Buffalo Waterfront - Table of Contents
Grain Elevators
On Buffalo Architecture & History:
3 drawings illustrating how grain elevators work
Buffalo Industrial Heritage Trail
The Slip Form Method and Reinforced Concrete Grain Elevators
Buffalo's Demolished Grain Elevators
Buffalo Grain Elevator "Preserve"
Dale Butler, Alfred Edward Baxter and the Grain Industry
Lynn Freehill-Maye, The Trouble With Owning a Grain Elevator
Francis R. Kowsky, Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity: Buffalo's Grain Elevators and the Rise and Fall of the Great Transnational System of Grain Transportation History of Buffalo's Grain Elevators
Tim Tielman, Buffalo's Unusual Claim to Architectural Fame
Timothy Tielman, Buffalo's Waterfront: A Guidebook Sample pages from the book
Ramona Pando Whitaker, Attitude Is Everything: Cylinders and Pyramids
Buffalo Listings - Historic American Buildings (HABS) Survey
Agway Elevator / GLF Elevator / / Cooperative Grange League Federation Elevator / Wheeler Elevator | 385 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2013) |
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American / Russell-Miller Milling Co / Peavey Elevator | 87 Childs Street | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
American Malting / Perot Malting / Genesee Brewing Elevator | 100 Childs Street | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Buffalo Malting Elevator / Kreiner Malting | 50 Elk Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Cargill Electric / Electric / Eastern Elevator | 40 Childs Street | DEMOLISHED |
HABS. (online April 2013) |
Cargill Flour Milling /Urban Mill & Elevator
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200 Urban St. | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Cargill Superior / Superior Elevator | 874 Ohio Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
ConAgra / Lake & Rail Elevator / International Milling | 120 Childs Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Concrete-Central Elevator | 175 Buffalo River | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Connecting Terminal Elevator |
100 Fuhrmann Boulevard | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Cooperative Grange League Federation Elevator / GLF Elevator / Wheeler Elevator | 385 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2013) |
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Cutter & Austin Elevator | ? |
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Dart Elevator |
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Eastern Elevator /
Electric / Cargill Electric Elevator |
40 Childs Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Electric / Cargill Electric / Eastern Elevator | 40 Childs Street |
HABS (online April 2013) | |
Electric Annex |
40 Childs Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills Elevator |
54 South Michigan Avenue | HABS (online April 2013) | |
GLF Elevator / Cooperative Grange League Federation / Wheeler Elevator / RiverWorks |
385 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2014) | |
General Mills / Frontier / Washburn Crosby Elevator | 54 South Michigan Avenue | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Genesee Brewing / American Malting / Perot Malting Elevator | 100 Childs Street | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Great Northern Grain Elevator / Mutual / Pillsbury Elevator |
250 Ganson Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Hecker / Nesbitt / Pillsbury / Standard Elevator | 1 Saint Clair Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
H-O Oats Elevator |
54 Fulton Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
International Milling / ConAgra / Lake & Rail Elevator | 120 Childs Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Kreiner Malting / Buffalo Malting Elevator |
50 Elk Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Lake and Rail Elevator / International Milling / ConAgra | 120 Childs Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Marine "A" Elevator | 105 Childs Street | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Marsh Elevator | |||
Meyer Malting Elevator / Meyer Malting / Schaefer Brewing Grain Elevator | 1314 Niagara Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Nesbitt / Standard / Hecker / Pillsbury Elevator | 1 Saint Clair Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Peavey Elevator /
American / Russell-Miller Milling Co. |
87 Childs St. | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Perot Malting / American Malting / Genesee Brewing Elevator | 100 Childs Street | Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Pillsbury / Nesbitt / Standard / Hecker Elevator | 1 Saint Clair Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
Pool / Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator | 1489 Furhmann Boulevard | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Russell-Miller Milling Co / American / Peavey Elevators | 87 Childs St. |
Silo City | HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator / Pool | 1489 Furhmann Boulevard | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Schaefer Brewing Elevator / Meyer Malting | 1314 Niagara Street |
HABS (online April 2013) | |
Spencer Kellogg / Schaefer Brewing / St. Mary's Cement Elevators |
389 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Standard / Hecker / Nesbitt / Pillsbury Elevator | 1 Saint Clair Street | HABS (online Jan. 2016) | |
St. Mary's Cement /
Spencer Kellogg Elevator / Schaefer Brewing Elevators |
389 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Sturgess Elevator | |||
Superior Elevator / Cargill Superior. | 874 Ohio Street: | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Urban Mill & Elevator / Cargill Flour Milling | 200 Urban St | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Washburn Crosby / Frontier / General Mills Elevators | 54 South Michigan Avenue | HABS (online April 2013) | |
Wheeler Elevator / Cooperative Grange League Federation Elevator / GLF Elevator | 385 Ganson Street | HABS (online April 2014) | |
Wollenberg Elevator | 133 Goodyear Avenue |
DEMOLISHED |
HABS (online Jan. 2016) |
Henry H. Baxter, Adventures in American History Series: Grain Elevators (online April 2013)
Nicholas Howe, Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin E-text (online April 2013)
Francis R. Kowsky, Historic and Architectural Resources of the Buffalo Grain and Materials Elevator Multiple Property Submission (online April 2013)
Mark Maio, Against the Grain Illustrations and info (online April 2013)
Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis: Buffalo Grain Elevators (online April 2013)
HABS: Buffalo Grain Elevators 107 data pages (online April 2013)
EPA, 9.9.1 Grain Elevators And Processes (online June 2013)
The Industrial Heritage Trail The Industrial Heritage Committee, Inc. (online April 2013)
Grain Elevator Map Buffalo History Works. (online April 2013)
As articulated by Reyner Banham in A Concrete Atlantis (1986), the grain elevators in general and those in Buffalo in particular were an inspiration to modern architects in Europe.
The Importance of Grain Elevators
2 excerpts from
Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis: Buffalo Grain Elevators (online Jan. 2013)
Le Corbusier declared, “Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age ..."
It was the power of the visual image that moved these architects, and the adoption of their formal qualities had a long term effect on modern architecture. The simple but powerful geometric structures and the ideology of practical design without ornamentation conformed to the purposes of modernism.
- Lynda H. Schneekloth, p. 15 (online Jan. 2013)
In the 1910s and 1920s, photographs of grain elevators circulated in European architectural publications dedicated to modern architecture, prominent Buffalo examples included. That the functional dictates of grain storage could produce the uncontrived beauty of the platonic cylinder was taken as proof of modernist values. Such industrial buildings, it followed, were at least as modern as any contemporary architecture with masterly authors, such as Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright.
On the authority of these images, avant-garde European architects began to design non-industrial buildings that resembled an American industrial type that they had never physically experienced ....
A Concrete Atlantis [by Reyner Banham, 1986] made the claim that the quintessence of European modernism was rooted in two types of American industrial buildings, the daylight factory and the grain elevator ....
The association of elevators with pure form appears to have entered modernist consciousness via Wilhelm Worringer’s comparison of contemporary silos to the monuments of ancient Egyptians in his celebrated text, Abstraction and Empathy (1908). In addition to the fact that the concrete silos bore an uncanny likeness to the massive columns of New Kingdom temples, ancient Egypt was associated with the history of grain storage through the biblical story of Joseph stockpiling grain for the seven years of famine, as well as the myth that the pyramids functioned as silos.
In 1913, Gropius’ [Water Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School] conclusion that America -- rather than Germany -- was the ‘Industrial Motherland’ would have come as a surprise the industrialists, artists, and architects to whom the manifesto was most immediately addressed.
- Hadas Steiner, pp. 106-107 (online Jan. 2013)