All right, is that focused? Think so, hope so. Good, I haven't got long. It is the end of the day,
I'm losing the light. I've got to drive on and
then catch a flight soon. So I'm going to tell you a story, but I have not been able to
work out how much of it is true. And that's okay,
and I'll tell you why that's okay, but it does put me in a
bit of a difficult position because everyone that I've met here in Wichita Falls, Texas, has been lovely. And this is a great story
that sends tourists to their town. So, with that said, this is
the Newby-McMahon Building, the World's Littlest Skyscraper. It's not much of a skyscraper,
it's only four stories tall, and its footprint is so small
that it is barely usable as a building. Now the legend goes that
back when Wichita Falls was an oil boom town, 1918, there was a massive construction rush. Investors were pouring money
into new downtown buildings, confident that the town
would be prime real estate for decades to come. Unfortunately, it wasn't. The boom was followed by a bust
and by the Great Depression. But this building caused its investors
more trouble than most. It cost $200,000, which is
about $3 million in today's money and the investors thought
that it was going to be 12 times as tall because the blueprints
they thought were marked in feet were actually in inches. No one noticed the little extra mark
next to the numbers on the plans. So the new downtown skyscraper turned out
to be only four stories tall and not 48, and so narrow it was almost unusable. The developer, J.D. McMahon,
ran off with most of the money, all that was left over from only
having to construct a tiny building, and a local judge ruled that
the blueprints were accurate. The investors had got exactly
what they'd signed off on, exactly what they paid for. The building sat abandoned for a long time and it was renovated in
the early 21st century and these days, it's a furniture boutique and I talked to the owner. - When we first took over this building
with our shop, this skyscraper was never
allowed to be entered by the public and we wanted to open it up. The engineers had to come to make sure the floors could
sustain constant occupancy and in fact, they did have to give us
some weight and load limits and they did have to put in
an additional structural beam. Whenever you have a multi-story building, by City code, there must
be an egress and entrance. So, they had said, well, we must have
at least two staircases to allow for that. Well, if this building
had two sets of stairs, it would literally be a building
full of two sets of stairs and there would be no
defined space whatsoever. So, I think, as the
compromise from our City, we do have a state-of-the-art
fire suppression system. The fire marshal that comes
to inspect it periodically tells me that if we do ever catch on fire, we will not have to worry about burning, but we might have to worry about drowning. In the early '30s, this
was engulfed in flames and so the floors were gone,
the roof was gone and it got boarded up and
it stood that way for decades. We do have some old newspaper accounts and some old documentation of
people that were interviewed back then, how they wanted the building
to be demolished immediately because it was a scandal. You know, these people had been ripped off and they were embarrassed
about being duped like this. However, it wasn't demolished because
they really needed it for office space so it was used. So we do have some
documentation like that, but the original plans
that allegedly he had given to his investors, they don't exist,
as far as I know. - It's a great story. So I started to fact-check it
and I came up blank. Here's what I did before getting here. I tracked down every article
I could on every database I could access, but they were all too modern
and the chain of references ran out, usually somewhere in the '80s. There are references to a "Ripley's
Believe It or Not" panel from the 1920s, but I emailed the archivists
at Ripley's and they said their archives are incomplete.
They don't have a copy of it. No one has a copy of it. And look, if we're honest,
"Ripley's Believe It or Not" is not a reliable primary source. So, when I got here, I went
to the Wichita Falls Library over there, thank you so much to all
the librarians who helped, and I looked through the
local newspaper from 1919. It's not been digitised so I had to hunt through microfilm and scan headlines and in the time I had here, I couldn't find a mention of the building
or of the lawsuit at all. I did find an article
about the changing skyline. It has no mention of a
planned 48-story building. So, it feels like the real estate scandal,
the lawsuit after, should have been all over the news
when it came out, surely, but maybe I missed it.
Maybe it was too small an article. In boom times it might have been, or maybe I wasn't looking
at the right dates. And look, this is a ridiculous building. On camera, it almost looks
sensible but standing here, it is very easy to agree
that this building, must have been a scam of some sort. So, if I was to place a bet, I would say that the
scam part is likely, that someone came along in
the middle of boom times, sold a dodgy building
to gullible investors and ran off with the proceeds,
is very, very plausible. The inches instead of feet
detail of the story, though, I just don't know. Surely the investors would have noticed that their giant skyscraper
only had four floors and a couple of windows. Surely they'd have questioned the plans, so maybe that was a joke from
the townsfolk a century ago that got reported as fact. Or maybe the investors
were off in another state and never got a close
look at the blueprints. Or maybe it's true and they were taken in
by a smooth-talking scammer. There is a plausible answer for
every skeptic's question about this and I am not saying
that the story is false, just that I can't find primary sources. I can't find anything from the time
that is evidence for it or against it. And if you can, don't tell me. Write an article, post
somewhere authoritative, take a picture of the old
newspaper and tweet it out, update Wikipedia. I've reached the end of what I can do. But that's fine,
and here's why it's fine. Because this is folklore.
This is a trickster story. This is the same thing
that appears in mythology from across the world and across time. If you think you've heard
something like this before, you have. There are a lot of stories like it. It's the monorail episode
of "The Simpsons." All those news outlets and blogs repeating
and emphasizing the tale. That's our modern oral tradition. That's passing on stories,
person to person to person. In a world where making up
complete lies to get ad revenue is a viable business model, this is kind of charming. It's a story. And as long
as those articles say, "according to legend",
or "the tale goes that", then I think that's fine. We're human, we see things
as part of a narrative. Margaret Atwood wrote:
"in the end, we'll all become stories", and yeah, this is a really good story. All right, hope that worked, 'cause I've got about...
not enough time to get to Dallas. All right, let's go.
Hey, that's my home town! We're famous!
It’s almost certainly not true that the building was expected to be 480 feet tall. The tallest building in Wichita Falls is 180 feet tall (technically a grain silo is taller). There’s no way that investors decided to invest in a 40 story building in a city when the next tallest building is 13 stories tall. Similarly, if there was a demand for that and this building was never constructed, one would expect that some other building would have eventually been constructed (this building was constructed in 1919, the tallest building was constructed in 1927, so the boom wasn’t over yet).
I think it’s much more likely that someone was paid to build a small office building but made it in such a way that it was completely impractical. Still a scam, but not half as intriguing as the story that’s been cooked up.
Is it supported by bricks? The worlds tallest brick building is 60 meters and that's at the extreme limit before the bricks at the bottom pulverize from the pressure above
It reminds me of a fire station hose drying loft. Or maybe a ladder training structure.
"this is a really good story"
why the singular? thought it is a 4 story building.
Is this a reupload?