Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity - Table of Contents
Part IV
Monuments
of a Vanished Prosperity: Buffalo's Grain Elevators and the Rise and
Fall of the Great Transnational System of Grain Transportation
Published in
Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis: Buffalo Grain Elevators.
L. Schneekloth (ed.).
Buffalo, NY: The Urban Design Project and
the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier, 2007, 17-42.
Note: This reprinting of the 2002 nomination excludes footnotes and includes some bold text and brown color text for easier reading.
Part IV: The Decline of Buffalo as a Grain Transshipment Port after 1959
Most historians agree that Buffalo's golden age as a world port of grain transshipment came to en end with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. In 1959, when President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth celebrated the opening of the Seaway, no Buffalo business leaders were there to cheer them.
It now became possible to load grain in Upper Great Lakes ports such as Duluth, Chicago, or Detroit directly onto ocean-going vessels. By taking the expanded Welland Canal from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and from there following the St. Lawrence to Montreal, these vessels had direct access to the Atlantic.
There was no longer any need to unload grain at Buffalo and put it onto canal boats or railroad cars for surface shipment to East Coast ports. "With no reason for ships bound either for the ocean from the West or from the ocean to the West to ever come to Buffalo," observes historian Mark Goldman, "the city sat bypassed at the end of a long dead-end street."
Gradually, during the 1960's-1980s the storage capacity of many grain elevators became superfluous and their operation, usually controlled by out-of-town ownership, was shut down. Milling also slowed during the last decades of the twentieth century, but, nonetheless, managed to survive as a significant local industry into the present century.
When in 1986 Reyner Banham published Concrete Atlantis, the book that called international attention once again to Buffalo's important legacy of concrete grain elevators, he cast his prose decidedly in the past tense. Many of the structures he wrote about had already disappeared. But a significant number endured, even if unused. "In such spectacular urban scenes as the view down the Buffalo River toward the Ohio Street bridge," wrote Banham, " . . . one can see that the combination of assured durability and long-sustained functional relevance has given concrete elevators a monumental longevity."
