This entire lengthy discussion is based upon the premise that the story is true. But in addition to Tom Scott's failure to find a historical contemporary source for any of it, mentioned elsewhere on this same page, there's the 2010 challenge to the article on the Wikipedia talk page.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:World's_littlest_skyscrap...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:World's_littlest_skyscrap...

It turns out that John Kelso was in the same boat as Tom Scott: having failed to find any contemporary evidence whatsoever for this.

All of the supposition in this thread about how it could have happened has the unstated premise that it even did happen in the first place, for which no supporting evidence has come to light.

The sad thing is that the article went through Good Article review and was rewritten with the intention of making it clear that the majority of the article was an unsubstantiated local myth; yet here we have people on Hacker News who have clearly not absorbed that from reading it. The rewrite has not achieved its goal.