In Wichita Falls, in northern Texas, there is a red brick building that has been called “the smallest skyscraper in the world” for more than a century. It is about twelve meters tall, has four floors and an internal surface so reduced that the stairs occupy the large part of the available space. The nickname is deliberately disproportionate: the Newby-McMahon Building has never really been a skyscraper, and for this reason it has become a small local attraction. His story is told as a scam born during the oil years, when a credible promise and technical design were enough to convince many people to invest.
Wichita Falls, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was not just an American metropolis as New York could have been in those years: it was a commercial and railway center expanding in the middle of the Texane plains, near the border with Oklahoma. The discovery of oil in the county of Wichita quickly changed the rhythm of the city: entrepreneurs, mediators, technicians, workers, newly formed companies and people looking for a fast way to do business. Within a few years the offices were no longer enough. Some contracts were discussed in temporary spaces, even in adapted tents and rooms, because the economy of the city and its population were growing faster than the real estate market.
Then J.D. appeared. McMahon, indicated by local reconstructions sometimes as a simple contractor, others as an engineer, but still linked to the oil industry. He had an office in the old Newby Building, a small building built in 1906, and offered investors a new office building right next to his building in the city centre. The project seemed to respond to the need to set up a modern space for oil-born activities, and McMahon collected about $200,000, a huge figure for the time, today equivalent to several million dollars. And so he started the work, as promised, on a lot next to the Newby Building.
When the building was finished, however, investors were faced with something very different from what they thought they had funded. Instead of a 480 feet high tower, that is about 146 meters, there was a 480 inch high construction: about twelve meters. The difference was all in a typographical sign. In the drawings, according to the most told version of the story, the height was indicated with the double apex of the inches, 480″, and not with the single apex of the feet, 480′. Those who signed the cards would not have noticed, perhaps because they trusted the project, perhaps because in those years the oil euphoria did not give too much room to doubts.
Local sources also speak of a cause brought by investors and lost, because McMahon, in the end, had actually built according to approved designs. Other reconstructions insist that many details, including the true identity or origin of McMahon, remain uncertain. However, when the building was finished, he was no longer at Wichita Falls. The city remained a narrow and embarrassing palace, too small to solve the lack of offices and too strange to be ignored. The structure is like a high and narrow parallelepiped of red bricks, whose inner plan is occupied for a third by the wooden staircase that crosses the building vertically, with each floor directly connected to the staircase without passing from any landing or door. In the 1920s, he also became curious about Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which helped set his nickname.
After the boom, the oil economy slowed down, the Great Depression and decades of abandonment. The building risked several times to disappear, but survived fires, nightmares and demolition attempts. Between the 1980s and 2000, it was recovered and included in the Depot Square Historic District, the historic area of the center of Wichita Falls. Today the “smallest skyscraper in the world” is definitely worth more as a story than as a building: it does not say much about the architecture of skyscrapers, but a lot about a city grown too quickly, about the investors of time and on a scam – or its legend – standing for more than a hundred years.
L’articolo The strange story of the smallest skyscraper in the world comes from IlNewyorkese.
