,727 feet high.
Mr. Larkin said the project would take up the three blocks from 43rd to 46th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, to be acquired by eminent domain. The lower seven floors, covering the entire footprint, were to be for trade shows and exhibitions.
The 1926 version of the tower was to have been faced with brick, but the new one was to be sheathed in bronze, the whole costing $185 million. At the same time he proposed an unrelated convention hall seating 75,000 with a 3,000-car garage, for the blocks from 31st to 33rd, from Ninth to 10th Avenue.
Mr. Larkin must have known his later visions were unlikely; perhaps he was a dreamer trapped inside the body of a practical man. His grandson says he was an ascetic teetotaler, and did virtually no socializing — “with my grandfather, there was no such thing as a holiday.” But he conscientiously sent his family to the seashore in the summer.
And despite his unrealized projects, his grandson said, “he left my grandmother without a care in the world.” He does not recall much talk about the unsuccessful 1926 project, but surely the skyscraper crossed his grandfather’s mind whenever he passed the McGraw-Hill Building, behind the present Port Authority Bus Terminal.
In the rendering for his World Trade Building, the rest of the landscape of Manhattan is drawn in hazy, generic terms — with one very specific exception on the left drawn with a harder edge. There, dwarfed by the 2,000-foot-structure, is a building with a squarish top and tiny lettering that reads “McGraw-Hill.”