Hundreds of times a year, I would look outside a NFTA metro car by 620 Main Street and see the three last names etched in stone: “LEVY KING & WHITE” with two flower-like objects enclosed in circles with the letters “LK&W” artfully presented on each end of the title.
Eventually I found out that LKW was the premier advertising firm in Buffalo during their hey day. This knowledge came to me during the same time I started contemplating a career switch in mid 2008 to communications design and watched Mad Men (Dear hypothetical advertising firm that is contemplating hiring future me, Mad Men had nothing to do with my career switch-I swear). So with all these factors in my head, LKW became the premier suit wearing, brandy swirling, modernist commercial art producer in downtown serving the well-financed industrialists of Western New York.
The firm’s reality was still a mystery to me however, a quick Google search doesn’t always bring up much of anything in relation to Levy, King, and White but I finally came across a great article by Annie Deck-Miller of Business First from 2005, interviewing former employees and summarizing the firm’s peak and fall.
Although the firm’s roots can be traced back to the 1940’s, it only became LKW in 1984 after a merge between Weil Levy King and Mainspring Advertising-this is when they took up space in 620 Main. Ironically, Miller compares the firm to a fictional one from “Thirtysomething” -clearly we all need to compare ad firms to the ones we know through television.
But besides reality being two decades removed from my fantasy, the rest of the agency life seemed to fit what I expected- dependency on one big client, office shenanigans, and excessive spending.
And like the season finale of Mad Men’s season three when Sterling Cooper is about to be purchased by McCann,leading to the secretive formation of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, LKW’s finale seems equally dramatic. Levy, King, and White crumbled mostly due to the collapse of its biggest client, Empire of America Bank, a victim of the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980’s. Two employees (Robert Travers and William Collins) salvaged as many clients of the collapsing firm as they could, departed, and eventually formed Travers Collins and Company in 1995. Another employee founded Crowley Webb. Syracuse’s Eric Mower and Associates merged with what was left of LKW and moved into the new Key Towers in the early 1990’s. These three form what are currently the most prominent members of Buffalo’s advertising scene, all carrying the LKW legacy with them through their founders and workforce.
*Image courtesy ECoastTransplant via Skyscraper City Forums
On a personal level, the next time I go by 620 Main, I will feel the crossings of my changed career path in that structure inside and out. Inside, a planning firm once on my list of potential workplaces, TVGA Consultants, and outside, still, the three names in all capital letters that are all that remain of a legendary local firm in a field I now pursue. Even with all the new facts I’ve discovered, the fantasy in my head is still just as vivid and the nostalgia still grows for something I never even experienced. Fittingly, it’s a similar feeling when I watch a typical day at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.