Can Buffalo, N.Y., Woo Tourists with its Grain Elevators?

Story from the archives by Tricia Vita / July 16, 2004

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Grain elevator in Buffalo, N.Y. (Charles J. Maley)

In 1842, Buffalo entrepreneur Joseph Dart devised a system of bucket "elevators" to scoop grain from freighters into bins. Nineteen years later, when the British novelist Anthony Trollope visited Buffalo, dubbing it "the great gate of Ceres," more than 50 million bushels of grain annually passed through what would become the world's largest grain port. "I saw bins by the score laden with wheat, in each of which bins there was space for a comfortable residence," Trollope wrote.

By the 1920s, when Le Corbusier heralded Buffalo's 38 grain elevators as "the magnificent fruits of the new age," the structures had influenced the Bauhaus school of architecture.

Today, nearly 20 elevators dating from 1897 to 1954 have survived the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the collapse of the Great Lakes grain trade. Most of these behemoths, including the largest, the 150-foot high, quarter-mile long Concrete Central, are made of concrete and occupy an industrial zone along the Buffalo River. Some are abandoned, and only a few are still being used in the grain industry.

Yet the creation of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor in December 2000—and its commissioning two years ago—has given fresh impetus to a group of preservationists and architectural historians who hope to preserve the elevator district as an industrial heritage area.

"In the last five to six years, there's been a rethinking of what could be the economic base for this area, and like many areas, we say heritage tourism," says Lynda Schneekloth, co-director of the Buffalo Grain Elevator Project, a joint effort of the University of Buffalo's Urban Design Project and the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier. "It's a radical shift for a working-class town like Buffalo, where people made their money on bread and steel."

The Concrete Central (Patricia Layman Bazelon )

In 2002, Schneekloth's group used grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Preservation League of New York State to organize a public symposium and prepare nominations for two city-owned elevators to the National Register of Historic Places. On May 19, 2003, the Concrete Central and the Wollenberg Grain & Seed, the sole surviving timber-framed elevator, became Buffalo's first grain elevators to win designation.

At the same time, a demolition standoff looms over the Great Northern, the oldest of Buffalo's surviving elevators and the first to use electrical power. Built in 1897, its brick box sheathes the last of the steel bins that were used after fire-prone wooden silos and before fireproof concrete.

The Great Northern (Jack Quinan)

The Great Northern, owned by the Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels Midland Corp., (ADM), "the supermarket to the world," hasn't been used in more than two decades. In February, the corporation announced plans to proceed with demolition of the city landmark, which the city's preservation board approved in 1996, subject to a number of provisions.

Those requirements include providing video documentation of the elevator and creating a plaque; the board dismissed the idea of salvaging one of the steel bins, according to John Laping, chair of the board. The key provision is that Archer Daniels Midland post a bond of $2.4 million, which is 20 percent of the estimated cost to build new silos, "just to make sure they would do something, not just tear it down and abandon it," Laping explains. "We thought if they were going to spend $12 million on new silos, that would be a pretty good sign they would stay."

Laping says discussions are "in limbo," despite the fact that city officials have tried to save about 80 jobs at the corporation's flour mill. Asked to comment on the situation, Karla Miller, vice president of public relations, says, "ADM is currently in negotiations with the city, and no further information is available as of yet."

The on-again, off-again talks between the city and ADM are all about demolishing the Great Northern, not about finding a way to preserve it, contends Tim Tielman, executive director of the Campaign for Buffalo History, Architecture, and Culture. "If you have an uncooperative or unresponsive owner, you find a new owner," says Tielman, who suggests that a preservation group like his might be willing to take over the elevator if ADM gave them the $300,000 they would use to demolish it. "This is one of the things that makes Buffalo distinctive. Why eliminate your distinctiveness?"

(Buffalo Grain Elevator Project)

In cash-strapped Buffalo, which is currently holding public hearings on whether to turn over its finances to a state control board, the community continues to debate the value of the Great Northern. In the letters column of the Buffalo News, opinions of the structure range from "as important to Buffalo as the pyramids are to Egypt" to an "obsolete, hulking eyesore on the city's waterfront" to "still a part of who we are."

At the Buffalo Grain Elevator Symposium in October 2002, participants learned about other successful conversions: in Baltimore, a developer plans to buy a former ADM elevator for $6.5 million and convert it into luxury condominiums, a hotel, and possibly a cruise-ship terminal. Yet Buffalo faces the challenge of preserving not one but 18 structures, all of which are eligible for the National Register.

"A strong argument can be made that you don't have to reuse all of them. They can just sit there, much the way old castles would sit there as ruins," says Schneekloth, who toured the Emscher Landscape Park in Germany's Ruhr Valley, where gigantic buildings designed as machines for the coal mining industry have been creatively reused, transforming the region into a tourist destination. "They'll put a restaurant here, an exhibition there, but mostly they're just vacant, and people can wander through them."

In the meantime, the Landmark Society would like to list a few more structures on the National Register and then try to establish a historic district. The society's Thomas Yots hopes the historic tax credits that accompany the designation will encourage private owners to upgrade other structures.

"I think we can save all of Buffalo's grain elevators. There's no reason not to," adds Schneekloth, who notes that Buffalo, a city of 650,000 people in 1915, now has a population of less than 315,000, with huge areas of vacant land. "We're trying to create a win-win situation so we can actually keep the grain elevators and keep the grain industry, too."

For the past 15 summers, Tielman, the author of Buffalo's Waterfront: A Guidebook, has wowed residents and tourists on boat tours of the largest collection of historic grain elevators in the world. "People gasp when the boat goes right under one of these sheer walls rising straight up,” he says. “It's a cultural landscape on a titanic scale."

For information on boat tours of the Buffalo River's grain elevator district, visit http://campaignforbuffalo.bfn.org/ or www.missbuffalo.com.

Tricia Vita is a freelance writer who divides her time between New York City and an 1850s mill conversion in Norwich, Conn.

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on June 20, 2003.

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