John D. Larkin and Elbert Hubbard in the 19th century founded the Larkin Soap Company, a highly successful American enterprise that innovated spectatularly in business structure, inventory control, marketing, commercial design, and design of corporate buildings and employee workspace.
Larkin Soap Company hired Frank Lloyd Wright as architect of its Buffalo corporate headquarters, completed in 1906. Everyone from the executives to the minions to the cleaners got to work in this beautiful, airy palace with air conditioning, Prairie style furnishings, and stained-glass windows.
One Larkin Company executive was named Darwin D. Martin. He did well, and his son Darwin R. Martin, used his own fortune and his inheritance of business skill to build the Buffalo Stuyvesant Hotel.
Here is a postcard from the Buffalo Stuyvesant Hotel. On the back is printed:
"Personal management of Darwin R. Martin
Buffalo's most charming hotel with the best of everything
245 Elmwood Ave.
Home of the internationally famous Peter Stuyvesant Room"
Larkin Soap Company hired Frank Lloyd Wright as architect of its Buffalo corporate headquarters, completed in 1906. Everyone from the executives to the minions to the cleaners got to work in this beautiful, airy palace with air conditioning, Prairie style furnishings, and stained-glass windows.
Here is a postcard from the Buffalo Stuyvesant Hotel. On the back is printed:
"Personal management of Darwin R. Martin
Buffalo's most charming hotel with the best of everything
245 Elmwood Ave.
Home of the internationally famous Peter Stuyvesant Room"
I'm told that the dance floor had a glass floor with blue lights shining up from under it. These things sound like travelers' tales from a lost world.
The Larkin Building was demolished in 1950 - not by the Larkins, but by the people who picked it up when it was let go for back taxes. The Stuyvesant Hotel is now owned by New York State.
There are not many photographs of these buildings; our best imagery comes from postcards and other ephemera. Which brings us to East Aurora, New York, as a matter of fact.
The East Aurora Village Shopping Center, to which folk trekked from Marilla to do grocery shopping, and where Clara (CAMZ) bought her daughter (JZ) her first and only pair of "gaucho pants," and where JZ bought her leather wraparound miniskirt for her senior year of high school . . . where was I?
Oh yes, the East Aurora Village Shopping Center was redesigned around 2000 by an architect named Patrick J. Mahoney. Patrick J. Mahoney has a postcard collection featuring classic hotels of Buffalo and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings everywhere. Good for him for putting it online.
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