Today in 2004, an important historic designation for a historic district in Wichita Falls, Texas.
One of the buildings that makes that district so historic is what’s known as the world’s littlest skyscraper.
It’s also known as the Newby-McMahon Building, and it didn’t start as a skyscraper at all.
It was a one-story brick office building built near the railroad depot downtown for one of the railroad directors, Augustus Newby.
It went up in 1906, which was just a few years before the oil boom.
After that, there were lots of people coming to town to make money, and they needed more office space than the Newby Building and other local buildings could provide.
One of the Newby Building’s tenants, J.D. McMahon, offered a solution: he would build a new office building right next to the Newby Building.
But the nearby land was only 12 feet by 20 feet; how was that going to solve the space problem?
Easy, McMahon said, this was going to be a skyscraper: it would make the most of its footprint by building way up high!
Investors gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars, worth millions today, to build what they thought was a 480 foot tall office building.
Had they looked at the plans and contracts more closely, McMahon’s building would be 480 inches tall, or about 40 feet.
He put up a four story office building with no stairs, and then left town with a great deal of the money.
It’s gone down in history as a notorious scam, though it was technically all legal since he built what he said he was going to build, whether or not people recognized it as such.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not gave the Newby-McMahon Building its nickname, the “World’s Littlest Skyscraper.”
Over time, people made repeated attempts to tear the thing down.
But locals fended them off, saying an odd-sized building with a Texas-sized backstory deserved to be preserved.
Eventually there was the historic designation and lots of refurbishments; it even got stairs!
Today in 1934, the US Patent Office got a patent application for a machine that led to what is now the cheese curl.
The company that makes Cheetos has a term for the orange cheese residue it leaves behind on faces and hands: cheetle.
In 2022, they commissioned an 18-foot tall statue of a cheetled hand holding a Cheeto, and installed it in an appropriate place: the community of Cheadle, Alberta.
Though you might find the whole stunt a little cheesy.
Legend of the World’s Littlest Skyscraper (Texas Co-op Power)
Cheetos statue unveiled in Canada, an homage to Cheetle, the orange dust’s official name (Boing Boing)
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