The ALICO Building: Tallest West of the Mississippi
Near Waco, Texas
When the ALICO Building opened in August of nineteen eleven, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Twenty-two stories of brick and terra cotta rising two hundred and eighty-two feet above Austin Avenue, costing seven hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars, designed by the Fort Worth firm of Sanguinet and Staats in the Beaux-Arts style. Waco was not a city that expected to be second to anyone.
The building was commissioned by the Amicable Life Insurance Company, and the initials are what gave it its name. Insurance was exactly the kind of capital-intensive industry that a prosperous cotton city with a university and a railroad junction would attract. Waco in nineteen eleven was the largest city between Dallas and San Antonio, and the Amicable Building was a statement about where it intended to go.
It held the title of tallest west of the Mississippi for less than a year. The Adolphus Hotel in Dallas was completed in nineteen twelve and surpassed it. But the ALICO did what tall buildings do best, it survived.
When an F-five tornado struck downtown Waco on May eleventh, nineteen fifty-three, the ALICO swayed several feet in the wind and survived intact while nearly two hundred buildings around it were destroyed. The structure was named a Texas Historical Landmark in nineteen eighty-two and added to the National Register of Historic Places in twenty twelve. It remains Waco's tallest building today, more than a century after it was built, still anchoring the downtown skyline above the river it was meant to command.
