The Landmark Tower Company was based out of
Fort Worth, Texas and founded by Henry “Hank” McGinnis. The company was known for designing and building a type of radio tower known by the same name. McGinnis, who had previous experience building electric transmission line towers, evidently came up with the unique design while scribbling a
Christian symbol of a fish on a napkin.
Tower design
The prototypical Landmark tower, also known as an Adelphon tower, is a tripod in shape with three legs that rise to meet each other about a third of the way up. The legs taper down from larger footings to a thinner middle and then expand again to the point where they meet. The outer cords continue all the way up to the top of the tower in one swoop, but the inner three loop around into each other, creating a central ovoid and voided core. Aside from its unique appearance, the Landmark tower design has several advantages compared to the typical free standing
lattice tower, with less wind resistance and a reduced amount of steel required for construction.
List of towers
The most well known example is the
Star Tower, located in Cincinnati, Ohio. The individual base leg columns were erected by crane, while the upper sections of the tower were built using a
Sikorsky S-64
The Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane is an American twin-engine heavy-lift helicopter. It is the civil version of the United States Army's CH-54 Tarhe. It is currently produced as the S-64 Aircrane by Erickson Inc.
Development Under Sikorsky
Th ...
helicopter. Numerous other Landmark towers can found across the United States, including the
Mesquite Tower in
Mesquite, Texas, the
Hughes Memorial Tower
The Hughes Memorial Tower is a radio tower in Washington, D.C., at 6001 Georgia Avenue, near the intersection of 9th Street NW and Peabody Street NW. At , it is the tallest structure of any kind in the district, surpassing the Washington Monumen ...
in
Washington, D.C., and, at a smaller scale,
WPXR-TV
WPXR-TV (channel 38) is a television station licensed to Roanoke, Virginia, United States, broadcasting the Ion Television network to the Roanoke– Lynchburg market. The station is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scri ...
's analog antenna on
Poor Mountain in
Virginia, and another atop the
Energy Plaza skyscraper in downtown
Dallas, used by
TXU Energy
TXU Energy is an American retail electricity provider headquartered in Irving, Texas, serving residential and business customers in deregulated regions of Texas since the deregulation of the Texas electricity market in 2002. A subsidiary of Vist ...
for its communications needs. None are known to have been built outside of the United States. The Adelphon Tower Company (Henry McGinnis) wrote bankruptcy on Prime Contractor Pyramid Tower & others in 1991 as Star 64 was completed. Many others were listed in the Chapter 7. The Landmark Tower Company went bankrupt as Henry's wife attempted to continue after Henry McGinnis passed on in 2002.
[http://www.wirelessestimator.com/t_content.cfm?pagename=Wireless%20Tower%20News]
See also
*
Lattice tower
*
List of tallest freestanding steel structures
References
{{Reflist, 30em
Bankrupt companies of the United States
Defunct companies based in Texas
Companies based in Fort Worth, Texas