Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism

Buffalo at the Crossroads is a diverse set of cutting-edge essays. Twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Across the collection, they consider the history of Buffalo's built environment in light of contemporary developments and in relationship to the evolving interplay between nature, industry, and architecture.

The essays examine Buffalo's architectural heritage in rich context: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful movement; world's fairs; grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and so-called white flight; and the larger networks of labor and production that set the city's economic fate. The contributors pay attention to currents that connect contemporary architectural work in Buffalo to the legacies established by its esteemed architectural founders: Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others.

Buffalo at the Crossroads is a compelling introduction to Buffalo's architecture and developed landscape that will frame discussion about the city for years to come.

Contributors: Marta Cieslak, University of Arkansas - Little Rock; Francis R. Kowsky; Erkin Özay, University at Buffalo; Jack Quinan, University at Buffalo; A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester; Annie Schentag, KTA Preservation Specialists; Hadas Steiner, University at Buffalo; Julia Tulke, University of Rochester; Stewart Weaver, University of Rochester; Mary N. Woods, Cornell University; Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501749780

Book preview

BUFFALO AT THE CROSSROADS

THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN URBANISM

Peter H. Christensen, Editor

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Buffalo at the Crossroads Peter H. Christensen

Part I: Buffalo as Territory

1. The Olmsted City: Heritage Landscapes and Civic Identity in Twentieth-Century Buffalo Stewart Weaver

2. The Peace Bridge and the Rhetoric of Hospitality at the US-Canada Border Peter H. Christensen

3. Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses: Uneven Geographies of Abandonment in Buffalo, New York Julia Tulke

Part II: Buffalo as Utopia

4. In the Thought of the World: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building Jack Quinan

5. Max Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion: An Airport for the Spirit, Where the Soul Takes Off for Heaven Francis R. Kowsky

6. Putting the Rust in Rust Belt: Architectural Tourism and Industrial Heritage Annie Schentag

7. Anticipating Images: Buffalo Industry under Construction, 1906–1943 Claire Zimmerman

Part III: Buffalo as Experiment

8. In the Buffalo Community, but Not of It: Polish Migrants, Urban Poverty, and the American Nation in Buffalo at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Marta Cieślak

9. Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes: Artists and Artist Communities in Postindustrial Buffalo and New York City during the 1970s Mary N. Woods

10. Lake Effect: Art and Childhood in 1970s Buffalo A. Joan Saab

Part IV: Buffalo as Palimpsest

11. Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York Erkin Özay

12. Cropping the View: Reyner Banham and the Image of Buffalo Hadas A. Steiner

Coda Peter H. Christensen

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This book, first and foremost, would not be possible without the contributions of its eleven authors. They have written engaging and diverse essays that I anticipate will have a significant impact on the study of Buffalo specifically and American urbanism generally.

This project began when I was hired as the curatorial consultant at the Buffalo Architecture Center (now the Lipsey Architecture Center Buffalo), housed in the former Buffalo Psychiatric Center, a building designed as a collaboration between Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted. Despite my living in nearby Rochester, a city that came to its own florescence at the same time as Buffalo, Buffalo's clear and outsized importance as a laboratory for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning quickly drew me into its history. In my initial year of consulting work I enlisted the help of two of this book's authors—Marta Cieślak and Annie Schentag—as well as Eitan Freedenberg as curatorial assistants. All of them brought a distinct passion and commitment to their research that has helped to shape both the content and conception of the book. Friends and colleagues including Brian Carter, Frank Kowsky, Toshiko Mori, and Mary Roberts engaged me in fruitful discussions about the city and its cultural landscape.

Elizabeth Demers at Johns Hopkins University Press took an initial interest in the project, and when it was considered to be too far out of their geographical purview, she laid the groundwork for its successful enlisting with Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press. Michael and his team, including Bethany Wasik, Jennifer Savran Kelly, Brock Edward Schnoke, and the copy editor Glenn Novak have insured the careful and thoughtful navigation from manuscript to finished product. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers for their excellent criticisms, which certainly made this book stronger.

Finally, I am grateful to two sources that helped fund this publication: the New York State Council on the Arts and the dean's office of the College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester. As funding in the humanities decreases and books become more expensive to produce, institutions like these are essential to the continued success of scholarly publishing.

Map 1 Buffalo.

Source: United States Geological Survey.

Introduction

Buffalo at the Crossroads

Peter H. Christensen

On September 5, 1901, Buffalo, relishing its new moniker as The City of Light, emblematized the ascendant and prosperous American city. The city had risen to the status of America’s eighth largest city, its peak, behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland.¹ Its prosperity, stemming dually from several decades of trade as the terminus of the Erie Canal and the home of a spate of new hydroelectric power stations harnessing the power of Niagara Falls and the Niagara River, had transformed a small trading outpost in the heart of the Wenro Nation into America’s great threshold between the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest. Its importance was not merely national—it was intercontinental, playing host to the elaborate Pan-American Exposition of that same year, a world’s fair sitting on 350 acres of what is today Buffalo’s Delaware Park and attracting a total of eight million visitors.² Unlike the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago nearly a decade earlier, famous for its monolithic all-white Beaux-Arts architecture, the Pan-American Exposition was designed to celebrate color and illumination, with its buildings festooned with color increasingly as they reached the exhibition’s center of gravity, the Electric Tower. Walter Hines Page, editor of the Atlantic Monthly (a publication established by Frederick Law Olmsted), exclaimed of the tower: Out of the city of beauty rises a massive pillar, like an overlooking flower in a gorgeous garden, a centerpiece in a cluster of gems, a venerable fabric of jeweled lace. There it stands, glowing with the lights of many thousand bulbs flashing its image in the basin at its feet, showing the gleaming dome to the people in neighboring cities. Its beauty is transcendent.³

One of the gems flanking the tower was the so-called Temple of Music, a concert hall and auditorium designed by the architects August Esenwein and James Johnson that served as the exposition’s main staging ground for all its large public performances and speeches.⁴ The ornate, if stylistically confused, building was also draped amply in lights, gleaming at night for all to see and boasting, like the Electric Tower, of Buffalo’s ample supply of electric power at a time when electrification was both exciting and synonymous with modernity. On that early fall day, William McKinley, a popular US president credited with bringing the American economy back from crisis several years earlier and into its second gilded age (replete with new colonial holdings like Puerto Rico and the Philippines), delivered a speech on tariffs and foreign trade. In it, McKinley, responding to the fair’s hemispheric purview, outlined a vision of a United States that would lead not only its own people but its neighbors in the Americas into a new century of power and prosperity. Like the Electric Tower, the country was to act as a beautiful beacon. His vision, projected out from Buffalo to the rest of the world at the dawn of the twentieth century, is one that would come true, at least for the United States. Buffalo, at the geographic crossroads of America’s agricultural, financial, and political power, marked also the United States’ chronological crossing from an upstart nation with growing pains into a country that confidently assumed the role of the world’s greatest political power.

Amid the throngs of visitors, however, not all was bathed in light and economic optimism. One visitor, Leon Czolgosz, the child of first-wave Polish immigrants, himself a devout Catholic and a steelworker from Michigan, had lost his job from the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company in the economic crash of 1893. Czolgosz was unable to find sufficient support in the church and developed an interest in radical socialism and ultimately anarchism.⁵ On September 6, the day after McKinley’s speech, Czolgosz traveled to the exhibition grounds with a.32-caliber revolver to find McKinley on a greeting line at the Hall of Music. At 4:07 p.m., McKinley extended his hand to Czolgosz, which Czolgosz slapped aside before shooting the president in the abdomen twice at point-blank range. McKinley would die eight days later in a Buffalo hospital, to be succeeded as president by Theodore Roosevelt. On October 29 Czolgosz was electrocuted by three eighteen-hundred-volt jolts at nearby Auburn prison. It was hoped that this spectacle of electricity, seen by far fewer people but followed by many in the news, would bring cold comfort to a grieving nation.

City of Light / City of Angst

In Buffalo, the horrible event cast a dark pall over the City of Light. Margaret Creighton has noted that the city’s newspapers and various voices from the Buffalo community had considered the assassination to be an assault on the city, as much as it was on the president.⁶ This sentiment seemed to bear itself out in the facts. Buffalo has since been unable to seize the outsize attention that it enjoyed in 1901. The city would be quickly outpaced by the growth of other American cities to its south and to its west and would drop out of the top ten most populous cities by World War I.⁷ The growing American railway network and the rapid growth of Chicago, in particular, displaced much of the original economic power of the city. For the following decades good jobs in Buffalo went from being plentiful to being scarce. The quality and quantity of new construction and urban development declined, with some very important exceptions featured in this book. Buffalo, once at the crossroads of America’s geography and prosperity, was now at the intersection of the woes wrought by both deindustrialization and the growth of the suburbs. One could say that those, too, paralyzed Buffalo.

This book is a story about a representative city, not a delimited one. To this end, a fuller portrait of Buffalo must move beyond its relatively small city limits to tell the full story that the Erie Canal, hydroelectric power, international trade (particularly with Canada), and suburbanization play in the vicissitudes of the city’s history. As such, this book is centered on both Erie and Niagara Counties from the eighteenth century to the present.

Figure 0.1 View of an abandoned home at Love Canal, 1976.

Source: Bettmann / Getty Images.

Indeed, looking to the city’s periphery provides useful insights into the full scope of how the grand City of Light, powered by Niagara’s heaving currents and celebrated at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, had its own undercurrents and afterlives. Furthermore, it is important to remember that history does not begin and end with great white men and politics alone. A fuller portrait is not only about geography but also about polyvalent voices. One must also tend to the stories of the underrepresented and the underheard, too, a task this book takes very seriously.

Let us fast forward three-quarters of a century to March 28, 1979. On this day, a couple from Niagara Falls, Anne Hillis and Jim Clark, presented testimony to the Joint Senate Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution and Hazardous Waste, detailing their prolonged struggle to get answers as to why their lives had been recently turned upside down. Why had a defunct canal, constructed in a utopian industrial scheme in 1894, been allowed to be the dumping ground for a company’s toxic chemical waste? Why, after that, at the height of white flight from Buffalo, had officials allowed the site to be developed as a residential enclave and school? Why were government officials hiding information and mishandling a disastrous environmental situation, making the residents feel all but abandoned? Hillis and Clark ended their testimony, the first of several residents of the area known as Love Canal to testify that spring, by holding up a picture of a young girl, her face covered in a horrible rash. The couple revealed that that girl had been hospitalized just days earlier and that she was, in fact, their daughter.⁸ Why, if we can send billions of dollars to Egypt and Iran, can’t we [get] help in Love Canal? they asked. Why had America turned its back on the city that had once been tasked to represent it?

Just as Hillis and Clark were sharing on Capitol Hill their account of a nightmarish life in a Buffalo suburb, a nuclear accident was unfolding ninety miles north on Three Mile Island, an accident whose shadow cast itself widely over the remainder of the hearings.⁹ At that moment, the anxiety of two private Buffalo-area citizens over their environmental welfare transmuted into the nation’s anxiety over its own environmental welfare, and the broader picture of its environmental future. The human reality at Love Canal was bleak, but the site also reflected a Zeitgeist that spring, sowed by the work of environmentalists like Rachel Carson and foregrounded by the Three Mile Island incident and the hit film The China Syndrome, released the same day Hillis and Clark’s daughter was hospitalized.¹⁰

It would be easy to chalk up to chance such a chronological coincidence, but for the student of Buffalo’s history, it is hard not to interpret it as something more. The history of Love Canal, which one might see as the historiographic inversion of the spectacle that was the Pan-American Exposition, is itself a sort of bellwether of patterns in American culture and urbanism. At first, it represented both unbridled faith in American industrialization and optimism for the City Beautiful movement. Conceived of by the railroad entrepreneur William Love in 1890 as a waterway that could bypass Niagara Falls and bring supplies to a utopian model city on the shores of Lake Ontario, Love Canal attracted a great deal of interest from industrialists who saw opportunities to develop the canal’s banks in tandem with the harvesting of hydroelectric power that was taking hold nearby. A serious economic depression, compounded by technological advancements in the nation’s electricity grid, thwarted Love’s plan and left only one mile of the canal, just north of the Niagara River, complete.¹¹

Later, Love Canal bore witness to the often violent confrontation in American culture between industry and rapid suburbanization. The Hooker Chemical Company purchased the canal site in 1947, using Love’s failed nineteenth-century canal as receptacle for caustics, alkalines, fatty acids, and chlorinated hydrocarbons, all within a stone’s throw of new middle-income ranch-style developments whose front lawns would reveal the slow upward bubbling of these chemicals in the decades to come.¹² Finally, while the Senate hearing on Capitol Hill represented a crossroads for a national environmental awareness, echoing back the historical legacies of industrialization and deurbanization, it also represented Buffalo’s pivotal role in getting something done: the expansion of the role of the Environmental Protection Agency and the establishment of the Superfund program in 1980.¹³

Neither McKinley’s assassination nor Love Canal, in other words, can be viewed as anomalous events. Rather, the history of Buffalo is, in so many ways, prescient of American culture and occasionally even global culture writ large. This leitmotif, one where Buffalo stands for the currents of history, urban life, architecture, landscape, art, and infrastructure, and where it represents a crossroads of historical legacy and contemporary development, is this volume’s common thread. In representing currents that are perceived as both good and bad and, more commonly, somewhere in between, this volume showcases the outsize importance of Buffalo’s history by focusing on its environments, like the Hall of Music or Love Canal, and their transmutable meanings.

Buffalo: Muse of History

As a collection of works by scholars from a variety of disciplines and with a variety of methods, this volume juxtaposes different interpretations of both history and the present moment, all of which resist the reductive, boosterist narratives around Buffalo’s so-called heyday and current supposed renaissance, as well as the hopeless, even nihilist depictions of its profound struggles as a desolated, abjectly poor, and peripheral American city. While the volume features architectural history most prominently, it also features essays by cultural historians, an environmental historian, an architect, and a theorist. Rather than partitioning the disciplines, it is the aim of this volume to stress the breadth of audiences that multidisciplinarity affords and that this book will hopefully enjoy.

The McKinley and Love Canal moments are two cases in point, testifying to the benefits of taking in multiple vantage points. Indeed while, circa 1980, the residents of Love Canal were suffering through an environmental catastrophe and the population of Buffalo itself experienced its single largest population decrease over the course of a decade, nearly 25 percent, the city was also experiencing one of its greatest cultural florescences: the pathbreaking exhibitions of then little-known artists Cindy Sherman, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Longo, among others, at the Hallwalls gallery, the arrival of the iconoclastic British architectural historian Peter Reyner Banham at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the emergence of a dynamic LGBTQ scene.¹⁴

The same dialectics can be located in the historical moment surrounding the Pan-American Exposition. While the city welcomed visitors from around the globe to its glitzy exposition touting Buffalo’s water-born modernity, newly arrived residents in the city, particularly Poles, Irish, and African Americans, were living in squalid tenements and flophouses that matched the level of dereliction of those documented by Jacob Riis in New York City. The problem was Buffalo did not have a Jacob Riis and would not, until decades later, enjoy the same housing reforms that Riis ultimately afforded to New York City. Nineteenth-century world’s fairs are well known for their less than tasteful depictions of race, but the Pan-American Exposition proffered a particularly nasty array of ethnographic encounters amid the colorful, electrified architecture. The Apache Geronimo was brought all the way from an Oklahoma prison to be ogled. Plains Indians came from the Midwest and Rockies merely to reenact the battles they lost as European settlers moved west. And Filipino warriors performed a number of native acts in the Native Village that celebrated America’s recent annexation of the Philippines, even as American soldiers were still fighting Filipinos in parts of the country that were still trying to assert their sovereignty from US imperialism.¹⁵ In Buffalo, there was always a human tragedy not far away from something touted as an unalloyed success, a fact that remains just as true today.

It is not novel to point out the dialectic of optimism and pessimism, of death and vitality in any place and time in history. Jane Jacobs made that dialectic famous in the Death and Life of Great American Cities.¹⁶ But in Buffalo, this dialectic seems almost to be conscious, as if it is designed to be the very fuel of the city, and one of its defining traits, rather than the result of the chronicler’s work. The city functions this way not because the historian says so but because it has been designed as such. One would be hard pressed to find another American city that exhibited such high-minded architecture and planning, just as one would be startled to see how little of the wealth that fueled those visions is left to support it.

To this end, let us consider Reyner Banham a bit more, a figure explored in some detail in this volume, that brought a fresh set of foreign eyes to the city’s uncanny importance. Buffalo is particularly indebted to his architectural scholarship and passion for the city, and for cultivating a global interest and local reinvestment in its urban fabric that persists into the present. In the introduction to his now-classic 1981 book, Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, which included contributions from Frank Kowsky and Jack Quinan, both who have contributed to this volume, Banham opens with the pronouncement: This book is intended to make it impossible, ever again, for anyone who cares about architecture to say, ‘We drove by Buffalo on the Thruway, but decided not to stop because there’s nothing there to look at—is there?’

With these words, written during the city’s deepest postindustrial struggles, Banham not only inspired readers to visit and understand the city on its own terms; he also illustrated how the city’s influence is legible beyond its borders, anywhere that industrial and modernist architecture is found. Almost forty years later, it would be hard to find anyone curious about architecture who would not get off the Thruway to see the treasures that Banham and his collaborators dutifully celebrated in a time when it seemed to many that there was very little to actually celebrate: Daniel Burnham’s Ellicott Square Building, Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building, Eero and Eliel Saarinen’s Kleinhans Music Hall, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, and Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Buffalo Psychiatric Center, among the most prominent examples. Banham’s contribution is key in that it forcibly inserted historical consciousness into Buffalo’s dialectic of optimism and pessimism, death and vitality, and forced the city and those who study it to reckon with the fact that a city like this had, and could continue to have, the ability to design its own fate despite any number of odds against it, ranging from military battles to harsh weather to the tumultuous politics of New York State, all themes that are examined in this volume.

Since 1981, in addition to gaining the attention of architectural scholars and tourists, Buffalo has emerged as a linchpin in discourses of urban revitalization. Indeed, Buffalo’s trajectory in the years since the Guide’s publication is best understood in the context of the city’s ever-evolving relationship with architecture and landscape. The city has historically been a laboratory for new design practices and ideas, from form follows function to sustainability, as a home to SolarCity and a Tesla production plant. Now, after decades of industrial decline and disastrous urban renewal policies, these same practices and ideas are central to the attempts to revive the city culturally and economically, some of which are successful and some of which are not. From adaptive reuse of factories to the conservation of Olmsted’s parks, urbanists, architects, and planners are wrestling with how best to design the city’s fabric in a way that suits the needs of its twenty-first-century populace, a populace whose demographics and spending power are in constant flux. Architectural heritage is valued not only as raw material but also as inspiration: pioneering skyscrapers such as the Guaranty Building and daylight factories such as Trico Plant No. 1, which once inspired architects globally, have been reclaimed as symbols of local vitality and resilience. But is this enough? In other words, is a distinguished architectural legacy a powerful enough agent of political and economic change? What can Buffalo teach us about how architecture that fights above its weight is—or is not—able to function as an economic engine in any number of cities across the globe? In addition to these questions about its inherent value in politics and economics, architecture, with its ties to landscape and urban history, is also a particularly useful means for grappling with some of the key social and cultural issues facing the American city: racial and ethnic inequality and the constancy of political corruption.

This volume includes one chapter explicitly about ethnicity, specifically Polish immigration, but also presents several additional reflections on the perpetuation of inequality in one of the most racially segregated (sixth in the white-black index and twenty-first in the white-Hispanic index) metropolitan regions in the United States, an inequality made abundantly clear by the red line running along the city’s Main Street.¹⁷ Segregation continues to impose a wide range of costs on people of color, hindering everything from their access to health care and education to good jobs and public transportation. Rather than consider this purely as a demographic issue, this volume looks at the historical and spatial mechanisms that have produced this serious problem, from the inequitable planning of parks and transport thoroughfares to the uneven development that characterizes Buffalo’s south side and strategies of refugee resettlement that both counteract and entrench patterns of inequality. Yet just as Buffalo is famous as the terminus of the Erie Canal, it was also a terminus of the Underground Railroad, playing an important role in the liberation of thousands of slaves.¹⁸

Buffalo’s woes have also included a legacy of crime and corruption, particularly as it relates to the city’s development. This was most recently highlighted in a spate of fraud and corruption charges brought against top deputies of New York State’s governor and the city’s biggest developer in conjunction with the so-called Buffalo Billion, a widely touted investment package supposedly intended to invigorate business and development in Buffalo, pledged by the governor in 2013.¹⁹ Why exactly such a legacy of corruption became established in this particular city is not entirely clear, but various actors, from politicians to developers to landlords, have laundered money, smuggled illegal substances, and rigged the appropriation of public monies in Buffalo for decades at a rate and scale far outpacing cities of its size. One way that we may consider this is through Buffalo’s status as a border city, something I explore in my own essay. Another way to explore the culture of distrust is through examining the upstate-downstate divide that has increasingly pitted a wealthy New York City against an upstate in a slow economic decline since the 1970s, a dynamic explored in two different essays about Buffalo in that decade. Buffalo is New York State’s second city, and in many ways must bear the burden of representing the vast territory of upstate to all those whose primary orbit is metropolitan New York City.

Ironically, the historical record also reveals Buffalo’s status as the cradle of the anticorruption movement. When President McKinley passed away and Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the White House, the former Rough Rider and New York City police commissioner made it one of his central missions to root out the corruption in civic life that had thrived in the state since Tammany Hall and William Boss Tweed.²⁰ Bringing his hard-charging police sensibility to the national stage, Roosevelt pursued numerous indictments of individuals involved in corruption in government and designed a multitude of new laws and structural systems that would form the basis for twentieth-century anticorruption law nationwide. Buffalo prides itself as the birthplace of Roosevelt’s Progressive legacy, most vividly in a house museum dedicated to the site of his impromptu inauguration following McKinley’s assassination. Here too we might underscore the consistent divide in Buffalo between rhetoric—for example the unilateral boosterist narratives of a contemporary renaissance—and the messier reality on the ground.

The contributors in this volume likewise see Buffalo’s status as a city of contradictions not as an impediment or nuisance, but rather as key to understanding the city’s past, present, and future. Their essays concern the local and global and high and low contexts of Buffalo’s architectural heritage: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful; world’s fairs; the grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and white flight; and the larger networks of labor and economic output to which the city has been attached—to Canada, the Great Lakes, New York City, Europe, and beyond. Bringing the past to bear on the present and vice versa, the contributors pay significant attention to currents that connect contemporary Buffalo to the legacy established by Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others. Interweaving familiar histories and figures with new research on everyday environments and critical interventions, they offer twelve modern, topically diverse, and provocative additions to Buffalo’s historiography. This book is organized in four clusters. The four clusters—Buffalo as Territory, Buffalo as Utopia, Buffalo as Experiment, and Buffalo as Palimpsest—all stress Buffalo’s multivalency, jettisoning the idea that the city has an exceptional status as an epicenter or is, like Detroit or Cleveland, American architectural history’s tragic muse.

Buffalo at the Crossroads: An Overview

The opening section, Buffalo as Territory, refers to the ways in which the city functions as a sprawling topography, connecting (or not) social, environmental, and geopolitical concerns, and features essays by Stewart Weaver, myself, and Julia Tulke. Stewart Weaver’s essay, ‘The Olmsted City’: Heritage Landscapes and Civic Identity in Twentieth-Century Buffalo, examines Frederick Law Olmsted’s environmental legacy in Buffalo and the central, and often troubled, role it played in the city’s identity in the century following its completion. Weaver shows that for all of the depredations of Olmsted’s work over the years (a new expressway being the most obvious example), much of Olmsted’s work in Buffalo survives both psychologically and physically.

In my own essay, The Peace Bridge and the Rhetoric of Hospitality at the US-Canada Border, I explore Buffalo’s role as a border city and a hub of transnational infrastructures, with the Peace Bridge as centerpiece. I explore the ways in which Western notions and traditions of hospitality can be seen as a lens for understanding how the built environment was tasked with manifesting transnational hospitality in concrete and steel.

In her essay Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses: Uneven Geographies of Abandonment in Buffalo, New York, Julia Tulke explores the disused industrial sites, vacant lots, and boarded-up houses of Buffalo that mark its decay and abandonment, a material condition that has come to be understood as a hallmark of rust belt urbanism. Tulke shows a struggling city in a region marked by decline and the debris and ruins of its industrial past, and marred by the residential abandonment left behind as the city lost more than half its population.

The second section, Buffalo as Utopia, examines Buffalo’s appeal as a place for grand visions in corporate, religious, and industrial architecture and their philosophical implications, and features essays by Jack Quinan, Francis Kowsky, Annie Schentag, and Claire Zimmerman. Quinan’s essay, ‘In the Thought of the World’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, probes the question of why Buffalo was the site of one of the most esteemed buildings in the modernist canon, the Larkin Administration Building. Quinan first considers the circumstances of the commission: a once-flourishing industrial city, a team of progressive clients, and a unique opportunity for the architect to extend his practice beyond the domestic realm, expand his practice eastward, and comment on the work of the Chicago School.

Francis Kowsky’s essay, Max Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion: ‘An Airport for the Spirit, Where the Soul Takes Off for Heaven,’ documents Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo, a significant but lesser-known example of mid-twentieth-century modernism. An in-depth portrait of this building, almost lost in the shadows of the works of more famous architects in the city, elucidates the historical and cultural significance of this four-part complex, comprising a synagogue, school, and other facilities.

Annie Schentag’s essay, Putting the Rust in Rust Belt: Architectural Tourism and Industrial Heritage, demonstrates that while Buffalo is currently lauded as a destination for viewing the commercial and residential architecture by the triumvirate of Sullivan, Wright, and Richardson, it also boasts a lesser-known, long-standing tradition of architectural tourism in the industrial sector as well.

Claire Zimmerman’s essay, Anticipating Images: Buffalo Industry under Construction, 1906–1943, explores Albert Kahn’s work in the city, beginning with the Pierce-Arrow Motor Company plant (1906), cited by some as a predecessor to the assembly line invented at Highland Park in Detroit several years later. This essay considers all of Kahn’s works in Buffalo over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Photographs of these projects while under construction capture the image of assembly-line manufacture as it came into being on these sites, and Zimmermann considers this image in relation to Buffalo’s history and also to factory architecture as a crucible of modernism.

The third section, Buffalo as Experiment, focuses on the city’s economic and geographic capacity to offer a haven for new artistic and social experiments differing from those in other associated centers like New York City and features essays by Marta Cieślak, Mary Woods, and A. Joan Saab. Cieślak’s essay, In the Buffalo Community, but Not of It: Polish Migrants, Urban Poverty, and the American Nation in Buffalo at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, probes questions concerning immigration and the experience of Polish migrants in Buffalo. Similar to other predominantly rural working-class Europeans in American cities, Poles established what one expert called a city within a city: neighborhoods in which migrants found their own space to face the challenges of urban industrial life and which many Americans perceived as a threat to the development of not only the great cities but also the American nation.

An essay by Mary Woods, Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes: Artists and Artist Communities in Postindustrial Buffalo and New York City in the 1970s, explores how Buffalo, like New York City, battered by white flight to the suburbs, misguided urban renewal programs, and widespread deindustrialization, struggled with economic decline, depopulated neighborhoods, and social and political unrest during the 1960s and 1970s.

Lake Effect: Art and Childhood in 1970s Buffalo, by A. Joan Saab, explores the overlapping environmental conditions of weather, everyday life, and industrial pollution in Buffalo through the prism of personal narrative. Saab employs the city’s watery sites—the Niagara River, Lake Erie, and the Erie Canal, as points of her analysis, and major weather events such as the blizzard of ’77 as defining moments in the 1970s and ’80s, a time when many of the locations that used to mark Buffalo’s prosperity, and events that used to define Buffalo’s hardiness and resilience, came to expose many of its sorrows and challenges, framed here through the lens of both art and the built environment.

Finally, Buffalo as Palimpsest