Relics of the Queen city

Story and Photos by Brycen Pace

Buffalo has long been a city caught between preservation and progress.  

That tension came to a head in early 2022 when a court ruling sealed the fate of the Great Northern Elevator, a towering relic of Buffalo’s grain industry. As preservationists rallied to save it, the fight over its demolition became about more than just one building — it became a battle over how the city remembers its past.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Great Northern’s destruction echoed a familiar pattern in a city often at odds with its own architectural heritage. 

The Great Northern Elevator was not the first landmark loss for Buffalo’s preservationists. The city has previously seen the demolition of the Larkin Administration Building and the Erie County Savings Bank — structures designed by some of the most influential figures in architecture and engineering, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Thomas Edison.  

Buffalo’s grain elevators tell a story of a city that once reigned as a national shipping and manufacturing stronghold, towering over the city’s harbor from an industrial age long gone. 

Their existence — and the industrial dominance they resemble — was made possible by the Erie Canal, the engineering marvel that transformed Buffalo from a small frontier town into one of America’s most important cities for a period of time.  

Completed in 1825, the Canal connected Lake Erie to the Hudson River, paving the way for commerce to pass through the Appalachians. Buffalo emerged as a key gateway to the Midwest, fueling economic expansion and population growth. 

Brycen Pace

A cargo ship being unloaded in Buffalo with the city’s historic grain elevators behind it.

Within a decade, Buffalo’s population surged, growing from just more than 2,000 in 1820 to almost 9,000 in 1830. By the early 20th century, the city was ranked as the eighth most populous city in America, and the grain industry was at the heart of Buffalo’s transformation. 

After the construction of the Canal was completed, Buffalo’s grain industry, like its population, grew rapidly. In 1829, four years after the Canal’s opening, the city handled 7,975 bushels of flour and wheat. 

A typical bushel weighed around 60 pounds, and by 1830, Buffalo grain saw over 180,000 bushels, about 10 million pounds of grain. 

The original process for moving and storing grain was mainly handled by Irish dockworkers, who would cup the grain into buckets and carry it on their backs into warehouses, where the buckets would eventually be weighed and recorded. Compounding the inefficiency, this could not take place during rainy weather, since work was done in the open and moisture damaged the grain. As a result, no more than 2,000 bushels could be moved per day, which resulted in a typically crowded Buffalo harbor.  

This bottleneck ended in 1842, when entrepreneur Joseph Dart and mechanical engineer Robert Dunbar introduced the steam-powered grain elevator, an invention that allowed Buffalo to handle massive quantities of grain at a time. A bucket would raise grain from boats along the Buffalo River and move the product to wooden storage bins, transforming the process that took weeks to unload ships into an hourslong operation.  

Within 15 years of Dart’s and Dunbar’s invention, Buffalo had become the largest inland port in the United States, shipping millions of bushels annually.  

In 1861, the city had 27 grain elevators, and by the end of the Civil War in 1865, it was the world’s leading grain port, surpassing global economic powerhouses like the ports of London, Odessa and Rotterdam. 

Most of Buffalo’s elevators were wooden, and the shift to the now-monumental concrete and steel structures was driven by fire risk. In 1900, the total burning of the Eastern Elevator caused over $750,000 in damages, about $29 million in today’s money.

The city’s grain industry peaked between 1925 and the years following World War II, as wartime and postwar Western Europe relied on its grain, with annual receipts reaching up to 300 million bushels, or 18 billion pounds.  

But as the city’s fortunes declined in the mid-20th century, driven by the deepening of the Welland Canal and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Buffalo’s time as an industrial powerhouse withered, along with the use of its grain elevators.

As the industry left, so did some of the people. By 1960, Buffalo’s population declined for the first time in its history, and it declined fast. Within 50 years, the city lost half its population, and it didn’t rise again until the 2020 census

Despite the industrial and economic rise and fall of Buffalo, some grain elevators still stand today, serving as symbols of Buffalo’s legacy as a dominant city in the global grain trade. 

Though their original purpose has faded with time, these structures silently line the waterfront. These monolithic vestiges have since become the focal point of a debate over Buffalo’s identity.   

For some, they are invaluable symbols of the city’s industrial and architectural heritage, deserving of preservation or restoration. For others, they are costly reminders of economic decline, and are better removed to make way for new development.   

The Great Northern Elevator embodied this struggle. 

In January 2022, a New York Supreme Court judge approved its demolition, sparking outrage among preservationists. The ruling came after a 2021 windstorm left the building severely damaged, with its owner, Archer Daniels Midland, citing safety concerns and high repair costs. 

What did the Great Northern become? A parking lot.  

Local preservationists — including Thomas Yots, founder of Preservation Studios and former executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara — argue that the significance of the grain elevators and Buffalo’s historic buildings are integral to remembering the role of Buffalo’s industrial past in shaping the city’s identity.  

“These pieces are such an important part of the history of their community that they tell the story without words,” Yots said. 

Yots, who left a 40-year career as a chemistry teacher to pursue his lifelong passion for historic preservation, sees the elevators as more than architectural landmarks. For him, they are vital to understanding the forces that shaped Buffalo and its people.  

“The Erie Canal didn’t just bring goods — it brought people, ideas and opportunities. The grain elevators were a natural evolution of that,” Yots said.  

Buffalo’s elevators have also become a draw for heritage tourism, bringing economic benefits to a city eager for revitalization. However, critics remained unconvinced, pointing to the high cost of maintaining or repurposing aging structures. 

“Historic preservation tourism has brought a lot of money to Buffalo, that’s for sure. But there are people who still don’t see the value of that. When you study the history of a building, you’re really studying the history of the community,” Yots argued.  

Yots claimed that the tourism aspect of the grain elevators started when influential architects such as Erich Mendelssohn, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier visited Buffalo. These visits put Buffalo’s industrial architecture on the global stage, and would be circulated throughout Europe as examples of American modernity.  

In his book Toward an Architecture, considered one of the most influential architectural pieces of the 20th century, Le Corbusier referred to Buffalo’s silos as “the first fruits of the New Age,” reflecting the architectural interest they garnered during this period. 

Walter Gropius, founder of the architectural style known as Bauhaus, visited Buffalo and was in awe, claiming that at the time, the grain elevators “almost bear comparison with the buildings of Ancient Egypt.” 

Mendelssohn, meanwhile, sketched the grain elevators and brought the images back to Europe, where he described them as cathedrals of concrete. “It created Buffalo as an almost spiritually industrialized city,” Yots said.

These conversations paint Buffalo’s grain elevators as some of the foundational inspirations for the Modernist architectural movement, and helped pioneer the slipform method of continuous concrete pouring that the Brutalist movement would later adopt.  

Buffalo’s grain elevators continue to stand as architectural testaments to an industrial age that shaped not only the city but also the trajectory of modern architecture. Yet, these past symbols of innovation now sit as hollowed-out relics staring into the Buffalo harbor. 

“The lesson that can be learned from Buffalo -– and not just with grain elevators but with a lot of other things in preservation — is identifying what you need to preserve, determining how you are going to preserve it and then acting right away, bringing it to the conscience of the community,” Yots said.  

With Buffalo caught between honoring its past and embracing its future, the fate of its grain elevators remains uncertain. Some have found new life as cultural landmarks, event spaces and tourist attractions, while others face demolition, their historical significance weighed against potential economic realities. 

Regardless of their future, the towering silos remain an unremovable part of Buffalo’s landscape and legacy. They serve as silent witnesses to the city’s rise, its struggles and its resilience.