Waco History Podcast

In August 1910 on the corner of Fifth & Austin in downtown Waco, construction began on a state-of-the-art, steel-frame office building. Founders and board members of the newly formed Amicable Life Insurance Company had originally planned a structure with eight stories, but that number soon rose to seventeen and then twenty-two. Construction on the building, known as the "ALICO Building," lasted a year and was the talk of the town, with crowds of onlookers common. Lee Lockwood remembers being in those crowds: "They would carry those big steel beams clear up to the top of that building, and we'd just stand there with our mouth open." Mary Sendón recalls the town's attitude toward the structure: "My dad said, ‘That's crazy! What are they going to do? Put up one skyscraper in this little town?' And everybody made fun of it right at first because it was so tall. And when Will Rogers came to Waco and spoke at the auditorium—the old auditorium—he said that Waco was a tall skyscraper surrounded by Baptist churches. (