Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism 9781501749797

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BUFFALO AT THE CROSSROADS

BUFFALO AT THE CROSSROADS TH E PA ST, P R ESE N T, A N D FU T U R E O F A M E R I C A N UR BA N I SM

Peter H. Christensen, Editor

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University This book is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Christensen, Peter H. (Peter Hewitt), editor. Title: Buffalo at the crossroads : the past, present, and future of American urbanism / edited by Peter H. Christensen. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009390 (print) | LCCN 2020009391 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501749766 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501749773 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501749780 (epub) | ISBN 9781501749797 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—New York (State)— Buffalo—History. | Architecture and society—New York (State)—Buffalo—History. | Buildings—New York (State)—Buffalo. | Buffalo (N.Y.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—­History. | Buffalo (N.Y.)—History. Classification: LCC NA735.B83 B834 2020 (print) | LCC NA735.B83 (ebook) | DDC 720.9747/97—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009390 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009391 Cover image: Prudential Building, 28 Church Street, Buffalo, NY; Louis Sullivan, architect; built 1894–1895. Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. Photo: Jack E. Boucher, July 1971.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Buffalo at the Crossroads Peter H. Christensen1 Part I:   Buffalo as Territory

  1. “The Olmsted City”: Heritage Landscapes and Civic Identity in Twentieth-Century Buffalo Stewart Weaver17   2. The Peace Bridge and the Rhetoric of Hospitality at the US-Canada Border Peter H. Christensen42   3. Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses: Uneven Geographies of Abandonment in Buffalo, New York Julia Tulke63 Part II:   Buffalo as Utopia

  4. “In the Thought of the World”: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building Jack Quinan89   5. Max Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion: “An Airport for the Spirit, Where the Soul Takes Off for Heaven” Francis R. Kowsky110   6. Putting the Rust in Rust Belt: Architectural Tourism and Industrial Heritage Annie Schentag131

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  7. Anticipating Images: Buffalo Industry under Construction, 1906–1943 Claire Zimmerman151 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 Cieślak175   9. Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes: Artists and Artist Communities in Postindustrial Buffalo and New York City during the 1970s Mary N. Woods193 10. Lake Effect: Art and Childhood in 1970s Buffalo A. Joan Saab213 Part IV:   Buffalo as Palimpsest

11. Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York Erkin Özay235 12. Cropping the View: Reyner Banham and the Image of Buffalo Hadas A. Steiner255 Coda Peter H. Christensen265 Notes 267 Bibliography 299 Contributors 315 Index 319

Acknow l edgme nts

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. vii

Map 1 Buffalo. Source: United States Geological Survey.

BUFFALO AT THE CROSSROADS

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 1

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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.

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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

Figure 0.1  View of an abandoned home at Love Canal, 1976. Source: Bettmann / Getty Images.

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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. 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

I n t r o d u c t i o n     5

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,

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 twentiethcentury 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

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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

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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

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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 workingclass 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 refers to the writing and rewriting of the city by a range of authors and features essays by Erkin Özay and Hadas Steiner. Özay’s essay, “Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York,” explores how resettlement embodies a viable force in the transformation of America’s weak market cities. Like Buffalo’s peers in the rust belt, the city offers affordable environments, cooperative city governments, and welcoming publics seeking to impede population decline and foster urban revitalization. By focusing on Buffalo, known as a “preferred resettlement community,” Özay provides insights into the workings of this resettlement urbanism, conditioned by a loosely coordinated network of institutions. In “Cropping the View: Reyner Banham and the Image of Buffalo,” Hadas Steiner employs the city of Buffalo as a tool to study the history of

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architecture itself. Steiner makes the provocative argument that the deployment of architectural history in Buffalo demonstrates how scholarship can be misused to justify policies that reify segregation. She notes the commonplace co-option of cultural capital by politicians and developers while prognostically exploring how disciplinary resources might be directed elsewhere, stemming the growing tide of what she describes as spatial injustice in Buffalo and beyond. Seen together, these essays proffer a dual register for understanding Buffalo’s myriad guises as at once an exceptional and a prototypical American city. The first of these registers is that of historical exegesis. The authors of this volume employ varied and innovative methodologies to unearth new facts and new stories that deepen our understanding of this important American city. The second of these registers is that of interconnectedness—be it diasporic, bi-urban, transnational, or stylistic—one that shows how the themes often at the core of biographic and national architectural and landscape history can be configured and perceived anew. This is Buffalo, at the crossroads of the physical and scholarly environment.

Ch a p ter 1

“The Olmsted City” Heritage Landscapes and Civic Identity in Twentieth-Century Buffalo Stewart Weaver

Approaching downtown Buffalo from the east on Interstate 190—the Niagara Section of the New York State Thruway— one hurtles thoughtlessly through the sprawling “geography of nowhere.”1 Strip malls, office parks, housing tracts, cell towers, high tension lines—all the dreary detritus of American exurbia slides past the windows at dizzying speed, and absent any obviously identifying features one might think oneself anywhere in that vast intermediate territory where the East gradually elides with the Midwest. Unless, that is, when crossing the city line one happens to catch a passing glimpse of a weathered, weed-choked, soot-begrimed sign that says “Welcome to Buffalo: Home of the Olmsted Parks System.” It stands stranded in the grassy verge of the South Ogden Street entrance ramp—as incongruous a tribute to the great apostle of the American pastoral as can possibly be imagined. And it hardly lessens the irony to know, as a few passersby might, that just ten miles ahead, Interstate 190 will completely overwhelm Front Park, an Olmsted-designed esplanade that once peacefully overlooked Lake Erie; or that twelve miles ahead, it will merge with the Scajaquada Expressway, a crosstown “arterial” that since the 1960s has brutally bisected Delaware Park, once Olmsted’s pride and joy; or that fourteen miles ahead the Scajaquada in turn will merge with the Kensington Expressway, a six-lane asphalt monstrosity that in 1958 obliterated one of

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the most beautiful and distinctive streets in America, namely, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway. Welcome to Buffalo indeed, one might think, former home of the Olmsted Parks System. But that would be unfair. For all the depredations and degradations of the years—and the expressways are only the most obvious of these—much of Olmsted’s work in Buffalo survives, both physically and psychologically, and even in its mangled form it remains one of the most original and distinctive park ensembles in the United States.2 Moreover, it is slowly returning from the brink of extinction and beginning to resume something like the prominent place in the social and topographical life of the city for which it was first designed. The same could be said, of course, of Central Park or Prospect Park or Franklin Park or any number of other Olmsted-designed landscapes across the country. They have all come back from the brink since the 1970s, when the word “park” scarcely applied to the dilapidated and dangerous places they had become. But Buffalo’s case is nevertheless distinctive in two crucial respects. First, no other city of comparable size fell so far or so fast in the postwar period. Buffalo lost half its people and almost all its manufacturing industry between 1950 and 2000. Even for the rust belt, such decline was dizzying, and it left Buffalo in especially dire need of a reason for being. And second, no

Figure 1.1  “Welcome to Buffalo”: the sign that has greeted northbound motorists on the Niagara Thruway at the Buffalo city line since June 2000. Photo credit: Stewart Weaver.

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other city of any size has so comprehensive a collection of Olmsted artifacts— not just parks, but parkways, gardens, playgrounds, parade grounds, hospital grounds, civic squares, carriage drives, promenades, and residential neighborhoods. New York has its Central Park, Boston its Emerald Necklace, Montreal its Mont Royal, but Buffalo, Francis Kowsky argues, was the client for whom Olmsted exercised “the fullest measure of his genius,” and in that circumstance (insofar as it is true) lay a unique claim on his legacy and the basis of a new urban identity for a postindustrial age.3 The Queen City; the Nickel City; the City of Light; the City of Good Neighbors—Buffalo has had many a moniker over the years. But it was only in 2003 that then-mayor Anthony Masiello officially proclaimed it “the Olmsted City” in a somewhat backhanded tribute to a park system that his predecessors had very nearly destroyed. No other American mayor has done this; no other urban territory asserts so direct and forceful a claim on the Olmsted heritage; nowhere else than in Buffalo, that is to say, do we see so clearly how a once-prized cultural landscape came first to be forgotten and abused and then suddenly remembered, reclaimed, and (partially) restored to its place at the center of American civic consciousness.

“The Best Planned City” Frederick Law Olmsted’s brief but consequential acquaintance with “the Queen City of the Lakes” began on August 16, 1868, when, en route to Chicago, he stopped off in Buffalo at the invitation of William Dorsheimer, the US district attorney for northern New York and the leading figure of a group of civic-minded citizens seeking to lend a sylvan aspect to their fastgrowing but otherwise unremarkable hometown. Already renowned as the co-architect (along with his partner Calvert Vaux) of New York’s Central Park, Olmsted was at that time busily engaged in the making of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and the residential subdivision of Riverside, Illinois, but what he saw in the course of a one-day tour of Buffalo intrigued him, and a week later he interrupted his return trip to New York for a closer look. Thus far in his young career as a landscape architect, he had been involved in the design and construction of individual parks, but in Buffalo he for the first time perceived a different possibility: not a single central park of the sort that Dorsheimer and his fellow worthies had in mind—that is, something to rival the great new parks of New York and Brooklyn—but a park system, a comprehensive ensemble of interconnected parks and parkways that would extend its salubrious influence throughout the far-flung territory of the city. Despite its obvious wealth and energy, and despite the elegance of Joseph

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Ellicott’s radial street design, Buffalo and its “immediate environs” struck Olmsted as “not generally at all attractive.” The relation of the town to its canals, railroads, and rivers was such “as to make an escape from it in several directions, to anything like rural quiet, difficult and disagreeable if not impossible,” he wrote, especially during that “considerable part of the year” when the “portion of the environs” that was “otherwise least repellent to rural exercise” was swept by “harsh, damp winds.” In light of all this and more, any landscape scheme for Buffalo had to be “comprehensively conceived.” A single large park, however desirable and necessary, “should not be the sole object in view,” Olmsted argued, “but should be regarded simply as the more important member of a general, largely provident, forehanded comprehensive arrangement for securing refreshment, recreation and health to the people.”4 Under the authority of the newly established Buffalo Parks Commission (1869), the main elements of the Buffalo park system went in more or less according to Olmsted and Vaux’s original conception between 1871 and 1876. Foremost among these was the 350-acre expanse that Olmsted called simply “the Park.” Here among the gently rolling meadows and forest stands north of Forest Lawn Cemetery, Olmsted indulged more fully than almost anywhere else the pastoral impulse for which he is most known. The heart of the Park was a greensward meadow twice the size of the famous Long Meadow in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Here was room enough indeed for that “sense of enlarged freedom” that was, Olmsted believed, the very essence of the park experience. Southwest of the meadow, where Scajaquada Creek flowed gently out of Forest Lawn Cemetery, Olmsted placed a picturesque “water park” around a forty-six-acre artificial lake. Together with the happily adjacent gothic cemetery, the pastoral meadow (complete with sheep and deer paddock) and the picturesque “water park” made for a remarkable landscape ensemble and the most notable addition thus far to Olmsted’s oeuvre outside of New York and Brooklyn.5 And still “the Park” was only the offset centerpiece of a remarkable landscape triptych that also featured “the Front,” a thirty-five-acre esplanade and playground overlooking Lake Erie and the Niagara River, and “the Parade,” a fifty-six-acre drill and picnic ground on the city’s East Side. Both of these smaller, satellite spaces Olmsted envisioned as active recreational complements to the larger contemplative sanctuary of the Park, and in placing them closer to the heart of downtown, he purposefully meant to integrate them more fully into the swirling life of the city. But they were still places apart, still places of quasi-rural refuge from the noisome influences of the commercial and industrial districts, and as if to emphasize their significance to

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Figure 1.2  “The Park & Approaches.” Olmsted, Vaux, and Company’s plan for the Park (now Delaware Park) and the four parkway approaches to it, circa 1870. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.

the overall scheme of things, Olmsted and Vaux designed a series of wide, shaded, grassy avenues to join them to the Park, to downtown, and to each other. These “park ways,” as the partners called them, were in some respects the most distinctive and original feature of the entire Buffalo system. Two hundred feet wide and planted with rows of overarching elms, they extended the parklike atmosphere throughout the city and served themselves as parks, in fact, arterial parks “suitable for a short stroll,” Olmsted wrote, “for a playground for children, and an airing ground for invalids, and a route of access to the large common park of the whole city of such a character that most of the steps on the way to it would be taken in the midst of a scene of sylvan beauty, and with the sounds and sites of the ordinary town business, if not wholly shut out, removed to some distance and placed in obscurity.”6 The Park, the Front, the Parade, and their interconnecting parkways were the four original elements of Buffalo’s Olmsted-designed park system. There were more elements to come. But in the meantime, even as the parks

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were under construction, Olmsted was at work on two other projects that adjoined “the Park” and together with Forest Lawn Cemetery made for a unique green space aggregation. First, in 1871, he and Vaux accepted a commission to design the grounds of what was then known as the Buffalo State Hospital for the Insane. Here, on land immediately to the west of his “Gala Water,” and in friendly collaboration with the young architect H. H. Richardson, Olmsted made fully explicit the psychic purpose that lay behind his entire theory of landscape design. The whole point of a park, as he understood it, was to provide mental relief from the strains and anxieties of urban

Figure 1.3  Olmsted’s plan of Buffalo highlighting the new park and parkway system for display at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.

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life. A park was above all recuperative; it was restorative. If well designed it allowed for the “unbending,” as Olmsted put it, of overtired and overtaxed faculties. As did, ideally, a well-designed residential community of the sort that the private investors behind the Parkside Land Improvement Company had in mind when they asked Olmsted to design a “detached suburb” on land wrapping around the Park to the north. Neither the asylum grounds nor “Parkside” (the name a deliberate nod toward Olmsted’s recently completed “Riverside”) was part of the Buffalo park system. But in Olmsted’s mind they were all of a single therapeutic piece, and he prominently featured them both, along with Forest Lawn Cemetery, when in 1876 he proudly displayed his Buffalo designs at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Eight years earlier he had thought Buffalo “not generally at all attractive,” but now he famously proclaimed it “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States if not the world.”7

The Period of Significance And still he was not done with it. In 1888, recognizing as he always had that the Park, the Front, and the Parade did little to meet the recreational needs of the working-class districts south of the Buffalo River, Olmsted drew up a visionary plan for a 240-acre pleasure ground along the shores of Lake Erie that many believe might have been his masterpiece. With its stunning combination of beach, meadow, lagoon, and sports ground, “South Park,” as Olmsted called it, promised to retain a pastoral aura even while allowing for that “slight spirit of adventure” that those condemned to “monotonous occupations” amid “somber surroundings” required.8 Sadly, the Buffalo Board of Parks Commissioners did not trust his cost estimates in this case, and the park was never built. In its place, Olmsted somewhat begrudgingly drew up designs for two smaller inland sites that he, for one, found “too large for local grounds, too narrow and cut up for parks.”9 In one of these, the 155-acre South Park, he combined classic pastoral greensward with a picturesque lake and an extensive arboretum that still survives. In the other, the 76-acre Cazenovia Park, he provided for the more robust recreations of boating, skating, riding, and the like. To connect the two southern parks, Olmsted again designed a beautiful pair of wooded parkways, though his hopes of someday extending these to the three northern parks were never realized. After his retirement in 1895, the successor firm of Olmsted Brothers then designed a sixth park for the Buffalo system that overlooked the Niagara River from the north-side community of Black Rock—Riverside Park—and they stayed

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on as consultants to the Board of Parks Commissioners until its dissolution 1915, twelve years after Olmsted’s death and almost half a century after he had first stopped off in Buffalo en route to Chicago. Taken inclusively, the four decades from the building of the first Olmsted parks in Buffalo in the 1870s to the parting of the ways with Olmsted Brothers in 1915 constitute what the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy calls “the period of significance,” that is, “the period of time in which the Olmsted parks made their historic mark on the City of Buffalo,” or “the time period during which [they] attained historical prominence.” Critics of the heritage industry often deride the whole idea of a “period of significance” as ossified and originalist, and the phrase does rather suggest that anything that happened after some idealized founding moment is corrupt and insignificant. But four decades is a long moment, and in this case, at least, the case of Buffalo’s Olmsted parks system, the “period of significance” accommodates considerable redesign and modification of Olmsted’s original intent. Almost immediately, for instance, flower beds and formal gardens began to intrude everywhere on his naturalist lawns and groves. Over his own strenuous objections, the romantic deer paddock in the Park evolved quickly into a bustling, workaday zoo. The bicycling craze of the 1890s forced even the devout William McMillan (Olmsted’s personally anointed Buffalo parks superintendent) to allow the construction of dedicated cycle paths in the Park. And already by 1915, the end of the “period of significance,” the largest open meadow that Olmsted ever designed had given way to an eighteen-hole golf course—an early instance of the profusion of single-use sports facilities that would soon mark the history of Olmsted parks everywhere. Golf courses and soccer fields and even (to a lesser extent) baseball diamonds are at least quasi-pastoral in aspect and thus somewhat assimilable to Olmsted’s aesthetic vision. Not so the large public buildings and institutes that began to encroach on the parks at the turn of the century. The earliest and most egregious instances of this in Buffalo were George Cary’s Buffalo and Erie Country Historical Society (1900) overlooking North Bay in the Park (officially, from 1896, Delaware Park) and Green & Wicks’s Albright Art Gallery, which in 1905 replaced Prospect Concourse, an elegant carriage drive overlooking Gala Water. Apart from simply being too large, conspicuous, and greedy of parkland, both were built in an imposing neoclassical style befitting Chicago’s (and Olmsted’s) White City, perhaps, but wholly at odds with the Romantic pastoral of Olmsted’s Buffalo parks. Not that Buffalo’s were the only Olmsted parks to suffer such institutional indignities. Far from it. But the case of the Albright Art Gallery was, in the estimation of Olmsted’s stepson and successor John C. Olmsted, “one of the worst

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ones from the point of view of landscape park design.” The building “completely dominates a considerable part of the park landscape,” he complained, “changing its character from that of a refreshing naturalistic landscape to a mere attachment and decoration of the Art Museum.” An art museum was perfectly desirable, even admirable in itself, he allowed. But “the whole idea of those who favor the placing of such museums in landscape parks is an utterly mistaken one,” he insisted, “and is due to their apparent failure to properly appreciate the purposes and art character of such parks, and to the idea that such parks are merely vacant land awaiting decoration.”10 Of all the existential threats to Olmsted’s parks, the idea that they were “merely vacant land” would in time prove the most destructive, and it derived, ironically, from Olmsted’s own inspired achievement. So natural were his designs, so carefully in keeping were they with the given spirit of a place, that people soon forgot they were engineered at all; they began to think of them as remnant open land available for any use. Happily, Olmsted himself seems to have anticipated this paradoxical response. He knew that cities would grow, that times would change, that civic and recreational needs would evolve, and he built a certain measure of resilience and flexibility into his naturalistic designs. An Olmsted park is artificial, but it is not fragile, and for the forty years following its conception, up to the end of the “period of

Figure 1.4  Green and Wick’s Albright Art Gallery, which much to the dismay of John C. Olmsted replaced his stepfather’s carriage concourse in Delaware Park in 1905. Source: University of Rochester Libraries.

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significance,” the Buffalo park system absorbed what came its way without too much distress. Despite the encroachments of golf courses and museums, it was still in 1915 the lush, spacious, sylvan retreat from the city that Olmsted had imagined when he first visited Buffalo in 1868. And then came the automobile.

“The Modern Moloch” The first intimation of the automotive assault on Buffalo’s Olmsted landscape came in 1899, when the newly founded National Motor Transit Company began to operate a half-hourly service from Lincoln Parkway eastward through Delaware Park to Humboldt Parkway and thence to Main Street. Olmsted had designed his parkways for horses, horse-drawn carriages, and pedestrians, of course, but with their level grade and wide expanse they proved to be eminently suited to automobiles and were soon the frequent scene of (at first) recreational motoring. The Olmsted firm seems not to have objected when in 1894 New York State ceded the northern perimeter of the Buffalo State Hospital grounds for the building of a parkway along the meandering course of Scajaquada Creek. Though it mildly compromised the integrity of the working farm that Olmsted had laid out for the benefit of the mental patients, it was after all a respectful extension of his parkway system, one designed eventually to link Delaware Park to Riverside Park, then under construction just to the north in Black Rock. Once occupied by clattering automobiles, however, Scajaquada Parkway emphatically intruded on the outdoor calm that Olmsted believed essential to a therapeutic regimen. And in conjunction with the transit service operating on South Meadow Drive in Delaware Park, it portended far worse things to come.11 Meanwhile, the last park in downtown Buffalo effectively vanished in 1912, when the Common Council authorized the extension of Broadway and Main Street right through Lafayette Square, thus turning Joseph Ellicott’s once-elegant civic centerpiece (and its Olmsted-designed landscape) into a traffic circle. It was this desecration that led the Buffalo Socialist to lament the “continual sacrifice of park space to the needs of traffic,” but theirs was a lonely, antimodernist voice.12 Automobiles were by now all the rage, and no one seems to have minded when in 1926 the whole eastern edge of the Front, Olmsted’s distinctive promenade and park overlooking the Niagara River, became an asphalt approach to the Peace Bridge, then under construction from the adjacent Fort Porter across the river to Canada. That same year, the Civic Planning Association (a coalition of commercial and downtown business interests formed in 1919) called for an end to “the

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meanderings of Delaware Avenue through the Park.”13 Such meanderings were absolutely essential elements of Olmsted’s pastoral design, but to a quickly growing number of suburban commuters using Delaware Avenue as their way to and from work they were simply a decelerating annoyance, and in 1936 they went, along with Calvert Vaux’s rustic, single-span viaduct that up to now had gracefully carried the park’s carriage drive over the road below. Once a two-lane city street, Delaware Avenue had become a four-lane divided highway bisecting the park on a rigid north-south axis. Bisecting, but still not destroying. Walter Curt Behrendt, a Bauhaus architect and urban planner who had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1934, did not find much to admire in Buffalo when he arrived to take up the directorship of the city’s newly established “Planning Research Station” in 1937. Most of the city struck him as sordid, disordered, and ugly. But he liked Joseph Ellicott’s radial street plan. And he loved Olmsted’s parks. Olmsted’s urban pastoral struck him, in fact, as America’s “first distinct contribution” to the art and science of town planning, and it was nowhere better shown than in Buffalo’s Delaware Park, where Behrendt often strolled of a morning, “enjoying the spaciousness of its landscape—the large perspectives opening up on wide water planes, the beautiful vistas framed by large, old trees.” The recent widening and straightening of Delaware Avenue alarmed him, however. Such a thing would never have happened in Europe, he said, where even the most urgent needs of automotive traffic routinely deferred to the built inheritance of cathedrals, castles, city halls, and the like. The roads went around them, refusing to conform to the crude principle, as Behrendt described it, “that the shortest connection between two points is the straight line.” Buffalo had no cathedrals and castles, of course, no real built inheritance. But it had Olmsted’s parks. These were the equivalent of its civic monuments, and Behrendt pointedly cautioned against sacrificing them to what he called “the modern moloch of speed.” In one of many addresses to Buffalo’s civic leaders, he called for “a strong and never-ceasing vigilance, assuring that this most valuable inheritance will never be impaired or destroyed.”14 But the high-minded, high modernist Behrendt was not a good fit for the (as he saw it) frontier town of Buffalo. He left in 1939, unloved and unlamented, and the modern Moloch of speed ran rampant, here as everywhere in America, as the restraining hand of the Depression lifted and the suburbs far outpaced the city in population growth. The Second World War gave Olmsted’s parks a reprieve in Buffalo, as road construction yielded to the urgent requirements of military production. But even before the war had ended, New York State declared as a matter of policy that “the modernization and construction of arterial highways” both through and around cities

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would “contribute greatly to post-war reemployment and to the stimulation of industrial recovery,” and with that, the destructive die was cast. The entire premise of the state’s postwar “Report on New York State Thruway and Arterial Routes [in the] Buffalo Urban Area” was that the city’s survival depended on the unimpeded flow of private automobiles to and from the fast-growing suburbs and the downtown business district. Traffic congestion, the report assumed, was strangling the city to death, spreading “blight and economic dry rot” and “seriously menacing city property and tax values.” To alleviate it, the report recommended (with no sense of irony, it seems) the building of “a virtual cordon” around the city, that is, a system of interlinked, limited-access highways that would intercept traffic from the surrounding suburbs and deliver it quickly to the city center. The first piece of this “virtual cordon,” the Niagara Section of the New York State Thruway, intensified the assault on Olmsted’s Front that the Peace Bridge had tentatively begun in 1926. Apart from the lost acreage—by 1957 successive takings had reduced the park’s original fifty acres to a remnant twenty—the Thruway destroyed the Front’s very raison d’être by severing it utterly and irremediably from the water. The “broad prospect over the lake” that Olmsted had meant to secure forever to the public, the “interesting view of the Niagara River and the Canadian Frontier” that he had so admired, was now a noisome tangle of traffic lanes, access ramps, tollbooths, and parking lots.15 “The Front is now but a shell of the park it used to be,” the Buffalo Evening News lamented in 1957, and they might have said the same of Riverside Park a few years later, when the Niagara Thruway tore through it also and made a dismal mockery of its very name.16 “Thruwayside Park” would henceforth have been more apt. On its completion in 1959, the Niagara Thruway joined Buffalo to Niagara Falls and so (for a little while, anyway) eased the burden of traffic congestion north to south along the Niagara River. But it did nothing to help the frustrated commuters of the fast-growing eastern suburbs, and in 1953, before the Thruway even opened, the City Planning Commission called for the construction of five “circumferential” and crosstown arteries to complete the cordon and overlay it at critical choke points from east to west. It was one of these arteries that finally spelled doom for Delaware Park, where as far as the commissioners could tell, the right of way was “predominantly vacant.”17 Strung violently together, the Scajaquada Parkway and the North Meadow carriage drive in the park became, in 1954, the Scajaquada Expressway, a four-lane divided highway complete with cloverleaf entrance and exit ramps on what had once been the quiet meeting point of the Meadow Park and Gala Water. Already bisected north to south by Delaware Avenue, the

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Figure 1.5  Olmsted’s Front, now Front Park, as mangled by the Niagara Thruway and the tollbooth approaches to the Peace Bridge, circa 1969. Photo courtesy of the Buffalo Courier-Express Photograph Collection, Archives, and Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.

park was now fully drawn and quartered, cut into pieces by asphalt and concrete, its pastoral tranquillity permanently lost to the roar of modern traffic. But of the many insults that Olmsted’s art was to suffer in the twentieth century, the destruction of Humboldt Parkway, the exquisite tree-lined avenue that he and Vaux had designed to link the Park to the Parade, was, in the authoritative view of Francis Kowsky, “the most egregious.”18 With its six stately rows of linden and tulip trees, its wide strips of green turf, and its elegant carriageways, Humboldt Parkway had come to be admired as one of the most beautiful streets in America. “Many a European city would envy Buffalo for her wide, spacious avenues bordered by such beautiful trees,” Walter Behrendt had noted in 1937, and Humboldt Parkway in particular impressed him as reminiscent of the Bois de Boulogne.19 But where Behrendt saw Parisian elegance the City Planning Commission, again, saw only vacancy—vacancy and an opportunity to build an eastside equivalent of the Niagara Thruway and connect downtown to the eastern vicinities of the Buffalo Municipal Airport. The bulldozers arrived in 1958, and Olmsted’s finest

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parkway fell victim to progress in the form of the Kensington Expressway, a monstrous, six-lane, concrete canyon designed simply to carry thirty-five thousand automobiles a day at unimpeded high speed to and from downtown and the northeastern suburbs. Not that the city planners and urban renewalists who perpetrated this “heinous act of urbicide,” as the biographer of Buffalo Mark Goldman describes it, would have thought of it as such.20 In all their plans and promotional brochures, they carefully render the Kensington Expressway as just another form of greenway, more sleek and modern than the Humboldt Parkway, perhaps, but consistent with its contours and still somehow pastoral, even idyllic in aspect. When the city expressed some concern over the possible effect of the Kensington on nearby property values, the district state engineers assured them that with its “gently-sloping, landscaped grades seeded and shrubbed,” the expressway, far from having a deleterious effect, would be an aesthetic improvement on the woodsy mess that had been there before.21 Whether they actually believed that or not is hard to say, but if they did, they could not possibly have been more misguided. As Goldman puts it: “No one

Figure 1.6  Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway in the late 1950s—still elegant on the eve of its destruction. Courtesy of the Buffalo History Museum, used by permission.

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Figure 1.7  The sunken Kensington Expressway, which replaced the Humboldt Parkway in the 1960s. Courtesy of the Buffalo History Museum, used by permission.

who remembers the serene beauty of Fredrick [sic] Law Olmsted’s parkway can understand how public officials charged with protecting the public trust could have conceived and then executed a plan so devastating in scale.”22 The truth is, though, that when the bulldozers arrived in the winter of 1958, few people thought of the Humboldt as “Frederick Law Olmsted’s parkway”—not the commissioners who condemned it, nor the engineers who destroyed it, nor even the few lonely neighborhood activists who tried

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valiantly to save it. They thought of it as distinctive, perhaps, an unusually wide and woodsy thoroughfare through what had by then become a predominantly African American neighborhood. But in none of the letters to the editor expressing misgivings over this brutal act of “improvement” does anyone invoke the Olmsted name or legacy. Both had simply faded from civic memory, taking Humboldt Parkway along with them. The two parks it had linked, Humboldt Park and Delaware Park, were still there, of course, and even in their degraded and dilapidated state somewhat loved. But they were not thought of as “Olmsted” parks. The very naturalness of their appearance, together with “the persistent mental opposition of nature and city,” had, as Anne Whiston Spirn argues, “gradually eroded the memory of Olmsted’s contribution” and turned his parks into vacant spaces vulnerable to aggressive appropriation.23 To save what was left would require recalling the art and artist to mind and so turning the Buffalo parks into precious relics of “the Olmsted heritage.”

The Olmsted Renaissance The origins of what we might call the Olmsted heritage industry lie at the intersection of historic preservation and environmentalism, two related responses to the destructive tendencies of unrestrained economic growth that emerged in tandem in the United States from the mid-1960s. Both of course had roots reaching back to the Romantic era and beyond. But it took the wholesale demolitions of postwar urban renewal to turn the genteel inclination of civic nostalgia into the preservationist movement, just as it took the indiscriminate deployment of petrochemical pesticides to turn a conventional love of nature into the environmental movement. The nearsimultaneous publications of Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 may be taken as precursory of the conjoined concerns that were to culminate legislatively in the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970. And Olmsted, as it happened, spoke to them both. In Olmsted, devotees of Jane Jacobs suddenly found an earlier prophet of urban vibrancy, even as those roused to indignation by Rachel Carson found something of an urban ecologist. In the context of the late 1960s, his was an eminently serviceable aesthetic that caught the progressive spirit of the time. The more direct stimulus to what came to be known as “Olmsted-mania” came from the sesquicentennial commemoration of his birth in 1972. Here, the decisive events were two major retrospectives of his work, one at the

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Whitney Museum in New York and one at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, both conceived by William Alex, an architectural historian who had stumbled on Olmsted unexpectedly while designing an exhibit on Back Bay for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Together with the accompanying catalogs, Alex’s retrospectives and what they represented “hit a responsive chord,” as David Grayson Allen has put it, and led to profiles of Olmsted and his parks in newspapers and magazines across the country.24 The same year saw the inception of the monumental (and still ongoing) Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project under the general editorship of Charles McLaughlin, followed closely by the first definitive biography, Laura Wood Roper’s FLO.25 There would soon be several more. But already by 1972 one scholar was speaking in terms of “the Olmsted Renaissance” and describing this hitherto obscure reporter-turned-landscape architect as “a major figure in the American experience—comparable, on numerous levels, to such persons as William Penn, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.”26 This was heady (if somewhat arbitrary) company, and it did not immediately convince. In an otherwise laudatory review of Roper’s biography, the eminent urban historian Sam Bass Warner queried its central claim that Olmsted spoke to our own time. His parks were antiquated, grandmotherly affairs, Warner argued, suitable for a genteel promenade or a decorous picnic, perhaps, but wholly unsuited to the boisterous place that America had become. “We are escaping a different city; we are in search of a different Mother Nature,” Warner concluded. But the true believers were not to be dissuaded. As recently as 1966, the curmudgeonly architectural critic Henry Hope Reed had fretted that Olmsted was “not a household word,” even in New York. Six years later, his name was inescapable, in educated households at least, and Olmsted was well on his way to inspiring a new movement for urban park reclamation.27 In Buffalo, an early intimation of the Olmsted revival came in 1963, when Robert Traynham Coles, a young disciple of Jane Jacobs who had studied urban planning and architecture at MIT, invoked his name in honoring “the great treed boulevards” that once formed “a cultural arc” from the Museum of Science north to Delaware Park and then south to Symphony Circle and Kleinhans Music Hall. “But parks and parkways are useless to people who are immersed in the automobile age,” he mourned, even as the bulldozers toppled the trees outside his home at 321 Humboldt Parkway.28 Earlier that same year, a group of concerned citizens in Parkside, the curvilinear suburb that Olmsted had designed for a private land company in 1874, formed the Parkside Community Association in hopes of slowing the pace of white flight from what had by then become a racially mixed neighborhood. How

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aware they were of Olmsted at the time is unclear. In their minds, Parkside was not a heritage landscape but their home, a robust, vibrant, living community that they meant to protect from unscrupulous, blockbusting real estate agents. Over time, however, as they became by necessity more alert to the distinctive design qualities of Parkside, the members of the association increasingly attached them to Olmsted’s name and deployed their pedigree against the threat of neighborhood disruption. At Parkside in Buffalo, the Olmsted heritage and grassroots community organizing found their first heartfelt but also mutually convenient union.29 Just south of Parkside, Delaware Park itself, once the pastoral pride of the Buffalo park system, the park that Olmsted had once expected to “take a more and more distinguished position among the parks of the world,” had by now fallen into a truly pitiable state.30 A 1958 proposal to drop yet one more arterial, the laughably named “Delaware Park Shortway,” down on the north side of the meadow happily foundered. But the Scajaquada Expressway went in as planned, and on its opening in 1962 left the park a

Figure 1.8  Aerial view of Delaware Park Lake and the Scajaquada Expressway, 1961. Prominent also are the buildings of H. H. Richardson’s Buffalo State Hospital, upper left, and the campus of SUNY Buffalo State, which replaced Olmsted’s hospital grounds in the 1920s. Photo courtesy of the Buffalo Courier-Express Photograph Collection, Archives, and Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.

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mangled mess. Stormwater and sewage runoff into Scajaquada Creek had long since fouled Delaware Park Lake (Olmsted’s “Gala Water”), and in 1958 the Erie County Health Department declared it a health hazard and closed it to public use. Parking lots, garages, zoo extensions, and other so-called noncontributing structures continued to proliferate across the park and deny its visitors—the few that still ventured it—that “sense of enlarged freedom” that Olmsted had promised. Dirty, degraded, and dangerous, Delaware Park was by 1968 a broken and abandoned shell of its former self, a sad testament, as the Buffalo Courier-Express finally noted, to the price of automotive progress.31 Into this sorry shell stepped a group of citizen activists called the Delaware Park Steering Committee. Prodded by Delaware District Councilman William B. Hoyt, the Buffalo Department of Community Development released in July 1973, at the height of the Olmsted renaissance, a master plan that finally recognized the historical significance of Delaware Park and promised both to “improve [its] position as a significant recreational and cultural facility” and “restore [it] to its original conception as a facility of excellence and beauty.”32 The steering committee came together soon afterward so that this “framework for park restoration,” as they understood it, “would not join other city ‘master plans’ on a dusty shelf.”33 It included among its members city officials, legislators, and neighborhood activists, some of whom knew who Olmsted was and even gestured toward his philosophy. But the committee was not a heritage society. It was an advocacy group motivated above all by a sense that Buffalo’s parks were unmaintained and underfunded and thus failing to meet even the most basic civic need. By the early 1970s, the jogging craze had come to Buffalo, and some of the members of the Delaware Park Steering Committee simply wanted a safe and reasonably green space in which to run. The real stimulus to the Olmsted heritage industry in Buffalo came a little later, in 1977, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the newly elected US senator from New York and a self-professed “Olmsted nut,” proposed to established an Urban Federal Parks Commission that would pay particular attention to the country’s Olmsted inheritance.34 Moynihan had grown up in New York, knew Central Park well, and had taken a special interest in parks as chief of Richard Nixon’s Council of Urban Affairs in the late 1960s. In Buffalo, his talk of an Urban Federal Parks Commission got the attention of Joan Bozer, a preservation-minded Erie County legislator, and Francis Kowsky, an architectural historian at Buffalo State College, who with a few others came together in 1978 to form the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks. The full unfolding that same year of the Love Canal disaster in nearby Niagara Falls

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was a tragic coincidence. But insofar as it thrust the Buffalo-Niagara region to the national forefront of the environmental movement, it strengthened local interest in urban reclamation and, by association, the organized citizens’ defense of the Olmsted parks. The founding supposition of the Buffalo Friends was that while the city’s 1973 master plan had done well to identify the glaring deficiencies of Delaware Park, it had failed to address “the continuing erosion of the Olmsted design.” The Olmsted park system was, “without exaggeration,” the Friends believed, “the most important thing ever built in Buffalo, historically, artistically, and culturally,” and Delaware Park was its centerpiece. Any changes to the park, therefore, had to consider its “historic integrity,” the Friends insisted, had to consider “Olmsted’s original design and intention,” as well as the park’s significance to the larger city park system. “The Friends are committed to the preservation, restoration and enhancement of the system,” one of their memoranda said. “The quality of the Olmsted design, its subtle separation of uses, its beauty and breadth, and its enduring contribution to the quality of life of this city—is an unmatched and invaluable legacy,” they asserted, and it was in hopes of preserving that legacy that they began to work toward placing the entire Buffalo park system on the National Register of Historic Places.35 Over at city hall, Elizabeth Blum, chair of the Delaware Park Steering Committee, was immediately apprehensive. Though not insensitive to the Olmstedian origin of Delaware Park, she and her members were more present- than past-minded. They wanted the park restored and reclaimed for current use and worried that any sort of historic designation would be, toward that end, counterproductive. “ ‘You can’t think of this park as a museum,’ ” she wrote, borrowing from Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the new Central Park administrator. “ ‘You would not like to rebuild it as a Victorian period piece. It has to be useful to a huge variety of constituencies.’ ”36 For their part, the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted conceded the point, and once satisfied that placement on the National Register would not impede badly needed repairs and renovations, the Delaware Park Steering Committee got behind it. But its membership remained somewhat wary of the Buffalo Friends and their tendency to worship uncritically at the altar of “Saint Olmsted.” And the truth is that the effect of “historic place” designation, in Buffalo as elsewhere, was to over-identify the parks with the great man. Parks are big things. They require a massive collaborative effort on the part of designers, architects, arborists, horticulturalists, hydrologists, engineers, and accountants, not to mention (in the case of Central Park, for instance), thousands of earth-moving laborers over a period of twenty years. But the heritage

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industry does not easily accommodate such nebulous collaborations. It likes things tightly attributable. One criterion for listing a cultural landscape on the National Register of Historic Places requires that it either “embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction” or that it “represent the work of a master that possesses high artistic values, or that represents a distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction.”37 Olmsted is that requisite “master.” He is that “distinguishable entity” that makes the parks eligible for inclusion on the National Register. But he is also, to that extent, something of a romantic fiction, a cultural construction in his own right. As Bruce Kelly puts it, “Olmsted has become a generic term, symbolizing the teams of men whom he supervised and the work which he so ably administered.”38 In preparing its nomination of the Buffalo park system to the National Register of Historic Places, the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier was at least careful to acknowledge the essential contributions of Olmsted’s senior partner Calvert Vaux and several other “key people on the ground,” including George Kent Radford, the chief engineer, and William McMillan, the general superintendent of the parks from 1870 to 1897.39 But the nomination is on behalf of the “Olmsted Park and Parkway System,” and over time the key collaborators (with the partial exception of Vaux) faded into obscurity as the generic heritage took hold. The Buffalo Friends of the Olmsted Parks were a critical influence here. In June 1979, as the National Register nomination was under way, they sponsored a one-day conference featuring Moynihan himself and the idea of a “National Olmsted Historic Park System.” One might have expected such a thing to emanate out of New York or Boston, but in fact it was in Buffalo a year later that delegates from New York, Boston, Detroit, Hartford, Newark, Seattle, Washington, Chicago, and many other cities convened to establish the National Association of Olmsted Parks. Here, finally, was a point of pride for a city that, as Mark Goldman writes, had by 1980 become “almost morbidly obsessed with traumas of unemployment.” Buffalo was a “city in search of a function,” as Goldman puts it, so it was somehow both consoling and fitting when the Olmsted park system went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, just in time for the celebration of the city’s sesquicentennial.40

The Olmsted City Anyone who imagined that placement on the National Register would prevent further encroachment on the local Olmsted legacy was soon disillusioned when the Buffalo Board of Education decided to build a $12 million

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magnet school alongside the science museum in Martin Luther King Jr. Park. Never very big to begin with, “the Parade” (as it once was) had already been sorely compromised and to some did not seem any longer worth fighting for. But the Buffalo Friends saw sacred ground at stake and, with the support of private donors and a National Trust Preservation Services Grant, at once filed suit in the State Supreme Court seeking a permanent injunction against construction. Initially sympathetic, the New York State Historic Preservation Office ultimately withdrew support from the Friends in light of neighborhood support for the school. The case was one that awkwardly pitted historic preservation against school desegregation, and in April 1986 United States District Judge John Thomas Curtin ruled in favor of the school board. The Friends took the loss philosophically. True, a few more precious acres of Olmsted landscape had succumbed to bricks and mortar, but the prolonged lawsuit had brought them much-needed publicity and even in defeat represented their coming of age as a fighting organization.41 The close identification of Buffalo with its Olmsted heritage received encouragement in another quarter, meanwhile, when in 1986—the same year as the Friends’ defeat over the magnet school—the buildings and grounds of the former Buffalo State Insane Asylum won shared designation as a National Historic Landmark—the highest heritage classification that a site can receive. Both Richardson’s buildings and Olmsted’s and Vaux’s grounds were by then in a lamentable condition—the buildings either demolished or abandoned and the grounds cluttered with all manner of service roads and parking lots. More than half the original asylum grounds had long since been lost to the artlessly utilitarian campus of Buffalo State Teacher’s College (now SUNY College at Buffalo) and much of the rest built over with modern substitutes for Richardson’s monumental but antiquated asylum wards. Enough green scraps remained, though, to justify a case for historical integrity, especially in topographical association with nearby Delaware Park. Olmsted himself had always regarded the asylum grounds as part of an arcadian ensemble that included the Park and Forest Lawn Cemetery, and from the early 1980s this worked to the asylum’s advantage, strengthening its claim to historic significance and national landmark status. Neither made it immune to further encroachment. In 1988, in fact, just two years after the asylum’s landmark designation, the Buffalo Psychiatric Center built a twenty-four-bed inpatient facility called, ironically, “the Olmsted Residence,” that severely compromised the parklike character of the southwest corner of the grounds. But the worst of this sort of thing was over. As Kowsky observes, “by the mid-1980s the entire landscape of North Buffalo with which Olmsted and Vaux had been associated enjoyed national recognition of its significance and

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possessed some degree of state and federal protection from further erosion of its historic character.”42 Local recognition, though, still lagged behind. A public survey conducted in 1990 found that while 83 percent of Buffalo’s adults visited the city parks at least once a year, over half of them were unfamiliar with the name of Frederick Law Olmsted and unaware of the distinctive nature of the Buffalo park system.43 By now, city managers emphatically wanted to change this. “The system is cited nationally in historical accounts, is the subject of attention from scholars, planners, and park professionals, and, if treated properly, could re-define the city’s image away from one of steel mills and toward one more reflective of its present day reality and likely future,” the Buffalo Environmental Management Commission asserted hopefully in 1989.44 But such redefinition was beyond the meager resources of the city parks department, and in 1992, inspired by the success of the Central Park Conservancy in raising public awareness of and commitment to the Olmsted legacy in New York, the Buffalo Friends proposed to establish the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit, independent, community organization dedicated to promoting, preserving, restoring, and enhancing the Olmsted parks and parkways in the greater Buffalo area. On their own, as an independent advocacy group, the Friends had had some success in protecting what was left of the parks. The idea now was to work in partnership with the city to manage and maintain them and to promote them nationally as an essential part of Buffalo’s civic identity. The dockyards and steel mills that had made Buffalo what it once was were gone. But in their place was a unique parks system that offered “vast potential for community revitalization, tourism development and economic expansion for the area.”45 In this forward-looking spirit, the Buffalo Friends in 1994 commissioned a “Tourism Market Opportunities” report that explicitly promoted the Olmsted parks as a commercial resource. “In terms of tourism product demand, there is an increased interest in traditional values, nostalgia and history,” the report somewhat cynically argued. “Heritage tourism” and “nature-based tourism” were both growing segments of the travel market, and Buffalo was well positioned in both respects if it could link its Olmsted parks to other historic and natural attractions in the area, especially Niagara Falls, where, as it happened, another Olmsted-and-Vaux-designed landscape served as a pastoral complement to the sublimity of the cataract and river gorge. The millions of annual visitors to Niagara Falls were just the sort of “nature and cultural tourism-based visitors” that Buffalo wanted to attract, but most lingered for only a day before moving on to Toronto. The hope now was to capture some of these tourists for Buffalo by promoting the Olmsted parks

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as a major “heritage asset” of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Region.46 Thus the reasoning, just a few years later, behind that unlikely welcoming sign on the Niagara Thruway with which I began. The idea was to lure some of those hurtling on toward Niagara Falls to linger in Buffalo and take in an Olmsted park or two en route. It has not really worked. Despite its new moniker as “the Olmsted City,” Buffalo still brings rust and snow mostly to the outside mind, and it remains a second-tier tourist destination at best. But raised awareness locally of the Olmsted parks has undoubtedly played a part in the overall urban revival that has many speaking of Buffalo as the new Brooklyn.47 In 2004, in a landmark agreement with the city, the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy assumed primary management responsibility for the park and parkway system and set out to restore it to its once-prominent place at the heart of civic consciousness. The most ambitious elements of its comprehensive restoration plan remain largely visionary.48 But all over Buffalo, even small-scale restoration and the value of the Olmsted “brand” have proved their worth to adjacent neighborhoods and brought genteel park enthusiasts and radical community organizers together in a novel and potent way. Thus in 2015 (partly in response to the death of a child struck by a car traveling at high speed through

Figure 1.9  Mayor Anthony M. Masiello unveils the Niagara Thruway sign identifying Buffalo as the “home of the Olmsted park system” on June 7, 2000, two and half years before he officially declared it “the Olmsted City.” Photo credit: Charlie Lewis / Buffalo News.

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Figure 1.10  Artist Tony James’s 2017 conceptual rendering of a restored Delaware Park, with the Scajaquada Expressway (New York State Route 198) downgraded to a boulevard and the water and meadow sections of the park reconnected by way of pedestrian stone arch and land bridges. Source: Tony James and the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy.

Delaware Park) the state Department of Transportation begrudgingly began to convert the Scajaquada Expressway into what they claim will eventually be a low-speed urban boulevard. And one year later, under pressure from an eastside citizens’ group called the Restore our Community Coalition, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced a $6 million feasibility study of the idea of covering the Kensington Expressway and restoring above at least a portion of the now fabled Humboldt Parkway.49 Neither Olmsted enthusiasts nor neighborhood activists are satisfied by such half measures. Both would like the see the offending expressways further downgraded or removed altogether. And increasingly they are not alone. According to the New York Times, the Scajaquada is “not just a local barrier” but also “a poster road” for a growing movement of progressive urban planners who want to replace downtown highways with pedestrianfriendly streets that actually connect neighborhoods and residents.50 How far they will ultimately succeed in redeeming Olmsted’s faith in “the best planned city in the world” remains very much to be seen. But at a time when environmentalists have suddenly rediscovered the American city, his is proving a broad appeal and the best claim Buffalo might yet have on the national imagination.

Ch a p ter 2

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

In 1927 the Peace Bridge, traversing the Niagara River and connecting Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario, was inaugurated, celebrating one hundred years of peace between the United States and Canada.1 The official rhetoric around the bridge’s construction in both the United States and Canada was exalted and lofty, stressing the themes of neighborliness and hospitality that these two nations, today sharing a border of 5,525 miles—the longest international border in the world—had embraced for a century as friends, both politically and culturally.2 A poem by Elijah Holt, a local Buffalo lawyer and amateur poet,3 commissioned for the bridge’s inauguration, is representative of the occasion: Conceived and built by nations twain; Born of the will and brawn and brain Of both their peoples, looming high O’er common waters, one more tie ’Twixt those whose friendship ne’er shall cease; We christen Thee “The Bridge of Peace.” These peoples of a kindred race, Who met each other face to face Upon the free and lasting way Of Thy broad road, where naught shall stay 42

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Thy welcome passage, they have seen Peace in its workings and its dream. Holt’s romantic portrayal of the bond of US-Canada relations nevertheless glossed over a more complicated geopolitical relationship between the two nations, one that while ostensibly peaceful for a century, bore witness to the emergence of a cultural juxtaposition that the Peace Bridge served to both thwart and emphasize at one and the same time, all within a rhetorical framework of hospitality. The Peace Bridge would become the largest single crossing between the United States and Canada, where the net value of goods cleared on both sides topped that of any international crossing in the world.4 The city of Buffalo, in particular, became the staging ground for the cultural component of this encounter. Hospitality, as a distinct political concept, has its origins in the Enlightenment, most notably in Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace.5 In his text, Kant lays the foundation for democratic peace theory by advocating policies on war, the formation of a military, debt, treason, interference, and other topics, a theory that ultimately rests on a fundamental respect for state sovereignty, the ability to reconcile after a disagreement, and a cosmopolitan ethic of hospitality, in which neighbors respect one another and offer a generous reception when they visit one another. The nature of this hospitality was further explored by Jacques Derrida when he distinguished between an “absolute hospitality” and “the law of hospitality as right or duty.”6 The latter, as Gillian Roberts argues, “underscores the power of the host, meaning that the host does not genuinely ‘give place’ to the stranger who remains as a guest, bound by the conditions outlined by Kant.”7 Roberts makes the observation that “the casual phrase one might utter to one’s guest, ‘Make yourself at home,’ ” is rarely meant to be taken literally and thus is not an absolute hospitality but rather hospitality as a duty. The line between absolute hospitality and hospitality as duty is often thin, particularly if you genuinely like your guest. Whereas Buddhist and Hindu cultures have what may be conceived as a culture of “absolute hospitality,” Judeo-Christian culture has developed along the lines of hospitality as a right and a duty.8 This would mean that there is a legacy in the West of a rhetoric of hospitality that is not accompanied by a genuine giving of place. This does not mean that the rhetoric is empty; it merely signifies its function as a cue of the ethical respect for sovereignty, irrespective of personal feelings. The philosopher Lorraine Code has described the subtle nature of USCanadian cultural relations, noting how even a discussion of the differences between the two nations “invites an impatient insistence that the similarities

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Figure 2.1  H. H. Green, rendering of the Peace Bridge under construction, gouache on paper, June 28, 1926. Courtesy of the Buffalo History Gazette.

are so overwhelming as to erase the differences; that casting them as ‘crosscultural’ is equally excessive.”9 Canada, as the nation with both the smaller population and smaller sphere of cultural influence on the global stage, thus gets subsumed to Americanness by much of the rest of the world, a tendency that Canadians often resent.

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What does it mean spatially to perform hospitality while not necessarily “giving place”? How does one even celebrate hospitality in the first place when much of the world sees little distinction of merit between host and guest? Buffalo (as well as Detroit, the only other major American city lying directly on the US-Canada border) became charged with the task to adopt and perform this rhetoric of hospitality, to define that hospitality through the built environment, and through this process, vis-à-vis design, to answer these questions. Indeed, the fact that Buffalo is not immediately associated with the status of border town belies its deeply transnational qualities and the hospitality it, and the bridge, perform to render US-Canada bilateral relations hospitable.

War and Peace To understand the subtle register of this encounter it is important first to reach back to the period before proverbial “peace” and what, exactly, the bridge’s meaning was supposed to be in contradistinction to. By the time of the arrival of Europeans in the area around the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffalo sat at an important pivot point of the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations, a nation that the inaugural literature of the Peace Bridge would commemorate as the “oldest living participatory democracy on earth.”10 To the east lay the historical homelands of the tribes constituting the Six Nations—the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples.11 To the west and to the north, in what is now Ontario, lay lands of disparate tribes newly conquered by the Six Nations. The immediate area around Buffalo had been the land of the Wenro and Neutral peoples, who were brutally conquered by the Senecas.12 Although there is no evidence of settlement in what is today Buffalo proper, the area would have played an important function as the fulcrum between the historical core of the Six Nations and its newly conquered provinces on the other side of Lake Ontario. This did not, of course, dictate why a formal border would be drawn through the Niagara River with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, turning the river into an international border. Yet the new border did roughly align with a historical division in Native American tribal territories. Just a few decades after the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, tensions between the United States and England were reignited as the result of a series of conflicts surrounding the Napoleonic Wars. This evolved into the War of 1812, a three-year conflict that nearly bankrupted the young United States.13 The Niagara frontier was a major theater of the war, with significant battles at Fort George, Queenston Heights, Niagara Falls,

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Chippewa, and Fort Erie, all on the Canadian side. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of the United States famously wrote to William Henry Harrison that “we have met the enemy and they are ours” after the battle of Lake Erie.14 The war ended in a stalemate, and the border returned to peace. The War of 1812 was also intrinsically interconnected with the popular doctrine that would later be dubbed “manifest destiny.” As the United States increasingly sought to expand westward, fulfilling their “destiny,” they often found themselves stymied by bands of Native Americans brandishing weapons given to them by the British with that explicit purpose in mind. The American invasion of Lower Canada at the Niagara frontier was thus also intended as a statement of reproach to the British for their efforts to hamper American westward expansion. Despite the lofty rhetoric about the people of the Six Nations at the inauguration of the Peace Bridge, westward expansion and manifest destiny functioned as a sort of counter-hospitality in their absolute disregard for the sovereignty of Native American lands. It was the Whigs who believed America’s salvation from the tyranny of the Old World would be through democratic example and international hospitality, not by conquest or imperialism. The initial conception of the Peace Bridge, in addition to being born out of pure need, was ostensibly to commemorate a century of peace between the two nations since the Treaty of Ghent.15 That peace, however, was a purely geopolitical one, as the War of 1812 was followed by violent uprisings on the Niagara frontier that intimated not only lingering tensions at the border but also the increasingly important role Buffalo would play as a center of hospitality. The first of those events was the Patriot War, which lasted from 1837 to 1838.16 Rather than being a formal war between sovereign states, the Patriot War was a series of twelve major incursions led by raiders attacking the British colony of Upper Canada (today the area around Lake Ontario within Canada). The raiders were members of a clandestine association known as the “Hunters’ Lodge,” formed in the United States as sympathizers to the secessionist rebellions taking place in Lower Canada. The organization was composed almost entirely of Lower Canadian refugees and first took hold in Vermont, eventually moving westward to the Niagara frontier. In December 1837, on Navy Island in the Niagara River, a tiny island with an area of less than half a square mile, the politician and journalist William Lyon Mackenzie, with some secret assistance from American arms dealers and other vendors in Buffalo, and with six hundred men at his side, including by now many Americans, proclaimed a new government called the Republic of Canada.17 The British army did not hesitate to drive Mackenzie and his

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men out of their self-proclaimed republic, forcing them to retreat to Buffalo, where the US army captured and imprisoned them for violating a neutrality agreement. Because many of the members of Mackenzie’s crew were US citizens, the battles of the Patriot War constituted the single largest deployment of US troops against their own since the Whiskey Rebellion.18 Buffalo’s role in the Patriot War was split between the social and cultural hospitality offered by private citizens to Canadians through a shared idea of liberty, on the one hand, and the official decision by the government to, rather unhospitably, imprison the rebels. Another disturbance was the unsuccessful Fenian Raids of 1866–1871.19 The raids were led by the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish Republican association located in the United States. The raids, on British army forts, customs station, and other locales, were intended to unnerve the British and to place pressure on them to withdraw from their occupation of Ireland. The most significant of all of the five Fenian raids was at Niagara. President Andrew Johnson, five days after the raid began, insisted on observance of the neutrality laws and sent generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade to Buffalo to mediate the crisis. The imprisonment by US forces of American citizens who sought to disobey the neutrality agreement happened in Buffalo, exhibiting a certain type of hospitality-as-duty in the sense that they acknowledged America’s duty to respect British sovereignty in Canada no matter how Americans felt about the British.20 Despite the series of conflicts and confrontations that took place in and around Buffalo between the United States and Canada, there were also manifestations of the region’s geostrategic potential as a haven of hospitality, attracting attention well beyond the confines of the United States and Canada. The most prominent example of this was an 1825 plan by the esteemed polymath (diplomat, lawyer, journalist, playwright) Mordecai Manuel Noah to establish a Jewish Arcadia on Grand Island in the Niagara River, a proposal that presaged the Zionist propositions of Theodor Herzl.21 Noah was of Portuguese Sephardic heritage and immigrated to the United States with his family as a young boy, eventually rising to the rank of sheriff of New York. George Washington was one of the more prominent guests at his Jewish wedding.22 Noah followed the development of the Erie Canal avidly and foresaw the waterway’s economic importance for the region, as well as the potential need for a larger, permanently settled populace. Shortly after the opening of the canal in October 1825, Noah purchased a portion of Grand Island and laid out his plans to create a Jewish homeland named “Ararat,” after the mythical mountain upon which Noah’s Ark landed.23 In his treatise, Discourse on the Restoration of Jews, Noah cited his belief that Native Americans were

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descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which gave his project on Grand Island the ethos of hospitality that it would need to attract the attention of the world’s dispossessed Jews.24 The project, despite a great deal of initial fanfare, failed as a result of the fact that Noah did not foresee how difficult it would be to access the uninhabited island amid the swiftly running waters of the Niagara and without the financial resources to build a sufficiently reliable bridge for the scale of development he envisioned. Buffalo and the Niagara frontier played an even more far-reaching role in the Underground Railroad, a network that transformed hospitality literally into a form of infrastructure, an infrastructure largely focused on the safe transport of formerly enslaved African Americans to Canada.25 Slavery was legal in New York State until 1827, while it had been illegal in Canada since the passing of the Anti-Slavery Act of 1793. Even after 1827, upon the completion of the Gradual Abolition Law, the children of freed slaves were obliged to stay in an apprenticeship system until the age of twenty-one, and slave owners from out of state were allowed to bring slaves into New York under particular circumstances.26 The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, whereby ex-slaves could legally be abducted and taken south, further helps to explain the need for underground secrecy in a supposedly free state. Harriet Tubman, known widely as one of the most ardent—and successful—engineers of the Underground Railroad, based her operations in St. Catharines, Ontario, roughly until 1859. Tubman’s records refer to the use of “the suspension bridge” for the transport of slaves into Ontario, most likely referring to John Roebling’s Niagara Falls suspension bridge.27 Slaves were slipped into Canada-bound trains and brought to their new hospitable home—and to freedom—across the Niagara River.

Water under the Bridge By the time of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, bilateral relations between the United States and Canada were both culturally and politically amiable.28 Canada held a prominent site in the northeast corner of the exposition grounds in Delaware Park, neighboring the stadium and located a good distance from the other foreign national buildings, a privilege that is said to have come at the request of the Canadian commission to the exposition. The architecture of the building was of a distinct Commonwealth extraction: a half-timbered Elizabethan style comprising two wings joined by a veranda on the lower level and a balcony above. The building contained offices for the commission, a reception hall, an exhibition space, a general parlor, and a ladies’ parlor. Displays in the

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Figure 2.2  View of the Canadian Pavilion at the Pan-American Exposition, 1901. Source: Buffalo History Museum.

Canadian Building included one for the Grand Trunk Railroad, an agriculture exhibition, a collection of stuffed animals, art made with Canadian grain, and a piano covered in sealskin.29 Canada also had exhibits in the Mines Building and other special exhibits of forestry, fine arts, and livestock. Manitoba, according to the Buffalo Evening News, “boasted the finest exhibit of cereals and grasses to be found in the Agriculture Building,” while Ontario had the greatest exhibition of fruit in the Horticulture Building.30 The Buffalo press was eager to gauge the reaction of the foreign press to the exposition. Seemingly aware of some of the possible lingering schisms between the United States and Canada, the Buffalo Evening News noted that “there are only a few captious newspapers in Canada which, for political reasons, like to show ill-nature toward the United States and say ungenerous things about the people on this side of the line. The thoughtful leaders and the intelligent people throughout the Dominion are friendly in their intercourse and liberal in business relations with neighbors in this country.”31 Illnatured journalism was, in the spirit of this celebration of cooperation and camaraderie, patently unhospitable. Visitors from Canada to the Pan-American Exposition would have had four ways of crossing the Niagara River to make their way to Buffalo. The

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Figure 2.3  View from the Canadian side of the collapsed Honeymoon Bridge, winter 1938, Niagara Falls. Source: Photo by WikiPedant at Wikimedia Commons.

first connection was the International Railway Bridge connecting Fort Erie and Buffalo, opened in 1873 and designed by the Buffalo engineer and firstwave Polish immigrant Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski.32 The second option would be the Honeymoon Bridge, opened in 1898 connecting Niagara Falls, Ontario, with Niagara Falls, New York, and at the time the largest steel arch bridge in the world.33 The bridge accommodated trolley cars, carriages, and pedestrians. (A brutal ice storm in 1938 led to its dramatic collapse and necessitated the construction of its replacement, the Rainbow Bridge, which opened three years later.) The third option would be the Niagara Cantilever Bridge, a railway bridge that began service between the US and Canada in 1883, designed by the German-born American engineer Charles Conrad Schneider. The vision for the bridge was not that of either the United States or Canada but rather of private interest, namely railway developer, financier, and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt.34 (In 1925 William Perry Taylor completed the Michigan Central Railway Bridge, the bridge’s replacement upon its closing.) The fourth option would be the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge connecting Niagara Falls, Ontario, with Niagara Falls, New York, designed by Leffert Buck with an upper deck for railway traffic and a lower deck for vehicular traffic. Buck had also been the managing engineer of the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge’s predecessor, the iconic Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge.35

Figure 2.4  View of Grand Trunk Railway on the Niagara Cantilever Bridge, 1900. Source: Shorpy Historical Photo Archive.

Figure 2.5  Charles Parsons, hand-colored lithograph of the Niagara Suspension Bridge, 1855. Source: Library of Congress.

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The Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, fully opened in 1855, was not only the very first bridge crossing between the United States and Canada but also the world’s first working suspension railway bridge.36 The suspension bridge had begun entirely as a political project, one primarily conceived of by Canadian politicians, although it was built by one American and one Canadian company.37 William Hamilton Merritt, a Canadian politician, promoted the idea of the bridge as a way to expand trade relations with the United States and to nourish the domestic trade market, particularly in the province of Ontario.38 Charles Ellet Jr. began the design, leaving after a financial dispute. The bridge commission chose John Roebling, who would go on to fame with the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, for the completion of the bridge. Roebling’s task for the bridge was enormous; suspension bridges were still in their infancy, and the public was suspicious about their safety. Moreover, Roebling had to engineer a track system that could accommodate the mismatched international railway gauge widths of the US and Canada, ultimately allowing for three different railways to navigate over the Niagara River: the Great Western Railway, the New York Central Railroad, and the New York and Erie Rail Road. The influx of commercial railway traffic transformed the Niagara Falls region from a sleepy, pastoral wonder into one of most important tourist attractions in the world. Poised against the background of the Great Falls, the bridge became an attraction in its own right. There were, of course, other attractions. On July 8, 1876, awestruck onlookers watched Maria Spelterini, an Italian tightrope walker, become the first woman to cross the Niagara gorge on a tightrope as part of a celebration of the US centennial.39

Figure 2.6  Maria Spelterini crossing the Niagara Rapids, July 8, 1876. Source: New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

Figure 2.7  View of the Niagara Spanish Aero Car (now the Whirlpool Aero Car). Source: Niagara Falls Museum.

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An additional structure at the border was engineered in the time between the Pan-American Exposition and the opening of the Peace Bridge. The Whirlpool Aero Car (also known as the Spanish Aero Car after its designer, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo) was a touristic cable car suspended between two points on Canadian land and opened in 1916.40 On the one-kilometer trip, passengers traversed the US-Canada border a total of four times, although no border clearance was necessary, as the passengers did not set foot on American territory. Nevertheless, they were able to see several notable sites in US territory from above, including Whirlpool State Park and, today, the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station.41

Bridge Building The Peace Bridge’s origins lay in the work of Alonzo Mather, the founder of the Mather Stock Car Company, a producer of railroad freight cars. Mather’s interest in design and innovation was manifest in his development of livestock cars that were markedly more hospitable to their animal passengers than their predecessors had been, incorporating feeding and watering facilities, an innovation that led to his being awarded a medal from the American Humane Society.42 In 1893 Mather proposed a massive development on both sides of the eastern edge of Lake Erie, including a harbor, a park on the Canadian side to rival Olmsted’s in Buffalo, new hydroelectric facilities, and a bridge more or less situated where the Peace Bridge stands today.43 The plan was taken seriously enough that it eventually reached a vote in the New York State Senate, only to be rejected.44 One part was realized, a park in Fort Erie, which today bears Mather’s name. In 1925, amid a booming national economy, discussion of what would become the Peace Bridge was renewed largely owing to the efforts of Frank Burdett Baird, a Buffalo industrialist and philanthropist. The bridge would be the first of the Niagara frontier bridges to be built entirely as a fiftyfifty collaboration between the US and Canadian governments, through an entity known as the International Joint Commission, although it is widely documented that the invitation to build the bridge came from the United States. Although the US federal government was interested in the Peace Bridge project, it believed that the administration of its construction, and ultimately the bridge’s management, was more suited to the state government of New York, which would be better situated to manage the tasks associated with the bridge.45 Canada, for its part, managed the bridge nationally, creating an asymmetrical partnership between a national entity and a state entity.

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The bridge’s design was headed by Edward Lupfer, assisted by William Davis and R. W. Cady.46 In the spirit of equality, the International Joint Commission issued major subcontracts evenly to American and Canadian firms: the substructure, concrete for the Canadian approach, granite pavement, balustrades, sidewalks, and grading went to two different firms from St. Catharines, while the steel and concrete for the US approach were fabricated by the Bethlehem Steel Company and the Turner Construction Company respectively, both of Buffalo.47 The three greatest challenges for the construction of the bridge were the limitations of the wood caissons, the difficulty of building in winter weather, and the speed of the water in all the other seasons.48 Lupfer’s design comprised five arched spans and a Parker through-truss span over a canal leading to Buffalo’s protected marina. A vast amount of steelwork, totaling over one kilometer in length, was involved, including nine thousand tons of structural steel and an additional eight hundred tons of reinforcing steel embedded in the concrete abutments and piers.49 The somewhat squat and inelegant appearance may have something to do with the fact that Lupfer could not design the bridge at a higher grade. As one report put it, “The construction of a higher bridge is prohibitive because the terminals would not permit of it at any point within the city of Buffalo, and the cost thereof would be entirely prohibitive and unnecessary for any possible contingency of navigation.”50 The groundbreaking for the bridge’s construction took place in August 1925, and construction was completed less than two years later, in the spring of 1927. The opening ceremony was attended by a number of distinguished guests, including the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), Prince George, Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, Ontario premier Howard Ferguson, US vice president under Calvin Coolidge Charles G. Dawes, US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, and New York’s governor Al Smith, all to the backdrop of music and other fanfare.51 The ceremony was transmitted via radio, the first ever international coast-to-coast broadcast, featuring language that touted the United States and Canada as one people, both socially and geographically. While the rhetoric of US-Canadian hospitality often portrayed the two countries as kin, rarely did it so bombastically portray the two nations as one entity as it did here.

Protagonist of Peace In the years following the bridge’s opening, it became a sustained force in the overall language and nature of US-Canada relations. Over the course

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of the next decades, the bridge bore witness to a steady ease in customs regulations and a major increase in real estate values on either side of the bridge. With the development of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s, the Peace Bridge witnessed a substantial increase in the international shipment of goods.52 The passing of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) in 1988 and later the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 successively phased out a host of trade restrictions between Mexico, the United States, and Canada that further accelerated cross-border trade and traffic.53 This massive increase in trade at the Peace Bridge, which brought with it brutal traffic, inspired the city of Buffalo, with support from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to sponsor a design competition for a new “companion bridge.”54 Publications like the Buffalo News covered the competition with zeal, and one private citizen (and former Buffalo News editorial contributor), Bruce Jackson, committed an entire side career to the promotion and documentation of the discussion around the new bridge.55 Even as Buffalo slipped into economic paralysis in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and as the population of the city spiked downward, traffic on the Peace Bridge increased at a steady clip.56 Even heightened border security in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks did not make a major dent in bridge traffic, although it did lead to increased security checks and wait times. Anecdotal evidence from Buffalonians and Torontonians reveals a reciprocal relationship between the two cities in this period. The beginning of Buffalo’s economic and population decline in the 1970s coincided with Toronto’s economic and population boom, the latter being largely driven by the desire of Canadian companies to move headquarters out of Montreal and Quebec and into Anglophone Ontario, where the political situation was perceived to be more stable.57 Whereas the Peace Bridge had formerly served as a conduit to bring eager Ontarians to the bright lights and big city of Buffalo, the 1970s marked a reversal in which Buffalonians were more likely to travel to Toronto for cultural and economic tourism than vice versa.

Place Making and the Peace Bridge The construction of the Peace Bridge dramatically changed the environment of Buffalo and its surroundings. People standing at the shore of Lake Erie prior to construction would have found their feet underwater by the time of the bridge’s completion. The mass of the bridge’s piers displaced enough water to force the lake level to rise a full three inches, an astonishing fact that is somewhat easier to comprehend when considering that Lake Erie is by far

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the shallowest of the five Great Lakes, with an average depth of 62 feet, compared to Huron’s 195, Michigan’s 279, Ontario’s 283, and Superior’s 483.58 The construction of the Peace Bridge was intrinsically interwoven with the construction of a number of other buildings and environments in the area, some directly, some indirectly. Those directly connected—the customs stations and buildings—tend to be prosaic affairs. Those indirectly connected, however, reflect in brick and mortar, for better or for worse, the rhetoric of US-Canadian hospitality. While some projects were never realized—like an “international” beach club and a brewery—new construction brought expansion of or encroachment on existing sites like the Crystal Beach Amusement Park in Fort Erie, Ontario, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Buffalo park system, along with the creation of entirely new attractions like the Fort Erie Ice Hockey Arena and a number of inns and roadhouses that would develop reputations for cross-border intrigue. Immediately upon the completion of the bridge, a local developer announced his intention to create the brewery, and another a resort. The Peace Bridge brewery, to be erected on an old shipyard site near the bridge, came with bombastic architectural renderings and the promise to employ one hundred, but ultimately died on the vine.59 The resort, billed as the International Beach Club, would, it was promised, elevate Buffalo into the top tier of American cities: “With the completion and opening of this beautiful family club, on the shores of Lake Erie, two miles from Point Abino, Buffalo will for its history take its proper place among American cities. . . . Women will be admitted to membership in the club on an equality with men.”60 The irony of this sprawling and never-realized eight-story scheme to aggrandize Buffalo was that Point Abino was neither American nor in Buffalo, but rather on Canada’s Lake Erie shoreline. Crystal Beach, an amusement park that had opened in 1890 near Point Abino in Fort Erie, capitalized on the construction of the Peace Bridge as well, enhancing its already popular facilities. The park was dominated by Buffalonians, most of whom arrived to the park’s dock by steamship (the luxurious Canadiana or the Americana, though the latter terminated its service in 1929). The bridge, along with a railway connection, brought the park to the peak of its popularity in the 1940s and ’50s, receiving several thousands of visitors on summer weekends.61 The Cyclone rollercoaster was added shortly after the opening of the Peace Bridge, and later, in the 1940s and ’50s, two new rides and a bumper-car course were opened. For many Buffalonians, this small slice of Canada was a piece of home. It proved itself not only as a site of Canadian hospitality but also as a locus of American middle-class socialization in Buffalo, incidentally on foreign

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territory. This socialization, and hospitality, were, however, challenged in the 1950s as a result of heightened tensions stemming from the massive immigration of African American families from the southern United States to Buffalo. Integration and desegregation efforts, energized by cases like Brown v. Board of Education, were nevertheless hampered by the informal policing of whites, including in Buffalo and at Crystal Beach, of certain public spaces, particularly spaces for recreation. The effort by white teenagers to police public spaces like Crystal Beach was overwhelmed on Memorial Day 1956. Black teenagers outnumbered their white counterparts on an unusually warm day marking the beginning of the coveted summer break. Sporadic fighting between black and white males, understood to be racially motivated, had broken out that day in the park, and tensions escalated while the Canadiana was in international waters on its way back to Buffalo.62 Angered by the day’s events, groups of teenage boys, this time joined by their female counterparts, began to brawl on the boat’s upper deck as a frightening storm roared over Lake Erie. Several perpetrators were arrested upon their arrival at the ferry dock in Buffalo. White-dominant newspapers tapped mainstream white anxiety over integration with the story of the riot on the Canadiana and telescoped it outward to the national press. One of the ways in which the so-called perpetrators were identified was by the colors and styles of their “club” and “gang” jackets, which in turn spurred social workers and school administrators to launch a campaign called “dress right,” encouraging high school students of all races to dress in standard middle-class attire, an effort that became known as the “Buffalo Plan” across the United States.63 The Peace Bridge simultaneously propelled Crystal Beach to the status of one of North America’s most popular sites of leisure and forced it into the unflattering spotlight as a public stage for American race relations, albeit in Canada. Back on the American side, a seemingly inverted situation was taking place at Frederick Law Olmsted’s Front Park. A major node in Olmsted’s interconnected Buffalo park system, Front Park had been one of the city’s most popular parks prior to the construction of the Peace Bridge, even despite its relatively small thirty acres.64 Its most prominent feature was a broad terrace that overlooked the northern edge of Lake Erie, which offered a distant view of Crystal Beach. Olmsted wrote that it was here that a visitor could take in “a river effect such as can be seen, I believe, nowhere else—a certain quivering of surface and a rare tone of color, the result of the crowding upward of the lake waters as they enter the deep portal of the Niagara.”65 The initial success of the site, and its warm reception by the people of Buffalo, dispelled the bromide

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Figure 2.8  Advertisement for Crystal Beach Amusement Park, circa 1956. Source: Steve Cichon.

that certain people had told Olmsted when he began his work in Buffalo: “Nobody here wants to look at the lake; we hate the lake.”66 Planners constructing the entrance ramps and customs facilities for the Peace Bridge, however, did not seem to care much about the park, impinging upon its northern edge with a dense network of concrete columns and

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decks. The delicate, pastoral landscape that Olmsted had envisioned was abruptly interrupted by the Peace Bridge, not only disrupting the vista of the lake-to-river transition, but also tarnishing the quiet green landscape of the park’s perimeter.67 While Front Park was extremely compromised by the bridge, its neighbor, Fort Porter, was altogether obliterated. Once the site of the largest masonry blockhouse ever built, as well as a small stone castle, Fort Porter contained elegant brick barracks and a military hospital for wounded Buffalonians after World War I. Everything on the site was razed for the construction of the Peace Bridge approaches.68 Recreational space, suffering on the American side, flourished across the way in Canada. In Fort Erie, Frank Burdett Baird commissioned the construction of the city’s first artificial ice hockey arena.69 The hulking reinforced-concrete structure showcased the iron-and-steel technology he had developed in his companies, the Tonawanda Iron Company, the Hanna Furnace Company, and the Buffalo Union Furnace Company.70 The facility hosted the Chicago Blackhawks in 1929, allowing Buffalonians the opportunity to experience National League hockey well before the formation of the Buffalo Sabres.71 Meanwhile, Canadian officials began the construction of the Queen Elizabeth Way, one of Canada’s largest highways, connecting Buffalo to Toronto with a terminus at the Peace Bridge.72 Inns and roadhouses populated the route, and it was common to meet Americans en route to or from Buffalo in one of them. But with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States

Figure 2.9  View of the Peace Bridge shortly after construction. Source: Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

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between 1920 and 1933, the Peace Bridge’s significance was enhanced as a conduit for bringing eager Buffalonians into Canada to imbibe alcohol at these inns and roadhouses.73 Although these facilities had not been planned as escapes where Americans could drink, or as havens for the prostitution and gambling that followed in their wake, many of the proprietors turned a blind eye to the Americans’ activities, or even actively encouraged them, seeing in it a major economic opportunity. This was itself criminal because, even though alcohol was not prohibited in Canada, it could be legally purchased only at government outlets and was not allowed to be sold or consumed in public places. Foremost among the establishments that disobeyed Canadian liquor laws was the Orchard Inn, about six miles west of the Peace Bridge, right on the battle site of the largest Fenian raid.74 A half-timbered Elizabethan-style building recalling the Canadian Building at the Pan-American Exposition, the Orchard Inn became the subject of numerous raids by the Canadian police. The unpaid bills left behind after raids and the steep fines levied by the Canadian authorities ultimately forced the Orchard Inn out of business, but not before it became semi-legendary among Buffalo’s leisure seekers.75 As clandestine watering holes became increasingly risky on the Canadian side, those interested in alcohol turned increasingly to the practice of rum running.76 Docks sprang up along the Canadian shore of Lake Erie, and entrepreneurial men loaded boats with boxes of rum and other spirits, to return, boxless, two hours later.77 The bus carrying hockey teams to the Baird arena in Fort Erie was also a famous conduit for thirsty Buffalonians. Drivers were known to carry unmarked containers of alcohol amid the hockey equipment on the return trip, to be dispersed to a network of shady distributors.78

Making Peace When Elijah Holt exclaimed in his commemorative poem that the people of the United States and Canada were “peoples of a kindred race / Who met each other face to face,” he conjured an image of the Peace Bridge as a “welcome passage” that realized the hospitality that political peace represented and facilitated the meeting of like-minded peoples. As the most urban of the Niagara crossings, and as the single most important economic crossing between the two nations, the Peace Bridge was symbolically tasked with representing, in steel and concrete, the dutiful hospitality of bilateral relations. The Peace Bridge fueled this amiable intercourse. Its symbolic value

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was reflected widely in the built environment, in buildings, parks, and other places on either side of the border. The rhetoric of peace surrounding the bridge purported an unalloyed harmony between nations. A deeper look reveals considerable truth to this metanarrative but also a more complicated picture, one where a dutiful hospitality was rehearsed both through and at the expense of the built environment.

Ch a p ter 3

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

The interior of Marine A, one of Buffalo’s many disused grain elevators, is saturated with visual interventions that animate the barren space. Small graffiti tags occupy concrete walls and rusty metal chutes; spray-painted portraits of fantastical creatures wrap around columns; a sculptural constellation of cogwheels is suspended from the ceiling of a silo shaft. In one corner, a series of chalk drawings depicts a landscape of miniature grain elevators, connected to the ground by dense networks of roots. Among them, a faint inscription written in red letters reads City of Ghosts. Similar epithets have been assigned to Buffalo in past eras, gesturing toward the city’s economic prowess at the beginning of the twentieth century (Queen City of the Lakes) and later to its state of industrial decline (City of No Illusions). The present ascription, impromptu and anonymous, powerfully captures the poetic melancholia of Buffalo’s postindustrial landscape of decay and abandonment, a material condition that has come to be understood as characteristic of rust belt urbanism.1 A struggling city in a region marked by decline, Buffalo parallels in its historical trajectory many other former industrial centers in the northeastern US: from economic success to deindustrial depression, from bustling metropolis to shrinking city, from the progress narrative of modernity to postmodern abandonment and disintegration. Presently, the city is littered with the debris and ruins of its industrial past, and burdened with the effects of residential abandonment left behind as 63

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Figure 3.1  “City of Ghosts,” inscription inside the Marine A grain elevator at Silo City, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

the city lost more than half its population since the 1950s. Within this spatial constellation, abandoned structures occupy the imaginary geography of the city as the “living dead who endlessly haunt the landscape, preventing it from ever becoming peaceful again.”2 Along with a number of other rust belt cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, Buffalo has in recent years been implicated in a process of economic and cultural revitalization. According to this “rust belt revival,” the ruptured spaces of former industrial centers are regaining significance as sites of innovation, aestheticization, and commodification: “Old industrial towns are realizing that they have a vital asset: cheap property. Disused mills and warehouses, with their high ceilings and exposed bricks and beams, can make attractive homes and workspaces for knowledge workers.”3 This narrative has a strong hold in Buffalo, where websites such as Buffalo Rising document the civic ambition that is carrying the aspirational revitalization of the city.4 As of 2019, the slogan “Keep Buffalo a Secret,” which has been printed on T-Shirts and given a permanent presence in the city through a mural on Main Street, captures this burgeoning energy and new-found confidence in Buffalo.5 Yet, as critical voices such as local blogger and photographer David Torke have noted, this development is a highly uneven “tale of two cities.”6 Another observer describes, “One half has been reborn like a phoenix

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from a graveyard of industrial ash—experiencing an economic and cultural resurgence that has transformed many previously barren areas into bustling centers of commerce and entertainment. Yet the other half sits in a state of utter disrepair—its streets manifest a palpable level of poverty, blind to the recovery and optimism growing across town.”7 Taking this critical perspective on rust belt revitalization as a point of departure, this chapter offers a close reading of what I call Buffalo’s uneven geographies of abandonment. I will stage a dialogic encounter between two specific sites, the abandoned grain elevators scattered along the Buffalo River, and Buffalo’s East Side, a neighborhood marked by residential abandonment, tracing the following questions: How do the two sites figure within the imaginaries of Buffalo’s past, present, and future? Which sites are folded into the narrative trajectory of rust belt revivalism, and which remain excluded? How are political power and precarity distributed differentially in both contexts? Based on an ethnographic approach, I discuss the postindustrial landscape of Buffalo as both a material condition for everyday life and a site of affective and symbolic attachment. As a case study of a prototypical rust belt city, this chapter analyzes the politics and poetics of abandoned space within the theoretical framework of recent scholarship on ruination, architectural decay, and abandonment. My account is sustained by two exploratory field visits undertaken in April 2016, as well as four interviews conducted during the same month: one with Brad Hahn, the executive director at Explore Buffalo; one with Thomas Bittner, a philosophy and geography professor at the University at Buffalo who has photographed the grain elevators extensively; and two with local urban explorers—the founder of urbex-buffalo.com, who wished to remain anonymous, and Mark James, the founder of concreteaperture. com. I returned to Buffalo in November 2017 to speak with photographer and blogger David Torke, as well as April Figueroa, founder of an East Side community garden.8

Landscapes of Abandonment In the Western European imaginary, the ruin has traditionally functioned as an idealizing representational device.9 From the drawings of Piranesi to the Ruinenlust of the Romantic era, the ruined form functions as what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler describes as a “privileged site of reflection—of pensive rumination. Portrayed as enchanted, desolate spaces, large-scale monumental structures abandoned and grown over, ruins provide a favored image of a vanished past, what is beyond repair and in decay, thrown into

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aesthetic relief by nature’s tangled growth.”10 In the past two decades, this intellectual genealogy and aesthetic representational apparatus—as well as its significant political implications—have been critically reexamined and displaced by a new type of ruin scholarship, which forms the theoretical context for my own analysis of Buffalo’s abandoned landscapes. These authors have shifted the focus away from the totalizing optics of nostalgic European ruin-gazing toward the process of ruination and “the lives of those whose sensibilities have been marked by the ruins in which they live, and on the possibilities foreclosed by how they have had to live in them.”11 Ruins are no longer treated as stable ontological objects, but rather as spaces of semiotic instability. They are ruined but still recognizable, residual and unproductive but open to recuperation and appropriation.12 Following this trajectory, this chapter will focus not on individual structures but will instead investigate landscapes that are marked by abandonment. By privileging the term “abandonment” over the more site-specific notion of ruin or ruination, I hope to point to the liminal status of the sites of research that I engaged with, as well as their deep entanglement with one another. Abandonment, in this context, is used to describe a landscape that is not being actively used according to its original designation, yet still constantly activated by everyday practice and imagination.13 My use of the term “landscape” herein is informed by the work of Charles Waldheim, who has posited that landscape as a cultural category is ideally suited to apprehend the “open-endedness, indeterminacy, and change” of postindustrial urban conditions.14 Within the specific context of US-American landscapes of deindustrialization, ruin scholarship has focused particularly on the symbolic and affective purchase of ruination, the ways ruins capture and embody “tensions between the industrial past, a deindustrialized present, and an uncertain or contested future.”15 Assemblages of industrial ruins constitute what Antoine Picon has called anxious landscapes, “saturated by man’s technological endeavors,” monuments to failed visions of progress and teleological modernity.16 In turn, the encounter with abandoned industrial structures such as factories or grain elevators may invoke a “deindustrial sublime, a sense of being swept away by the beauty and terror of economic change.”17 This ambiguity of beauty and terror, aestheticization and repulsion, manifests an uneven geography of abandonment in which “certain buildings are left to decay whereas others are rapidly demolished and replaced; others are left as ‘devalued capital,’ presently disused but ripe for future accumulation.”18 In the case of Buffalo, this uneven distribution of vulnerability is exemplified by the relation between the abandoned grain elevators, where the ruined form affords glossy visions of rust belt

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revivalism, and the East Side, where abandonment is construed as a problem negatively affecting the economic progress of the entire city. Putting the two sites into dialogue with one another, I hope to demonstrate how landscapes of abandonment manifest and impose a highly politicized and moralizing symbolic order.19

Silo Dreams Redux: Buffalo’s Grain Elevators and Rust Belt Revitalization They do have an almost Egyptian monumentality in many cases, and in abandonment and death they evoke the majestics of a departed civilization.20 They’re the most uniquely Buffalo structures. You can go to other cities and see a very fine Art Deco building like City Hall, not as beautiful of course. But you’re not going to go anywhere else and have the chance to walk inside or go up to the top of a grain elevator. It just isn’t something you’ll be able to do and see. To me that is the number one Buffalo experience.21

First invented by Joseph Dart in 1843 in Buffalo, the grain elevator, in its development and symbolic significance, is closely tethered to the historical trajectory of the city.22 During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, owing to its geographical location at the terminus of the Erie Canal, Buffalo emerged as one of the most important grain ports in the world. It was thus in Buffalo that the technological innovation of the grain elevator, from the early steel bin structures toward the cylindrical, reinforced concrete bin, occurred.23 According to Reyner Banham, who studied Buffalo’s grain elevators extensively in the 1980s, the cylindrical concrete form came to constitute a “symbol of curious and ultimately atavistic power in America, as its characteristic silhouette came to dominate vast expenses of land.”24 These monumental structures animated the minds of the architectural avant-garde of European modernity such as Walter Gropius, or Le Corbusier, who saw in them “the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age,” an idealized manifestation of a rational, anti-ornamental modernism.25 The modernists’ fascination with these structures was tied to their monumental scale and geometric form that embodied their productive function within the emergent prosperity of American industrial centers. Eventually the grain elevators proved to be just as central to the decline of Buffalo as they had been to its economic success. With the opening of the

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Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959, grain storage in Buffalo became obsolete, ringing in a long period of deindustrialization.26 By the mid-1960s most of the structures had fallen into disuse, now lingering as “negative icons to a glorified past.”27 Its concrete materiality afforded the grain elevator an extraordinary resilience. Banham describes it as “a conspicuously durable building type, resistant even to skilled demolitionists, long after its physical functions and economic justifications have disappeared.”28 As the city entered a period of sustained financial deficit, the derelict grain elevators became simply too expensive to demolish. For decades, they were left to sit idle. Public appreciation in the form of preservation efforts did not become apparent until the 1980s, when the intended demolition of the Great Northern grain elevator incited a large public response.29 At present, fifteen out of the original sixteen grain elevators still tower over the Buffalo River—many of them designated landmarks—and continue to shape the symbolic and material geography of the city. Their physical presence is activated and imbued with meaning by both informal and formal encounters, ranging from graffiti and urban exploration to art projects and guided tours. As material manifestations of a prosperous industrial past, the contemporary presence of abandoned grain elevators has inspired myriad manifestations of the deindustrial sublime. They have been admired as “great hulks,”30 “mammoth[s],”31 and “massive monuments of a now classical modernity.”32 They have been compared to Egyptian pyramids,33 anthropomorphized into “silent witnesses”34 and “survivors,”35 and decried as “eyesores” and “big, ugly, obtrusive buildings [that] do absolutely nothing for the look of the waterfront except to symbolize a city that can’t, or won’t, stop clinging to its past in the hopes that it will one day be like that again.”36 Their continued aesthetic appeal emanates from their historical significance as well as their monumental size that lends them a sense of being “impermeable, secret, and aloof.”37 The picturesque corrosion and collapse afforded by decades of abandonment and disuse only intensify this aura. Their abandoned presence has been captured visually by photographers, while also providing the material basis for urban subcultures such as graffiti and urban exploration.38 Through practices of aestheticization, Buffalo’s grain elevators have been implicated in the detached and idealizing gaze that has emerged as the privileged mode of representation for rust belt cities such as Detroit and Buffalo. Such instances of so-called ruin porn serve as both cautionary tales and coping mechanisms. “As faith in a better future erodes,” explains Detroit-based ruin scholar Dora Apel, “the beauty of decay helps us cope with the terror

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of apocalyptic decline.”39 The aestheticization of ruin and abandonment that motivates ruin porn has been criticized as a contemporary equivalent of ruin gazing. When deindustrialization is displayed via the exceptional optics of derelict structures that are evacuated of the “victims of the city’s decline,” the viewer is distanced from both the ongoing process of ruination and the effects that decline and abandonment have on everyday life.40 The history of deindustrialization and its violent effects are collapsed into a visual contemplation of form and structure.

Silo City and Its Discontents As sites of informal use, visual contemplation, and the continued efforts of preservationists, Buffalo’s grain elevators have in recent years witnessed a sustained resurgence in interest. As other rust belt cities such as Pittsburgh have fashioned their industrial heritage into highly sought-after commodities within a gritty urban aesthetic reveled in by the creative class, the grain elevators have attained a new significance as places of possibility for a similar development—even more so as they occupy currently undeveloped waterfront property.41 Sharon Zukin has cynically described this economic momentum as “nouveau grit,” a phenomenon sustained by “the postindustrial spirit of the times and in the symbolic economy’s ability to synthesize dirt and danger into new cultural commodities.”42 Yet, owing to their stubborn materiality, the adaptive reuse of grain elevators has proved challenging. The relatively few successful examples include the Granary in Philadelphia, which is partly occupied by an architecture firm; the Quaker Inn in Akron, a modified grain elevator serving as a hotel; and Silo #5 in Montreal, which has been used as a giant sonic device.43 In Buffalo, where a configuration of no fewer than fifteen mostly unused grain elevators lends itself to the imagination, proposals for reuse have included an industrial heritage trail, recreational spaces, the reforestation of the area, a digital reconstruction, residential occupation, as well as the conversion of the space into a performing arts center.44 In recent years a complex known as Silo City, consisting of the American, the Perot, and the Marine A elevators, has emerged as the most prominent site of attempts to incorporate Buffalo’s grain elevators into the economic and cultural revitalization of the city. Local entrepreneur Rick Smith purchased the site in 2006 to produce ethanol, a plan that failed in 2011 owing to unstable demand and market conditions.45 Instead of redeveloping the entire site, Smith started to gradually open up Silo City to creative forms of use that have steadily multiplied over time. Today Silo City is a location for a number of activities, including guided tours, flea markets, climbing, light

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Figure 3.2  Remnant of a marriage ceremony at Silo City, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

shows, concerts, food truck festivals, and marriage ceremonies—many of which have by now become incorporated into official city marketing.46 This impromptu development of the site is embraced by many as an authentic process of revitalization and has been lauded for its pioneering approach to “historic preservation in an economic void.”47 Brad Hahn, executive director of Explore Buffalo, one of the many organizations working closely with Smith, explains, Buffalo is a really realistic city, a really pragmatic city. We’ve had a lot of people come along and say they’re going to do a lot of great things, build beautiful things and whatever, especially in the last 20, 30, 40 years, that a lot of hopes have been pinned on, so people in Buffalo are a little apprehensive, to a certain degree skeptical. When something is really genuine and authentic, and you see something like Silo City, where it’s not someone coming in with bucket loads of money and wanting to radically change things, it’s just a very simple process of opening up a site and letting people come in and use it, in ways that still reflect the site, that reflect the city, I think that’s really what attracts people, that it hasn’t changed much. You still have the same site, just the uses have changed. It’s the same setting, different purposes. I think people respect that.48

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As part of the larger rust belt revival narrative, the accumulative use of the grain elevators is hailed as a sign of a positive trajectory carried by civic ambitions instead of grand schemes of renewal. The numerous contemporary uses of Silo City have opened up new possibilities of encounter, allowing for the site to become, at least temporarily, a public space. Most residents of Buffalo have only known the grain elevators as a distant monumental presence. Inviting them to participate in new modes of material engagement may offer local communities a point of departure for exploring their collective past and imagining a common future. Yet, public access to Silo City is limited. If you approach the site outside of a scheduled event, you will find it fenced off and guarded. Similarly, not all uses of the site are equally tolerated. Certain self-authorized practices, such as tagging, and the people who engage in them are considered problematic and are subject to regulation. The “problem” of graffiti, for instance, is being countered by encouraging street artists to beautify surfaces, thereby making them unavailable for graffiti writers. In an anecdote shared by Brad Hahn during our interview, he tells me that a surface on Marine A that used to be covered in particularly vulgar graffiti has recently been painted with Disney characters by a local street art project.

Figure 3.3  Disney characters on the exterior of Marine A, a measure meant to cover up and deter graffiti on the site (2015). Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

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Despite its relative openness, Silo City remains a private development governed by the incentives of value production. Its revitalization privileges exceptional and often highly commercial events that cater largely to the creative class over broader, vernacular uses. Owner Rick Smith’s visions to incorporate the current uses into a more cohesive site development include a conference venue and learning center in cooperation with local universities and colleges, recreational facilities, including upscale restaurants, and a showcase for industrial building materials.49 Across the river from Silo City, an upscale property development bears testimony to the aspired future of the wider area. While engaging with the industrial materiality and aesthetics of the grain elevators, none of these visions reflect the working-class history attached to the site or the social inequalities that continue to govern the city in the aftermath of deindustrialization. Within the vast landscape of grain elevators still present in Buffalo, Silo City represents an exceptional space. As Hahn notes, “The buildings are essentially abandoned, but the [Silo City] elevators aren’t an abandoned site. There’s an owner who is caring for the property and making use of the property.”50 Other sites, such as the adjacent Concrete Central and Cargill Superior, remain vacant and more or less open, while others continue to be used in their original capacity. During one of my trips to Buffalo, I ventured beyond Silo City to visit a vacant elevator: Cargill Pool, previously known as the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator and the only elevator directly located on Lake Erie. Though relatively easy to access via the adjacent Gallagher Beach, the site is filled with signs designating it as private property and urging potential trespassers to keep out. Towering over the lakefront in isolation, Cargill Pool is an impressive site to behold. The surrounding area is deserted, save for a small population of wild geese. The interior, which appears to be used as a storage facility for the marina that forms part of the property, is strewn with boat parts, storage barrels, and electrical equipment. The outside surface of the structure is textured by buff marks indicating past markings of graffiti. Holes in its concrete walls allow for glimpses into the dark interior. Urged by the dooming silence of the space, paired with its isolation and aggressive signage, I traverse the site only once, leaving shortly after my arrival. Cargill Pool, I find out later, plays a distinct role within Buffalo’s revival narrative. In 2013 the vacant structure was purchased at auction by a local real estate company for $475,000.51 No official announcements have been made regarding the intended use of the facility, but a representative of the buyer has stated tentatively that the new owners are “talking about some

Figure 3.4  Cargill Pool grain elevator on the shore of Lake Erie, as seen from Gallagher Beach, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

Figure 3.5.  Inside Cargill Pool, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

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kind of industrial-commercial-residential project that continues to expand the waterfront development plans.”52 Whether these plans will involve the demolition of the elevator or make use of its existing infrastructure remains unclear at the time of writing. Aesthetically and symbolically charged sites located on prime waterfront real estate, Buffalo’s grain elevators have come to be considered firm anchors in the emergent economic and cultural revitalization of the city. As abandonment and rust belt grit are reimagined as potent sites of economic possibility and aesthetic contemplation, the complex histories of deindustrialization that the grain elevators embody largely disappear from view. Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly clear that the benefits of the rust belt revival will be distributed unevenly within the city of Buffalo and will likely reiterate the inequalities that are so intrinsically tied to the city’s demise.

Residential Abandonment on Buffalo’s East Side Over time, as the city entered a sustained period of decline, people moved out, and houses were left. With no one in them, they fell apart; some would stand bravely, some would sag. A gap-toothed window frame, an empty eye-socket, would stare out onto the street, an eyesore, an embarrassment. These abandoned houses . . . are twice forgotten . . . no one is left to remember the spaces and rooms, the colors and the light. The houses dilapidate, deflate, as if the breath of inhabitants had supported the structure. Then later, in moments, it’s torn down and the rubble buried or cleared away. All that remains is a space the size of a house.53

One of the most palpable effects of deindustrialization is the decrease of population that accompanies the structural decline in employment. Buffalo, a “critical case of a shrinking city in a declining region,” lost no less than half its population since its peak in the 1950s.54 This loss was particularly staggering during the 1970s, which saw 23 percent of residents leave, “a massive exodus that in just a few years decimated neighborhoods in all parts of the city,” with dramatic consequences for the social fabric and spatial configuration of Buffalo.55 The demographic dynamic caused by economic decline and white flight severely affected white working-class neighborhoods on the East Side, such as the Broadway-Fillmore area, which had been the center of the Polish working-class community for more than a century. As old residents left

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for affluent suburbs, notes city historian Marc Goldman, the area was “fast becoming a slum. The main streets were filled with empty storefronts and the pot-holed side-streets, strewn with garbage, were lined with wood-framed homes, some burnt out, many in a state of terminal decay.”56 Although new, mostly black, residents moved in and formed new communities, the appearance of the East Side remains, to this day, dominated by residential vacancy and abandonment. Following its historical trajectory from a cohesive community to a fractured landscape dominated by abandonment, the East Side occupies a deeply contested and problematically racialized space in the symbolic geography of Buffalo. The official discourse of the city government, for the most part, casts the East Side as a space of deviance and blight, an obstacle to the projected revitalization of the city. At the same time, for residents the frayed streets of the neighborhood remain sites of everyday life, affective attachment, and community building. Future visions for the area thus oscillate between grassroots DIY renewal and large-scale demolition and development. The history of Buffalo’s East Side is closely entwined with the industrial development of the city. As a neighborhood “where railroads, factories, and cheap lodging converged,” it became a destination for many of the economic migrants from Europe who arrived in Buffalo during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.57 Broadway-Fillmore, an area that came to be known as Polonia, became home to a stable Polish working-class community, sustained by a large number of local businesses and shops and anchored spiritually by a dense network of Catholic churches.58 By the 1950s, certain parts of the East Side were the most densely populated areas in the city, with up to thirty-nine thousand residents per square mile.59 Tethered to the economic decline of Buffalo since the 1960s, the East Side was subject to a fundamental demographic transformation—from density to vacancy, and from white Polish to black—that continues to structure its present condition and perception. It has come to prominently embody the pathology of the city’s postindustrial landscape, marked by abandonment, social disintegration, and poverty. Buffalo’s “chronic problem of vacant and abandoned property”—the current vacancy rate is at 17.31 percent, about 5 percentage points above the national average—is selectively associated with the East Side.60 At the time of writing, the 14212 zip code that extends along Broadway holds the highest number of vacancies in the entire state of New York: 26.3 percent, or 1,704 vacancies among 6,471 units.61 As abandoned residential buildings are cast as sites of deviant behaviors as well as obstacles in the path toward economic revitalization of the city, they are implicated in an interventionist managerial discourse put forth by

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political leadership as well as mainstream media. While the abandonment of monumental industrial structures like grain elevators or factory buildings bears the possibility of adaptive reuse, it has been argued that the “burnedout and boarded-up buildings, which are visible on nearly every street in East Buffalo, have deterred even the most pioneering investors from moving in.”62 According to Mayor Byron Brown, “If we do not address the decline in these neighborhoods, we will see more people losing hope and faith in the city’s ability to fix the problem, and more people leaving.”63

Deviance and Demolition The most prominent solution that has been offered to address the problem of residential abandonment in shrinking cities is targeted demolition, which is considered to stabilize housing markets and contribute to the so-called right-sizing of urban landscapes.64 In Buffalo, this policy paradigm was systematically adopted in the “5 in 5” demolition plan put forth by Mayor Brown in 2007. The goal of this “accelerated, aggressive, and comprehensive, citywide attack on the dangers and blight of vacant structures” was to demolish five thousand “vacant, dilapidated, or un-repairable” structures within five years.65 Demolition, here, is rhetorically tied to the narrative of rust belt revitalization: “With an affordable cost of living, nationally recognized architecture and leisure attractions, many Buffalo neighborhoods are experiencing a resurgence and revitalization. In order to accelerate our economic revival, removing blight and opening up shovel-ready sites for new investment are critical.”66 Vacant and abandoned houses are framed not merely as an economic burden but also as sites of deviant, dangerous, and problematically racialized behaviors like “drug activity, prostitution, crime, fires and dumping.”67 The removal of such structures is thus presented as a quasi-patriotic act in the service of the local community: “These blighted properties perpetuate a negative perception of Buffalo. The blight thwarts economic investment; it strains City finances; and, of prime importance, it compromises the safety of our residents who live adjacent to these structures and the courageous men and women of the Buffalo Fire and Police Departments who respond to the high rate of fires and crime in these structures.”68 As abandoned residential properties are framed as sources of blight, houses that have formed part of a dense community for decades are discursively evacuated of their historical and mnemonic significance, becoming mere “zombie properties” that “no longer have a raison d’être in the new urban milieu, but . . . persist as lifeless shells.”69

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The number of structures that were effectively torn down as part of the 5 in 5 program is unknown, but the strategy of targeted demolition has rendered neighborhoods like East Buffalo into frayed and fragmented landscapes. A demolition takes less than two hours yet “rapidly, spectacularly and brutally changes the built environment,” with potentially troubling consequences for the community that navigates it.70 Though houses targeted for demolition are often argued to have no particular architectural or historic value, they form part of the cumulative history of a neighborhood, microhistories embodied by individual houses.71 As one opponent of the plan articulated at a city hearing, “[these vacant houses] housed people that we knew. They’re not just pieces of flotsam on the stream.”72 Prominent preservation advocate David Torke has reiterated this concern, criticizing the 5 in 5 plan as a “bingo- scorecard approach to demolitions [lacking an] integrated plan why certain properties should be knocked down or not.”73 During our interview, Torke explained further that not only does the city fail to employ tactical approaches other than demolition to address buildings deemed unsafe—such as “mothballing,” an umbrella term for various temporary stabilizing measures—but also that there are no official bids for the demolition contracts, making the process of allocation highly opaque. Other critics have argued that instead of knocking down single properties, the city should raze entire blocks, a practice known as land banking. Buffalo historian Mark Goldman has asserted that “half of Buffalo looks like New Orleans after the storm. The city needs to turn the whole area into a great forest. We can’t afford to keep the infrastructure.”74 Large-scale demolitions, as violent as they may appear, are frequently hailed as sources of hope and sustainable redevelopment. Following a paradigm that has been referred to as New Pastoralism, cleared spaces are envisioned as the grounds of new urban economies rooted in agriculture and community gardening. Aaron Bartley, a Buffalo-based community organizer, describes the significance of the development as follows: “New Pastoralism inhabits the vacant spaces, now growing green and wild, left in capital’s wake, [a] landscape . . . now fetishized by urbanists and aesthetes for its edginess and off-the-grid development potential.”75 Faced with both sustained criticism of the program and high financial costs associated with demolitions—based on its condition, a single house may require up to $20,000—in recent years the city has been promoting the so-called urban homesteading program as an alternative solution, selling dilapidated properties at costs as low as one dollar.76 While East Buffalo is a far cry from the gentrification that has swept most of the city’s West Side in recent years, there is a clear understanding that development there will eventually become part of the narrative arc of

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development via a kind of trickle-down effect. As property values in adjacent neighborhoods continue to steadily increase, development is bound to spill over into the East Side, argues Brad Hahn: The East Side still has a lot of issues with abandonment, with vacancy, but even that is starting to change and I think will change a lot more in the next few years as the West Side is really, it’s getting filled up in terms of projects. The West Side didn’t have anywhere near the number of demolitions as the East Side does. And they’re off of the Medical Campus which is on the edge of it, and then you have the Larkin District which is on the Southern Edge of it and so I think that’ll push, and it’ll creep up on the East Side, filling in.77

Ethnographic Reflections on Abandonment A space saturated by vacancy and deviance, a problem in need of addressing, a development waiting to happen: Buffalo’s East Side occupies a prominent position in the imaginative geography of the city. Yet its streets remain the site of everyday life for thousands of residents, however far dispersed they may be. Conducting ethnographically inclined empirical work within a small section of the Broadway-Fillmore area, driving, walking, and visually documenting a number of streets, allowed me some partial insights into its vernacular significance as well as its affective and political implications. My research concentrated on an area comprising just over twenty blocks, confined by Walden Avenue to the north, Lathrop Street to the east, Broadway to the south, and Fillmore Avenue to the west. The number of total inhabitants of this area is 2,977, at a density of 8,615 people per square mile, considerably below the figure of the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area, listed at 11,437.78 The sale value of rental properties within the area averages $52,775, with significantly lower values in the northern section. The median year of construction is 1939. Residents are exceptionally young; the average age is under thirty. Below-average school ratings and above-average crime statistics—mostly larceny, robbery, and assault—quantitatively define the area as undesirable.79 While the East Side is generally associated with the black community—which appears to be true for my research site as well—this particular area is also home to a large Muslim community. I encounter Arabic signage, a large mosque with an adjacent school complex, halal meat shops, and women wearing hijabs. One of the roads had even been unofficially renamed Medina Avenue. Viewing the area through the abstract lens of aerial photography reveals a severely fractured landscape in which buildings appear as sparse interruptions in vast fields of green.

Figure 3.6  Overview of the research area. Image via http://gis.ny.gov/, generated by Blair Tinker.

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Driving and walking through the streets of the neighborhood only reinforces the visual impact of this spatial configuration. Green grass—perhaps the shovel-ready sites envisioned by Mayor Brown—dominates the field of vision, with houses at times appearing as mere islands within large swaths of overgrown land. Empty lots are commonly used as waste sites: trash bags, building debris, discarded furniture, and dozens of old TV sets are strewn across them. The houses that remain are in a variety of conditions, some well kept and maintained, some abandoned and boarded up, most of them somewhere in between. While not particularly lively, the streets of the neighborhood themselves are not abandoned. I encounter plenty of people and cars to suggest an active community. Still, the experience of traversing these streets carries an enormous affective and aesthetic charge that haunts the vast empty lots and discarded items that populate them. It is easy, as a temporary researcher, to be stunned by the spectacular optics of houses half burned, boarded up, and decomposing. A deep discontent permeates the time I spend there. I am visibly out of place, objectifying a landscape and community, viewing a space of concentrated poverty through the lens of my expensive camera, suspending selective views between the intervals of shutter clicks. The single most imposing structure I encountered within the area was the Transfiguration Church at Sycamore and Mills. The massive Gothic Revival

Figure 3.7  Empty lot in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

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Figure 3.8  Discarded items on an empty lot in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

church was erected in 1896 and follows architectural styles prevalent in Eastern Europe. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the church was a source of spiritual cohesion to a Polish Catholic congregation of six thousand.80 Yet, as the East Side was drained of its old population and congregations, Transfiguration, like many other religious structures in the area, became fiscally unsustainable. Along with four other East Side churches, it was eventually closed in 1993. Originally intended for demolition, the structure was declared a local landmark in 1994 and sold for $7,000 to a nonprofit group with plans of converting the complex into a school and community center. These ambitious plans, however, never materialized. Instead, the building has been almost unaltered and thus subject to numerous legal disputes between the negligent owners and the city. Visible from afar, the amateurishly mended roof and boarded-up church windows lend Transfiguration an uncanny presence. The plight of Transfiguration mirrors that of most of Buffalo’s numerous abandoned churches, places that were once “source[s] of physical food and shelter, as well as . . . of stability and spiritual life” to large communities of Catholic immigrants. The city is struggling to find ways of reuse for these structures that benefit the communities that surround them today.81

Figure 3.9  Abandoned Transfiguration Church, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

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It is impossible to imagine what everyday life within and around these ruins, abandoned properties, and overgrown gaps might feel like, but the loss of houses demolished and communities collapsed is deeply present, even at a surface level. In their disappearance, local artist Carl Lee notes, they “take with them some ineffable aspect of urban life, which is some combination of the material and the immaterial: the loss of the moments and memories haunting these structures constitutes another order of demolition.”82 East Buffalo is a space somewhat out of time, its future suspended in a present that is overwhelmingly oriented toward the past. Within the area of my research, neither the optimistic vision of New Pastoralism nor the prospect of urban revitalization seemed particularly present in the landscape. In the sections of Broadway-Fillmore I explored, the economic potential of the empty space remains dormant. The only proposed development immediately within the area is a vacant K-Mart on Broadway and Fillmore, which was recently bought by local investor Fadi Dagher, who intends to convert the structure into a charter school.83 The actual site remains, at the writing of this chapter, unchanged. The one community garden I encountered during my research was a small patch far from the vision of sustainability that is often projected onto vacant green spaces within the urban landscape. A sign identified the space as Barakah, an Arabic word that alludes to the Muslim concept of blessing and is here invoked in the context of sharing the produce and eating com­ munally.84 Because of its small scale—the patch might easily be overlooked on the vast lot that it occupies if it wasn’t for a large sign—the Barakah garden does not quite fit the functional ideal of sustainability attached to urban agriculture and community gardening. Instead, it may be read as a vernacular site of spiritual nourishment, a meaningful antithesis to the derelict Transfiguration Church just a few blocks away. For April Figueroa, Barakah’s founder, the garden was an opportunity to do something meaningful with one of the many empty lots she had found difficult to live among since moving to the East Side in 2006, while also connecting with the largely Muslim community of which she is part. Prompted by other community garden initiatives in the city, she decided to create a place “using that [empty] space, not only to make something beautiful but also something where women in our community could come, socialize, pick some flowers, pick some vegetables.”85 The Barakah garden became a reality through a cooperation with Grassroots Gardens Western New York in 2010 and has been operating successfully ever since. Unlike larger gardening projects on the East Side, such as the Wilson Street Urban Farm just a few blocks away, it operates at the scale of

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Figure 3.10  The Barakah garden on Sweet Avenue, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke.

its immediate community, yielding just enough produce for the people living within a block or two—not a grand pastoral vision but a powerful approach to repurposing and reclaiming the spaces untouched by the rust belt revival.

Lessons of Uneven Landscapes If you’re a building, it’s a more promising time than usual to be in Buffalo. But for the average person, not much is different.86

Everyday life in Buffalo is structured around complex and uneven landscapes of abandonment, of which the grain elevators and vacant spaces of the East Side represent only fragments. The histories of abandonment that these sites embody are deeply entangled with one another: industrial decline initiated a large-scale population loss, which in turn led to residential vacancy and infrastructural decay. As dialectically entwined dynamics, these histories of loss continue to saturate the city’s material reality and symbolic geography, fostering meaningful encounters between urban dwellers and the body of the city. “The unbuilding of cities,” according to Jeff Byles, “is today our most potent source of urban meaning.”87 Within the present momentum of aspirational revitalization, the East Side and the grain elevators occupy vastly different positions. As their embodiment

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of the gritty ruin porn asethetic is paired with their sought-after location on the urban waterfront, the grain elevators are imbued with a sense of economic optimism and possibility. The abandonment of the monumental spaces here becomes the raw material for glossy silo dreams of the twentyfirst century. On the East Side, residential vacancy is considered a marker of deviance and blight that is couched in highly racialized terms. Abandonment here is conceived as an obstacle to economic development of the entire city, a problem whose only mode of address seems to be targeted demolition—with serious effects for local communities. At times the vast empty lots of grass that now govern the visual appearance of once densely populated neighborhoods such as the East Side are implicated in the optimistic visions of a New Pastoralism and envisioned as “places of edgy artistic experimentation and DIY sustainability,” which seem to apply more to the creative class that revitalization attempts to attract to the city than to the everyday reality of places like the East Side.88 Yet, vacant land remains the most significant political resource for cities undergoing variants of the rust belt revival. As Aaron Bartley of PUSH Buffalo notes, “With a sober understanding of land as power in the capitalist context, disempowered communities, if they win control of the vacant parcels in their midst, could use them as leverage in surviving the post-industrial turn.”89 The many transformative processes that Buffalo has undergone in the past years have deep implications for everyday life in the city as a whole. Goldman describes this dynamic as follows: “A city’s urban fabric—its ecosystem, if you will—is extremely sensitive to change. A long loved building demolished here, a surface parking lot there, one or two ugly buildings somewhere else resonate throughout the body that is the city.”90 Buildings razed on the East Side impact the city just as much as grain elevator revitalization efforts on the riverfront. The euphoric revitalization narrative that has attached itself to aesthetically exceptional structures such as Silo City, while waiting for its effects to sprawl out to the more neglected parts of the city, contributes to an uneven distribution of precarity and power. In a highly segregated city where more than 30 percent of residents live in poverty, glossy visions of revival that are tethered to aspirational notions of the creative class will inevitably collide with the realities of social inequality that have governed the city for decades. The result, hopefully, will be a recalibrated rust belt urbanism less invested in teleological success stories and more attentive to the complex social geographies it inhabits.

Ch a p ter 4

“In the Thought of the World” Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building Jack Quinan

Shortly after Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Larkin Administration Building in 1906, Russell Sturgis, a leading American architecture critic, wrote a scathing review in the Architectural Record, characterizing the building as “extremely ugly” and “a monster of awkwardness.”1 For his part, Wright, upon hearing of the building’s demise forty-two years later, said that he believed that the building “had taken its place in the thought of the world.”2 History has proven Sturgis wrong, but how can we measure the validity of Wright’s claim? The Larkin Building is firmly entrenched in histories of architectural modernism, beginning with Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration of 1929, where it is seen together with Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1897–1909), Peter Behren’s AEG Turbine Factory (1908–1909), and Otto Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank (1903–1904/1910–1911), buildings that rival Wright’s Larkin commission for architectural distinction at the turn of the twentieth century. These four monuments—an office building, a commodities exchange, a factory, and a post office savings bank—differ typologically, but all are distinguished structures that represent public and private businesses in ways that reflect the forces of modernity—industrialism, urbanization, the rejection of tradition, secularism, the rise of the nation-state—that had been gathering in Europe and North America since the end of the eighteenth century. In this essay, the 89

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Figure 4.1  Exterior elevation, Larkin Administration Building, 1903–1907, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Source: Buffalo History Museum.

origins of Wright’s Larkin Building in the company’s history, its material characteristics, and its principal functions will be weighed against similar considerations of the three European buildings in order to identify the ideas and qualities that all four architects shared while also demonstrating characteristics in Wright’s building that are distinctive. The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, was in grave need of a new office building in 1902.3 Founded in 1875 by John D. Larkin as a soap manufacturing business, the company had grown from a building of fifteen hundred square feet in 1875 into a multiple-building complex estimated at six hundred thousand square feet in 1901, a result of the transformation of the business into a nationally prominent mail-order operation.4 By 1902,

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Figure 4.2  Interior light court, Larkin Administration Building, 1903–1907, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Source: Buffalo History Museum.

customer mail was arriving at the rate of six thousand letters a day for processing by secretaries working on a single floor of a former factory building with inadequate lighting, no air conditioning, and persistent soot infiltration from passing trains. Wright designed a two-part building featuring a principal steel-framed, brick-clad office measuring one hundred feet in height and width and two hundred feet in depth, with a smaller attached annex containing a reception

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space and four diminished upper floors for various personnel services. The office building was illuminated by a light court that rose from an above-grade main floor, four and a half stories to a gridded skylight. Customer mail was trucked directly into the basement of the building and elevated to the second floor, sorted according to the company’s system of “state groups,” and delivered to each group by people on roller skates.5 Because the fireproofing of customer accounts was essential, all the office furniture was made of metal, and the floors, desktops, countertops, and decorative flourishes were fabricated in magnesite, making the building clean, attractive, brightly lit, and fireproof. On the main floor of the light court, the company’s directors, department heads, and their secretaries worked in full view of the fifteen hundred mostly secretarial workforce arranged on the tiers of balconies surrounding the light court. The fifth floor contained a kitchen and restaurant spaces, and above that, at either end of the building, Wright inserted a mezzanine containing an ivy garden with a viewing balcony well above the level of the skylight over the light court—a place of respite from the hum of work below. Stair towers and intake shafts for air conditioning—the first in an office building—were attached to the four corners of the main building; two additional stair towers anchored the annex corners. The Larkin Administration Building was modern in the abstractness of its blocklike forms and its many innovations, not the least of which was the way Wright’s structure accommodated the Larkin office system and its employees.

The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the AEG Turbine Factory, and the Post Office Savings Bank Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange is unique among the four buildings under discussion in that it bore the weight of an activity—the exchange of commodities and stocks resulting from sea trade—that was integral to the existence of the city of Amsterdam if not of Holland itself. Located along the Damrak, a major avenue in the heart of Amsterdam, the Stock Exchange is more than twice as long as Wright’s Larkin Building. Four-story blocks with pyramidal roofs anchor three corners of this long, narrow building, while at its southwest corner a 171-foot-tall oblong bell and clock tower takes command of the building, the street, and the surrounding neighborhood, in striking contrast to the ornate steeple of the nearby eighthundred-year-old Olde Kerk. The irregularity of the plan and its twenty-odd individual roofs express an internal spatial complexity composed of the Commodities Exchange Hall

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Figure 4.3  Exterior elevation, Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1896–1903, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, architect. Source: City Archive, Amsterdam.

(the largest space in Amsterdam), the smaller Grain and Stock Halls, scores of offices along the exterior walls, and a variety of support spaces. While the entire building is handsomely crafted in brick, with limestone details held to the plane of the wall, the Commodities Hall is an ingenious tectonic construction of brick, stone, and metal. Five granite columns on

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Figure 4.4  Commodities Exchange Hall, Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1896–1903, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, architect. Source: City Archive, Amsterdam.

either side of the hall support brick pilasters that expand above the third-floor level to accept one of the five barrel-vaulted metal trusses that support the glazed roof. Berlage facilitated the transition from the masonry wall mass to the skeletal trusses by relieving the wall at each level with segmental arches and perforated balustrades of brick. At the main floor level, the wall and a series of five two-arch sequences are subsumed beneath five blind segmental arches that appear to carry the entire superstructure effortlessly. Inspired by Gottfried Semper’s emphasis on the integrity of the wall and Viollet-le-Duc’s exploration of the structural use of metal, Berlage dispensed with the finials, crockets, and traceries of Amsterdam’s historic architecture and introduced a new, if tentative, modernity in which the wall and the space it creates constitute the building. Peter Behrens’s AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft) Turbine Factory in Berlin is representative of Germany’s drive under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to accelerate its industrial production. Whereas Berlage’s building was intended primarily as a place of business for wealthy merchants, Behrens’s building was a setting for heavy industrial

Figure 4.5  Exterior elevation, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1910, Peter Behrens, architect. Source: Der Industriebau.

Figure 4.6  Interior, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1908–1910, Peter Behrens, architect. Source: Der Industriebau.

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production, a great hall four hundred feet in length and eighty-five feet high outfitted with gantries capable of lifting turbine parts weighing up to one hundred tons. A secondary two-story structure outfitted with smaller cranes and machinery was attached to the long west side of the main hall—a configuration similar to the bi-nuclear organization of Wright’s Larkin Building. Trained as an artist, Behrens, as director of architecture and design for the AEG Company, strove to create a building that would represent and even elevate the aspirations of the company in the eyes of Germany and the world.6 Nikolaus Pevsner wrote of it as “perhaps the most beautiful industrial building ever erected up to that time.”7 Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory is modern in that it uses the modern materials of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass, and modern structural technologies, to serve a contemporary purpose—the fabrication of turbines—and does so with an acute awareness of its symbolic significance. The Imperial and Royal Austrian Post Savings Bank was founded by Emperor Franz Josef in 1882 to encourage the people of Austria to save and for the state to make use of their funds. Over three thousand post offices were established in Austria to serve as branch banks from which all transactions were forwarded to a central bank in Vienna for processing, much as Wright’s Larkin Building was designed around the daily influx of six thousand customer letters.8 The bank succeeded well enough initially, but twenty years of poor management and inadequate spaces led to deteriorating working conditions for the two thousand employees in Vienna.9 In 1903 Otto Wagner won the competition for a new building under the imperial directive that it be “a simple yet artistic monumental building, . . . completely contemporary, that is functional-formal design. . . . In all decoration, the emphasis should be on durability and low maintenance costs.”10 Wagner’s seven-story building was to house two thousand employees on a fifty-thousand-square-foot trapezoidal site one block from Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Like Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory, Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank was to be monumental and representative of the institution and its purposes but under the restraints cited above in a city famous for the sumptuousness of its baroque and historicist nineteenth-century heritage. Wagner’s principal façade is classically organized, with decoration confined to the grid pattern of the countersunk aluminum bolt-heads that affix a veneer of granite and marble plates to the underlying brick walls, along with two heraldic aluminum angels flanking the sign “österr. postsparkasse,” above the cornice level. Its principal entrance brilliantly combines sculpted granite framing and slender aluminum piers that support a cantilevered metal-and-glass canopy.

Figure 4.7  Exterior elevation, Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna, 1903–1906, Otto Wagner, architect. Source: ©Bwag/Wikimedia.

Figure 4.8  Banking Hall, Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna, 1903–1906, Otto Wagner, architect. Source: Jorge Royan / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Wagner’s restrained exterior does not prepare the visitor for the Banking Hall, the building’s centerpiece. Shaped by a two-story elliptical glass vault invisibly suspended from steel columns above a glass-block floor and ordered by grids within grids, the hall is a luminous precursor to the corporate skyscraper lobbies of the mid-twentieth century.

Theories in Common The architects of these four buildings came of age as hundreds of machines, devices, and methods of production were revolutionizing cultures globally, expanding and changing the nature of cities and connecting entire countries with new methods of communication and transportation. In spite of their geographical and national differences, the four architects were variously influenced (as will be treated below) by the writings of three architectural theorists—Gottfried Semper, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and John Ruskin—who were attempting in their individual ways to come to grips with the implications of industrialism for architecture. Gottfried Semper’s intention in The Four Elements of Architecture11 (1851) was to identify the fundamental elements of architecture as they might have been assembled in a simple hut by a hypothetical early man. Each element was associated with a craft: the hearth connoted fire and ceramics, the foundational mound upon which the hearth rested represented masonry, the enclosing walls were made by the weaving of wooden strips, and the roof structure represented the origins of carpentry. Though based on a speculative archaeology, Semper’s theory led architects to turn from their preoccupations with classical and Gothic styles to deeper elemental considerations of architecture. According to Kenneth Frampton, a synthesis of the theories of Semper and Viollet-le-Duc occurs in the later work of Berlage, who had studied at the Zurich Institute of Technology, where the influence of Semper, who had left a few years prior, remained strong.12 Peter Behrens, on the other hand, knew Semper’s work well enough to dismiss it in favor of Alois Riegl’s support for the abstractly atectonic that is apparent in the nonsupporting quoined corners of Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory.13 Published as Entretiens sur l’architecture (two volumes, 1863–1872), Violletle-Duc’s lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris were based on his extensive experience with the restoration of Gothic cathedral architecture, which he understood as a coherent system of construction of value to architecture broadly.14 His lectures aroused controversy when he advocated the use of metal in architecture at an institution dedicated to the perpetuation and refinement of classical architectural models. Viollet’s Entretiens was

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influential on the art nouveau architects of France and Belgium, the Catalan modernismo movement in Spain, Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier in France, Berlage in Holland, and Frank Lloyd Wright.15 His vision for the possibilities of metal in architecture was prescient in regard to the proliferation of steel and glass skyscrapers of the twentieth century. John Ruskin, a giant intellectual figure in the nineteenth century, was read and admired by architects and by such notable figures as Gandhi, Proust, and Tolstoy, for his critical acumen, his social ideas, and his prose style. As an art critic and ardent medievalist, Ruskin was concerned that architecture had been mired in historical revivals for nearly a century. In Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) he proposed models for an authentic nineteenth-century architecture based on seven moral qualities (Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience) chiefly derived from his study of Italian medieval buildings.16 The immediate result was the Victorian architecture movement, but Ruskin’s moralism contributed an ethical dimension to the thought of the next generation of modern architects. For Europeans, the institutional depth of architectural teaching and its critical discourse was considerably more advanced than it was in North America. The disciplines of the history and criticism of art and architecture began in earnest during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany and Austria, where pioneering art historians J. J. Winckelmann, Jacob Burckhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Alois Riegl were deepening the pursuit of meaning in the visual arts under the influence of Immanuel Kant and the idealist philosophers Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that he read Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc as a boy, and it is likely that he knew something of Semper’s work, either from a symposium in Chicago at which the German immigrant architect Frederick Baumann quoted Semper,17 or through the translation of portions of Semper’s Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten published by Wright’s Chicago contemporary, architect John Wellborn Root, in the Inland Architect, 1889 and 1890.18 Wright, whose intellectual roots were in American Transcendentalism, dismissed an opportunity to study at the École des Beaux-Arts out of hand.19 Having begun to cultivate an interest in the arts of Japan following his first encounter with Japanese prints in the office of Joseph Lyman Silsbee in 1887, Wright eventually obtained commissions in Japan and became something of an authority on its arts.20

Interpersonal Connections The web of knowledge that connected the four architects also functioned at an interpersonal level. Among the Europeans, proximity and multiple-language

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fluency facilitated interaction—Berlage, Behrens, and Wagner knew each other, while Wright began monitoring activities in Europe in the 1890s even as he was also turning his attention toward Japan.21 One of Wright’s threads of interest leads from his youthful readings of Ruskin and William Morris to his founding membership in the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society in 1897, to his initial meeting with the British Arts and Crafts leader C. R. Ashbee, in 1899, and culminated with a visit to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis—a veritable feast of Secessionist work by J. M. Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, and others—that so impressed Wright that he sent his office staff to the exposition.22 Although there is no evidence that Wright ever met Otto Wagner, there were several points of connection between them: in describing his apprenticeship in Wright’s Oak Park studio from 1902 to 1908, Barry Byrne mentions “one man out of post-graduate school at Harvard, who had the finishing gloss of a year in Vienna under Otto Wagner.”23 Wright’s son, John (born in 1892), wrote a letter to Wagner in 1913 to express interest in studying with him in Vienna, but his father is said to have discouraged him.24 Wright apparently admired Wagner’s work, as well as that of his students J. M. Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, and that of two Viennese modernists of a younger generation—Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler—who emigrated to the United States and joined Wright’s office at Taliesin in the 1920s.25 In A Testament (1957) Wright acknowledged his European peers, “The Mackintoshes of Scotland; restless protestants also—Van de Velde of Belgium, Berlage of Holland, Adolph Loos and Otto Wagner of Vienna—all were genuine protestants, but then seen and heard only to Europe.”26 “Protestant,” in this instance, held several meanings for Wright: the Lloyd Jones family had a history of Noncomformism in Wales dating to the seventeenth century, which is reflected in their motto, “Truth Against the World.”27 Wright, the son and nephew of Protestant (Methodist and Unitarian) preachers, transposed the familial religious militancy into his own protest against nineteenth-century architectural historicism. By identifying the Larkin Building as “the First Protestant” in his autobiography, he asserted his own primacy among the practitioners of the prevailing historicist styles.28

Reciprocity and Difference Although a reciprocal interest in Wright on the part of the Europeans is less evident at the outset, H. P. Berlage is the exception.29 Following a visit to the United States in 1911 to see the work of Wright and Louis Sullivan, Berlage lectured in Holland, Germany, and Switzerland about his American

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experiences and published an article in the Schweizerische Bauzeitung of September 1912 that included insightful comments about the uniqueness of Wright’s Larkin Building vis-à-vis European models: Having been told that Wright’s masterpiece was the Larkin Company office building in Buffalo, New York, I went to see it and must confess that this is an understatement. The building consists of only one large room, thanks to the American concept that offices should not be divided into separate rooms. The head of the office works at the same table as his employees, and from this table his view encompasses the entire room with its various floors which, like galleries, surround the central hall. This hall has excellent light in spite of the large brick masses that form the exterior corner towers; indeed, the effect is similar to Unity Temple where the corner staircases are lighted from inside. The building is conceived in terms of contrasting masses—and these have a very powerful effect. Whatever may be one’s concept of an office, particularly here in Europe, I assure you there is no building here with the monumental power of this American design. The exterior and interior are both of brick, with floors and ceilings of concrete. Detailing is handled naturally, in accordance with Wright’s originality, and clearly shows his creative genius.30 While Peter Behrens left no extended opinion of Wright, it is difficult to imagine that he could have been unaware of his work. Wright visited Berlin in 1909 and 1910, during which time Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier were employed in Behrens’s office in Berlin at various times. There is no evidence that Wright met any of these pioneering modernists at that time.31 Regarding an exhibition of Wright drawings at the Union of Berlin Architects in February 1910, Mies later reminisced, erroneously,32 “The more we were absorbed in the study of those creations, the greater became our admiration for [Wright’s] incomparable talent, the boldness of his conceptions and the independence of his thought and action. The dynamic impulse emanating from his work invigorated a whole generation. His influence was strongly felt even where it as not actually visible.”33 Mies elaborated these thoughts in a subsequent interview: “Certainly I was very much impressed by the Robie House and by the office building in Buffalo [italics added]. Who wouldn’t be impressed? He certainly was a great genius—there is no question about that.”34 Wright’s work, nevertheless, does not appear to have interested Otto Wagner. Though Wagner was widely respected as an architect, planner, and teacher throughout Europe, his realized commissions were primarily

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confined to Vienna. It seems, according to V. Horvat Pintarić, that Wagner’s and Wright’s ideals were antithetical: Pintarić writes that the most unusual feature of Wagner’s Academy of Fine Arts design of 1910 was “Wagner’s use of unbroken wall surfaces, the building being lit by glass roofs. . . . When he had first considered the project, Wagner had refused to consider any location with existing clumps of trees or uneven ground because that would have meant making his buildings fit in with the landscape [italics added].”35 Wright may have sealed the Larkin and the Johnson’s Wax buildings from negative environmental conditions, but otherwise he consistently strove to make his houses and buildings harmonize with their landscapes. The critic Adolf Behne summarized the breadth of Wright’s impact in Europe in 1923: “Wright’s influence on European architecture was significant: in Germany (Peter Behrens, Gropius, Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe); in Holland (Oud [b. 1890]), Jan Wils, van t’Hoff, Greve); in Switzerland (Le Corbusier); in Czechoslovakia (Orbtel, Krejcar, Tyl, Černý, Víšek, Fragner, Feuerstein)—at first probably affecting the elevation more than the plan, which has only recently come to be fully understood.”36 Their shared modernist proclivities notwithstanding, Wright’s separation from his European counterparts was pronounced in several ways—there were cultural, political, language, and geographical differences, but most notable are the differences of education between Wright and the Europeans. Berlage and Wagner were trained at leading architectural schools in Europe—Berlage at the Zurich Institute of Technology (now the ETH—Swiss Federal Institute of Technology); Otto Wagner at the school of architecture at Vienna’s Technical University, then at Berlin’s Architectural Academy and finally back to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Peter Behrens’s preparation in a number of art schools, leading to an early career as a graphic artist, was somewhat comparable to Wright’s preparation for the architectural profession, though the trajectories of their careers differed markedly. By European standards, Wright’s preparation for architecture was highly unorthodox, as Henry-Russell Hitchcock observed: There was no architectural school at the University of Wisconsin. Wright, therefore, although it had been his intention to become an architect, studied engineering. . . . Never having studied in American architectural schools of the eighties, there was much he never had to unlearn. . . . His education advanced on either side of architecture, below it in the field of construction and above it in the field of aesthetic theory. The middle plane of artistic actuality he had from the first to fill in alone.37

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Equipped with a smattering of engineering courses at the University of Wisconsin, a year in Joseph Lyman Silsbee’s office, and five years with Adler and Sullivan, Wright, like Behrens, learned architecture on the job.

Wright’s Promotionalism The most conspicuous difference between Wright and the European architects is Wright’s zeal for promoting his work. One could see Wright in the light of the American character as it has been observed and interpreted by many European observers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, and J. T. Bryce, who have commented on the fluidity of the class structure in which “any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son,”38 a paucity of good manners, a pervasive sense of haste, and the belief that change was a measure of progress. Bryce wrote, “Why in Heaven’s name this haste? Why, then, seek to complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years over in the older continents?”39 This American hustle is apparent in Wright’s comment to client Darwin Martin in 1904: “You fellows down there [in Buffalo] put a Chicagoan to shame in your get-there-gait, but be persuaded that the best result in buildings don’t [sic] come with that gait.”40 Wright made change an integral feature of the Taliesin Fellowship, which moved seasonally between Wisconsin and Arizona and daily from the drafting table to building construction to farm labor to orchestra rehearsals. Wright was steeped as well in a legacy of writings that centered on the self, including Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Thoreau’s individualism in “On Walden Pond,” and Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and could hardly have been unaware of such flamboyant contemporaries as “Buffalo Bill” (William F. Cody), Elbert Hubbard (partner in the Larkin Company from 1875 to 1893 when he departed to establish the Roycroft community), Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum. Though not a native, Oscar Wilde had a substantial impact on the American public during his tour of the country in 1882.41 None of this accounts for the extraordinary energy with which Wright promoted his work. Shortly after he entered independent practice, Wright began lecturing publicly (eleven presentations have been documented between 1894 and 1902 in the Chicago area) and mounting exhibitions of his work at the Chicago Architectural Club (eight exhibits between 1894 and 1914).42 To introduce the first Prairie House in 1901, he chose the Ladies’ Home Journal—circulation of nearly one million—over the Inland Architect or the Architectural Record, whose circulations were less than three thousand. Nowhere were Wright’s efforts at promotion more assiduous than his campaign on behalf of the Larkin Administration Building, his first scale

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commission beyond his burgeoning domestic practice. Upon the building’s completion in November 1906 he wrote an article for the Larkin Idea, the company’s customer magazine (circulation six hundred thousand), that explained the building and its many innovations.43 He then featured the building in “In the Cause of Architecture,” a statement of his architectural principles that was accompanied by an unprecedented eighty-seven illustrations of his work in the Architectural Record of March 1908.44 When Russell Sturgis criticized the Larkin Building in the Architectural Record the following month, Wright lashed out: “Counseling return to first principles, I make no plea for ugliness, nor is ugliness necessary—although I think the buildings Mr. Sturgis, in an unguarded moment permitted himself to building, are very ugly.”45 In consideration of Sturgis, who died in February 1909, the Architectural Record declined to publish Wright’s response, but the Larkin Company—very likely at Wright’s insistence—published his defensive response as a discrete pamphlet in 1910.46 From the start of his career forward, Wright sought and maintained relationships with critics, publishers, and sympathetic architects both in the United States and abroad. When critics commented negatively, as Sturgis did, Wright either wrote letters to them directly, or he expressed his objections in published articles. The Larkin Building was again featured among the one hundred largescale lithographic plates of Wright’s work published by Ernst Wasmuth as Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright in Berlin in 1910 and in the special photographic collection, Frank Lloyd Wright: Ausgeführte Bauten, in 1911. Owing to personal turmoil and his extended stay in Japan for the construction of the Imperial Hotel, Wright experienced a decline in building and publishing activities from 1910 to 1923, but upon his return to the United States two publications of his work were published in Europe, H. Th. Wijdeveld’s The Life Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (C. A. Mees, Santpoort, Holland, 1925) and H. de Fries’s Frank Lloyd Wright: Aus dem Lebenswerke eines Architekten (Verlag Ernest Pollak, Berlin, 1926). The Wijdeveld book was a compilation of seven issues on Wright from Wijdeveld’s architectural periodical Wendigen, with articles by Wijdeveld, Wright, Lewis Mumford, Louis Sullivan, J. J. P. Oud, Robert Mallet Stevens, Erich Mendelsohn, and H. P. Berlage—impressive evidence of the ties that Wright had forged with the European architectural community. The Dutch publication opened with seven images of the Larkin Building and concluded with extensive coverage of Wright’s most recent buildings. Similarly, H. de Fries’s book contains essays in German by de Fries, Wright,47 and Richard Neutra,

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along with portions of Berlage’s speeches on Wright. The Larkin Building is prominently featured in photographs by Clarence Fuermann. Wright’s persistent publicizing of the Larkin Building owed something to its impact in Europe, thanks to Berlage, to the monumentality of its presence in comparison to the scale of his domestic buildings, and to the promise it contained for additional large-scale commissions. In An Autobiography (1932) Wright dedicated a chapter to the Larkin Building titled “The First Protestant,”48 but for the 1943 edition of An Autobiography he compared the Larkin Building to the recently completed Johnson’s Wax headquarters building (1937): “For once, again an up-to-the-minute thoroughbred, daughter of the Larkin building—1906—was born—1938—on provincial American soil. A great modern building completely furnished, planted complete in perfect keeping with the original idea of this more feminine building as a whole, was its sire, the masculine Larkin Building of Buffalo.”49 By treating the two buildings in terms of gender Wright was able to rationalize the transition from the angular monumentality of the Larkin Building to the moderne curvatures of the Johnson Building while continuing to feature the earlier work. In A Testament, published two years before his death in 1959, the Larkin Building is represented by four large plates, three of them Clarence Fuermann’s 1907 photographs. Despite its demolition in 1950, Wright never lost sight of the importance of the Larkin Building, about which he once wrote, “When the Larkin Building came from me,”50 as if it were a child that he had outlived.

Exhibitions as Promotion Wright’s record of publications—seventeen books and approximately 150 articles, pamphlets, and catalogs—is paralleled by 120 solo and group exhibitions. According to Kathryn Smith,51 Wright’s work was the subject of exhibitions every year but two between 1930 and 1959, and in many years the work was being exhibited in multiple venues in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.52 Between 1932 and 1953 the Museum of Modern Art held fourteen exhibitions in which Wright’s work was shown, six of them exclusive to his work. Wright exercised an unusual degree of control over most of the larger exhibitions and generally refused to be shown together with other architects, particularly practitioners of International Style modernism. The European architects discussed here each maintained a vigorous practice of writing and lecturing on issues critical to their respective practices. H. P. Berlage was a prolific writer whose bibliography of 186 entries includes

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eighty-six articles, seventeen design presentations, twenty-nine published lectures, and eight books, four of which were essay collections, of which two—Thoughts on Style (1904) and Beauty in Society (1919)—are distinguished contributions to architectural thought in early modernism.53 He frequently wrote to express critical observations on individual buildings, on the work of artists and architects. Beyond concerns with aesthetics, planning, criticism, and materials, Berlage ranged across a wide variety of topics that include travel writing, folk arts, art exhibitions, decorative arts, building restoration, and the impact of World War I on architecture. Berlage’s writing represented a means for him to remain a critical force throughout Europe and beyond. Otto Wagner’s bibliography includes forty-nine entries, of which twenty are competition reports and proposals, two are books (Sketches, Projects and Executed Buildings [Einige Skizzen, Projecte u. Ausgeführte Bauwerke], a first volume in 1890 and a second in 1897, and Modern Architecture [Moderne Architektur], 1896 and subsequent editions);54 and the rest are speeches and miscellaneous items, including his important challenge to the planning ideals of Camillo Sitte’s The Development of the Great City (Die Großstädte: Eine Studie über diese) of 1911. Peter Behrens was not a writer of books. His bibliography includes 126 entries, including one hundred articles, eleven speeches, and some miscellaneous items.55 Less academic than Wagner and Berlage, Behrens wrote about aspects of the work that occupied him (graphic design, factory architecture, and aesthetics), issues pertaining to planning (especially Berlin), and occasional critical articles on individuals and individual buildings. A compelling case can be made as to why Wright’s Larkin Building had a greater impact on modern architecture than the major works of his three European peers. One only need acknowledge the classically based bilateral symmetry and tripartite vertical organization of Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank, the vestiges of the Gothic in Berlage’s Stock Exchange, or the persistent aura of the classical temple in Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory to feel the weight of the past in Europe. Whereas each of their buildings is structurally a hybrid, the Larkin Building was a steel-framed structure right out of the Chicago School reimagined for an entirely new use as a light-courtcentered office building. Whereas the three European buildings clung to a language of representation, Wright’s building was decisively abstract—an assemblage of blocklike forms artfully generated from the building’s many functions to resemble nothing similar in the history of architecture. While each of the three European buildings was innovative within the constraints of historical memory (witness Berlage’s carved human keystones, Behrens’s quoins and tacit reference to the Greek temple, and Wagner’s

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aluminum angels), the Larkin Building was innovative in terms of structure, lighting, air conditioning, fire safety, built-in file cabinets, wall-hung toilets, and attached cantilevered desk chairs to facilitate cleaning, and with a semiattached structure for various human services—all conceived as an inspirational expression of the Larkin Company’s progressive goals and ideals. The impact of Wright’s work abroad was based on the quality of the work augmented by Wright’s own vigorous promotion of it through the publication of the Wasmuth portfolio in 1910 and by Berlage’s enthusiastic public lectures and essay on the Larkin Building in Europe. There was no comparable reciprocal acceptance of the Europeans’ work in the United States until the 1920s, when the younger modernists Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and William Lescaze immigrated. Through Berlage, Wright had a particularly strong impact in Holland, and through Behrens—whose office in Berlin included the three seminal modernists around the time that the Wasmuth portfolio was published and Wright’s work was exhibited—Wright made his way into the very wellspring of the International Style. His work would eventually influence Mies, Le Corbusier (who acknowledged Wright’s impact upon him circa 1914–1915),56 and Gropius, whose Model Factory at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (with Adolph Meyer) “closely resembles [Wright’s] perspective of his Mason City (Iowa) Hotel of 1908” (as published in the Wasmuth Portfolio in Berlin in 1910), according to Vincent Scully.57 Despite this groundswell of interest abroad, acceptance of Wright’s work in the United States was tepid in the 1910s, in no small part owing to Russell Sturgis’s damning 1909 Architectural Record article, the scandals that began when Wright abandoned his family in 1910, and his isolation in Japan from 1916 to 1922. During those years the Larkin Building was widely emulated by architects of little distinction all over North America. Massing elements and details from Wright’s building appear on banks, schools, Masonic temples, churches, and courthouses—“façadism,” Wright called it—with no attempts to emulate the building’s overall coherence or the spatial wonder of the Larkin light court.

The Demise of the Larkin Building The fate of the Larkin Building was intimately tied to the concurrent history of Buffalo, which became the nation’s sixth-largest city in 1900 (350,000) on the strength of its location as a port at the eastern end of Lake Erie. Initially, lumber, grain, and livestock were processed and shipped from the Midwest to the East Coast by canal, but in the 1880s, with the influx of iron ore from Minnesota, coal from Pennsylvania, and electricity from Niagara Falls,

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Buffalo became a major manufacturer of iron and steel products second only to Pittsburgh. Significant railroad traffic rapidly displaced the Erie Canal. Buffalo and the Larkin Company, the latter strategically situated at the junction of three major railroad lines heading east, southeast, and west, grew apace, but both the city and the Larkin Company ultimately fell victim to changes in the way goods were transported and marketed.58 Among the major circumstances that conspired to bypass Buffalo in the early twentieth century were the development and refinement of the Welland Canal portion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway that connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean; the advent of the trucking industry, which enabled manufacturers to deliver goods directly to businesses anywhere; and the completion in 1913 of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental federal highway, passing some two hundred miles south of Buffalo.59 The fortunes of the Larkin Company turned from a high point in 1912 (with two million square feet of industrial space in Buffalo) to a steady reduction in sales through the 1920s due to competition from five-and-dime stores and the impact of the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, the Larkin Company was forced to sell off its subsidiary businesses and much of its real estate. Wright’s Administration Building was turned into a department store, briefly, in 1937, and in 1943 the building was sold, without access to the company’s heating system—a disastrous occurrence, given Buffalo’s severe winters—to a new owner seeking tax relief, but that too was denied, with the result that the City of Buffalo assumed control of the building. An advertising campaign to sell it was launched in 1947 in New York and Chicago newspapers, to no avail.60 In 1949 Councilman Joseph Dudzick proposed that the building be turned into a recreation center for the city’s disadvantaged youth, but that too was defeated.61 With demolition impending in 1949, articles expressing alarm appeared in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Buffalo Evening News, but they were too late.62 Wright’s Larkin Administration Building was demolished in 1950 for what remains, even now, a parking lot. Ironically, Berlage’s Stock Exchange, Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory, and Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank are still functioning today. Despite its international renown, the Larkin Administration Building had no significant influence on any other building in Buffalo, with the exception of Edward Durell Stone’s four-story modernist Buffalo News Building (1973), the third floor of which consists of a two-story, sky-lit work space (“the atrium”) surrounded by a fourth-floor balcony lined with plants.63 In its later years, the Larkin Administration Building stood in increasing isolation a mile east of the city’s center, in a neighborhood of decaying houses and empty

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lots mixed with vestiges of various industrial enterprises. Even in its decayed state, the building was of interest to architectural historians and students of architecture from near and far, but the city was unable to figure out how to reuse it. It is a measure of the state of things in a city where H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Cyrus Eidlitz, Louise Bethune, George Post, Ernest Flagg, Carrere & Hastings, and McKim, Mead & White had built prior to 1900 that after the construction of the Larkin Building in 1906 only two buildings of international distinction—Eliel Saarinen’s Kleinhans Music Hall (1937) and Gordon Bunshaft’s addition (for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1962)—were realized. The surge of preservation consciousness that began in the late twentieth century has led to the restoration of many of the aforementioned nineteenth-century buildings, Olmsted parks, and neighborhoods, and with it the popular if misguided notion that the Larkin Administration Building ought to be rebuilt.64 Wright’s Larkin Building did “take its place in the thought of the world,”65 as he projected, both in the historical record of the building’s leadership role at the start of the twentieth century and in the work of architects such as Hendrik Petrus Berlage in the 1930s, Paul Rudolph and Louis I. Kahn in the 1950s, and Pei Zhu in 2008, who absorbed and synthesized ideas drawn from Wright’s Larkin Building into new expressions for an ever-changing world.

Ch a p ter 5

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

Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo is a significant but lesser-known example of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture designed by prominent New York architect Max Abramovitz. The four-part complex consists of the synagogue seating 1,000 congregants, a two-story religious school building, a multipurpose auditorium, and a chapel accommodating 150 people. The congregation chose the architect from among a number of practitioners with national reputations. Earlier works with which Abramovitz was associated were landmark statements of the International Style. For Temple Beth Zion, he turned to the aesthetic of neo-expressionism and brutalism, what architectural historian Reyner Banham termed the antirational trends that appeared in postwar modernism. One of a number of important synagogues designed by well-known architects in the postwar period, Buffalo’s Temple Beth Zion was built between 1962 and 1967.

The Temple Beth Zion Congregation in Buffalo, 1850–1961 Temple Beth Zion has deep roots in the Buffalo community. It traces its origin to the late 1840s in Temple Beth El, an Orthodox congregation founded by Polish Jews who worshipped in their native tongue. During the Civil War, certain members of the parent body sought to establish a Reform movement congregation in Buffalo. In so doing, they were following a national trend 110

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Figure 5.1  Temple Beth Zion, 1962–1967, Max Abramovitz, architect. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

toward a more secularized form of Judaism. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the “father of the Jewish Reform Societies in America,”1 came from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which he had founded to promote the Reform cause, to give his blessing to the nascent Buffalo congregation. Temple Beth Zion was, in fact, the fourth Reform congregation in America. The membership chose as its first religious leader a progressive-minded German immigrant, Rabbi Samson Falk. Falk, remarks historian Selig Adler, believed “in linear human progress and was therefore typical of the early American reform Jews who were prime optimists because they found prosperity and tolerance in nineteenth-century America.”2 Like liberal Roman Catholics, many Jews saw Americanization as the path to greater acceptance in their predominantly Protestant country. Under Falk’s direction, Temple Beth Zion sought forms of worship that were in tune with American culture. At the time of Rabbi Falk’s investiture, a local newspaper assured its predominately Protestant readership that he “proclaimed the broadest principles of humanity and the implicit belief in the One God. Sectarian ideas were not to be inculcated and an important aim was to instruct the children of the congregation to be good men and women and good citizens of the United States.”3

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The new Temple Beth Zion quickly attracted members, especially among the city’s prosperous merchant class. These people were pleased to participate in “a modern service enhanced in interest by choir singing and edifying preaching of the word of God in a known tongue.”4 (Early services were performed in German and English.) By 1865, the year after joining the secularized Reform movement, the congregation purchased a former Methodist Episcopal church on Niagara Street. Within twenty years, the expanding congregation sold the modest Romanesque Revival structure and acquired land at 599 Delaware Avenue, where it proceeded to erect a grand synagogue. To design the new house of worship, the congregation chose Buffalo architect Edward Austin Kent. Kent created an imposing Medina sandstone building that embodied Romanesque, Byzantine, and Arab elements, a style Kent’s contemporaries usually referred to as “Moorish.” In the late nineteenth century, many synagogues in the United States and in Europe gloried in such displays of Middle Eastern tradition. Gottfried Semper’s Dresden synagogue of 1838 had been the fountainhead of this international Jewish architectural phenomenon. Henry Fernbach, America’s first

Figure 5.2  Temple Beth Zion, 1890, Edward Austin Kent, architect. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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prominent Jewish architect, celebrated this style when, in 1872, he designed New York City’s Central Synagogue. Likewise, Adler & Sullivan, architects to Chicago’s Reform Jewish community, codified an overtly Moorish style for such works as Zion Temple (1884) and Sinai Temple (1892) in that city. Buffalo, however, had never seen anything so exotic as Kent’s building. The buildings that most directly inspired Kent’s Temple Beth Zion were Henry Hobson Richardson’s renowned Trinity Episcopal Church of 1872 in Boston and Adler & Sullivan’s 1889 Richardsonian Romanesque Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv Synagogue in Chicago. In place of the stone crossing towers of those central-plan buildings, however, Kent’s synagogue featured an immense copper-clad wooden dome some eighty feet in diameter. “The building is the only one of its kind of such large roof span in the country,” speculated the editors of the national Engineering News.5 In contrast to the severe exterior, the worship space, which seated 850, was richly and colorfully decorated with frescoed ornament in the ByzantineArab style. The predominant hue was a deep reddish yellow, over which played colored light that filtered into the octagonal auditorium through a variety of openings, including the cupola of the dome, a row of twentyfour yellow-glass windows around the drum, and several marble-screened stained-glass windows high up in the walls. At night, a series of gas lamps ringing the base of the dome cast a radiant glow over the room. “How glorious it is,” remarked a local clergyman at the time of its dedication; “It is an Oriental dream, noble form outside and the interior rising like the sky in soft tints, deepening into a blue vault. It lights up magnificently. It is the most beautiful building in Buffalo.” His companion agreed: “The congregation of the Temple are to be envied,” he confessed. Nevertheless, he lamented, “What a pity they are not Christians.”6 Kent’s Temple Beth Zion quickly became one of the landmark structures of Delaware Avenue, a street that by 1890, when the synagogue was dedicated, enjoyed the status of one of America’s premier addresses. Over the next decades, like many reform congregations around the country, Temple Beth Zion developed numerous educational and social programs that benefited its members and the wider community. “Reform Judaism,” observes historian Dana Kaplan, “has historically emphasized what it interpreted as the central message of the prophets: the need for social justice.”7 These nonliturgical social and educational initiatives required that the congregation erect additional facilities adjacent to the synagogue. By the 1920s, Temple Beth Zion maintained a complex of spaces used for various activities. In 1954, in response to the growth of the congregation, Temple Beth Zion opened a suburban location in Amherst, New York.

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During that time, Temple Beth Zion also became known beyond the city thanks to the career of its dynamic leader, Rabbi Joseph L. Fink. A confidant to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Rabbi Fink enjoyed a reputation around the country as a fervent advocate for progressive ideals. For over twenty-five years, he voiced these convictions to a wide audience on The Humanitarian Hour, a national radio program he produced at Temple Beth Zion. By the time of Rabbi Fink’s retirement in 1958, Temple Beth Zion had grown considerably in prestige and membership. All went well for the congregation until the night of October 1, 1961, when a spectacular fire destroyed Edward Kent’s magnificent 1890 tabernacle and the attached ancillary facilities. Among them was a 1924 annex that contained Rabbi Fink’s large collection of rare religious books. Along with hundreds of others, the rabbi stood by watching helplessly as the flames raged, bringing down Kent’s great dome in a burst of fiery glory. Buffalo architect John Laping, a member of the congregation, remembered the moment: “When the great copper clad dome collapsed into the surrounding walls it sent a huge burst of sparks into the October night sky. It was, like the whirlwind in Job, a clear signal that our history was about to change.”8 Rather than attempt to rebuild the severely fire-damaged structure or to erect a replacement on its 1.5-acre site, the congregation decided to purchase property for a new home further north on Delaware Avenue. This came after an earnest debate over whether the new synagogue should be built in the suburbs. In February 1962, the chair of the site committee, Edward Kavinoky, a well-known lawyer and civic leader, announced that they had voted to remain in the city, where a majority of the congregation lived. The new location would be a four-acre site just north of the Jewish Center on Delaware Avenue at Barker Street.9 The choice of a principal location near two prominent Presbyterian churches—Westminster Church and North Presbyterian Church—and the Roman Catholic Cathedral involved more than concern for the convenience of most of the temple’s congregants. “It seems to me,” remarked Kavinoky, “this temple represents more than just a building where religious services are held. It represents the Jewish community.”10 For the next six years, until the present temple structure opened, the congregation worshipped in several temporary locations, including friendly churches (notably the Westminster Presbyterian Church) and the Kleinhans Music Hall. In a gesture of ecumenism, the Catholic owners of the Schwab Brothers construction company donated their services to demolish the ruins of the former synagogue. Once the congregation had secured a site for the new building, its members confidently determined that the new structure would accommodate sixteen

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hundred families. It would also need to incorporate facilities for the social and educational activities that had long been part of the temple’s mission. Neither did construction estimates of $2.9 million deter their enthusiasm. (Nearly half of this would come from insurance claims on the fire-damaged synagogue and sale of the property on which it had stood.) The next step was to secure the services of an architect. This task became the charge of a specially constituted architecture committee. The Search for an Architect: The Architecture Committee

The energetic chair of the architecture committee was Paul P. Cohen, a well-known Buffalo attorney who had a keen interest in architecture. Cohen pushed for hiring an architect with a national reputation. As a result, the committee contacted some of the leading lights of the postwar architectural profession in America. The list included Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Minoru Yamasaki, Marcel Breuer, Sidney Eisenshtat, Percival Goodman, Bloch & Hess, Bertram Bassuk, Edward Durell Stone, Pietro Belluschi, William Lescase, Ely Jacques Kahn, Alfred S. Alschuler, Daniel Schwartzman, and Max Abramovitz.11 Most of these men’s credentials listed modernist structures for Jewish congregations. In 1959, Italian-born Pietro Belluschi, who felt that “there is no architectural tradition to match the Jewish faith,” had been commissioned to design Temple B’rith Kodesh in nearby Rochester.12 The complex of buildings grouped around a court featured a spectacular, twelve-sided steel-framed dome that symbolized the original twelve tribes of Israel. Marcel Breuer, who stated that “a place of worship seems to demand dignity and serenity as its birthright,” had recently received an important commission to plan Temple B’nai Jeshrum in Short Hills, New Jersey.13 Yamasaki, who believed “Judaism appears to offer a beautiful combination of tradition, thought and equality,” had designed two Reform synagogues in New York and, in 1959, was commissioned by the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois, to plan their new house of worship.14 One critic described his cathedral-like scheme for the latter building as “one of the most striking designs of the postwar years—daring in its technical and structural innovations, triumphant in its spatial configuration and breathtakingly beautiful in its landscape setting.”15 Los Angeles architect Sidney Eisenshtat had made his name in 1953 with his plan for Los Angeles’s Temple Emmanuel. It was one of the first postwar attempts by a modernist architect to reinterpret the traditional synagogue. In El Paso, Texas, Eisenshtat’s Temple Sinai complex had just been completed as the committee started its work. It featured a

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spacious sanctuary space sheltered beneath a thin parabolic concrete ceiling that many observers likened to a tent. Percival Goodman’s Temple Beth El in Providence, Rhode Island, of 1954, was another forward-looking synagogue. Goodman broke with tradition to introduce an innovative structural system. The congregation prayed beneath a striking wooden vault spanning the entire auditorium in a series of diamond-shaped coffers formed by crisscrossing beams. A few years earlier, at his B’nai Israel synagogue (1952) in Millburn, New Jersey, Goodman had advocated for involving contemporary artists in synagogue commissions. Along with Erich Mendelsohn, Goodman was one of the first modern architects, observes art historian Janay Wong, “who adopted a new attitude toward synagogue art, viewing it not as a separate entity but as an integral part of the architecture that must be taken into account at the preliminary stages of the building’s design.”16 Mendelsohn, a major figure in the twentieth-century evolution of Jewish architecture, had built the Park Synagogue in Cleveland, for which he was justly famous. Undoubtedly, if he had been alive (he died in 1953), Paul Cohen would have included him on the committee’s list of prospective architects. Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft was a natural first choice. In fact, Cohen and others had spoken with him before the architecture committee was officially established. The occasion was the January 19, 1962, dedication of Bunshaft’s addition to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The elegant new International Style wing of Buffalo’s museum of modern art had opened to rave reviews. In the opinion of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, Bunshaft had created “the most beautiful building in the world for an art museum.”17 Nonetheless, after an initial interview with Paul Cohen, Bunshaft, whose family had been congregants of Temple Beth El, the historical parent of Temple Beth Zion, failed to answer the committee’s request for additional information. Others to whom the architecture committee had turned also fell off the list. Yamasaki and Stone appeared to have had too much work in hand to take on the project.18 Belluschi and Lescase were deleted for unknown reasons. Breuer’s demand for hefty pre-commission consulting fees and his suggestion that the congregation acquire a different location for the temple disqualified him. Max Abramovitz, who thought the new site was excellent, responded warmly to the committee’s inquiry. He came at least twice from his office at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York to Buffalo for interviews with the committee. During these meetings, he highlighted the foremost projects that he and his partner, Wallace K. Harrison, had guided, notably Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the United Nations headquarters, the

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Alcoa Building in Pittsburgh, and the Corning Glass Center in New York.19 Abramovitz must surely have spoken of his Jewish heritage and his personal interest in synagogue architecture. In the late 1940s, he had planned Jewish Hillel centers on university campuses in Evanston, Illinois (demolished), and Champaign, Illinois. In 1952, he had written an extensive article on the history of synagogue design for Talbot Hamlin’s authoritative book on modern architecture, Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture. Abramovitz had not had, however, the opportunity to design a synagogue, something he strongly desired to do. This must have contributed substantially to his enthusiasm for the Temple Beth Zion undertaking. If chosen to design Buffalo’s Temple Beth Zion, Abramovitz told Cohen and the committee, he would take personal responsibility for the commission. It would not fall prey to shopwork. Impressed with Abramovitz’s strong credentials, Jewish background, and promised commitment, the committee voted unanimously on April 15, 1962, to hire him. The members had every reason to believe that Max Abramowitz would provide them with an outstanding example of modern architecture that would earn the admiration of people both locally and nationally. When Abramovitz signed on to design Temple Beth Zion in 1962, the fifty-four-year-old designer commanded a major reputation in American commercial and institutional architecture. The son of Jewish parents who had emigrated from Romania to America early in the twentieth century, Abramovitz had grown up in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he studied architecture for two years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1941, he became a partner with Wallace K. Harrison, an association that lasted until Harrison’s death in 1976. As Harrison’s partner, Abramovitz was often the principal designer on significant projects. “He is best known,” state his biographers John Harwood and Janet Parks, “for his association with some of New York’s most significant postwar building projects, notably as the deputy director of planning for the United Nations Headquarters and as the architect of Philharmonic Hall [the present David Geffen Hall] at Lincoln Center.” Evolution of the Design and Construction, April 1962–April 1967

Once Abramovitz had signed the contract, he became responsible to the building committee headed by Milton Friedman. The architect immediately got to work on plans for the new complex. In May 1962, the local press reported that he expected to be finished within six months. In October, when asked again to reveal details of his scheme, Abramovitz declined to be more

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specific, other than to state “at present the complete complex will include a temple, chapel, auditorium, classrooms and offices.” He indicated, however, that, true to his word, he was in close contact with the building committee. “Something like this,” he said, “evolves out of discussions and we work very closely with the board.”20 He promised that he would have designs on paper ready by the end of 1962. Abramovitz met this deadline, and in February 1963, the building committee approved his preliminary plans.21 Although later modified in details, the program that Abramovitz laid out for the buildings and site, which he illustrated in a perspective drawing dated February 1963, would guide construction in the coming years. Abramowitz organized the Temple Beth Zion complex as four connected structures. The dominant element is the tall oval synagogue or Sanctuary, as it was identified in early plans. It consisted of fluted concrete walls with large stained-glass windows filing the spaces above both the main entrance on Delaware Avenue on the west and the ceremonial or bimah end on the east. Behind the synagogue and parallel with Delaware Avenue, Abramovitz placed a long, two-story religious school building from which a large auditorium extended to the rear almost to Linwood Avenue, the street behind the property. The fourth component was the lesser worship space, the Sisterhood Chapel. It occupied the southern area of a broad lawn that bordered the property along Delaware Avenue. To facilitate circulation within this U-shaped complex, Abramovitz connected the Sanctuary and chapel to the school building behind them by means of glassed-in passageways. The elliptically shaped Sanctuary dominates the site and stands in stark contrast to its surroundings (see figure 5.1). Its distinctive scalloped walls reach forty-five feet high on the Delaware Avenue side and sixty-two feet on the eastern or Sanctuary end. Composed of cast concrete that is three feet thick at the base and tapers to eleven inches at the top, the walls flare outward from the vertical at a fifteen-degree angle. The dramatic cant is wide enough to keep a person standing beneath them dry during a shower. Like ancient Roman builders, Abramovitz dressed the outward concrete with a veneer of fine stone. Cream-colored Alabama limestone, said to grow lighter with age, imparts a warm, elegant surface to the exterior. The delicately veined ashlar blocks, which are trimmed with white mortar joints, are laid up on end, thus subtlety enhancing the structure’s upward thrust. Moreover, by dispensing with any sort of molding at the base or terminal feature at the roofline, the architect emphasized his building’s daring construction and abstract form. The main entrance to the Sanctuary faces Delaware Avenue, where a concrete canopy leads to a small vestibule pervaded by light from the large stained-glass window over the doorway. In this initial area, where stairs climb

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to the spacious organ loft, the architect took the opportunity to introduce visitors to the special beauty of unadorned concrete. The bare surfaces that surround the space express the elemental nature of the material in a display of fine workmanship. “The pillars in the vestibule,” reported an observer when the building was new, “are so intricate that cabinet makers rather than journeymen carpenters had to create the forms to pour the concrete.”22 From the vestibule, low wooden doors open into the main worship space with its neat rows of blue-fabric pews. Stepping inside, the visitor encounters the stunning oval auditorium that expands dramatically from a height of forty feet at the entrance to over sixty feet above the bimah. Here, two thirty-foot-tall freestanding pylons display the Decalogue in bright golden Hebrew characters. Beyond them, Abramovitz disbanded the eastern wall in favor of the towering stained-glass window that invokes the spectacle of the creation of the universe. Otherwise, windowless walls of gray concrete cast in cylindrical segments envelop the sweeping space of the auditorium. The undulating forms call to mind enormous ramparts. Workman carefully hammered the concrete to tame its coarseness, but, like the builders of Buffalo’s concrete grain elevators, which were also poured in stages, left evident

Figure 5.3  Temple Beth Zion interior looking toward the eastern, bimah, end. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

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the lines marking the rising tide of the casting. Abramovitz also insisted in leaving unfilled the bolt holes that held wooden forms in place during construction. Overhead, the flat ceiling seems to hover unsupported, as if floating on the clear light that seeps in from out-of-view skylights bordering its periphery.

Figure 5.4  Detail of peripheral skylights. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

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In fact, the ceiling was hung from trusses resting on brackets embedded in the upper parts of the walls. This arrangement freed the roof from touching the walls, allowing the architect to fill the interstices with glass. Light from the skylights washes the gray masonry walls from top to bottom, passing behind the dark wood balcony that, suspended on brackets, embraces the sides and rear of the auditorium. This tranquil radiance imparts a comforting tactility to the bare concrete. At the eastern end of the auditorium, a broad flight of steps ascends to the bimah. The two thirty-foot concrete pylons displaying the Ten Commandments dominate this ceremonial center of the synagogue. A few feet behind the pylons, the large gilded wooden Ark, the cabinet that holds the Torah scrolls, rests on a low wall. For the faithful, the Ark is the most sacred element in the synagogue. Emphasizing its importance, an oculus spotlights the area in front of the Ark where the lector stands at an eight-foot-wide wooden podium to read from the unfurled scrolls. This arrangement had roots in earlier Reform movement practices. “The new visual focus on the podium,” remarks historian Charles Davis, “reflected the growing importance of rabbis, who had become modern scholars leading the way toward enlightened forms of contemporary worship.”23

Figure 5.5  Detail of upper part of the synagogue’s concrete walls lit from hidden skylights. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

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Figure 5.6  Detail of the ground-floor level of the synagogue’s concrete walls lit from skylights. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

The layout of the Temple Beth Zion complex adhered to an established pattern in postwar synagogue design. It consisted of grouping the predominant temple together with a smaller chapel, school, auditorium, and offices around a court space. Erich Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue in Cleveland of 1922 is generally credited with pioneering this arrangement. “Today’s

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religious centers should comprise three units,” maintained Mendelsohn, “the House of Worship—the House of God, the Assembly Hall for adult members—the House of the People, the School for the education and recreation of their children—the House of the Torah.” Mendelsohn saw the duty of the modern architect to bring these different functions into “organic plan-relationship, to express this material and mental unification in his structure.”24 The particular arrangement of the Buffalo buildings might also have had a secular precedent. The U-shaped arrangement of the synagogue, school, and chapel embracing a central space facing the avenue recalls the plan of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on Broadway in New York, a project with which Abramovitz had been closely associated. Like Lincoln Center, the Temple Beth Zion complex engages the urban context of its location. Such a ground plan expressed physically the open nature of Judaism that Rabbi Fink and his Reform Temple Beth Zion congregation wished to present to the world.25 After the building committee signed construction contracts with Siegfried Construction Company of Buffalo in May 1964, the new complex moved steadily toward completion. Groundbreaking ceremonies, attended by the architect, took place on June 24, 1964. In November, when construction was under way, Abramovitz displayed a large model (now lost) of the complex at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The director, Gordon Smith, took special pride in bringing before the public another fine example of modern architecture that would grace the city.26 The architect’s model revealed a few changes from his earlier plans. Notably, the walls of the oval Sanctuary, which appeared in the earlier perspective drawing as thin, slightly convex vertical slivers of concrete (resembling a series of “ladyfingers”) were now to be built as larger fluted or scalloped segments, ten to a side. Some nicknamed this the “cupcake” design. Even more than the Sanctuary, the architect’s design for the Sisterhood Chapel evolved over time. Abramovitz soon discarded the design shown on his first perspective drawing. In fact, even the model misled the public about its appearance. By November 1965, he had modified the building, planned to accommodate 150 people, to its final, rectangle-within-a-circle footprint. A contemporary newspaper report indicated that excavations had begun for the chapel foundations. As built, the chapel has a rectangular plan with semicircular brick wing walls extending from either end. A flat concrete slab with rounded ends turned slightly upward serves as the roof. The curving profiles better relate the chapel to the elliptical plan and fluted walls of the Sanctuary than did the shoebox form displayed in Abramovitz’s model. The “drum-shaped” chapel,

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Figure 5.7  Sisterhood Chapel. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

wrote a well-informed contemporary observer referring to the sixty-footdiameter circle implied by the arcs of the wing walls, would function “as an intermediary between the piquant appeal of the ellipsoidal sanctuary and the routine rectangularity of the . . . two-story religious school building.”27 A more practical vision governed Abramovitz in his design for the Rabbi Joseph L. Fink auditorium, a multipurpose space with adjacent kitchen facilities. The large rectangular hall is enclosed between paneled brick walls and covered by a plaster ceiling composed of coved segments that enhance its acoustic properties. The open-floor room terminates in a trapezoidal stage set between tall wooden wing walls. Many who first came to the auditorium must surely have been reminded of Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s Mary Seaton Room auditorium at the nearby Kleinhans Music Hall. Indeed, Temple Beth Zion enjoyed a special relationship with Kleinhans. After the fire that destroyed the 1890 synagogue, the congregation had met numerous times for services in the Mary Seaton Room. Abramovitz, who had worked with Eero Saarinen on the planning of Lincoln Center, himself had attended at least one of these occasions.28 The Fink auditorium was the first part of the complex to be put into use. On the evening of April 21, 1966, Abramovitz came from New York to speak

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at the auditorium’s dedication and to inform the congregation of the rapid progress of the overall project. The religious school, he said, was about a month away from completion, and the Sisterhood Chapel would be ready in May. Abramovitz also mentioned that in June or July the great windows would be installed in the Sanctuary, which he predicted would be in use for High Holy Days in September.29 His forecasts, however, proved a bit optimistic. The entire complex was to be dedicated on April 21, 1967, a year after the auditorium ceremonies.

Ben Shahn and the Stained-Glass Windows and Ten Commandments From the earliest days of the design of the Sanctuary, the architect had planned for large stained-glass windows over the entrance and behind the bimah. This art form was traditionally associated with Christian churches, where, since medieval times, figurative images had served to instruct the faithful in church theology. Architects Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett are credited with inaugurating the vogue for stained glass in modern American synagogues. In 1958, they engaged the American expressionist artist Abraham Rattner to design a colorful, abstract stained-glass window on the theme “And God Said Let There Be Light” to fill the entire eastern wall of their Chicago Loop Synagogue. For his Temple Beth Zion project, Abramovitz engaged the services of the wellknown American painter, lithographer, and photographer Ben Shahn. Born in Lithuania, Shahn came to New York as child in 1906 when his parents immigrated to America. After studying art in high school in Brooklyn, Shahn attended the Art Students League in New York, the cradle of the careers of many of America’s important modern artists. During the 1920s, Shahn expanded his horizons with travel in Europe and North Africa and decided to devote himself to themes drawn from the modern life of ordinary people. By the 1930s, Shahn had evolved a passionate socialist viewpoint and a distinctive stylized realism mode of expression. His most celebrated work was a series of paintings commemorating the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. During the Great Depression, Shahn made figurative murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and created lithographs chronicling the unfortunate plight of the American farmer. In 1956, Harvard University confirmed his stature as a leading American artist by appointing him to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetics. During his tenure there, Shahn articulated his philosophy of social realism in a series of lectures that were published as The Shape of Content (1957). His defense of realism ran counter to the rising tide of abstraction identified with the New York School. For this

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reason, his nonrepresentational windows at Temple Beth Zion are all the more remarkable. It is likely, however, that Shahn chose to couch his imagery in abstract terms out of respect for the ancient Hebrew reluctance to depict the human form in religious art. After midcentury, Shahn had turned more and more to subjects drawn from his Jewish heritage. “It seemed to me,” wrote his wife Bernarda, “since he had rather emphatically cast off his religious ties and traditions during his youth, he could now return to them freely with a fresh eye, and without the sense of moral burden and entrapment that they had once held for him.”30 In particular, he held a great reverence for the Psalms, above all the 150th. “He was deeply affected by its running cadences, its majesty, its vivid imagery,” recalled Bernarda.31 At Temple Beth Zion, his twenty-eight-foot-by-twentyfour-foot, slightly concave stained-glass window over the entrance, the socalled balcony window, evokes the words of the psalm, which appear along the lower part of the window: Praise God in his holy place! Praise him in the heavenly dome of his power! Praise him for his mighty deeds! Praise him for his surpassing greatness! Praise him with a blast on the shofar! Praise him with lute and lyre! Praise him with tambourines and dancing! Praise him with flutes and strings! Praise him with clanging cymbals! Praise him with loud crashing cymbals! Let everything that has breath praise. Shahn’s larger and more visible eastern or bimah window commemorates God’s act of creation as recounted in the Book of Job, verses 38:4–7. “A hand, evidently holding mankind in its palm, with swirling lines,” wrote a reporter who interviewed Shahn, “evidently represents the Voice out of the Whirlwind that spoke to suffering Job.”32 Maintaining that “words and lettering may amplify and enrich the meaning of a painting,” Shahn also inscribed the psalm in the lower part of the window.33 The thirty-two-by-forty-foot composition, which may have been based on a lost painting by Shahn,34 depicts God as the architect of the universe: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Speak if you have understanding.

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Do you know who fixed its dimensions? Or who measured it with a line? Onto what were its bases sunk? Who set its cornerstone? When the morning stars stand together And all the divine beings shouted for joy? The predominant sky-toned color scheme of blue and lavender conforms perfectly with the architect’s desire that his building convey a feeling of freedom from earthly boundaries, that it be an “airport for the spirit.” Installing these windows called for almost as much ingenuity as did the building of the temple’s reinforced concrete walls. Not only did the virtual walls of glass need to withstand the buffeting of the winds, but they also had to meet the artist’s demand that his designs be done as single compositions rather than as a series of “vignettes,” as the manufacturers first proposed.35 Taking the artist’s side, Abramovitz told him to “create one unit, we will resolve the problem.”36 To devise a solution, Abramovitz turned to Lev Zetlin, a well-known New York construction engineer on whom Abramovitz and other modern architects relied to overcome difficult structural problems. The system that Zetlin devised for both windows involved quarter-inch, highstrength steel wires that were stretched across the openings and anchored into the concrete walls. By means of miniature metal rods, the wire cables were attached to narrow mullions that held sections of the glass in place. This method, which has been compared to a cat’s cradle and the principle of the wire wheel, supported the great weight of the glass and secured the vast surfaces against the wind pressures while minimizing the need for supports that would otherwise have seriously hampered one’s view of the monumental images. Because of the viewer’s perspective and the height of the windows, the thin net of cables is practically invisible. The “fabulous ethereal effect” of the windows (especially the remarkable creation window) that a contemporary commentator praised can still be enjoyed today.37

“An Appropriate and Unhampered Expression” Architecturally, the Temple Beth Zion synagogue represented a bold departure for Abramovitz from his earlier modernist designs in the International Style. In forsaking metal-and-glass construction and embracing concrete as a medium capable of molding curvilinear spaces and forms, the architect had opted to follow the example of the French architect Le Corbusier in his

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Figure 5.8  The system of steel cables supporting the eastern stained-glass window. Source: Francis R. Kowsky.

design for the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1955) at Ronchamp, France. In that famous instance, the renowned champion of the International Style abandoned his machine aesthetic to create a building of massive, sculptural shapes and raw concrete surfaces. Reviving the architecture of expressionism, the chapel at Ronchamp returned emotion and symbolism to modernism. Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion shares these attributes.

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Members of the congregation who remembered Edward Kent’s former synagogue must have been surprised by the cool, abstract nature of Abramovitz’s replacement. Believing that a synagogue need not conform to any particular shape or style, Abramovitz had chosen to express in his building’s unusual shape the universal sentiment of hands upraised in prayer and, in the pairs of ten fluted segments, the ancient Judeo-Christian moral heritage of the Ten Commandments. Given the terrible events of the recent Holocaust years, the potent symbolism that Abramovitz embodied in the exterior of Temple Beth Zion can also be regarded as an affirmation of hope and justice. In this way, Temple Beth Zion shared more with Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, which rose on the ruins of a medieval church destroyed during wartime fighting, than it did with the earlier synagogue’s colorful celebration of Judaism’s historic roots. Internally, Temple Beth Zion possesses one of the most impressive and affecting spaces in architecture of the recent past. Abramovitz’s building evokes a mood of quiet contemplation that is enhanced by the simple monumental shapes of the bare concrete walls and the soft light that bathes them from unseen skylights. Whether intended or not, the effect is evocative of certain Italian baroque churches, a similarity that was noted at the time of the building’s completion.38 Such buildings as Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1630s) in Rome relied on light from hidden sources to create a spiritual atmosphere. Moreover, like baroque designers, Abramovitz incorporated visual drama in his design for the interior. Entering the auditorium from the narrow vestibule, the visitor finds his attention drawn emphatically toward the Sanctuary; the rising height of the walls, the illuminating oculus, the Decalogue pylons, and the great eastern Creation window are calculated to lift one’s thoughts to higher things.39 “I wanted a feeling inside of not being confined by walls,” said Abramovitz, “so that a person can look toward the Ark and the Tablets and the building doesn’t impose itself upon you and you can relate yourself to the intangibles or find your own personal relationship.”40 By the time Abramovitz came to design Temple Beth Zion, natural light had assumed a major role in contemporary religious architecture. Erich Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona (1950) in St. Louis and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom Synagogue (1954) in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, had sanctified their interiors with celestial brightness. Writing in relation to his 1961 design for Mikveh Synagogue in Philadelphia, Louis Kahn, the modern master of luminosity, proclaimed, “a space can never reach its place in architecture without natural light. . . . The structure is a design in light. The vault, the dome, the arch, the column are structures related to the character of light. Natural

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light gives mood by space, by the nuances of light in the time of day and the seasons of the year as it enters and modifies the space.”41 Kahn’s synagogue was never built, but Abramovitz could have seen the architect’s recently completed First Unitarian Church in nearby Rochester, New York. There, the sensitive relation Kahn maintained between light and space epitomized his desire to render light the life-giving force of his buildings. In few other instances in modern architecture does natural light so powerfully engender a mood of stillness and contemplation. Perhaps the closest actual design precedent to Abramovitz’s Buffalo synagogue is Eero Saarinen’s MIT Chapel (dedicated in 1955), an abstract brick cylinder standing within a reflecting pool. Abramovitz surely knew the MIT building; the year of its completion, he himself had designed three collegiate chapels at nearby Brandeis University. As at Temple Beth Zion, natural light seeps into Saarinen’s interior from hidden windows (in this case, ringing the lower periphery), and an oculus lights the altar, anticipating the oculus illuminating the podium in Temple Beth Zion. Temple Beth Zion represents the only opportunity that Max Abramovitz, a leading American modernist, had to plan a complete congregational synagogue (distinct from campus chapels and religious centers) and the sole building with stained-glass windows created by Ben Shahn, a major figure in twentieth-century American art. At the time of its opening in 1967, Temple Beth Zion drew an enthusiastic welcome from the local architectural community. “It immediately became a landmark in Buffalo, drawing more than two thousand visitors,” wrote John Harwood and Janet Parks in the catalog that accompanied a 2004 exhibition of the architect’s work (he had died the same year).42 Today, however, Temple Beth Zion, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, deserves to be better known as one of the significant buildings of Buffalo. It merits an honored place among the city’s collection of works by other modern masters, including Wright, Yamasaki, Stone, and Bunshaft. The principal historian of American Jewish religious architecture, Samuel Gruber, regards Abramovitz’s temple “an expressive masterpiece, one of the few fully uplifting emotional responses to architectural modernism in the United States.”43 When Ben Shahn brought his friend Yevgeny Yevtushenko to see the newly completed building, the Russian poet and novelist exclaimed: “That is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.”44 He added that he saw it as “an airport of the spirit, where the soul takes off for heaven.”45

Ch a p ter 6

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

The Buffalo-Niagara region boasts an incredibly rich architectural heritage that has been a cornerstone of the area’s attempts to rebrand itself as a tourist destination. Today the city is in the midst of a so-called renaissance, and urban planners, real estate developers, and city boosters are right to identify historic architecture and tourism as key components to urban revitalization.1 At this pivotal time, architectural tours have been instrumental in identifying Buffalo as a place with momentum for the first time in decades. The press generates both local and outsider interest in Buffalo’s architectural heritage, evidenced by popular articles in the New York Times, the Guardian, and USA Today.2 Multiple tours guide visitors through the city’s notable buildings designed by Louis Sullivan, H. H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright, but tourists have also begun to appear with increasing frequency at industrial sites such as the grain elevators. These tours reflect, address, and encourage a growing public interest in Buffalo’s renowned but often ignored industrial architecture and history. This practice can be traced back to a much longer historical tradition of architectural tourism at industrial sites in the Buffalo-Niagara region at the turn of the twentieth century. Tourists visited industrial businesses such as the Adams Powerhouse and the Shredded Wheat Company to witness their production processes in action. During an era of corporate mistrust and labor reform, factory tours promoted the benevolence of new technology in 131

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modern society as part of a grand vision of a shining industrial future. Serving as part advertisement, part education, and part entertainment, these factory tours influenced the perception of industrial architecture for decades to come. Visitors experienced industrial buildings in unique ways that were carefully designed to guide their viewpoints and perceptions. Some of these tourist practices reemerge today in contemporary explorations of Buffalo’s industrial architecture. Historically, these architectural tours engaged the public with industrial structures to identify a technological, cultural, and aesthetic break with the past. Today, they explore industrial architecture as a way of reconnecting the city’s present to its past in the hopes of future profit. Tourism significantly shapes the public understanding of industry, both at the height of the industrial era and in today’s postindustrial one. The public engages with industrial architecture, more so than with many other types of architecture, only at limited and highly controlled moments. While the average citizen could simply walk into a commercial or institutional building, viewing industrial architecture typically requires guidance, education, and interpretation in order to ensure a safe and regulated experience. Industrial architecture, and the industries it serves, can therefore seem far more mysterious, confusing, and illegible than other types of architecture. Architectural education was an important component on industrial tours, which often instructed the public on how to “read” an industrial building from the outside inward. Factory designs directly incorporated physical infrastructure that enabled guides to entertain tourists within the context of an industrial space. The presence of infrastructure such as elevated observation galleries and rooftop viewpoints provides insight into the ways that architectural tourism played a key role in translating “industry” to the public. These architectural devices simultaneously guided, controlled, educated, and entertained tourists at industrial buildings in the Buffalo-Niagara region at the turn of the twentieth century. Tourism was historically essential to the economic, social, and cultural development of the region at the turn of the twentieth century. It plays a similar role in revitalizing the city’s industrial architecture today. At the turn of the twentieth century, architectural tours presented an inherently “modern” industrial vision of the Buffalo-Niagara region at the Adams Powerhouse. Conversely, today’s tours at Silo City emphasize architectural history as a way to engage with the city’s contemporary redevelopment. Historically these sites demonstrated, as they continue to demonstrate, the ways in which architectural tourism can contribute to the identity of both a place and its place in time.

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Industrial Tourism at the Adams Powerhouse Designed by the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White in 1895, the Adams Powerhouse in Niagara Falls is generally recognized as “the birthplace of the modern hydroelectric power station.”3 The introduction of large-scale hydroelectric power in the late nineteenth century was marked by a series of sudden technological developments, dramatic visual effects, and even utopian visions of unhindered industrial potential. In 1896, electrical current generated at the Adams Powerhouse in Niagara Falls was transmitted to the city of Buffalo over twenty miles away. This marked the first major long-distance transmission of alternating current in the world. Emerging seemingly overnight, the sudden and dramatic appearance of electricity marked a change that, as historian Ginger Strand observed, required “more than infrastructure; it was a nationwide behavioral modification. . . . It required reeducation.”4 The new presence of electricity required an adjustment period for the average American citizen, who “had to be trained to stop fearing electricity and instead consume it.”5 In response, the Adams Powerhouse was specifically

Figure 6.1  Exterior of Power-House Number One, from Edward Dean Adams, Niagara Power: History of the Niagara Falls Power Company, 1886–1918. Image courtesy of The Buffalo History Museum

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designed as a space where tourists could culturally absorb this new technology through architectural design. By choosing McKim, Mead & White to design the powerhouse, the Niagara Falls Power Company (NFPC) made a calculated commitment to erecting a building that would be far more institutional than industrial in appearance. Renowned for their work on civic buildings and residences for the wealthy, McKim, Mead & White had never designed any type of industrial building prior to the Adams Powerhouse. Despite the firm’s lack of experience with industrial architecture, their reputation for civic architecture made them particularly well suited, oddly enough, to design this powerhouse. President of the NFPC Edward Dean Adams identified three important considerations for the building’s design, stating it “should be attractive, protective and instructive.”6 These design requirements directly align with three major ways he aimed to influence public opinion of electricity: by making it attractive for consumption, by ensuring citizens that it would be safe, and by instructing the public on how it works. Architecture was Adams’s primary method of conveying these ideas. Using a relatively traditional, European-derived scheme of ornamentation, McKim, Mead & White’s design promoted an institutional exterior appearance that was remarkably different from the progressive technology it contained inside. Rusticated stonework and curved arches conveyed a conservative sense of continuity with tradition, assuring a nervous public that electricity could provide a benign and beneficial impact on society. Envisioned as a way to attract, protect, and instruct the general public about electricity, the Adams Powerhouse was designed to function as much an educational and entertainment attraction as it was to be a fully operational industrial facility. The Adams Powerhouse was conceived of as a tourist destination even before its doors opened. Niagara Falls tourist promoters and power developers “proudly publicized each new step in harnessing Niagara as positive events worthy of  . . . offering delights to tourists.”7 Envisioning how it would appear on promotional materials, Adams stated, “The souvenir pictures carried away by the visitors should include one or all three of the powerhouses.”8 Architectural elements were installed in response to this anticipated need to “instruct” tourists, and several infrastructural components were designed specifically to accommodate, guide, and even control visitors’ perception of the building and the technology it contained. In the first few years of its operation, far more tourists visited the powerhouse than the company had initially anticipated. As Adams revealed, “As soon as Powerhouse Number One had been erected and its first turbo generators were in operation in 1895, the number of visitors at the powerhouse

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greatly increased, and special attendants became necessary for their guidance and protection.”9 Although the exact number of tourists who visited the powerhouse in its first few years is unclear, some NFPC documents suggest the numbers were in the hundreds or even thousands. This interest dramatically increased in 1901, when the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo featured electricity as its main attraction and led many tourists to explore the source of this energy at the Niagara Falls powerhouse. While this event would likely have given the Adams Powerhouse at least temporary momentum as a tourist destination, public interest in the building continued long after the exposition was over. On a single day in 1926, for instance, Adams recorded 3,246 visitors entering the powerhouse.10 By that time, he stated, the company had hosted over eighty thousand tourists that year alone. Publicity pamphlets declared that the powerhouse was “rich in features of interest to the visitor, whether engineer or layman,” and records indicate that officials tended to categorize tourists into these two main types.11 On the one hand, the powerhouse attracted experts in electricity-related fields, with engineers, mechanics, and other specialists attending tours in great numbers. Both Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison went on a tour of the powerhouse by 1900, along with many of their senior employees. Adams stated, “As a class, engineers were the most numerous. They came from all countries, particularly our own, and usually appeared well informed in a general way of the company’s problems and how they were being solved.”12 These highly educated, specially trained, or professionally oriented tourists were typically male, as women were usually discouraged, if not prohibited outright, from pursuing such professions in the early twentieth century. In addition to these expert engineers, a more general, nonexpert type of tourist visited the powerhouse. This kind of tourist typically had little understanding of electrical operations and likely entered the powerhouse as part of a more casual visit to the attractions in the Niagara Falls region. As a broader, more diverse group, this “casual tourist” type may have also included some female visitors. Paul Lincoln, an engineer and tour guide at the powerhouse, discussed the casual tourist who was “drawn to the Niagara area by the double magnet of the world’s greatest artificial wonder situated alongside the world’s greatest natural wonder.”13 Adams stated that such tourists came to the powerhouse because they “wished to understand the process, know what became of the water diverted, and how it would be possible to translate the water-power into an electric power that would escape to Buffalo unseen.”14 This “unseen” quality would have been difficult to communicate to visitors. Some may have wanted to see the full mechanics of the powerhouse in operation, but much of the process was hidden from sight.

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Indeed, the complexities of hydroelectric generation may have been difficult to understand for casual visitors to the Adams Powerhouse. It was not an easy task for tour guides to explain the principles of generating and transmitting hydroelectric power. As historian William Irwin has suggested, “The general public stood little chance of understanding the conversion of power from the plunge of Niagara’s waters into transmittable energy.”15 Nevertheless, it is clear that this did not deter tourists from coming to the powerhouse. Adams’s aims to “instruct” tourists at the powerhouse may have been only marginally successful in some cases, but that did not seem to matter as much to visitors as it did to him. Even if some did not fully understand the technicalities, the powerhouse remained a Niagara Falls attraction to the general public, engineer Coleman Sellers insisted, because “they cannot help but be impressed with the magnitude of the undertaking and the thought of this great power being turned to the uses of man.”16 The average tourist may not have walked away with a complete understanding of the scientific forces at work, but that tourist would now be able to directly link the process of hydroelectricity to a physical location. But the question remains, how much did the average tourist actually learn at the powerhouse? Furthermore, to what extent did it matter? Tourists continued to visit the powerhouse for several decades. Perhaps Adams’s aims to attract and protect the public were successful enough that the educational qualities of the tour could be simplified in favor of entertainment. The tourist infrastructure at the building may have provided only the impression of an educational encounter with the building, rather than a truly instructive experience. Adams himself seemed unconcerned that visitors would leave the powerhouse with a full understanding of the electrical process. Instead, he hoped, “each visitor should learn enough to desire to know more, and should be impressed that the managers of the enterprise had confidence in the investment of their own capital, and had built for endurance and continuity of operation.”17 Increasing tourist curiosity, rather than quenching the thirst for knowledge, appeared to have been the goal of the Niagara Falls Power Company entrepreneurs in providing tours through the powerhouse. Architectural tourism, in this case, served an essential function in gaining public admiration and trust at a time when this business venture was still highly speculative and technologically innovative. The powerhouse incorporated several design elements specifically used to shape tourist perceptions of the powerhouse, the company that owned it, and the technology it utilized. To a visitor entering through the main entrance, the overall first impression of the interior would have been one of a singular large, open space filled with machines.

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Figure 6.2  Interior of Power-House Number One, from Edward Dean Adams, Niagara Power: History of the Niagara Falls Power Company, 1886–1918. Image courtesy of The Buffalo History Museum

The main room housed the majority of the machines, switchboards, and technology used to control the generation and transmission of power. The sheer volume of this room was mostly uninterrupted by floor divisions, conveying an impressive cavernous space. The machines contained in the main room, however, were likely the main attraction for tourists. Originally, ten generators were installed on the ground floor, aligned in the center of the room. These machines, along with the turbines, would have likely attracted the most attention and curiosity among visitors, as they seemed to one, “remarkable for their simplicity as well as for the enormous power they are capable of developing.”18 Tourists would have seen this space only from certain angles. Entering through the office door, visitors climbed a set of stairs to begin the tour on a raised observation gallery specifically constructed for that purpose. Elevated above the floor, the gallery offered an idealized perspective. ­ This iron walkway ran along the edge of the interior walls at the secondstory level and crossed the main floor toward the south end of the building. Serving as a bridge that crossed the main room of the power

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station, the observation gallery enabled tourists to float above the machines in operation. The observation gallery provided a space specifically for tourists in an otherwise purely industrial building. With no functional relationship to the machines and operations, this gallery served no purpose other than to provide a safe space for observing the processes below. Although a professional guide led visitors through the building, the infrastructure itself circulated them throughout the powerhouse on a connected circuit of elevated walkways, delineated pathways, and strategically placed observation points. Through this system of tourist pathways, “the interior design of the powerhouse ushered visitors to convenient viewing platforms” that provided a clear and calculated path through the building.19 A closer look at this arrangement illuminates the ways in which the experience of architectural tourism historically shaped the public perception of electricity and industry. The elevated walkway, or observation gallery, became increasingly common at industrial sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enabling the tourist practice of watching other people work. Designed primarily for manufacturing purposes and only secondarily for aesthetic ones, industrial structures may have seemed particularly illegible to many citizens. Those who did not work in them rarely encountered factories, unlike more publicly accessible buildings such as museums and churches. During this time, “Work inside the factory became a mystery to many Americans, a thing apart from ordinary life.”20 Countering this aura of unfamiliarity, observation galleries began to appear in industrial spaces such as the Adams Powerhouse in order to provide outsiders with an “experience” of work inside the building. As sociologist Dean MacCannell suggests, industrial tours became a way of reconciling a new relationship between work and leisure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. MacCannell viewed this moment in history as a time when work and leisure were mutually displaced through tourist practices. Tours often included “work displays,” which were typically some form of public observation of laborers at work. Devices such as observation galleries assisted in a touristic process that transformed work into entertainment, at least for those who could afford to visit factories on their vacation. MacCannell referred to this observation process as “alienated leisure,” arguing that it emerged only because work was no longer the central feature of modern society, allowing people to gaze at it instead during their leisure time.21 In this sense, MacCannell’s argument introduces the notion that the work displays not only shifted cultural conceptions of work, but also participated in the rise of the mass-tourism industry.

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As industrialization created new production spaces and laboring lifestyles, public curiosity about these environments was coupled with increased leisure time for some classes. At this time, factory tours and their work displays “permitted Industrial Man to reflect upon his own condition and to transcend it.”22 The indulgence of this self-conscious contemplation was accessible only to those who had plenty of leisure time, and not to the workers themselves. Issues of socioeconomic class were thus deeply embedded into the physical design of work displays, as can be seen in the history of architectural tourism at the Adams Powerhouse. Even while sharing the same room, the observation gallery and factory floor were vastly different spaces in terms of both function and occupant. By raising the observation platform above ground level, the architect reinforced a clear message about the role of tourists and workers in this space. Unable to meet eye to eye at this height, tourists were instantly placed on a higher tier than workers, both literally and socially. As historian William Littman described, “Tourists frequently looked at employees from behind glass or down upon them from platforms and other raised viewing sites, intensifying the social distance between tourists and workers.”23 These galleries thereby conveyed an inherently hierarchal relationship that elevated the tourist to a higher socioeconomic status than those who were working. Tourists were privileged with a panoptical view that implied a sense of power, much like the physical position of management in many factories. Visitors experienced a similar view at the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, where Wright’s unique courtyard-style atrium enabled visitors to gaze down from the top floor at a large body of workers below. Even if some of the tourists were laborers themselves, they could exorcise their usual status by experiencing the observation galleries and gazing down at work during their leisure time. By creating specific, highly controlled vantage points for tourists, factory observation galleries worked in tandem with corporate executives and advertising techniques to craft a careful display that effectively hid the worker while displaying work itself. Tours further conveyed this image of worker totality by emphasizing the role of machines in alleviating laborers from mundane tasks or physical hardships. Filled with machines rather than people, the powerhouse floor would have seemed remarkably different from the bustling factory floor at other nearby industrial buildings, such as the Shredded Wheat Company’s cereal factory located just a few blocks away. Often identified as the “Palace of Light,” the large Shredded Wheat Company factory produced thousands of pounds of cereal products a year, in a facility powered by the hydroelectricity generated at the Adams Powerhouse.

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Figure 6.3  Women Packing Shredded Wheat, Edward T. Williams Collection, Marjorie Williams. Image courtesy of the Niagara Falls Public Library.

From the vantage point of tourists gazing down from the observation gallery at the Shredded Wheat factory, the multitude of workers appeared to act as a collective unit, suggesting the seemingly benign environmental conditions of the factory floor and the company that ran it. This type of tourist experience, with an observation gallery view of large groups of workers working in a united production line, was common on many factory tours at the turn of the twentieth century. Seen from above, the messy realities of the factory floor were transformed in appearance to one well-oiled machine, working smoothly toward an exalted industrial ideal. At the Adams Powerhouse, however, only a handful of laborers were working within sight of the observation gallery, and the physical aspects of this type of work would have appeared far less demanding. Figure 6.4 illustrates the spatial relationship between tourists and workers from the perspective of the observation gallery in the main hall. Although the scene depicts the installation of a new alternator rather than a typical workday, the photograph nonetheless provides a sense of the workers as separate and physically lower than the visitors. The machines and their laboring attendants are on the lowest level, the switchboard operator

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Figure 6.4  Installation of Alternator in Power-House Number One, from Edward Dean Adams, Niagara Power: History of the Niagara Falls Power Company, 1886–1918. Image courtesy of The Buffalo History Museum.

occupies the platform above, but it is the observation gallery at the back of the photo that offers the most privileged and detached view of the scene. Typically, only one or two skilled engineers monitored the machines on the ground floor, distributing the company’s electricity from their seat at the main switchboard. Tourists in the elevated gallery would likely have noted “the neat, easy manner of these workers [that] conveyed the clean, effortless, and leisurely aura of the electricity age.”24 This sense of “effortlessness” perceived in the lack of hard physical labor would have made a distinct impression on tourists. This would have been a clear contrast to the view from the observation gallery at the Shredded Wheat factory, where the labor was done by a mass of bodies in conjunction with machines. Machines, rather than people, appeared to do the majority of the work at the Adams Powerhouse. Switchboard workers appeared to be in an advanced relationship with the machinery they operated, where they functioned as “extensions of the control room machines, dials and switches as heroes of the electricity age.”25 Seemingly operating as an extension of the machines, these switchboard operators likely appeared, at least from above, to be

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working harmoniously alongside the equipment as part of a Taylorist system. Novelist H. G. Wells recorded his own impression of this relationship during his visit to the powerhouse: “The dazzling clean switchboard, with its little handles and levers, is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million disciplined, unquestioning men.”26 In this view, it was the switchboard that proved to be the focus of the work display at the powerhouse, rather than the workers themselves. Rather than the bustling factory floor full of people, products, and motion seen at many other factories, the view from the observation gallery at the Adams Powerhouse conveyed the opposite impression to tourists. If the work display was intended to “permit Industrial Man to transcend his own conditions,” then the particularly clean, orderly, and relatively worker-less appearance of the powerhouse would have provided hope for tourists that one day work could be as minimally demanding as this. The overall appearance of the main room at the Adams Powerhouse was that of absence rather than presence. A tidy appearance prevailed in what was a clean, functional area where toil, dust, and clutter had no place. One engineer remarked on the absence of clutter in the room, stating that “a neat and orderly appearance prevailed, because conduits and casings kept the wiring carefully hidden.”27 After visiting the Adams Powerhouse, journalist William Andrews similarly identified the building’s departure from other powerhouse structures: “The typical power station of a decade ago was a chaos of electric wires which were festooned from the ceiling and crossed and recrossed each other in every direction. In the Niagara plant the wires are conspicuous by their absence, it being impossible to find a trace of this most important part of the installation.”28 Tucked inside earthenware ducts in the cement floor, the cables were passed between the machines and the switchboard away from view in order to create a less cluttered appearance. Strand similarly observed the impact of this clean, uncluttered appearance, stating, “The production of hydroelectricity wasn’t like the noisy, dirty factories of the Industrial Revolution, this was a sparkling industry for a gleaming new age.”29 In this sense, touring the powerhouse was notable precisely because there was not much to see. Sound, or the absence thereof, also distinguished the powerhouse from other industrial sites. Inside the powerhouse, visitors could observe not only the cleanliness and order of the main control room, but also the “relative quiet of the operation.”30 In comparison to other industrial buildings and to Niagara Falls itself, there was a clear architectural divide between the interior and exterior aural impressions of the powerhouse. The comparative silence would have been notable immediately on entering the building, in marked

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contrast to the roar of nearby Niagara Falls outside. The technologically sophisticated, silent, and even futuristic interior would have seemed remarkably different from the classically inspired appearance of the naturalistic limestone exterior. Silence, rather than noise, was a key element marking a break with the past. As historian John Stilgoe has demonstrated, the interior of older coaldriven powerhouses presented a somewhat chaotic scene, “of pistons flying, balance wheels spinning, and drive shafts revolving.”31 This made it not only difficult, but also dangerous, to enter a conventional powerhouse; hydroelectricity offered an utterly changed appearance of what a power station could be like. Unlike the large steam-powered boilers and machines that Irwin described as “a clanging maze of moving belts and shafts,” the Niagara dynamos “were remarkable for the simplicity of their streamlined forms of cold, black steel.”32 As engineer Francis Greene observed on his tour, “To those who comprehend what tremendous forces are here controlled, this silent room is a most impressive spectacle.”33 At the Adams Powerhouse, stillness and silence distinguished the scene from older, conventional powerhouses. On a purely entertainment level, this sterile appearance may have been less thrilling to the average tourist than the noise and motion encountered on other industrial tours at the time. Sellers acknowledged the inherently boring qualities of this stillness to the average tourist: “The electrical generators in the Power House will of themselves show perhaps little that is especially attractive, as to massive proportions or intricate and curious machinery, but they will be wonderful for their subtlety.”34 Subtlety, stillness, and silence: these were the qualities of the next wave of the industrial revolution as it progressed beyond steam and coal power. Despite the conservative, muscular design of the Adams Powerhouse’s exterior, once inside, tourists encountered a strikingly benign, controlled, and sophisticated vision of modernity. Conveying both historic continuity and groundbreaking innovation, the Adams Powerhouse provided a tourist experience that was stylistically rooted in the past but technologically stretched toward a more perfect future.

Postindustrial Tourism at Silo City Today, tourism creates encounters with industrial architecture that are markedly different from what people would have experienced in the previous century. Buffalo is currently experiencing a boom in construction and redevelopment, and the majority of the structures undergoing rehabilitation can be classified as industrial architecture. The Buffalo-Niagara region has almost always conveyed an industrial image, both literally and figura-

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tively. Images of grain elevators appear on Buffalo-themed coffee mugs and T-shirts, and the association with blue-collar, working-class values continues to identify the city as a place with industrial roots. This industrial image can operate as an anchor for continuum in today’s increasingly digital economy, even though many of the factories have closed. In this postindustrial context, rehabilitated or decaying grain elevators, factories, and powerhouses are quickly becoming the epicenter of these efforts to rebrand Buffalo with a sense of rust belt pride. Paradoxically, the shift away from traditional forms of industrial production has led to an increasing public interest in understanding industrial architecture. Before this shift, smokestacks and factories seemed nearly invisible to both public and scholarly attention, easily ignored from a passing train en route to the more celebrated, canonical monuments downtown. Now that many manufacturing jobs have gone and the factories are left behind, the city, like the nation, is newly interested in industrial architecture as a canvas for reexamining recent history. Although once invisible, these industrial structures are now becoming, in a word, trendy. This raises concerns that the manufacturing industries will be replaced by the less tangible, but increasingly potent, industry of tourism. In other rust belt cities like Detroit, industrial “ruin” tourism creates a magnetic attraction to these postindustrial spaces, serving as both an obstacle and an opportunity for revitalization. Groups of ruin tourists flock to Detroit, producing photographic evidence of their travels on both informal and guided tours. Detroit resident Jesse Welter offers one type of ruin tour, where he guides visitors through abandoned industrial sites, often technically trespassing, as part of a photography workshop. When I took one of these tours, Welter told me that his tourists are “mostly internationals, a lot from Europe—I almost never have a local, at least not from the city proper.”35 The narrative provided on these tours is that Detroit’s industrial architecture is predominantly one of ruin, rather than revitalization. The places are seen as finished, their stories done. At the Packard Plant, we were directed to take photographs of the colorful reflections of graffiti in puddles, with no mention of the historical, industrial, or architectural significance of the place. The seductive quality of “ruin porn” has given new life to these spaces as artworks, but it is time to communicate far more about these spaces than their aesthetic ruin. These tours can have a major influence on the public perception of postindustrial buildings and landscapes. Given the tours’ subtle but powerful impact on the public understanding of these places, it is essential to ask, how much do these tours incorporate industrial architecture and its history? What narratives, if any, are being promoted by these kinds of tours, and what is being

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excluded? This form of tourism also generates both impediments and inspiration for industrial heritage strategies. As sociologist John Urry has suggested, “The development of an industrial museum in an old mill is a metonymic sign of the development of a post-industrial society.”36 In this sense, it may be the very act of creating an industrial heritage that defines our own era as postindustrial. In doing so, some of these tourism efforts may inadvertently fix industry firmly in the past, not the present or future. In Buffalo, local companies such as Explore Buffalo and Buffalo River History Works provide a somewhat different engagement with formerly industrial sites, offering a variety of tours through a complex of four grain elevators now called Silo City.37 Putting forth narratives of revitalization, these architectural tours take visitors through the empty grain elevators as part of an attempt to reclaim the city’s waterfront amid its recent improvements. Privately owned, Silo City has been host to diverse events and projects, including craft beer festivals, weddings, concerts, art installations, poetry readings, and theater performances. Although most of the grain elevators are no longer functioning as industrial structures, they are increasingly used for a variety of creative endeavors

Figure 6.5.  Silo City, 2014. Photo credit: Annie Schentag.

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that challenge the notion that these places are “abandoned.” Historic tours of the grain elevators at Silo City have become an important agent in refamiliarizing the public with this section of Buffalo today. Unlike Detroit’s ruin tours, Buffalo’s tours attract many local participants. This localized audience has been both a blessing and a burden, as it has allowed a more nuanced presentation of industrial history but also a more provincial one than in Detroit. The tour narrative tends to focus on both historic working-class communities and contemporary projects nearby at the waterfront. The silos are presented as structures that belong to the local community, imbuing locals with a sense of ownership and pride over their industrial heritage. One such tour, provided by the nonprofit Explore Buffalo, involves a climb to the top of a grain elevator over the course of three hours. Much like the tour path followed at the Adams Powerhouse a century ago, the tour circumambulates the building on the exterior before entering inside. Accessing the interior incites a small thrill to some tourists, as the elevators are normally closed to the public except during special events; this is technically private property. Unlike the Adams Powerhouse and many industrial factories, grain elevators were not designed to accommodate tourists, and their monumental, towering forms were strictly off limits to the general public. Furthermore, the presence of tourists in these spaces today is only possible because they are no longer functioning. There are no workers to observe in action, no mechanical devices to witness in motion. As the structural and

Figure 6.6  Joe Cascio, Touring with Explore Buffalo, from Katie McKenna, “A Journey to the Top of Silo City.” Source: Visit Buffalo Niagara, May 11, 2011.

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functional requirements of their design required that the silos have no windows and few entrances, the mysterious nature of their interior functions has been amplified by their design, subsequent deactivation, and privatization. In this sense these grain elevator tours are literally creating a new path for tourists, while also providing a new type of engagement with these buildings. In contrast to a history of architectural tourism at the Adams Powerhouse and many of Buffalo’s industrial sites, there is no such history at the grain elevators. Today’s tours therefore do not continue in this tradition, but rather begin a new one. Temporal juxtapositions often emerge on these tours, combining the present with the past in sometimes unexpected ways. Century-old conveyor belts connect to rooms with contemporary chalk drawings and sculptural installations made by local artists during special events, blurring the neat historical timelines the docent narrates for the visitors. While at the Adams Powerhouse the architectural design and tour programming softened the impact of modernity, here there are no such attempts. Newness peeks out from the shadows in the form of recent art installations along the rounded concrete walls, obstructing the view of a more perfect past with the valuable reminder that the present should not be ignored, but celebrated. Aside from their informational content, these tours also provide a highly sensory experience of industrial landscapes that echoes the sensory turn in historical scholarship. Tourists are encouraged to touch and listen to these spaces, to discover the layout of an unknown building by climbing around it, up to the top, and through small holes in it. The addition of a significant experiential component to architectural tourism arose in the twentieth century, as Disneyland, Coney Island, and other theme parks have historically been a model for this type of tourist engagement. Although this experiential turn is rooted in an older tradition, this tactile component can be applied in fresh ways to a less formalized tourist site such as an abandoned factory. Scholars such as Tim Edensor have examined abandoned factories as spaces that offer an experiential, playful alternative to an increasingly capitalistic, conscripted urban reality.38 Activities such as skateboarding and parkour can also deliberately transform the experience of these spaces, redefining the utilitarian aspects of industrial architecture through creative physical activity and spatial appropriation.39 Industrial heritage tours exemplify the potential of applying this experiential turn to architectural tourism. They provide an important model for how historians could jump off the page and into the buildings themselves, giving form to an industrial heritage experience that could not only entertain visitors but also educate them. At the nearby Riverworks complex,

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a newly installed rock climbing course rises up the cylindrical walls of a grain elevator, directly encouraging a tactile experience with this type of architecture. There is a physical engagement with industrial architecture here that is not often present on, say, the formalized tours of the Pantheon. By viewing tourism as a vehicle for a performative, experiential, or sensorial understanding of the built environment, architectural historians can reconsider notions of architecture not as an object, but as a malleable experience. Early twentieth-century industrial tours and early twenty-first-century tours reveal similar challenges: finding the balance between education and entertainment, and between the present and the past. At a time when electricity was a mysterious new phenomenon, the Adams Powerhouse incorporated tourism in order to illuminate electricity’s potential to improve upon the past in nonthreatening ways. When informational content became too intricate to simplify in a short tour, the Adams Powerhouse provided a range of sensory-based experiences for visitors instead. Even though the content of its tours was not particularly historic, the powerhouse provided an architectural experience that ushered in this new, inherently modern technology alongside a stylistic sense of continuity with the past. Although the cultural context has changed greatly over the past century, architectural tourism at industrial sites has reemerged in similar ways today. While Detroit’s tours sacrifice informational content in favor of a compelling aesthetic experience, Buffalo’s tours attempt to negotiate the contrast between presenting

Figure 6.7.  Riverworks, 2017. Photo credit: Annie Schentag.

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industrial history and embracing postindustrial uses. Since its inception more than a century ago, industrial “architourism” in Buffalo has revolved around an attempt to simultaneously connect visitors with the past and acknowledge a new era in the present. These different approaches to industrial heritage tourism illuminate two of the biggest issues that postindustrial sites face: being noticed and being nuanced. Tourism-oriented development made industrial landscapes more visible, but that does not necessarily mean it has made them more legible. Doing so requires careful consideration of the narratives put forth regarding the history of these industrial buildings, but also the role of that history as the city moves into a new era. As historian David Lowenthal reminds us, heritage is “how we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong.”40 In this sense, the practice of touring these postindustrial landscapes can serve as a continual process of redefining the American industrial past, present, and future. The history of industrial architecture is ongoing. Industry still thrives in some places; elsewhere, postindustrial structures continue to adapt to new functions. Buffalo’s identity is still intimately linked with these industrial structures, but their role in the local economy, community, and built environment has substantially changed. During this process of rust belt reinvention, industrial architecture takes on new physical forms and cultural meanings, making this history ripe for reinterpretation during Buffalo’s renaissance. Will these grain elevators and factories henceforth be attractive only as decontextualized ruins? Is there some way to capitalize on the nearly universal aesthetic attraction to decay while also illuminating the sociocultural aspects of this architectural history? Now more than ever, it is essential that the history of this industrial architecture be integrated into future visions for the city. The growing interest in industrial sites creates a particularly charged context for architectural historians, who can be instrumental in shaping these postindustrial narratives. In this sense, historians should be incorporated into the tourism industry, along with planners, preservationists, and entrepreneurs. Only by working across these disciplines can we encourage a multifaceted approach to understanding architecture—not only historically or spatially, but also sensorily, experientially, and even recreationally. In order to capitalize on this opportunity for rejuvenation, it is essential to incorporate a diversity of perspectives, voices, and histories that have otherwise been marginalized or absent in the context of ruin porn and ruin tours. These absences are not isolated to the tourism industry, but instead are symptomatic of similar gaps in the historiography of industrial

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architecture and urban development. By incorporating these perspectives, this rich history of spatial engagement can extend beyond the singular stories of former industrial grandeur or contemporary industrial demise, and move instead toward industrial revitalization in ways we may have not yet even dreamed.

Ch a p ter 7

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

I set forth how the project—as in the method of smashing an atom—releases the enormous energy of history that lies bound in the “once upon a time” of classical historical narrative. —Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch

A newspaper ad placed at the beginning of the previous century depicts the newly constructed George N. Pierce manufacturing plant at Buffalo. The ad’s photographic centerpiece shows generous bays marching off into the distance, in an off-center single-point perspectival view. Deep ribs-on-point-supports allow light to pour in through angled skylights and side walls of glass. Three lines of columns march away from the viewer into the depth of the image—converging to the vanishing point of the photograph. Parallel to the picture plane, deep transverse ribs frame the skylight mullions but also hold up structural trusses that in turn support the roof. Neither fully interior nor exterior, the space combines weather protection with spatial porosity to optimize cost, materials, and labor in a setting that provided shelter from the elements, maximum openness, and natural light. Prefiguring modern architects’ preoccupation with such characteristics, the building is unlikely to supply other amenities, judging purely from information available in the image.1 The caption text superimposed on the third-nearest of these transverse supports reads “Reinforced concrete beam 61 feet in clear,” merely the latest milestone in an ongoing expansion of capacity in industrial buildings in the US at the time. A new kind of industrial architecture built at unprecedented

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Figure 7.1  Pierce-Arrow Factory assembly hall, George N. Pierce Automobile Company, Buffalo, New York, 1906, as featured in an advertisement for the Trussed Concrete Steel Company and the “Kahn System.” Source: Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum, Buffalo, NY.

size, scale, and speed satisfied the demands of rapid technological change in the United States over the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Fueled by a system that linked technological change with significant financial gain (and risk) for individual actors, the growth of US industry in the early twentieth century coupled market capitalism with scientific optimization moderated by Progressive Era reforms.2 Archives filled with images similar to this one document US industrial architecture under construction, roughly between 1905 and 1945, in Detroitarea collections. Among a nearly overwhelming quantity of photographs (currently estimated at eighty thousand images in one collection alone) are many that provide valuable information about construction practices,

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materials, and laborers on building sites. Some of these striking images of industry as it came into being in the United States in the wake of a “Second Industrial Revolution” were produced by the architecture firm of Albert Kahn Associates. 3 These appear as early as 1905 and continue through World War II, after which negative and print sizes changed, and large-format field cameras were replaced by handheld single-lens-reflex cameras in the office. They include three important Buffalo-area industrial campuses, all by the Kahn firm.4 Moving in reverse chronological order from World War II back to the Pierce-Arrow factory of 1906—one of the very first buildings in which the automobile assembly line began to take shape—this chapter considers the historical resource that such photographs constitute. They document buildings that changed rapidly over time—and often no longer exist—so that primary architectural historical information can be gleaned from them. They describe a kind of architecture yet to be fully historicized. Despite muteness on larger aspects of architectural and other history, they revivify episodes in the twentieth century in a rather unusual way. Suggesting not how buildings looked, but rather what was required to make them—how much material, how long, and how many people—they begin to reveal the history of their own making, which is generally invisible in finished buildings. They can be put into dialogue with the larger history of labor and industry, the role of both in global military-industrial regimes, and the present climate crisis that fossil fuels have generated through the interface that automobiles provided. Visual information of the past thus resonates today. Manufacturing got an early start in Buffalo when the Erie Canal opened in 1825.5 The city’s explosive industry-spurred growth occurred well ahead of that in Detroit, where the period of most rapid expansion coincided with the emergence of the auto industry leading up to and following the turn of the century.6 Even as Buffalo was a bona fide city of industry well before the age of the automobile, equipped with plentiful electricity from its hydroelectric plants and robust commerce from the grain supply that poured in from north, south, and west, the city’s economy changed after the arrival of Lackawanna Steel and the related growth of steel production and the auto industry.7 Detroit-based car companies eventually overtook Buffalo’s luxury Pierce-Arrow and E. R. Thomas Companies in volume, speed, and price point. Buffalo offered an excellent site for Motor City expansion, with its Great Lakes proximity and existing industrial infrastructure. Assembly plants, service buildings, and showrooms for Chevrolet and Ford appeared in and around the edges of the city in the first two decades of the new century. Among these was the Fuhrmann Assembly Plant designed by Albert Kahn

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Associates, the same firm that had also collaborated on the earlier design of the Pierce plant.8 Later still, as the US geared up to fight World War II, an even more space-demanding industry added facilities near Buffalo, when the Curtiss-Wright Company commissioned Kahn to construct a fifty-seven-acre building for the production of airplanes out in the cornfields of Cheektowaga, east of Buffalo proper. After the war, the bubble of industry began to collapse. Companies like Curtiss-Wright had produced aircraft, motors, and other matériel for the armed forces. Many anticipated the rapid shrinkage of a market that had been artificially inflated by the war and took steps to cushion the impact by downsizing. Other industrial firms (like those producing automobiles before and after the war) embraced efforts to generate new demand for factorymade products to match the new capacity of US industry. Yet Buffalo was one of the losers in this economic zero-sum game; Curtiss-Wright’s Plant #2 closed after the war, resulting in a 77 percent shrinkage of the company’s local wartime workforce. A new tenant restored some jobs to the plant, which did not finally close until 1985; it was torn down in 1999. Production facilities in and around Buffalo similarly contracted in the three decades following 1945, leaving the city as an early example of what we might now call “Detroit syndrome,” often described as a common fate of rust belt cities.

Curtiss-Wright Cheektowaga, 1940–1943 The Westinghouse Plant (2,500,000 square feet of space) on Genesee Street in Cheektowaga . . . was shut down by Westinghouse in 1985. . . . When demolition of the factory [was] completed in mid1999 the factory grounds were razed to expand the crosswind 14–32 runway and the Buffalo-Niagara Airport terminal and tarmac.9

The Curtiss-Wright Cheektowaga Plant (Plant #2) was constructed in a farm community east of Buffalo, on land formerly occupied by the Seneca tribe of the League of the Iroquois, who had appropriated the land in battle from an earlier Iroquois-speaking agrarian tribe, known as “the Neutrals.” After the Revolutionary War, the Senecas’ claim to the land was systematically “extinguished” in a series of land purchases, of which the best known is the Morris Purchase of 1791. The town was incorporated in 1839; during the growth of nearby Buffalo as an industrial center, Cheektowaga attracted fledgling aeronauts.10 Later Polish immigrants attracted to industrial jobs settled there. The Bentley Library at the University of Michigan contains 157 prints of the Cheektowaga construction phase photographed from 1940 until 1943.11

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The photographs were stamped by commercial photographer George A. Ostertag, and many were also time-stamped by departments in the Kahn firm. In January 1941, for example, one set of prints moved across twelve desks within the office, sometimes crossing two per day. The original complex consisted of large assembly and manufacturing spaces for the components of aircraft in one building, and a second, taller volume that accommodated complete airplanes, adjacent to the runways of the Buffalo Airport. An office block along the front, an engineering building for drafting, a powerhouse, and a truck garage supplemented the two main buildings. A basement dug into the sloping site underneath the hangar provided for employee entry beneath the factory floor, where locker rooms and other human-scale facilities were located—a typical configuration for airplane manufacturing facilities. The roof of the assembly floor and the hangar are both furrowed with clerestories, which run perpendicular to each other: in the assembly plant, the clerestories run roughly north-south; in the hangar building, east-west. Construction lasted two and a half years, after an order for 524 P-40 Warhawks from the US Army Air Corps in 1938 prompted expansion of Plant #1

Figure 7.2  January 31, 1941, Curtiss-Wright Airplane Plant (#2), Cheektowaga, NY, 1940–1943. Architect: Albert Kahn Associates. Photographer: George Ostertag. Source: Bentley Historical Library / Albert Kahn Associates.

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in Tonawanda. As building work at Cheektowaga commenced, Ostertag visited the site intermittently, taking views from the same locations each time, but with varying frequency. The images include a title block that provides date and description in the bottom right-hand corner of the image; at the top right, a plan diagram with an arrow indicates the position of the camera. Ground was broken in November 1940, when the photographer captured empty fields and farm buildings at the site. By December 19, steam locomotive shovels scooped earth into waiting trucks to be carted away as the building site was prepared; the end of January saw a structural skeleton emerging. By mid-February 1941 the superstructure had begun to rise, dominated by deep Warren roof trusses that seem closer to the scale of bridge engineering than to that of architecture. The steel structure and exterior walls for the first construction phase were completed between March and June 1941, when the production of P-40 fighter planes began in a building that was still under construction as late as August of that year. Subsequent building phases expanded the capacity of the plant over 1942 and 1943, when it was also retooled for cargo aircraft. According to

Figure 7.3  May 8, 1941, Curtiss-Wright Airplane Plant (#2), Cheektowaga, NY, 1940–1943. Architect: Albert Kahn Associates. Photographer: George Ostertag. Source: Bentley Historical Library / Albert Kahn Associates.

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the photographic record, equipment was installed into the new additions by March 1943, when production lines occupied the new space. The photographs leave an impression of rapid construction in the midst of winter, with a building turned to use before its finishing touches had been added— including the matter of stopping leaks in its very large roof. One image shows multiple tarps suspended from the trusses as if to catch water and channel it into one very large drip.12 Like Pierce-Arrow’s 1906 building, the interiors of Curtiss-Wright #2 define a particular micro-environment, neither fully interior nor exterior, enclosed but not fully regulated. The photographs show raw industrial buildings constructed rapidly during World War II, not strikingly different from other buildings for the big aeronautics companies; Curtiss-Wright’s campuses in New Jersey, Ohio, and Kentucky also required similar facilities at roughly the same time, as did Pratt &Whitney, and the Glenn L. Martin Company, progenitor of today’s Lockheed Martin. Photographs of the halffinished interior recall similar images of another airplane manufacturing building that has entered architectural history by association. Kahn Associates had used an even deeper Warren truss at Glenn Martin’s Middle River, Maryland, plant in 1937, to achieve a three-hundred-foot clear span. Such a

Figure 7.4 A-B.  June 19, 1941, Curtiss-Wright Airplane Plant (#2), Cheektowaga, New York, 1940–1943. Architect: Albert Kahn Associates. Photographer: George Ostertag. Source: Bentley Historical Library / Albert Kahn Associates.

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span was reportedly unprecedented at the time, and it made an industrial building also a precedent-breaking one.13 For the Kahn firm, single-level manufacturing buildings required an ongoing investment in roof design, both in terms of structure and for efficient daylighting. The better the roof design, the larger the enclosed space might be. Roof lighting became a design focus of the firm, which produced nuanced variations coordinated with the distribution of activities on the floor below in a variety of production facilities. World War II, with its round-the-clock schedules running every day of the year, made the widespread use of artificial light a necessity; only better heating and ventilation systems were required to make the artificially lit factory cheaper than its fenestrated counterpart. Before artificially lit buildings made the daylight factory obsolete in the 1940s (Kahn Associates’ latest additions to Building #1 in nearby Tonawanda in 1943 depended on artificial light), the roof plane remained an important locus of design at factory complexes like Curtiss-Wright’s. The Kahn firm continued developing a roof profile in Cheektowaga that might capture more light while requiring fewer geometrical changes to the building envelope. In the 1937 Glenn Martin Building “B,” the horizontal planes of the roof plate alternate from the bottom to the top chord of the truss, creating an unevenly corrugated profile with long clerestories running the length of the building along the trusses. These clerestories run roughly north to south in the Maryland building, allowing light to enter from east and west. At Cheektowaga, similar furrows were dug into the surface of the roof, which consisted of an up-tilting steel frame cut at an angle by vertical windows. The clerestory appears to rise slightly above the top chord of the truss, as if this upward-reaching lip, which animates the building’s profile, might grasp a little more daylight for the interior of the plant. The Cheektowaga plant joined a growing list of airplane assembly plants and munitions buildings constructed throughout the second half of the 1930s and into the 1940s. At the time, these buildings were marvels of rapid design development and production. The best known in architectural history has already been mentioned: the Kahn firm’s sequence of plants for one of Curtiss-Wright’s two main competitors, the Glenn L. Martin Company. Among the interior photographs of the 1937 Middle River building is one that became the base image for a now-famous collage by German émigré architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). According to Jan Frohburg and others, Mies was fascinated by the original building, published in Architectural Forum in 1938, and in George Nelson’s monograph on Kahn the following year. Mies adapted the idea of packing a subterranean podium with dense program, leaving the floor above free of interior division or support—

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a configuration used by the Kahn office at both Middle River and Cheektowaga, and adopted by Mies at the New National Gallery in Berlin (and its predecessor designs). Both the Concert Hall photo collage (now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and the New National Gallery feature prominently in architectural historiography. In the former, Mies transformed a wartime plane factory by adapting it to serve a cultural program, suggesting a postwar use for the many vast production facilities built during the war. An example of the industrial sublime, perhaps, the Glenn Martin plant’s span was not a programmatic necessity; no airplanes had a wingspan large enough to require such an interior. Anomalous in the Kahn firm, where economics of construction were closely indexed to functional necessity, the Martin plant was the unusual one-off for Kahn Associates, a firm devoted to the art of the multiple and the mass production of buildings. Cheektowaga, by contrast, was quite typical. Kahn also built plants for the third giant of aeronautics, Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Aircraft Corporation, around Hartford, Connecticut (architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock worked in one of these for a spell during the war), in Palm Beach, and in Kansas City. Perhaps best-known of all was the vast plant for the Ford Motor Company at Willow Run, near Ypsilanti, Michigan—a building that covered more than eighty acres under one roof and is one of several that marks the advent of the windowless factory. These aeronautical factory buildings, like auto assembly plants, consisted of flexible components that might be adapted to particular program needs and site conditions. Photographs of any one of these buildings address two tasks at once: they describe individual instances on specific sites, but they also depict types that differed relatively little from place to place. Kahn’s firm organization was well suited for the rapid production of such buildings, ones that relied on reconfiguring existing solutions for new sites and programs. Turning back to Curtiss-Wright Cheektowaga: the building that the photographs document went unremarked in architectural history or the history of technology; it is not listed on historic Buffalo architecture websites or printed in city guides, and it is not recorded in the Historic American Building Survey or the Historic American Engineering Record. While its spans were more economical than those of the Glenn Martin plant because interior columns were introduced, it resembles the Maryland facility in its essential characteristics; and both buildings also resemble still other large plants that Kahn’s organization built in the second half of the 1930s and the early 1940s. The Curtiss-Wright images underscore how repetitive, adaptable, and driven by functional typologies the firm’s work was at this time. The corpus of buildings erected in the early 1940s were highly responsive to external

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pressure for speed and quality, but not to internal professional mandates of architecture. They responded to intense political pressure incentivized economically, a “state of exception” that allowed the US to mobilize for war and remain economically and politically dominant afterward. Kahn’s organization designed one airplane manufacturing facility—and then modified that facility for different sites.14 What worked well during the pressured acceleration of industry under war came later to seem like something other than architecture: an entirely repeatable building process modified only for the idiosyncrasies of a given piece of land. Curtiss-Wright produced thousands of airplanes for World War II.15 As with the Martin Maryland plant, and its gargantuan branch near Omaha, Nebraska (this one documented by a Historic American Engineering Record [HAER] study), photographs of the Buffalo building make the scale of the US war effort unexpectedly visible, even as they were taken in anticipation of production, and as part of a monitoring system that persisted throughout the entire production cycle.16 The first task of the war predated 1939 or 1941— capacity to meet rising production quotas for a host of industrial machinery for war.17 Like Glenn Martin’s airplane plants, and the vast sheds designed and erected for Pratt & Whitney, the Buffalo Curtiss-Wright plant represents the intersection of private capacity and public funding, as the government enlisted industrial producers to turn existing manufacturing facilities to airplane production, and to build new ones for the same purpose. This activity penetrated back into the second half of the 1930s, as the likelihood of war increased. Albert Kahn Associates was a crucial intermediary between the need for new capacity, and its realization. Thanks to buildings like the Cheektowaga plant, the capacity of the surrounding region swelled during World War II. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation, with three manufacturing facilities in Buffalo, employed forty-three thousand workers in and around the city in 1943, the vast majority at Cheektowaga. For four years, the plant operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to manufacture over seventeen thousand aircraft. Yet by the end of 1945, the employee rolls had dropped to fifty-five hundred.18 The company moved its Buffalo operations to Columbus, Ohio, the following year, leaving as many as 15 percent of local workers unemployed and relinquishing the plant to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the economic backstop to wartime industrialists who stood to net profit without assuming full risk. Westinghouse bought the Curtiss-Wright Cheektowaga plant from the RFC as the aerospace industry in Buffalo gradually shrank throughout the decades after the war.19 The construction photographs of the Cheektowaga plant give a detailed fragment of the longer history of the plant and the industrial region around

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Buffalo, chiefly by showing the scale of the operations. They supplement other kinds of historical information by depicting the physical infrastructure within which an important phase of US history unfolded. This in turn suggests the degree to which this phase of industrial production was tied to a labor force, on the one hand, and geopolitical events on the other. Taken to ensure the orderly completion of construction on a site, this series of photographs is part of a remarkably thin historical record on industrial architecture. The military history of World War II is told in texts that describe events; these images, by contrast, provide a visual microhistory of the emergent military-industrial complex that would come to dominate US politics in the years after the war, even as that particular economic benefit left cities like Buffalo behind.

Fuhrmann Assembly, 1931 Back in June 1930, 94 acres of land lying under water next to Fuhrmann Boulevard was purchased from the state and the Buffalo Creek Railroad. A year later, the swampland had been miraculously transformed into an important cog in operations of the gigantic Ford Motor Company of Detroit.20

In the archives of the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, a file of black-and-white photographs document the construction of the Fuhrmann Assembly Plant on Buffalo’s lakeside. As for Curtiss-Wright #2, for the Ford Motor Company the Kahn firm made extensive records of the process, this time calibrated on weekly or biweekly schedules. An innovation that attests to the penetration of scientific management into architecture, photographic records of midwestern industry under construction offer a rich trove of information about the nuts and bolts of industrial building before World War II, both as immediate documents of a process and as general historical records. While showing how the Fuhrmann Assembly Plant was built at a granular level, the prints also trace the story of Buffalo as an engine of the US-based “Second Industrial Revolution” before the massive upheavals of the war. The Buffalo site is located south of the city center on the edge of Lake Erie, slightly northwest of the steel town of Lackawanna. The lakeside site presented challenges common to assembly plants built on the edge of large bodies of water, of which the Kahn firm built several.21 A significant economic force in Buffalo, this building type—not for manufacture but rather for the assembly of already-produced parts—was common to other sites in the US and abroad. Yet on the Buffalo site, the topography of land and water

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and the sandy dunes inflect a series of photographic images that capture construction history while also representing a building type, many exemplars of which were built before 1934, when the Kahn firm gathered the results of its design process for assembly plants into a single booklet.22 The blackand-white film used to record a timed construction process also recorded particular conditions on each site. The assembly-plant script was written in Detroit, its execution unfolded differently on each of its stages, and cameras recorded the performance. Photographs from the Fuhrmann Avenue archive files show the process of construction from start to finish. Before construction might begin, the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Co. prepared the site. Their work completed, GLD&D handed work off to the Frederick T. Ley Company, the firm responsible for driving piles into the newly dredged and reshaped lakeshore zone (both above and below water level) to support the steel-and-concrete structure above. Finally, the contractors arrived—Hunkin Conkey of Buffalo built the assembly plant on the lakeshore between late summer 1930, when Frederick Ley finished foundation work, and the summer of 1931, when the building opened. Ten folders containing 260 photographic images, mostly stamped by the Baldwin Studio, document the construction process in detail, dating from July 11, 1930, to June 19, 1931. Like the set discussed above, these are also printed with a title block that provides basic details and dates, and they were stamped on the back. The set includes a generous number of panoramic prints made from separate 8 x 10 images then spliced together with a taped hinge down the back edges. Having shot one side of the site from his field camera, the photographer might simply turn the camera on the tripod to expose a second plate, contiguous to the first. In at least two cases, a tripleplate panorama of the site includes one negative made head-on, and two at raking angles to left and right. Chronicling the progress of construction, the photographs show site preparation regularizing the lake edge with a bulwark fence, for water access along the lakeside, and to banish water from the interior of the construction area on the water side. A dock from which to offload automobile parts or onload finished cars was cut perpendicularly into the lakeshore, parallel to the long side of the planned assembly building. In addition to a straight bulwark along two sides of the plot, a grid of pile foundations was initially driven into a site into which water continued to enter. A photograph from September 16, 1930, shows the concrete pile grid and the last section of steel construction fence, driven into the lakeshore to keep water away while the bulwark was constructed. The stabilization of the bulwark preceded drainage

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Figure 7.5  September 30, 1930, Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 1930. Architect: Albert Kahn Associates. Photographer: Baldwin Studio. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

of the site. Indeed, although that process was completed in late summer of 1930, problems arose by November, with subsidence creating pits in the sandy surface. These were documented in a separate series of photographs, with scale figures to indicate the depth (literally) of the problem, which did not impinge immediately on the building site itself and appears to have been solved well before completion. Construction of the steel superstructure commenced once the foundations were firmly embedded in earth, a process that occupied much of October and November. The structure appears largely complete by November 28. A particularly cold and windy day in mid-December shows bitter wind billowing the sheets of burlap that hang on the scaffolding erected for the bricklayers, as they built the weather wall throughout these cold winter months. Later still, a construction fence enclosed the exterior of the building, providing better protection from Buffalo’s frigid winter. Inside, a smooth concrete floor was poured after the roof and side walls were erected, throughout the spring months of 1931. At the same time, the long roof, with its complex profile of top and side lights, appears in snow-filled images taken from its surface.

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As a single chronicle of a yearlong process, the photographs provide technical detail and anecdotal history of construction on this site, one of a large number of automotive assembly plants built throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s and across the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. The Buffalo set includes some striking images. One group shows the sandy dunes of a lakeside site with a metallic building growing in the background of the image. In one, a man wearing a suit and hat stands between the camera and the building to provide a scale figure by which to judge earth subsidence. With his hat over his eyes, this individual marks the spot where water has entered into the heart of the site from the failed dike enclosing the northwest corner. In another, a series of sandbag walls abut an overflow sluice that funneled water away from the building site. The failure of one of these dikes caused subsidence in the sandy dunes. The photographer thus documented topographic irregularities, using scale figures where necessary to show the resulting depressions and water overflow. Despite the mundane explanation, the results are visually arresting.

Figure 7.6  “View looking east along northwest corner return,” undated photograph of Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 1930–1931. For this photo and all remaining photos in chapter 7: architect, Albert Kahn Associates; photographer, Baldwin Studio. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

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Figure 7.7  “View looking south showing sluice and north dyke,” undated photograph of Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 1930–1931. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

Figure 7.8  November 14, 1930, Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 1930–1931. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

June 19, 1931, the last day of the Fuhrmann photographs, appears in one triple-print panorama, taken from the roof of the nearby warehouse that accommodated many of the overview photographs of the site. The building appears finished; its powerhouse and water tower complete. Encompassing the result of the previous year’s labor, it contrasts with photographs of the

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open site taken twelve months earlier. Ships await in the lake; the gantry crane stands ready to load them, and oil tanks next to the assembly building to fuel them. The parking lot awaits cars and factory workers. The city of Buffalo lies in the distance to the north and east. But the focus of the image is not so much the building as an elongated tidal pool in the foreground, in line with the slip where ships dock to load or unload. The pool is full on this warm June day; young kids, or factory workers, play in its shallows or linger at its edges. Having completed their construction task, one might imagine, the workers celebrated by having a swim.

Pierce-Arrow, 1906 The completion of the Pierce Automobile Plant at Buffalo marks an Epoch in Reinforced Concrete Construction; and furnishes positive proof of the structural possibilities and range of the Kahn System. These buildings of concrete . . . are as substantial as if carved out of solid stone, are monolithic in type, fireproof, and have the granite-like qualities of concrete combined with the elasticity of steel.23

Over twenty years before the Fuhrmann Assembly plant, Kahn had supervised an important building project in Buffalo. Once his new system of reinforced concrete construction, invented in partnership with his brother Julius in 1904–1905, had proved its utility, Kahn’s name passed from one industrial client to another and he landed the commission in Buffalo.24 The attributes of Albert and Julius Kahn’s Packard #10 building and other early reinforced concrete manufacturing buildings in Detroit are well known—a significant increase in the bay size and floor-to-ceiling height of the manufacturing plant, from approximately twenty-four to thirty-two feet between vertical supports.25 The George N. Pierce manufacturing plant, soon to become the home of the Pierce-Arrow Motor Company, brought new manufacturing technology to a city that was already well versed in industrial building.26 According to Grant Hildebrand, the Pierce plant was “radically different and very significant” in a number of ways. The column span, as our advertisement points out, at over sixty feet, more than doubled traditional mill construction in brick and timber (transposed to steel, this increased to an impressive three hundred feet by 1937). The immense span was facilitated by the fact that the assembly building was a single-story building, like much of the Pierce plant, allowing expansion as needed for manufacturing and depending on the roof to light the interior. The seeds of Fuhrmann Assembly and Curtiss-Wright

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Cheektowaga were thus planted much earlier, at the beginning of industrial mass production in the first decade of the new century. Although the column span, measured from north to south, fluctuated from roughly thirty to sixty feet at Pierce-Arrow, the bay increment, measured east to west, remained constant at sixty-one feet throughout the facility. Since the railroad sidings to the north of the site plan also ran east-west, the regularity of the layout in this direction coordinated rapid movement from freight cars into the factory and back again.27 Hildebrand noted that although Pierce did not use the moving assembly-line that Ford pioneered at Highland Park several years later, the building nonetheless anticipated assembly-line manufacture in its layout, providing an early precedent for single-story assembly-line buildings that would emerge at the River Rouge complex built for the Ford Motor Company beginning in 1917. As the photographs anticipated production that would take place after they were made, so did the building itself anticipate a manner of labor organization in its very design. The assembly line was, after all, a spatial solution dependent on a building to house it. What fate befell this factory building? Fuhrmann Assembly and CurtissWright #2 are long gone, leaving a set of valuable photographs and little other documentation. The Pierce-Arrow plant, by contrast, still stands. Yet its current configuration as a commerce park means that the complex bears little resemblance to a manufacturing facility. Industrial buildings are routinely demolished, or radically altered, so that their current state often tells little about their history. A limited set of construction photographs of the Pierce plant were published by Hildebrand in his 1974 monograph. At least two of these images show the newly completed building before occupation from a brochure entitled The Typical Factory: The Factory behind the Car (Detroit, 1907) that included eighteen such photographs. In this case, while the building survives, the photographs (if they existed) did not.

Buffalo’s Arcades It is the function of concepts to group phenomena together, and the division that is brought about within them thanks to the distinguishing power of the intellect is all the more significant in that it brings about two things in a single stroke: the salvation of phenomena, and the representation of ideas.28

The archive of construction photography associated with US industrialization is currently untabulated. The selection associated with Albert Kahn Associates presented here provides a peculiar kind of historical record of

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the development of industry in Buffalo. The by-product of a process, this graphic description of twentieth-century industrialization is seemingly purely documentary. Yet today, when the buildings they depict are gone or radically altered, these images acquire a different valence. As with the photographic collection of Eugène Atget after it was “discovered” by Berenice Abbot (who then conveyed its significance to André Breton and the surrealists), the temptation to willfully misread these images is difficult to resist. Made to track progress on a construction site, and sometimes to advertise research-and-development milestones once they had been executed, construction photographs were not produced as visual spectacle, although they are often admired today for their aesthetic qualities.29 Often badly printed, sometimes badly framed, generally objects intended to bring worksites to office desks, these are generally well-crafted if straightforward images. At times, they begin to suggest another purpose; when the photographer’s eye seems most sensitive and skilled, or when the particularities they document are striking, they are transmuted from one context to another, as in the sandy images of steel construction at the Fuhrmann plant. If mass-produced buildings emblematize industrialized modernity in the West these images endow it with specificity and location. They give the lie to claims that mass production entered architecture later and more hesitantly than it did the photographic image, and only during the “second machine age.”30 Buildings like these were not admitted into Reyner Banham’s definition of “architecture,” so slow to accede to industry; they nonetheless document historical modernity, if by that we allow technology into the architectural historical fold.31 Industrial capacity in relation to supply and demand, not decisions made by architects, determined the industrialization of building. Construction photographs reflect the temporal factors that dictated their production—whether weekly, biweekly, or sporadically—as the buildings that they show were similarly based on the temporality of mass production. The photographs­ represent building in process, but they also signal the processes that will unfold inside them in the future. In part because of the way time is figured in these photographs, viewers looking at them today may experience a flash of historical realization, simultaneously seeing the time of construction and imagining what took place since the buildings were first occupied, then gradually emptied out or modified for new uses, and, in many cases, demolished. The time elapsed from first construction to the present day subsumes the history of American industry; these photographs call attention to that process. Reflecting the exercise of scientific management, and illustrating the US construction industry during critical years of expansion,32 these photographic

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sources suggest how little the physical sites of industrialized production have been examined within the history of architecture. Seemingly focused only on building shells (the province of architectural form),33 no assembly lines manned by workers appear in them, even as the photographs depict industrial labor and output. Mimicking the processes that will unfold inside factories as engine blocks and wheel assemblies come together, the photographs narrate building construction over regular time intervals. They foreshadow, rather than graphically depict, our incipient infatuation with automobiles and planes, with motive power, and with heedless consumption of natural resources. World War II production represented a boon for the US economy, echoed here in sheer number and density of images. Yet this boon of war capitalism was short-lived, at least for residents of particular municipalities such as Buffalo and Detroit. This phase of war capitalism hints at the emergence of a global economy indifferent to the needs of particular regions, as US factories pumped out machines to be used half a world away: first on the airfields of Guam, or over the cities of war-torn Europe; later in markets and on battlefields the world over. This “tectonic unconscious” of US industrialization, to use a formulation that Walter Benjamin took from architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, provides a set of diagnostic images that reveal the importance of industrialization and the new prominence of concrete and then metallic construction.34 Benjamin summoned Karl Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism with the term “phantasmagoria,” highlighting the arcades’ imperial underpinnings in their role as global commodity markets.35 The Buffalo images similarly recall the overburden of North American industrialization in twentieth-century life on a global scale, from the opposite standpoint. They show the bare sites of commodity production, not those of public consumption. Factory-made products are almost entirely absent. Even the machines and the men who operated them are seldom in evidence; instead, construction laborers are present, “producing production lines” where cars, trucks, and airplanes were to be made for decades. The hidden underbelly of twentieth-century consumerism, they depict manufacturing facilities seldom seen by consumers, yet essential to consumption. These are also the sites that underpinned a new politics of empire.36 The “tectonic unconscious” lurking beneath the surface of these photographs reflects a tale of hegemony that puts nineteenth-century empire builders to shame. Combining the brute violence of military capacity and the cognitive violence produced by consumer marketing, the “concrete evidence” of US industrialization and concomitant global economic imperialism after World War II appears in the massive expansions of Detroit, Buffalo, and the

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industrial Midwest more generally, from the last decade of the nineteenth century. The evidence is concrete, but yet not present, since it is photographs rather than buildings under examination here. In reference to the later twentieth century, then, these documents show future as well as past.37 Mimicking the buildings they record as repetitive, incremental, consistent, and systematic, they reveal the rationalizations of mass production and industrial manufacture, even as the ebbs and flows of industrial capital that determined the facets of the buildings shown here were highly unpredictable and illogical. The photographs index the way things are made, providing a critical diagnostic tool for writing about architecture, and showing procedures predicated on and mimicking building processes. This imagery makes something that generally remains invisible, visible. By showing how buildings are first made—which is to say how they come to exist in the world as material objects—this photographic architecture—which we might refer to as “Buffalo’s Arcades,” provides a primary historical source. Any admiration that accrues to the images qua images is offset by a present in which de-growth and deceleration are the new objects of desire. Should consumption ever lose its appeal, architects, take heed.

Figure 7.9  May 3, 1931, interior of assembly building nearly complete, Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

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Figures 7.10 and 7.11  June 19, 1931, Ford Motor Company Fuhrmann Avenue Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 1930–1931. Source: Benson Ford Research Center

Pa rt I I I

Buffalo as Experiment

Ch a p ter 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

Between 1871 and 1910, around nineteen million Europeans migrated to the United States, most with the goal of securing industrial jobs in rapidly growing Northeastern and Midwestern urban centers. The sheer magnitude of this transatlantic wave triggered a debate over who was a “desirable” and, more importantly, who was an “undesirable” immigrant.1 The distinction appeared particularly pressing in light of a previously unseen phenomenon: around half the newcomers were coming from East Central and Southern Europe. It was the first time when migrants from these marginal and at the time still largely agricultural parts of the European continent arrived in the United States in such large numbers, and many white urbanites did not find the so-called new immigrants fit for life in American cities.2 As the East Central and Southern Europeans were mostly uneducated and impoverished rural workers, and as they settled in urban areas, many perceived them to be a threat to American cities and, by extension, to the American nation.3 The impact of this settlement and specifically its relationship to poverty spreading in urban industrial centers became a key point in the ever intensifying debate over the new immigrants. With millions coming from some of Europe’s most struggling areas, a connection between the poverty of the newcomers and the poverty that was increasingly visible across American cities seemed undeniable. Edward Bemis, an economist and urban reformer, claimed that it could not have been coincidental that nearly half the immigrants from 175

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the East and South of Europe lived in the poorest and most neglected urban quarters.4 Sociologist Robert Hunter, author of a study titled Poverty, had no doubts that the immigrants were the main source of destitution in urban America. “The poor,” he concluded, “are almost entirely foreign born.” “On a small scale,” he continued, “we have Russia’s poverty, Poland’s poverty, Italy’s poverty, Hungary’s poverty, Bohemia’s poverty—and what other nation’s have we not?”5 For Bemis and Hunter, poverty peeking from around every corner of Northeastern and Midwestern cities could not be American. It was, instead, transferred from and essentially belonged to the Old World. Another investigator summarized this belief: “The Italian, the Hebrew, and the Slav . . . are poisoning the pure air of our otherwise well-regulated cities; and if it were not for them there would be no congestion, no filth, and no poverty in the great industrial and commercial centers of America.”6 The experts agreed that poverty in American cities came from within the immigrant communities that allegedly transported their homelands’ poverty across the Atlantic. It was neither urban, industrial, nor American but rather rural and European. In essence, poverty in American cities was un-American. Buffalo was no exception to these national trends. The city’s strategic location fueled extraordinary growth.7 In the four decades before the outbreak of World War I, the population nearly quadrupled, reaching over 444,000 in 1912.8 In 1910, around 28 percent of the city’s residents were estimated to be “white foreign-born,” but even that high number concealed how much Buffalo’s growth depended on transatlantic migration. White American-born Buffalonians with two foreign-born parents constituted around 31 percent of the city’s population, and those with one foreign-born parent made up around 12 percent. These numbers suggest that over 71 percent of Buffalonians in 1910 were either white foreign-born or had at least one “foreign white stock” parent.9 With thousands of new arrivals every year, Buffalo embodied a nationwide tension that escalated as the transatlantic migration wave intensified. On the one hand, the growth of American cities was fueled by Europeans willing to risk their meager savings, health, and even lives in pursuit of American opportunities. On the other, the same millions whose work contributed to the growth hardly fit in an idealized model of a “wellregulated” modern city. A federal immigration survey conducted in Buffalo and six other major cities concluded with no reservations, “The phenomenal growth of cities and the difficulties accompanying their growth have been intensified by the influx of millions of aliens, who for the most part are unacquainted with urban conditions in their own countries, and are dazed by the complexity of existence in the great American cities.”10

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Poles in Buffalo were an unexceptional case in the local version of the debate on how “the millions of aliens” complicated “the phenomenal growth” of “great American cities.” Above all, the Polish presence in the city was inescapable, as Buffalo attracted disproportionally large numbers of Poles.11 Similarly to other cities with substantial Polish settlement, Buffalo’s Polish community grew as a result of chain migration, which implied newcomers following relatives, friends, and fellow villagers already settled in the United States. These networks were the source of transatlantic news as to which cities offered reliable industrial employment.12 Shortly before World War I, Poles constituted around one-sixth of the city’s residents, around onethird of which were American-born children of Polish parents.13 By 1904, most Poles in Buffalo concentrated in the area marked by Sycamore Street to the north, Bailey Avenue to the east, William Street to the south, and Smith Street to the west. Smaller but substantial Polish communities found a home in the Black Rock District and in the Fifth Ward around the borders of Clinton Street, Snow Avenue, and the Buffalo Creek.14 While the Polish American settlement in Buffalo would gradually expand beyond these early enclaves, the East Side and specifically the Broadway-Fillmore area was commonly referred to as “little Poland” and still remains associated with the original Polish presence in the city.15 Poles’ collective demographic profile also matched the popular image of rural, uneducated, and impoverished European laborers allegedly spreading European rural poverty in American cities. Between 80 percent and 93 percent of all Polish pre–World War I migrants in the United States were of rural working-class background, while only around 5 percent belonged to the middle class and intelligentsia.16 Given the condition of the countryside in partitioned Poland at the time, the great majority of the tens of thousands of Poles who settled in Buffalo could not indeed have been of other than very modest means and with no or limited exposure to city life.17 In the atmosphere of national discussions that linked escalating urban poverty to the influx of immigrants, many white middle- and upper-class Buffalonians unsurprisingly embraced the claims that the newly arriving Poles were bringing their Polish poverty into the city. It could not help that similar sentiments about Poles in Buffalo were not unheard of at the national level. The reason behind the US Immigration Commission’s choice of Buffalo to be one of seven cities under the commission’s investigation was the “enormous colony of Poles who [had] come from farms in Europe and [had] to learn the solution of the problem of existence in a city.”18

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Poles in Buffalo Franciszek (Frank) Ruszkiewicz arrived in the United States on October 5, 1888, when he was only thirteen. Born in the area of Torun, a town in the Prussian zone of partitioned Poland, Ruszkiewicz settled with his family in Buffalo. Although he did not speak a word of English, he was able to secure a job at the Buffalo Hardware Company,19 making a mere two dollars a week. He soon moved onto Charles Boller & Sons on Chicago and Carroll Streets, where he worked for four years until he suffered a saw injury in the planing mill at the age of nineteen.20 He recovered speedily and resumed the path of industrial employment at the D. L. & W. Railroad shops, where he started as a car mechanic, continued as a painter, and finally became a boilermaker. Simultaneously, he was attending evening English classes. In 1896, only eight years after his arrival in Buffalo, and with a recently developed interest in politics, he ran for the office of district committeeman from the Fourth Election District of the Eleventh Ward, at the time demarcated by Broadway, Fillmore Avenue, Clinton Street, and the eastern border of the city. Despite the fledgling political career in Buffalo, however, Ruszkiewicz moved to Albany, where the support of the Republican Party helped him secure a position of elevator man at the Capitol. But eventually western New York promised better opportunities, and in 1901 Ruszkiewicz moved back to Buffalo, took college courses in business, and on January 1, 1902, started working as a license clerk in the mayor’s office.21 Ruszkiewicz’s story, shared in part by the Buffalo Times in 1904, was familiar yet noteworthy. The unremarkable beginnings of a young worker with no English skills, a series of industrial jobs, and even an industrial accident mirrored many recent migrants’ lives. In this context, the later and less common accomplishments of becoming a politician with a white-collar job served as evidence that immigrants could succeed if they were sufficiently ambitious and hardworking. But that triumphant narrative went far beyond the popular notions of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and assimilation. It was also a tale of a young Pole who presumably chose to reject his impoverished working-class background and embraced those aspects of the immigrant reality that made him suitable to be a respected Buffalonian and a full-fledged member of the American nation. Ruszkiewicz learned English, sought attractive job opportunities, and got involved in local politics. All that arguably demonstrated his commitment to American opportunities and American democracy. Educated, politically active, and with a position at the mayor’s office, he was a model immigrant—a shining example in the American story of white middle-class urban respectability.

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Figure 8.1  Franciszek Ruszkiewicz, center, on chair, with his four brothers, Anthony, Alexander, Joseph, and Valery, 1906. Photographer unknown. Source: University at Buffalo Libraries, Digital Collections.

What is particularly striking about Ruszkiewicz’s story in the larger context of the American nation-building experiment is that to become a model immigrant, Ruszkiewicz did not have to denounce his Polish identity. Assimilation and Americanization meant not as much the rejection of one’s European roots as aspirations to become a middle-class urbanite—the antithesis to the collective portrait of contemporary immigrants.22 This is

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why Ruszkiewicz’s story was highlighted as an illustrative case in the tale of the “remarkable growth” of Buffalo’s “Polish colony.”23 The immigrants were welcomed to hold on to or even celebrate their ethnic identities as long as they ostensibly refused to embrace what in essence was their original class background. That process did include learning English and civics, at least for male migrants, but not necessarily losing one’s Polishness, regardless of what that notion implied. The Buffalo Times could hardly have chosen a more fitting example to demonstrate how that process worked. Just several years later, Ruszkiewicz would become a prominent real estate developer and agent and a newspaper publisher. In both positions, he targeted his businesses at the local Polish community. His company was responsible for construction projects in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, at the time home to one of the largest Polish communities in the country, where Ruszkiewicz himself resided at 1291 Broadway.24 In 1911, he took over a Polish-language newspaper, which would operate under the title Dziennik dla wszystkich (Everybody’s daily) for the next four decades.25 Ruszkiewicz was a perfect example of a Pole who chose to be American and through that process also chose to be the right kind of Pole in the American city. Ruszkiewicz’s profile also highlighted how an individual triumph was attainable even in the community that many white middle- and upper-class Buffalonians accused of flooding their city with Polish poverty. In the midst of the 1893 economic crisis, when the local press promoted particularly aggressive anti-immigrant narratives, a controversial article described a Polish neighborhood as the hub of “sickness, hunger, desertion, brutality, fallen pride, ignorance, drunkenness and often the misery of shame.”26 More moderate reports at least attempted to present some evidence for their antiimmigrant sentiments, although their treatment of data was usually fragmentary. Disproportionally high numbers of Poles in the juvenile court and in the city’s poor office were presented as an indication that too many Polish immigrants chose idleness and “truancy” over honest work. Very high infant and child death rates were linked to inadequate hygienic conditions. The latter, in turn, were discussed in terms of a deliberate choice that poor Poles made.27 Following the popular moralistic tone of Prohibition supporters, one author even concluded that Poles were simply unable to resist alcohol, which caused “the greatest amount of trouble in the [Polish] district.”28 But it was Polish homes, part of Buffalo’s built environment, that were presented as the core evidence that poor Poles were not fit for living in American cities and, by default, membership in the American nation. A committee investigating sanitary conditions among Buffalo’s poor residents chaired by Dr. John Pryor blamed the “steady increase” of “tenement population”

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directly on Poles. “Insufficient supply of air, disgraceful overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and lack of protection from fire” were all identified to be major un-American problems in the immigrants’ homes.29 Frederick Almy, secretary of Buffalo’s Charity Organization Society, identified congestion to be the most urgent problem in the Polish neighborhood and discussed a small cottage on Mills Street that in 1902 reportedly hosted sixty individuals. Although in 1911 he admitted that such extreme cases belonged largely to the past, overcrowding was an ongoing issue. Big families living in small cottages and additionally hosting boarders were for Almy an unAmerican phenomenon that produced “disease and immorality.” “If [Polish immigrants] want to become really prominent American citizens,” he argued, “they must live like Americans.”30 By insisting that the immigrants be compelled “to live like Americans” if they wanted to become Americans, Almy linked the notion of national identity to living conditions, and he was hardly the only one to insist on that correlation. B. S. Kamienski, by 1914 managing editor of Ruszkiewicz’s newspaper, claimed that the substandard conditions in Polish homes were largely a product of old habits. Kamienski argued that most Polish immigrants “lived under unsanitary conditions since childhood” and simply felt no “need of a larger and more sanitary home.” It was nearly a miracle, he suggested, that they did not keep livestock inside their dwellings, because that was what they did in the old country.31 Kamienski only mirrored the earlier assessment by Pryor, who called for the legal ban on “the importation of habits and inclinations dangerous to a community” and considered such “importation” a sufficient reason to deny immigrants admission into the country.32 Neither was Kamienski the only local Pole who not only suggested there was something inherently wrong with Buffalo’s poor working-class Polish community and clearly distinguished that majority from the minority of white-collar professionals and business owners. The authors of a 1906 Polishlanguage album recording past and present Polish accomplishments in the city were not shy to reveal the reason behind why the book was published in the first place: to encourage Polish trade, manufacturing, and social initiatives in light of the poor image created by the underwhelming presence of Poles among respectable white-collar professions and in local institutions. “It can’t be any worse,” the authors complained, calling for “saving [the Polish] name” in Buffalo.33 The album highlighted profiles of Polish priests, entrepreneurs, and politicians, next to the stories of Polish parishes, fraternal organizations, and small businesses. An image of a community aspiring to be seen through the prism of urban middle-class respectability, entrepreneurship, and initiative was the publication’s clear message.

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The split between middle-class Polish Buffalonians like Ruszkiewicz, Kamienski, or the many business owners highlighted in the 1906 album, and poor working-class Poles chastised for their questionable habits and living conditions best illustrates the true source of anti-immigrant sentiments. By endorsing stereotypes about poor, rural Polish migrants or by scolding their allegedly insufficient efforts to join the ranks of respected citizens, middleclass Poles did not exhibit a lack of ethnic loyalty. They were, instead, the faithful (even if in some cases recently adopted) sons of their class. They were not anti-Polish. They were, similarly to middle- and upper-class Buffalonians like Almy or Pryor, anti-poor. This class distinction between the “desirable” and “undesirable” immigrants was perhaps most obvious in the voices that criticized the allegedly quaint and ignorant ways of poor Poles but also lauded those developments in Buffalo’s Polish quarters that demonstrated urban middle-class respectability. Unsurprisingly, the initiatives that endorsed obvious Americanization efforts, like English-language classes, provoked generous praise among middle- and upper-class Buffalonians.34 But organizations and community projects promoting Polish culture were welcomed as equally important, at least as long as they promoted a class-approved model of Polish culture. Singing and theater circles or community outreach were enough to quiet down the anti-immigrant anxiety, no matter how much these activities embraced customs of the Polish diaspora. Their respectable nature was more essential to the process of assimilation and Americanization than their ethnic character. A Polish library and public talks on history and other topics of interest in the Polish language offered by Dom Polski (the Polish Home) on Broadway and Playter Street were praised as worthy initiatives when the Express aimed to familiarize its American readers with the little-known institution “in the center of [Poles’] intellectual and social life.”35 Two performances a week organized by the Teatr Polski, housed also at Dom Polski, provoked an ecstatic reaction not only because of the productions’ high artistic value but also because of “audiences as crowded and enthusiastic as those which fill the English speaking theaters.” A reporter praising the most recent staging of The Three Musketeers even expressed blatant “surprise” at the “the love of dramatic art among the Poles.”36 Ethnic educational institutions, fraternal organizations, and churches all served as evidence that Poles were “self reliant and independent, and in no way liable to become a charge upon the community which they have chosen for their home.”37 The more sophisticated the activities, the more justifiable their ethnic component. When Buffalo’s Polish elites organized their 1914 ball, patronized by the Moniuszko Singing Society and inspired by the gatherings of the old Polish nobility, the

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Figure 8.2  The Polish Home (Dom Polski) was designed by Wladyslaw Zawadzki, Buffalo’s most prominent Polish American architect, and completed in 1905–1906. The building was the center of Polish cultural life and home to many Polish American organizations in Buffalo. Photographer unknown. Source: University at Buffalo Libraries, Digital Collections.

Courier admired the “exclusive, haughty and aristocratic” character of the Polish “upper ten” whom it compared favorably to the residents of the city’s wealthiest quarters. At that gathering, women were not even vaguely reminiscent of their poor compatriots wearing “shawls over their heads” and “gray-colored gowns”

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at the local Polish Broadway Market.38 Instead, they were described as “strikingly beautiful, classic in features, fair in skin and delightfully companionable.” At the time, the Singing Society was proudly gathering in clubrooms on Peckham and Wilson Streets but planned to erect a new clubhouse at the impressive cost of $20,000 on Fillmore Avenue, between Peckham and Lovejoy (today Paderewski Drive).39 The true “Polish soul” was identified not in the poor Polish households but in the “art and music.”40 Protecting Polish culture and identity among the less-affluent and less-cultured Poles was also compatible with Americanization efforts, at least as long as middle- and upper-class Buffalonians were able to recognize an aspect of urban respectability in whatever activities took place in the city’s Polish quarters. If Polish parents appeared to understand the importance of the American system of education and sent their children to public schools, they were praised for their efforts to teach children Polish. That distinction was acceptable because middle- and upper-class Buffalonians assumed that when the same children grew up, “they [would lose] the Polish customs of their parents and [would] be as American as anyone.”41 But preserving Polish was also commendable because of the repeatedly discussed political situation of Poland. English-language publications highlighted the themes of foreign oppression and lack of independence and justified not only the practices of preserving the language and customs but even some seemingly eccentric behaviors, including being suspicious toward non-Polish strangers.42 In this context, what might have been a strange and foreign tradition, like a traditional Polish nativity play written and produced by local workers, or the fact that Polish children shockingly did not hang stockings for Christmas, became an adorable folk component of emerging Polish American culture or even a proud expression of Polish patriotism.43

“How the Poles Live in Buffalo” Perhaps the most comprehensive profile of Buffalo’s early Polish community emerged in 1910, when John Daniels, director of the Buffalo Social Survey, presented findings of an investigation that he had designed to learn how much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric targeted at poor Poles echoed the reality. His investigative approach to the question of how immigrants were changing American cities was so urgent that it attracted national attention. The influential La Follette’s Magazine expressed hope that Daniels’s Buffalo study would examine facts against the background of myths and, as a result, “remove lots of misunderstandings.”44

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Daniels belonged to the growing group of social scientists who believed that at least to a certain extent material environment affected how individuals developed and what decisions they made. Nonetheless, he never entirely dismissed the assumption that the poor were poor because of their deeply rooted habits and choices. Accordingly, his reports on Buffalo’s Polish community contain a mix of scholarly objectivity, genuine admiration, and condescension that reflected as much Daniels’s attempt to be a progressive social scientist as his own class privilege. Daniels and his team confirmed both the fears and biases of those interested in how the presence of Poles shaped Buffalo and, analogously, how the presence of European newcomers shaped American cities. His investigation did not entirely dispel the image of Poles as overly attached to those Old World ways that were seen as impeding their own progress and the overall progress of the city. The popularity of parochial schools, for example, with their underqualified teachers who barely spoke English, was linked to the question of limited opportunities available to the youngest generation.45 However, unlike many critics of the parochial education system, Daniels called not for its eradication but for reforms that would introduce the highest standards in usually less-than-rigorous Polish parochial schools.46 Similarly, he remained ambiguous about the question of ownership among Poles, the component of his investigation that he called “one of the most reliable tests of a people’s economic condition.” Meticulously listed and non-trivial values of property that Poles owned served as evidence that they aspired to become home and business owners. With around forty-five hundred houses and twelve hundred private businesses, however, the overall numbers made it clear that the rate of local Poles who owned property was still low.47 In his summary of Buffalo’s Polish quarters, Daniels highlighted Polish accomplishments but made it clear that most Poles did not fit in the American middle-class model of living. Echoing the tension between the idea of the greatness of American cities and the cities’ newest residents from Europe, he concluded that Polish migrants were “in the Buffalo community, but . . . not of it.”48 Daniels attempted to search for causes of that situation in the challenges that Poles faced, insisting on a correlation between the reported condition of Polish families and the overall economic opportunities available to them in Buffalo. He stressed that higher numbers of Poles relied on a local poor relief office’s support at times of economic crises. Unemployment among Poles correlated not only with global economic cycles but also with the pace of new arrivals: the unemployment rate grew with the higher numbers of newcomers in a given period. That, in turn, was linked to the situation of

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the housing market. Those who had no jobs naturally could not afford highstandard housing.49 Even when the Charity Organization Society reported that between October 1908 and March 1910 over 30 percent of all families who received its aid were Polish, Daniels noted that it was still a relatively small number, and most Polish families did not have to rely on charity.50 The investigation of wages also revealed why so many Poles in Buffalo simply continued to be poor. Among the workers inspected by Daniels’s team, an estimated 94 percent made less than a living wage.51 The fact that nearly 20 percent of the surveyed workers were women only intensified the issue, as women made on average half of what their male counterparts made.52 Finally, although Daniels confirmed that indeed a disproportionally high number of Poles appeared in local crime statistics, he also noted that the numbers were no evidence for an inherent ethnic flaw. Instead, he suggested examining the statistics in the context of all the discussed factors, most notably unemployment and low wages.53 Even the widely discussed and anxiety-provoking living conditions in Polish homes did not appall Daniels.54 Despite the evidence that overcrowding was real in Polish quarters, Daniels remained calm and concluded soberly, “These conditions are neither the worst nor the best. Worse conditions would be found.”55 This restrained assessment came at the time when dire living conditions in immigrant communities could not have shocked middleand upper-class Americans much. Most of them had seen Jacob Riis’s photographic record of New York City slums in Riis’s immensely influential How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890.56 For Daniels, the most extreme cases of overcrowding in Buffalo were thus not a reason to lament but evidence that the city’s housing market did not keep up with the needs of Buffalo’s residents. A cluster of “barracks,” built originally on Rich Street but “owing to protests from the residents” moved to Fillmore Avenue between Broadway and Lovejoy Street, served as living quarters for years, despite the fact that they were erected as a short-term temporary “shelter for the most needy.” Although houses in the Polish district emerged quickly, their cost, just like the cost of higher-standard rental spaces, was simply too much for most immigrants.57 To a certain extent, Daniels highlighted the logic of systemic poverty that many of his contemporaries refused to consider.58 The poor would not magically cease to be poor if everything that they were able to access, including jobs, wages, and homes, was designed for the poor. Yet Daniels’s awareness of the correlation between poverty-triggering environmental and economic factors and the immigrants’ lives did not eradicate his belief that

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the immigrants’ American experience was also determined by their European past. His team’s response to the complex picture of Poles in Buffalo resulted also from the familiar assumption that the newcomers could change their fate if they only stopped making what Daniels saw as choices rooted in Old World mentalities shaped by Old World poverty. Far from discarding the rhetoric of self-reliance and hard work, he proposed that poor Poles simply make all the right choices, even if under the limiting conditions that his reports revealed. Daniels’s education agenda was his proposed solution to most problems found in Polish households. Poor education, he suggested, was what stopped Poles from trying harder to battle their own poverty. American public education would eventually help Buffalo’s Poles understand that “their present living conditions [were] intolerable,” and that would help them “exert themselves far more actively than at present to better these conditions.”59 His language regarding the immigrants’ apathy, refusal to try, and bad decisions was only more powerful when juxtaposed with Daniels’s narrative of Polish success. All the home and business owners proved that getting out of poverty was possible, regardless of circumstances.60

First Poles in Buffalo Today The first generation of Buffalo’s Polish immigrants is weaved into the city’s history and mythology, but it is the built environment that most directly connects the present to those accused of dragging their European rural poverty into the great American city. The Polish immigrants who arrived in the Broadway-Fillmore area before 1914 left lasting marks on the neighborhood whose fortunes have mirrored the social and economic forces driving American society throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Few of the structures built by and for Buffalo’s pre-1914 Polish settlers are still used for their original purposes. Some no longer exist. Others have been repurposed and reused, although not a trivial number have been deteriorating, and their future remains unknown. Already in 1920, Florian Znaniecki and William Isaac Thomas identified churches to be the true centers of Polish experience in the United States.61 The Roman Catholic parishes attracted all Polish immigrants, regardless of their class status and even religion, as they offered all kinds of services and became sites of activities reaching far beyond the realm of religion.62 Saint Stanislaus, the oldest Polish church in Buffalo, completed in 1874, was initially a wooden structure, which the community’s leaders quickly found insufficient for the growing congregation. The original building was turned

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Figure 8.3  Workers in front of Edmund Hodkiewicz’s White Eagle Bakery at the corner of Broadway and Sobieski Street. The original Romanesque-style building with mansard roof was completed in 1906, and an additional section was added in 1912. Photographer unknown. Source: University at Buffalo Libraries, Digital Collections.

into a school and the residence of the parish’s leading priest and his assistants when the Romanesque church at Townsend and Peckham, designed by T. O. Sullivan, was erected in 1886.63 But this new imposing structure also turned out to be inadequate. Saint Adalbert Basilica at Stanislaus Street and Rother Avenue, designed by Raymond Huber; Saint John Kanty at Swinburne and

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Broadway; the German Gothic–style Church of the Transfiguration at Mills and Sycamore Streets, and Corpus Christi all accommodated the growing numbers of Roman Catholic parishioners in the 1890s, although the present Medina sandstone Romanesque building of Corpus Christi at Clark and Kent Streets designed by Schmill and Gould was not completed until 1909. Out of these, the Transfiguration remains empty and at risk of demolition, while

Figure 8.4  The original wooden building of the Church of Saint Stanislaus, the first Polish church in Buffalo. Photographer unknown. Source: University at Buffalo Libraries, Digital Collections.

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the four others still function as active yet much smaller parishes.64 Between 1891 and 1922, fifteen Polish congregations formed in Buffalo, and their locations reflected the expansion, mobility, and religious diversity of the Polish American settlement.65 Another egalitarian place where Poles of all social classes left a lasting mark was the Broadway Market. Opened formally in 1890 at 999 Broadway as an outdoor market housing vendors of different ethnic origins, it would become the Polish settlement’s absolute nucleus, the place where Buffalo’s newsmen reporting on the Polish community sought material and information.66 The market’s architectural history echoes various stages of Buffalo’s twentieth-century social history. The original building, designed by H. H. Little, was repeatedly altered and eventually demolished and replaced in 1956 by the current concrete structure at 981 Broadway, following designs by James, Meadows, and Howard. Little’s brick building, designed to match the aesthetics of the city at the end of the nineteenth century and placed at the heart of a booming neighborhood, turned into what one expert called “an uncompromisingly functional structure” in the middle of a neighborhood that the descendants of the original Polish settlers would leave but continued to see as the landscape of their near-mythical immigrant past.67

Figure 8.5  The Broadway Market at the beginning of the twentieth century. Photographer unknown. Source: University at Buffalo Libraries, Digital Collections.

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Even a fragmentary look at the legacy of Buffalo’s most prominent Polish American architect, Wladyslaw Zawadzki, illustrates this familiar story of too many American cities. Born in partitioned Poland in 1872, Zawadzki designed at least eighteen buildings in the Broadway-Fillmore area, ranging from religious and community institutions to commercial and industrial structures.68 Their fate today is yet another chapter in Buffalo’s larger story where revival, repurposing, and reuse happen in the shadow of deteriorating buildings whose future is undetermined. The Renaissance-style Dom Polski (1905–1906) at 1081 Broadway, renovated in the 1970s and restored in the early 2000s, is today a human services organization center, while the Polish Union Hall at 761–765 Fillmore Avenue is used for religious and community purposes.69 The brick building at 562 Fillmore, designed as a residence for the Felician Sisters who run the school at Saint Stanislaus, is still part of the parish, but it serves as the bishop’s residence.70 A bakery built for Edmund Hodkiewicz in 1906 and expanded in 1912 at Broadway and Sobieski Street is today Al Cohen’s Bakery, although the original three-story building has been dramatically altered.71 Similarly, the Polonia Hotel at 1067 Broadway, built in 1906 for Stanislaus Dengel, was first remodeled already in 1919 to accommodate the Broadway National Bank, and after further alterations the structure, still used as a commercial space, bears little resemblance to the original design. Finally, a number of structures designed by Zawadzki are currently empty, awaiting renovation and reuse. An incomplete list includes the Singing Circle Building at 1168–1170 Broadway, what was originally Wladyslaw Niebieszczanski’s bakery at 889 Broadway, and the Schreiber Brewing Company at 662 Fillmore Avenue, once the largest Polish business in the city.72 A comprehensive architectural picture of Buffalo as it connects to the city’s Polish American history is continuously changing and still waiting for its scholarly investigation. But the legacy of Polish Buffalonians preserved in the built environment remains as unexceptional in the city’s architectural history as their social history is in the larger narrative of migration and American nationhood. Just as the old Polish neighborhood and its buildings have shared the fate of many neighborhoods, the experience of Poles settling in Buffalo before the outbreak of World War I was no different from that of other immigrant groups coming from East Central and Southern Europe. And it is precisely this absence of exceptionality that makes this story so critical to the understanding of the experiments that the American city and the American nation were at the turn of the twentieth century. Their ambitions but also injustices and inequalities are part of a long, troubled history of American progress built upon the changing fortunes of some and

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continuous exclusion of others. By the 1920s, Poles as a collective would be seen as respectable Buffalonians, the kind that the city’s white American middle- and upper-class residents always wanted them to become.73 Their descendants, together with the descendants of other East Central and Southern European migrant groups, would follow in other white Americans’ footsteps and leave the neighborhood built by their forefathers. The Broadway-Fillmore area would eventually turn into Buffalo’s original Polish neighborhood without Polish Americans, as the latter joined other Americans of European descent to enjoy their complete inclusion in the American nation in racially demarcated suburbs.

Ch a p ter 9

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

Although separated by almost four hundred miles, Buffalo and New York City were literally connected with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Built to create a navigable east-west waterway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, the canal transformed New York into what became known as the Empire State during the nineteenth century. As the canal’s urban pivots, Buffalo and New York City were tied to cities of the East Coast and Great Lakes, midwestern farmlands, and Canadian, British, and European port cities. As a result, industries soon settled along the thriving waterfronts of both cities, making them prosperous centers for manufacturing as well as trade. Those seeking greater opportunities from across the country and around the world brought racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity to these two cities. Built on intertwined economies of shipping and manufacturing, this prosperity collapsed with the construction of the interstate highway system and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which together rendered the Erie Canal completely obsolete by the 1950s. Two decades later, Buffalo and New York City were still struggling to rebuild in the postindustrial era.1 Although it was the worst of times for most of their residents, it was the best of times for many young artists there. It was a truly Dickensian period for both Buffalo and New York City. These two cities experienced disasters, financial crises, derelict and abandoned buildings, collapsing infrastructure,

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social unrest, and political turmoil in the 1970s. But avant-garde art and artist communities also thrived in both cities during this decade. Given the political, economic, and demographic differences that separate upstate and downstate New York today, the strong exchanges and affinities between Buffalo and New York City avant-gardes during the 1970s are especially striking. As one Buffalo artist later described it, the cultural interactions between the two cities were then like an “import-export model.”2 In this chapter, I map the flows of artistic imports and exports created by Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and other artists at either end of New York State. The unlikely convergence of government support for avant-garde art and artists with declining real estate values in postindustrial Buffalo and New York made this cultural Erie Canal possible in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a convergence is wildly implausible today given the overheated art and real estate markets stoked by neoliberalism. While A. Joan Saab, in her “Lake Effect” chapter, covers some of the same figures (Matta-Clark, Longo, Sherman, and others) that I focus on here, she views them through her experiences of growing up in postindustrial Buffalo amid the environmental calamities of the 1977 blizzard there and Love Canal in nearby Niagara Falls. By contrast, my chapter focuses on institutions these artists built in both upstate and downstate New York by and for themselves. Like many other young people during the 1960s and 1970s, these artists became disillusioned with traditional programs of education, culture, and government. Matta-Clark shunned the conventional practice of architecture he had been trained for at Cornell. Instead he became a founder of “anarchitecture,” an interdisciplinary group committed to “anarchy + architecture.” Despite his avowed nihilism, Matta-Clark believed in building institutions. He was one of the founders of 112 Greene Street, an early artist cooperative gallery, and FOOD, an artist-run restaurant and performance space, in the postindustrial landscapes of downtown Manhattan. Although Longo and Sherman were art students at Buffalo State College, they spent more time and said they learned more at Hallwalls, the artist-run space they founded in Buffalo. While they remained embedded in avant-garde organizations in first upstate and then downstate New York, Matta-Clark tried to build institutions engaging with communities beyond his artistic circle in the last years of his life. The account that follows of upstate and downstate artist communities raises, I hope, larger issues about artists, urban renewal, and rights to the city that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s but still resonate almost half a century later in shrinking and exploding cities around the world.

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Tales of Two Cities Attracted by nonunion labor and inexpensive land tracts for modern automated factories, industrialists in Buffalo and New York City relocated to the suburbs and then to Sunbelt cities in the South and West during the postwar period. African Americans and Puerto Ricans who moved to Buffalo and New York City then found fewer and fewer well-paying jobs in a now decimated industrial sector. In 1950 the populations of Buffalo and New York were 580,000 and 7,812,000 respectively. Thirty years later, Buffalo’s population had plummeted to 358,000 and New York’s to 7,017,000. The losses would have been even greater had it not been for the new African American and Puerto Rican arrivals. But the population in each city grew older, poorer, and more unskilled. On the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, New York City was refused federal assistance by then President Gerald Ford, prompting the now infamous New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” As the tax base eroded, there were almost no funds to repair and maintain infrastructure. When sixty feet of New York City’s elevated West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, it was permanently closed rather than repaired. There were federal funds, however, for the construction of new freeways and interstate highways that devastated working-class communities, especially of color, and expedited the exodus of white residents to the suburbs surrounding Buffalo and New York City. While Buffalo was paralyzed by the blizzard of 1977, with snow drifts reaching thirty to forty feet, New York experienced looting and rioting after the citywide blackout of that same year.3 These two disasters reinforced the stigmatization of Buffalo and New York as failed cities. While Buffalo and New York City struggled to finance basic municipal services, there were, paradoxically, public monies available for the arts during the 1960s and 1970s. Before Nelson Rockefeller served as governor of New York between 1958 and 1973, he was a patron of modern art like his mother, a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. Despite his own philanthropy, Rockefeller believed the arts needed public funding if they were to thrive and become accessible. In 1960 he was instrumental in creating the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the first such public arts agency in the United States. Modeled after NYSCA, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal agency, was founded five years later. During their first two decades, both NYSCA and NEA were unusual for their enthusiastic support of experimental art, music, media, and performance. To ensure political support for these programs, the two agencies required grants be decentralized and widely dispersed. Thus upstate as well as downstate artists in New York received monies to create new works and organize alternative

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spaces to traditional galleries, museums, and theaters. Artists also qualified for public service jobs funded by the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) enacted by the Nixon administration in 1973.4 Matta-Clark, Sherman, and Longo all received such public support for their work, as did organizations like Artpark outside Buffalo. The latter was an innovative residency program that brought working artists together with the public in a 172-acre state park along the Niagara gorge. As Jody Pinto, an artistin-residence at Artpark for the 1975 season, later said, “Most people don’t realize what the 70s were like. . . . To be given $300 and an extraordinary site in which to experiment was absolutely unheard of.”5 Like the Works Progress Administration programs that employed painters, photographers, musicians, and writers during the Great Depression, state and federal agencies created another golden age for New York State arts and artists amid the social and economic crises of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Upstate and Downstate Matta-Clark knew upstate New York well. After receiving an architecture degree from Cornell in 1968, he stayed on for another year in Ithaca, a turning point for him. In 1969 the so-called Earth artists created temporary installations at sites on the Cornell campus and around Ithaca. Matta-Clark volunteered to assist Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Hans Haacke, and other artists. Here he learned to appreciate rock and earth as well as salt and rope as materials for making art. Earth art involved hard physical and sometimes dangerous work with tools like shovels, pickaxes, and backhoes. Such art came off the pristine white walls of galleries and museums and into spaces of everyday life. Equally important was the mentoring Smithson and Oppenheim provided for Matta-Clark once he returned to New York City in 1969.6 Before he left Ithaca, however, Matta-Clark created his first installations there: a rope bridge suspended over an Ithaca creek; and large, plastic sleeves inflated with an industrial vacuum. While one inflation took place on campus, the other snaked its way through the colonial revival house of LeGrace Benson, his art history professor and early supporter. A single photograph published in the campus newspaper depicts the former, but the latter project was never documented. Benson later recalled that Matta-Clark and his friends were so amazed the inflation actually worked that they forgot to photograph it, in spite of all the camera equipment they brought.7 Matta-Clark never made that mistake again; thereafter he assiduously documented his ephemeral projects through films, photographs, and photo collages.

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Apart from the artistic upheaval the Earth Art exhibit brought to Cornell, there was also social and political turmoil during Matta-Clark’s years on campus. Tense protests against racism and the war in Vietnam drew both students and faculty members. Photographs, reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the world, of African American students with guns and bandoliers leaving the student union they had occupied made Cornell infamous. Matta-Clark was well acquainted with leftist politics and activism by way of his father Roberto Matta, the Chilean architect and painter. During the 1960s, the University at Buffalo was roiled by the same issues of racism and Vietnam. Campus sit-ins and demonstrations so alarmed university administrators that they summoned police to arrest protesters. Issues of racism, displacement, homelessness, and environmental degradation were soon to engage Matta-Clark as both artist and activist. Back in New York City, he became involved in a boycott of the São Paulo Biennial to protest the military dictatorship’s censorship of entries and imprisonment of artists, musicians, and architects in Brazil.8 Although inspired by the Earth artists at Cornell, Matta-Clark did not share their love for working in remote and isolated sites. Instead, his interest, he said, was “how to extend a real environmental situation into something that’s more accessible for people.” Thus he worked in New York City, Paris, Genoa, and Antwerp, making the derelict urban fabric of these cities the very medium of his art. However, he was not done with upstate New York after Cornell. Several years later he wanted to use a grant for “a work in the rapidly disappearing nineteenth-century canal and railroad towns of upper New York . . . as well as Albany-Syracuse-Buffalo etc.”9 Although this project came to naught, he did return to upstate New York for his Bingo project and Artpark residency during the summer of 1974. Sited in the city of Niagara Falls (just outside Buffalo and near the Erie Canal), Bingo involved cutting into and removing sections of a house slated to be demolished for urban renewal. Opposed to such demolition and displacement, Matta-Clark tried to make these neighborhoods visible and eventually even viable again through his artistic interventions. Matta-Clark had firsthand experience of urban renewal. He grew up in a New York City apartment just north of Houston Street. His building and others in the neighborhood were demolished for the southward expansion of the New York University campus. Thus he identified with the estimated half a million New Yorkers, primarily poor and working class, displaced from their homes and communities for postwar urban renewal projects. Many became homeless because there was no plan for providing them with affordable replacement housing.10

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He faced a housing problem once again when he returned to New York City in 1969. Several years later he recalled a city where “artists were constantly confronted with their own housing needs. . . [and] raw, uninhabitable spaces constantly had to be transformed into studios or exhibition areas.”11 Since the 1950s and 1960s artists had colonized lofts and warehouses in moribund industrial districts of downtown New York. Because they were illegally living and working in buildings zoned for manufacturing, their lives were precarious, and their homes and studios were at risk. If discovered by municipal officials, they were subject to immediate eviction. In 1968, however, working artists and performers were legally allowed to occupy buildings in this postindustrial landscape.12 Matta-Clark shared a cast-iron loft with his friend and fellow artist Charles Simonds on Chrystie Street in Soho, the acronym for the area south of Houston Street. Putting his architectural education to good use, Matta-Clark earned a living by renovating lofts into homes and studios for his friends. These young artists, dancers, musicians, and filmmakers also needed community spaces for exhibitions, performances, and simply socializing. In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark, Jeffrey Lew, Carol Gooden, and others created artist-run alternative spaces like FOOD, a restaurant and performance space, and 112 Greene Street, a cooperative gallery.13 At a time when many architects, planners, and public officials advocated razing these postindustrial neighborhoods for urban renewal, Matta-Clark and his

Figure 9.1  Gordon Matta-Clark, “Matta-Clark installing Wallspaper at 112 Greene Street, 1972.” Credit: © 2017 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 9.2  Hallwalls founders in the courtyard of the Essex Street Ice-Packing Plant, Buffalo, 1974. Source: Hallwalls Collection, the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo.

friends saw their potential for art and community. The Soho they created soon became a template for young experimental artists in postindustrial Buffalo. During the 1960s, Governor Rockefeller committed substantial public funds to improve and expand the state university system. The University

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at Buffalo became the crown jewel of the system, attracting students and faculty from across the state and world. Along with his funding for the arts, Rockefeller’s support for public higher education helped lay the foundations for the avant-garde in Buffalo. Known as the “Berkeley of the East,” the University at Buffalo became a center for radical experimentation in media, literature, and politics in the 1960s and 1970s.14 Drawn by this community, Charles Clough, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman all came to study in Buffalo. In 1974 they founded Hallwalls in a former ice-packing warehouse on Buffalo’s West Side. Here they lived, worked, socialized, exhibited, and performed, like Matta-Clark and friends in Soho.

Bingo and Artpark The artist’s photograph that Matta-Clark chose to accompany his project Bingo in the Artpark publication for 1974 shows him sitting on a rubble pile next to an abandoned tenement. The location is the Bronx, where he cut and removed sections of the walls, floors, and ceilings of another condemned tenement for his Bronx Floors: Threshole (1972). The boarded-up tenement awaiting demolition in his photograph for Artpark is juxtaposed with a modern high-rise apartment in the background. In a 1977 interview, Matta-Clark explained why he was attracted to sites devastated by urban renewal: The first thing that has to be considered is the fact that I grew up in New York in this kind of environment. As the City evolved in the Fifties and Sixties into a completely architecture International Style steel and glass megalopolis, by contrast, great areas of what had been residential were being abandoned. These areas were being left as demoralizing reminders of “Exploit it or Leave It.” It is the prevalence of the wasteland phenomena that drew me to it. I couldn’t help but feel for the claustrophobic, cluttered rooms, stinking hallways, burned out and windowless environment that, in an abandoned condition, still reverberated with the miseries of ghetto life.15 Garbage Wall (1970) was his first project to deal with homelessness. Installed in the Mad Max landscape of trash, junked cars, and homeless encampments around the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage, it was a wall of trash secured with tar, plaster, and chicken wire. This project, he hoped, would inspire the homeless living there in makeshift shelters to build with materials more substantial than cardboard. Reincarnated as Homesteading: an Exercise in Curbside Living, first in the East Village and then at 112 Greene Street, the

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garbage wall became an enclosure where Matta-Clark “performed” everyday domestic activities.16 In 1974 he persuaded Horace Solomon, husband of gallery dealer Holly Solomon, to let him cut through a house Solomon owned in Englewood, New Jersey, for the project Splitting. It was awaiting demolition for “suburban renewal” after the African American residents, who had worked for Englewood’s wealthy families, had been evicted.17 Using electric saws he and his assistant Manfred Hecht made two parallel cuts through the middle of this wooden house, jacked up half the building, cut away part of its foundation, and then lowered the house down to deepen the cuts. As two white artists working in communities of color, Matta-Clark and Hecht were met with suspicion and hostility. In an interview while he was working on Bingo in Niagara Falls, Matta-Clark stated that in “New York people have accused me of using their electricity for my tools or stealing stuff from the building.” He described the working conditions for Bronx Floors: Threshole as “always the most adverse that I can remember. We were not only stopped by the police on several occasions, but also by roving gangs from the neighborhood. There was always an acute sense of paranoia that accompanied this work.” Surely matters did not improve when Matta-Clark showed up with white friends from Soho on a “field trip” to troop through the South Bronx tenement and New Jersey house he had appropriated for his building cuts.18 African Americans and Puerto Ricans had good cause to resent Matta-Clark and his friends. They were white outsiders like the politicians, architects, and planners who had devised urban renewal projects that devastated neighborhoods of color. These programs were really about “Negro removal,” in the words of writer and activist James Baldwin.19

Bingo, Artpark, and Audiences in Upstate New York Matta-Clark was the only Artpark artist who chose an urban site, a gritty downtown neighborhood in Niagara Falls, rather than the bucolic setting of the state park. In contrast to his experiences in the South Bronx and New Jersey, Matta-Clark was surprised at just how pleasant working in Niagara Falls was for him and his crew. As an Artpark artist, he was guaranteed funding, assistants, and logistical support. The staff at the urban renewal agency in Niagara Falls helped locate the red house on Erie Avenue that he deemed “perfect” for his project. Even the demolition company, hired to tear down the house, “liked the novelty of the idea,” according to Matta-Clark. Despite his distance from the park, his project seemed to fulfill Artpark’s official purpose of artists and the public “having fun together . . . to offset the fragmentation and depersonalization of the urban environment.”20

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Although better known as a destination for honeymooners, Niagara Falls had been a center for manufacturing since the late nineteenth century. Chemical, steel, and processed-food factories had located there because of abundant and inexpensive electricity generated by the nearby falls. Still visible in a photograph of the red wooden house Matta-Clark cut for Bingo are the concrete grain silos of the Shredded Wheat cereal company.21 The collapse of the city’s power plant into the Niagara River, along with widespread industrial pollution, precipitated the exodus of manufacturers like Shredded Wheat in the late 1950s. Like Buffalo and New York City, Niagara Falls underwent a devastating deindustrialization. Tourism, the local economy’s other engine, was decimated in the 1960s. Then a new parkway (planned by and named after Robert Moses) rerouted traffic away from the downtown and blocked pedestrian access to the falls. At the same time, on the Canadian side, which always had the best views of the falls, new hotels and casinos were under construction. Matta-Clark got the Erie Avenue house for his Bingo project because it was slated for demolition as part of downtown’s urban renewal. Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s conference and convention center, completed in 1974, destroyed most of the downtown’s historic core and further cut it off from the falls. The convention center proved too large and expensive to manage and maintain, and it failed to attract the tourists and conventioneers Niagara Falls was counting on to revive the economy.22

Figure 9.3  Gordon Matta-Clark, “Bingo Project, Niagara Falls, New York, 1974.” Credit: © 2017 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Bingo, originally called “Been-Gone by Ninth,” involved cutting and removing eight sections (each measuring five feet by nine feet) from the house’s northern façade. The name came from its resemblance to a bingo playing card. In the film shot to document the project, Matta-Clark and his assistants strain to lower the sections by pulley to the ground. The camera wanders away from their efforts to peer through windows, doors, and the cut sections. Here the debris, vacant lots, and demolition workers around the house come into view. These scenes prepare us for the denouement, the bulldozer’s arrival, delayed until the next morning, allowing Matta-Clark to complete the removal of all eight sections. Clawing clumsily at the house and one remaining section of Matta-Clark’s nine-square grid (his disdainful poke at the formalist design device then and still taught to Cornell architects), the bulldozer is a toylike predator in the film, nonetheless reducing the house to dust and splinters in thirty-five minutes. Five of the surviving eight façade pieces were encased in plastic, packed in wooden crates, and then transported to a site along the Niagara River at Artpark, where, MattaClark wrote, they were “judiciously dumped and with the forces of natural reclamation . . . became eternally mysterious remnants of an elaborate celebration of abandonment.”23 The three remaining sections of Bingo are now in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Because Bingo was not at Artpark, there were probably fewer tourists who found their way to his site in downtown Niagara Falls. In an interview with a local reporter, Matta-Clark referred to the local residents who watched him work. While some reminisced about the house’s former occupants, he said, others admired the building materials, “when 2 x 4’s were still really 2 x 4’s.” Matta-Clark was unsure, he told the reporter, if Bingo should be called a work of art. However, he was certain that his project was about buildings and changing the way people see them.24 Watching Matta-Clark struggle to dismantle the solidly built Bingo house, visitors may have responded like Robert Stackpole’s “man in the Budweiser hat.” The latter was a builder who came away with a “new sense of importance and appreciation for what he did” after seeing Stackpole erect a wooden A-frame structure at Artpark in 1977. Both artists may have made some working-class visitors feel pride for what they had once built in a now-struggling postindustrial New York.

Hallwalls: Decentralizing the Avant-Garde The summer of 1974, when Matta-Clark worked on Bingo, was the inaugural year of Artpark’s artist residency program. That same year, Charles Clough and Robert Longo founded Hallwalls on Buffalo’s West Side. While Longo

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was from downstate, on Long Island, Clough was born in Buffalo. Along with Cindy Sherman, who was originally from New Jersey, they were all studying art in Buffalo. Hallwalls was only a thirty-minute walk from Buffalo State College, where Longo and Sherman were enrolled. Unlike their conventional academic programs at Buffalo State, Hallwalls was a laboratory where these young artists experimented with art, media, performance, and community. The name Hallwalls came from the small and interconnected hallways outside their studios used for exhibitions. Ronald Ehmke, a Hallwalls artist and historian, said it was “not simply a place to see or present art, it’s a school, a social circle, an adopted family.” While the building was rather dilapidated, the founders of Hallwalls had great ambitions for it and themselves. “The Essex Street complex was cold and, I thought a bit shabby,” another artist, Donna Jordan Dusel, recalled, “but the dedication of the students who ran literally everything there was overwhelming. The very early Hallwalls with its tiny hallway space was the most ‘New York-like gallery’ that Buffalo had to offer.”25 Some of the early Hallwalls artists had been “art rangers” at Artpark, where they assisted artists and interacted with visitors. Equally important was what Clough and Longo learned about grant writing and fund-raising at Artpark. The two men also visited 112 Greene Street and Artists Space, another alternative space run for and by artists in Soho. As early as 1972, NYSCA and the NEA had funded alternative spaces in New York City and Buffalo. Beginning in 1978, CETA federal grants made it possible for Hallwalls to pay staff and create community arts programs across Buffalo. Another advantage to its upstate location, Clough claimed, was Hallwalls could not be as strictly monitored as its sister alternative spaces in New York City.26 Moreover, “because people weren’t making any money . . . and nobody expected you to be successful [in Buffalo],” as Sherman noted, she had greater freedom to experiment than in New York City. Given the number of studio art graduates being produced by colleges and universities during the 1960s and 1970s, commercial galleries and traditional museums were in no position to exhibit their work, even if they had been willing to risk showing young and untried artists. While public funding supported these alternative spaces, urban renewal and postindustrial buildings in Buffalo and New York City provided affordable real estate.27 With an eye to funding agencies, the Hallwalls founders stated their purpose as the creation of “effective lines of communication between arts centers. . . [to] inform artists of recent developments outside those covered in the Arts journals, allow for coordination and possible co-sponsorship of visiting artists and critics, and provide assistance for organizational problems that

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develop.”28 More simply put, what the Hallwalls artists wanted, Clough said, was “to hang out with the heroes. . . [and] the amazing thing was the heroes were willing to come” to Buffalo. Based on their visits to 112 Greene Street and Artists Space and reading of Artforum and Avalanche, Clough and Longo invited Robert Irwin, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Michael Snow, Irving Sandler, and Lucy Lippard in Hallwalls’ first year alone. Speaking later of Irwin’s visit, Longo said: “He stayed with us for two days, and basically lectured us about art and about making an alternative space and getting grants. It was an incredible shot in the arm. . . . He made us believe we could, so we started writing grants, which was completely bizarre for us but amazingly we got them . . . but luck and context are amazingly important.”29 Part of that luck was also an art world not yet awash in money and celebrity. There was then, Clough noted, “an impoverished sensibility—hitchhiking, nomadism, and a not-so-worldliness were commonplace, such that the artists who came didn’t have any expectations of fancy hotels and such. . . [they] saw it as some kind of recognition and a way to get their work out.”30 Although Matta-Clark never spoke at Hallwalls, his work Pier 18 (1971) was shown there in a 1978 exhibit about photography of ephemeral artwork. Harry Shunk’s photograph of Pier 18, part of New York City’s crumbling infrastructure along the Hudson River, showed Matta-Clark suspended upside down from a ceiling rafter over an evergreen tree. With one leg tied to a rope, he resembled the Tarot card’s Hanging Man. The latter, a symbol of rebellion and transition, surely made Matta-Clark one of Hallwalls’ “heroes.”31 He and the Hallwalls founders also shared a fascination with postindustrial wastelands. In the 1970s, radical art and performance, along with punk music, Longo observed later, “all kind of happened in dying cities. Buffalo was one of those dying cities.” Today postindustrial grit is a chic commodity hawked for Sephora’s line of “Urban Decay” eye shadow. But during the 1970s in Buffalo, Longo said, it “wasn’t so much an appeal, as it was a presence . . . the factories, the old defunct warehouses, the downtown that felt like a ghost town, the grand old train station with only one track in use, there was a kind of funky shittiness about Buffalo.” Also important for a young artist then, he emphasized, there was “nothing interesting there [in Buffalo] except to make our own stuff.”32 Matta-Clark’s films, photographs, installations, and performances resonated with the early work Clough, Longo, and Sherman created and exhibited in Buffalo. Reminiscent of Matta-Clark and his performance of everyday living for Homesteading, Longo and Sherman collaborated with their fellow Buffalo State students Philip Malkin and Richard Zucker to create 3 Ring Circus (1975). Its centerpiece was a “living room environment/installation.” At

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the opening Sherman channeled Rose Scaleci (one of what became her many female avatars) there for tea and talk. While Rose was chosen to honor Buffalo’s large Italian-American community, Scaleci was a variation on Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy. The artists occupied traditional furniture arranged in the circle of a pretelevision living room. Here the focus was on food, hospitality, and conversation between the artists and gallery visitors. The essentials of the Hallwalls experience were now displaced to a Buffalo State College gallery with 3 Ring Circus. As Sarah Evans observes, the gallery is not a showcase for art but the site for exchanging ideas about art in real time.33 Moreover, Matta-Clark and Sherman blurred the boundaries between installation and performance. While he “performed” acts of cutting and removing for the camera in films like Bingo, she installed hundreds of small photographs of herself as various female archetypes from a play she had written for a 1976 work at Hallwalls. Just as Matta-Clark sliced into the walls of a Bronx tenement and New Jersey house, Clough cut and carved into the walls of Hallwalls. In his I Wear the Wall (1976), he embedded photographs and then merged them into the brick or sheetrock by painting the edges where the images met the walls.34 Despite these affinities, Longo, Sherman, and Clough were a different generation from Matta-Clark. Although his work rejected modern architecture’s

Figure 9.4  Robert Longo, Philip Malkin, and Richard Zucker, 3 Ring Circus, 1975. Source: Hallwalls Collection, the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo.

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formalism, his social idealism and geometrical cuts opening buildings up to light and air still spoke to the social and aesthetic concerns of early twentieth-century art and architectural avant-gardes. Born in the 1950s, the Hallwalls artists were too young to have experienced the social and political crucibles of the 1960s that shaped Matta-Clark. Turning inward, they focused on creating art and community for themselves; they never really engaged with the mean streets of Buffalo and its residents outside Hallwalls. Known as postmodern artists and the “pictures generation” by the late 1970s and early 1980s Longo and Sherman appropriated the popular cultures of movies, television, and advertising in media-centric works. Longo’s enameled panels of Hollywood heroes and Sherman’s black-and-white photographs casting herself as stereotypical female characters from B movies brought them early critical acclaim and financial success. While Matta-Clark used film and photography to create and document, popular culture did not really enthrall him except for the silent films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and the young graffiti artists then tagging the city.35

Artists, Urban Renewal, and Rights to the City “We wanted to bring in whatever we were interested in,” Clough later said of the Hallwalls “import/export” idea, “whatever we thought was cool. You sniff it out, you go find it, you eat it, and then you ARE it. Culture consumption.”36 Although Clough and Sherman did discuss how they could become part of the New York City art world and still live and work in Buffalo, they along with Longo soon left Buffalo and Hallwalls behind. Longo and Sherman, then a couple, “exported” themselves to New York City after the Buffalo blizzard of 1977. And Clough followed them the year after.37 The downtown art scene that Matta-Clark and his fellow artists created changed dramatically, too, after the mid-1970s. Because they had made Soho exciting and alluring, it acquired a certain cachet as early as 1971. FOOD, 112 Greene, and Artists Space began to attract outsiders from north of Houston Street. City officials and real estate developers took note of these migrations to Soho. And eventually they embraced the once-illegal conversion of postindustrial spaces as a development strategy for generating new wealth. When this happened, artists and artist communities began to be displaced. Troubled by this invasion, Matta-Clark left Soho for East Twentieth Street. Yet his own position was rather complicated because he was himself a Soho landlord. Using funds from his father, he purchased Soho lofts for himself and his brother and rented out others through his Table Top Realty company.38

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Matta-Clark’s attitudes about art and community changed in the four years between Bingo and his death from cancer in 1978. His experiences in Niagara Falls had been very different in atmosphere and working conditions from Bronx Floors or Splitting. The Bingo project was supported by the municipality and Artpark; and Matta-Clark even enjoyed his interactions with demolition workers and local residents who visited the Erie Avenue site. A 1975 encounter with young communists occupying an abandoned factory in an industrial suburb of Milan, Italy, made him think further about his art and community. The Italians he met in Milan demanded the factory there be repurposed as a community center rather than razed for a high-rise commercial development. In his application for a Guggenheim fellowship, MattaClark wrote that “my goal is to extend the Milan [factory] experience to the U.S., especially to neglected areas of New York.” Here he proposed working with Hispanic community activists on the Lower East Side, to build with and for them a resource center and environmental program. He categorized the proposed project as an “alternative space,” constructed from the all-tooplentiful abandoned and derelict buildings there. “The young Lower East Siders would gain “practical information about how buildings are made,” Matta-Clark wrote, envisioning “the real possibility of transforming their space. . . [into] an informal school of the streets.” Instead of being done in “artistic isolation,” Matta-Clark continued, his work “would no longer be concerned with just personal or metaphoric treatment of the site, but finally responsive to the express will of its occupants.” He reached out to Lower East Side community activists, and perhaps because he spoke some Spanish, his father’s mother tongue, they did not treat him as an outsider. Moreover, the Lower East Side’s “lived-in streets, homes, and a healthy dose of fantasy” reminded him of the Soho that was now vanishing. Matta-Clark died before he could really begin work on the Lower East Side project. The only traces of it that survive are a handful of sketches, letters, and the Guggenheim application.39 The New York City Matta-Clark had known was undergoing profound changes in the mid-seventies. A public finance corporation, appointed by the state legislature in 1975, now monitored the city’s finances and raised municipal funds through the bond market. Composed of bankers, executives, and public officials, it also persuaded corporations not to relocate their headquarters to the suburbs or Sunbelt cities. Based on media, banking, and finance, a new service-sector economy took root and rapidly grew. Elected mayor in 1978, Ed Koch was a new kind of Democratic politician who saw government’s chief purpose as facilitating private profits, especially in real estate, instead of redistributing wealth and providing social services. Koch

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was especially astute about the monetary potential of the arts and arts organizations for New York City. Realizing that artists like Matta-Clark had laid the groundwork for Soho’s gentrification, he urged, in his first inaugural address, other young “urban pioneers” to come east and “grow up with the city of New York.” During his three terms as mayor, Koch increased funding for the city departments of parks and cultural affairs because of their importance to his urban redevelopment strategy.40 When the Buffalo Hallwalls artists arrived in New York City, the art market there was also rebounding. Artists Space, which had inspired Hallwalls, gave Longo and Sherman their first exhibitions in New York City. And when one of its curators decided the time was ripe for a commercial gallery, Metro Pictures, Sherman and Longo became (and still are) two of its most important and successful artists. Abandoning the installation and performance works they had made at Hallwalls, Sherman and Longo now returned, Evans notes, to more “conventional media, object-making, and figuration.”41 However, their fascination with imagery from popular culture persisted and found favor with collectors from New York City’s now thriving media economies. Championed by postmodern critics Hal Foster and Douglas Crimp and ensconced in the commercial art world, Longo and Sherman were well positioned to ride out the cultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Funding for the arts underwent a sea change then when Ronald Reagan brought neoliberal policies like Koch’s into the White House. Unlike Koch, however, Reagan did not spare the arts but slashed their public funding, too. In 1981 the Reagan administration abolished the CETA program that had funded artists and their alternative spaces in Buffalo, New York City, and elsewhere. Rightwing senators like Jesse Helms of North Carolina launched an all-out war on avant-garde artists and alternative spaces supported by state and federal monies during the 1960s and 1970s.42 When gentrification engulfed Soho, pushing the artists and gallerists out, they decamped to first the East Village and then Chelsea. Eventually rising rents and prices there pushed them further out to the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Now the communities they created did not simply rejuvenate postindustrial areas as they had in Soho or Chelsea. Artists became complicit in the process of destroying poor and workingclass communities, usually of color, in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn for redevelopment as high-end residential and commercial properties. Today the exodus of young and usually white artists to the South Bronx where Matta-Clark worked in the 1970s has put yet another community of color at risk of displacement and dispossession. Desperate to revive their economies and neighborhoods, rust belt cities have eagerly embraced the gospel of

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gentrification facilitated by the creative classes and the IT sector and spread by urban theorists and consultants like Richard Florida since the mid-1970s.43 New York not only came back in the 1980s, but it also became the model for global cities built on economies of media, consumption, real estate, technology, and the arts. The downside, which even Florida recognizes now, is increasing displacement, homelessness, and sharper divides between not only the rich and poor but now the rich and middle class.44

Buffalo Redux at Last? Buffalo has yet to experience New York City’s resurrection. It is still struggling with the after-effects of deindustrialization from the 1970s. The state university at Buffalo could have provided a foundation for new media, medical, and technology economies as early as the 1960s. Spearheaded by African American architect Robert Coles, a group of downtown professionals and business leaders lobbied in 1966 for a new four-hundred-acre campus in downtown Buffalo along the waterfront. However, the university president, an urban planner, rejected the proposal, saying “my principal concern must be the future of the University, not the future of downtown Buffalo.” Leaving the city behind, the new campus moved to the suburbs. Buffalo’s politicians were as inept and shortsighted as its university administrators. Part of the old-time Democratic machine, they were ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of a postindustrial city. James Griffin, Buffalo mayor from 1974 until 1994, saw no economic potential in the city’s arts and media. “Well they have got this one thing in Buffalo—‘Hallways’ [sic],” he said. “To me that’s strictly trash that they put out.”45 And New York State never considered setting up a municipal assistance corporation to resurrect Buffalo as it did for New York City in 1975. Today the upstate avant-garde of Buffalo’s Hallwalls and other organizations there have survived because of sweat equity invested by new generations of artists drawn by the city’s vibrant arts scene and still affordable real estate. During the 1980s and 1990s Hallwalls became a less white and less heterosexual community as its artists engaged with race, gender, and identity politics in their work. Beginning in 1978 it created art programs for residents in community centers across the city, until CETA was ended in 1981. Today Governor Andrew Cuomo is investing a billion dollars in tourism, computerized manufacturing, and renewable energy technologies to rejuvenate Buffalo’s economy. Bringing the city back would serve Cuomo well with rust belt voters if he ever runs for higher office. Equally important is the University at Buffalo’s return to downtown with its opening of new schools for medicine and biomedicine there in late 2017.46

Figure 9.5.  Dennis Maher, interior view, Assembly House 150, Buffalo, 2017. Source: Charles Alaimo and Dennis Maher

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Dennis Maher, a Cornell architecture graduate and Hallwalls artist, has worked in Buffalo since 1999. He has filled the Fargo House, which he saved from demolition, with his elegant assemblages of objects and materials salvaged from the city’s waste stream. Although a collector and accumulator, he also opens up the house with cuts through its walls, floors, and ceilings. He has invited building-trades people to create art and exhibit alongside his own work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His Assembly House, a deaccessioned church, is a place for community choirs and experimental art and architecture. Maher began a training program in building crafts and construction skills for students referred by the city’s social services department at Assembly House in 2017.47 Maher dislikes being compared to Matta-Clark. But his collaborations with the community to ensure public welfare are as important as corporate welfare for Buffalo’s redevelopment and would make Matta-Clark feel at home in the upstate avant-garde of today.

Ch a p ter 1 0

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

In the summer of 2012, while visiting my parents in my hometown of Buffalo, New York, I walked over to the nearby Albright-Knox Art Gallery. On view was a show marking the museum’s 150th anniversary. Titled Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s, the exhibition celebrated a time in the city’s history when, as Branden Joseph announced, writing in Artforum, “Buffalo must have seemed the center of the avant-garde world.” Joseph continued: “Not even in Manhattan could you find celebrated structural filmmakers Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits rubbing shoulders with Morton Feldman and John Cage; catch outdoor installations by Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, and Gordon Matta-Clark; drive through sound art by Max Neuhaus; and encounter soon-to-be-dubbed ‘Pictures’ artists Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo.”1 Similarly, Carol Strickland, writing of the moment in Art in America, described the 1970s in Buffalo as “a decade in which the city played a seminal role in the development of contemporary art.”2 The Albright-Knox’s director, Louis Grachos, used similarly exalted language in his preface to the exhibition catalog to describe the 1970s in Buffalo. For Grachos it was a significant moment . . . when the City of Good Neighbors, increasingly known for its resourcefulness and its collaborative spirit in the face of economic hardship, became a creative hub and incubator for 213

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the art world’s newest ideas. It was a time of intensely spirited innovation and exploration, when the world of visual and performing arts broke through the white cube of the museum space and the traditional formality of concert auditoriums into the outdoor landscape and alternative spaces in unlikely neighborhoods.3 Indeed, as Tony Conrad recalled at the time of the exhibition, “I could have been in New York City, but it was almost the same thing to be in Buffalo. . . . In fact there were things that were better, because of the funding resources, and the animated spirit of the young people in our program and other places in the city.” Bill Viola, who visited Buffalo frequently in the 1970s, echoed Conrad. “Everybody managed to go through Buffalo,” he said. “It was kind of the mecca.”4 As I walked through room after room of the sprawling exhibition, I marveled at many of the pieces on display—works I had seen elsewhere and had studied in my art history classes in college (and now teach in my own visual culture survey classes). I passed by Cindy Sherman’s early portraits and films, installations by Vito Acconci and Gilbert and George, and experimental works by Conrad, Bruce Nauman, and Paul Sharits—to name just a few. Despite the familiarity of the space—less than a half a mile from my parents’ house—the history on display was not the history of the city with which I was familiar. My Buffalo in the 1970s was not the avant-garde mecca described by Viola and Conrad. Thus, the realization that all this had happened almost literally in my backyard was a bit unnerving. The 2012 show took its name from a work created by the artist Diane Bertolo during the devastating blizzard of ’77, a massive storm that hit the city hard from January 28 to February 1, 1977. Buffalo was no stranger to snowstorms. Its location on the southeast end of Lake Erie made it susceptible to regular lake-effect accumulation, a phenomenon that occurs as cold, dry air coming from Canada picks up moisture and heat as it passes over the relatively warm Lake Erie. But a chance combination of factors made this particular event extraordinary. The winter of 1976–1977 had already been brutal. That January was the coldest month on record, and it recently had snowed for twenty-eight days straight. According to local meteorologist Ed Reich, when the blizzard began at 5:00 a.m. on the twenty-eighth, it seemed like just another early morning snow flurry. But by 11:35 a.m., dark clouds gathered, and lightning began to flash across the sky. The wind shifted and began to blow in gusts that measured up to seventy miles per hour in some places, causing widespread whiteout conditions. Reich recalled, “My reaction? ‘Wow!’ It was the most dramatic storm I ever saw.”5

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Figure 10.1  Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York, guarded by two military police personnel enforcing the driving ban during the blizzard of ’77. Source: Buffalo Stories Archives / Steve Cicho.

The city came to a virtual standstill. On Saturday the twenty-ninth, The Buffalo Courier-Express, for the first time in 143 years, did not publish the morning edition of its daily paper. The Buffalo Braves basketball and the Buffalo Sabres hockey teams postponed their professional games. Factories and retail stores closed (and they would remain closed for days). School was canceled, mail was suspended, and at the Buffalo Zoo over twenty animals died, and twelve reindeer climbed over the snowdrifts and out of their cages to wander the empty streets. President Carter declared seven western New York counties federal disaster areas, the first time ever for a snowstorm in the United States. The federal government took over snow-removal operations and deployed over five hundred national guardsmen as well as countless volunteers with snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive vehicles in the effort. After a few days, members of the US Army were called in from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to assist the national guard in digging out the city and its residents. The costs to the city were enormous. Snow removal alone exceeded $20 million. Twenty-nine people died from snow-related issues (many of them froze to death in their buried cars), and numerous business and automobiles were robbed—over one hundred people were arrested for looting. The

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psychic toll on the city was also great. Images of buried homes and vehicles filled national and international papers and news broadcasts for days, cementing for decades to follow Buffalo’s reputation as the snow capital of the world. Rather than close in the face of the catastrophic storm, the alternative-art space Hallwalls instead hosted a Snow Show, which contained snow-related works by fifty-five artists.

Figure 10.2.  Snow Show flyer, Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York. Source: Hallwalls Collection, the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo.

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Hallwalls had opened three years earlier, in 1974, on Buffalo’s West Side when a group of young artists, including Bertolo, as well as Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Longo, Larry (LP) Lundy, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack, formed an exhibition space from the walls in the halls outside their studios in a former icehouse. Their primary goal was to provide a space to show new work by emerging local artists (including themselves); but they also wanted to provide opportunities for artistic exchanges between Buffalo and artists in other cities and regularly invited visiting artists to give talks or create installations, and organized exchange shows with similar spaces in other cities. The Snow Show included a multimedia opera, Buffalo Is an Island, by Tony Conrad, Paul Lemberg, and Robert Longo, as well as four nights of film and video screenings. Bertolo’s contribution was an oversize wall painting of a postcard with text that read, “Having a wonderful time . . . wish you were here!” emblazoned on the bottom. For Albright-Knox curator Heather Pesanti, this breezy gesture encapsulated “the ironic yet persevering sensibility of the moment” and grounded the Hallwalls’ “exhibition as a geographically based exploration of the particular era . . . a tongue-in-cheek response typical of outsiders’ (and snowedin natives) unenthusiastic view of Buffalo, but also a poignant sensibility referring to a moment that was truly special, something not to be missed.”6 Hallwall’s Snow Show, with its opening-night gala and “chilled refreshments,” located a form of spontaneous creativity in a particular time and space—not just the halls and the walls of the former icehouse but in the icy confines of the city itself.

“A Prolonged Modernist Golden Age” Much like the blizzard of ’77, a chance combination of factors contributed to creating this “truly spectacular” cultural moment. Once a booming industrial city, Buffalo had enjoyed what Pesanti calls “a prolonged modernist golden age,” beginning with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Roughly midway en route between New York City and Detroit, the Erie Canal linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, bringing an influx of new opportunities to the region and earning Buffalo the moniker of “the Queen City.” The 1901 Pan-American Exposition placed Buffalo in the international eye. The original 1897 plan of the organizers, the Pan-American Exposition Company, was to hold the giant international world’s fair on Cayuga Island, a small land mass in the Niagara River adjacent to the city of Buffalo and a few miles upstream of Niagara Falls, which by that time was already a major tourist attraction. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, however,

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put plans for the international expo on hold. When the war ended, a heated competition emerged between the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls over the location of the fairgrounds. In the end, Buffalo won, and on May 1, 1901, the fair opened on 350 acres on the western edge of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park. The official pamphlet for the exposition announced that the goals of the fair were “to join in commemorating the achievements of the Nineteenth Century by holding the Pan-American Exposition at the City of Buffalo to illustrate the progress and civilization of the nations of the Western Hemisphere, to strengthen their friendships and to inaugurate a new era of social and commercial intercourse with the beginning of the new century.”7 Fair planners stressed what they called “the simple fact” that “there will be no such thing as staying away from Buffalo and the Pan-American Exposition in 1901.” They argued that “Buffalo is the easiest place to get to from the greatest number of other places in the United States and Canada. That statement is not an advertising superlative but a modest announcement of the truth. Let us re-state it. There are more people who live within a day’s journey of Buffalo than of any other place in the Western Hemisphere.”8 While today Buffalo may not seem like the center of the Western Hemisphere, in 1901 it was within a five-hundred-mile radius of the most populated cities in North America and was part of an extensive transportation network of ship and rail travel. President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist while visiting the exposition, and his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, took the oath of office in a mansion owned by the prominent Wilcox family on the city’s central thoroughfare, Delaware Avenue. Both events brought even more international attention to the city. Moreover, the fair stunned the world with its widespread use of electricity. Every night of the exposition’s run, hundreds of thousands of eight-watt lightbulbs illuminated the gleaming white neoclassical buildings, as well as the many lakes and reflecting pools, fountains, and sculptures that filled the grounds. This was the first massive display of electric power to take place in the United States, and it briefly linked Buffalo to Paris as a “City of Light.” The electricity that powered the fair’s illumination was generated by the newly constructed power plants fueled by the magnificent waterfalls at Niagara Falls twenty miles away. Moreover, with its extensive park system—conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted himself (as opposed to merely by his firm)—the city was also, or would soon be, home to standout buildings designed by modernist masters, including Louis Sullivan, David Burnham, Henry Hobson Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others.

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Decline and Nostalgia Yet, as rail travel and then trucking, along with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959, made the Erie Canal system obsolete for moving freight, Buffalo was no longer the major transportation hub that it had been a century before. Like other rust belt cities such as Cleveland and Detroit, Buffalo suffered a steep decline in population as heavy industries shut down and the middle class fled to the suburbs or the Sunbelt as the twentieth century progressed. Buffalo became one of the poorest cities in the United States with populations of more than 250,000. By the 1970s, Buffalo had become the butt of jokes in the opening monologues of late-night comedians. Johnny Carson in particular took aim at the city many times, laughing once that he saw an advertisement in the classified section of the New York Times asking anyone with information on a city called Buffalo “to please contact [post office] box 234.” The sense of despair reached its apex in a billboard purchased by Bethlehem Steel workers outside Buffalo City Hall, with the text: “Notice: Will the last worker out of western New York please turn out the light.”

Figure 10.3  Buffalo steelworkers’ billboard. Source: Buffalo Stories Archives / Steve Cicho.

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The Wish You Were Here show marked nostalgia for this moment, which despite widespread devastation and a prevailing sense of desolation for many residents was also a time of increased optimism in the arts. This sense of possibility resulted from a number of factors, including increased government spending for local arts programs. As Mary Woods outlines in her chapter for this volume, an influx of money from sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts provided funds for the expansion of the massive neoclassical Albright-Knox complex—notably Buffalo-born SOM architect Gordon Bunshaft’s then cutting-edge glass cube addition to the complex—and seed money for alternative spaces such as Hallwalls, Artpark, and CEPA. Moreover, Governor Nelson Rockefeller aimed to make Buffalo the “Berkeley of the East” and steered large amounts of funding to the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo to create flagship programs in the arts and sciences, in part by creating new faculty positions. One of these new positions went to Gerald O’Grady, who despite his training in medieval literature had an interest in the burgeoning field of media studies. In 1971, O’Grady founded Media Study / Buffalo, a nonprofit space that offered film and video workshops and access to equipment. Two years later, he helped establish the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, where he hired the structuralist filmmakers Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits, followed by Steina and Woody Vasulka, the founders of the Kitchen in New York, and Tony Conrad, the minimalist musician, experimental filmmaker, and video artist.9 Regarding this moment, the photographer Ellen Carey recalled, “I didn’t think of Buffalo as crumbling or falling down . . . I just thought it was great. It was rough in the 1930s in Paris too.” Wandering through the Albright-Knox show in 2012, I was struck by this nostalgia myself. Buffalo in the 1970s did seem great, and I wished I had been there.

Buffalo Gal But, actually, I had been there. Born in Our Lady of Victory Hospital in nearby Lackawanna in the summer of 1966, I spent most of my childhood in Buffalo and its suburbs. Yet the Buffalo of 2012’s Wish You Were Here was not exactly the Buffalo I remembered in the 1970s. My experience of the city was shaped by many of the same environmental factors that allowed for the flowering of contemporary art and culture in the city at this particular time. But as an upper-middle-class child of immigrant families—my paternal grandfather’s family emigrated from Lebanon, settling in Lackawanna, and my mother’s extended family as well as my maternal grandmother’s came

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from Ireland and lived in the Irish American enclaves of South Buffalo—I, along with my Buffalo cohort, was markedly different from the slightly older “Pictures” generation showing in Hallwalls, CEPA, and Artpark. My Buffalo too was marked by massive snowstorms that canceled school for days on end and ecological disasters made manifest in what seemed like the hundreds of dead fish that would float on top of Lake Erie on certain days in the summer—my siblings and I made an elaborate game out of whipping them at one another for points. Nevertheless, my experiences of the city also were shaped by its particular cultural landscape. I took weekly art classes at the Albright-Knox, always stopping by the glass house afterward to see myself, in my sweaty socks, reflected in infinite directions. In high school, I started a program reading to young patients in the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, built adjacent to the original Richardson buildings that made up the large complex known as the Buffalo Asylum for the Insane. Once a week for two years I visited the site as a student volunteer, the giant Romanesque towers looming from behind a barbed-wire fence, spooky and forlorn but also massive and beautiful. I regularly jogged through Olmsted’s Delaware Park, which was across the street from my high school. I drove by the Darwin Martin House on my way to visit my cousin (it was around the block from her house), and I shopped in the stores in the Ellicott Square Building, which was designed by Daniel Burnham in 1896. Mine was a particular built environment, in the shadow of the steel plant and always dictated by the lake and the river. I spent a lot of time driving over the Skyway, the massive concrete highway that soared over the factories of the Old First Ward—and from which you could smell Cheerios, if they were making the cereal at the General Mills Factory beneath it—passing by the massive Bethlehem Steel works complex and the Ford Stamping Plant on my way to school every day during the academic year and in the summer en route to my grandparents’ house on Lake Erie. Today, as an adult, marveling at contemporary celebratory accounts of the city of my childhood—a city that I could not wait to leave—I realize that the industrial landscape, in particular of the Buffalo Skyway and the Bethlehem Steel works, and the extreme environmental conditions, in particular paralyzing blizzards and toxic waste sites, as well as the inventive art spaces such as Artpark that I visited regularly without knowing their broader significance, all contributed to my lake-effect childhood.

Skyway Stories Like many things in the city’s history, the Buffalo Skyway, once seen as a sign of progress, in some ways helped lead to the city’s decline. The massive

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concrete roadway opened in 1955 after four years, twelve million dollars, twenty-two thousand tons of steel, and ten thousand cubic yards of concrete. Over a mile long and 110 feet tall at its highest point, the Skyway was, in the words of the Buffalo Courier-Express, the “grand dream of a progressive, utilitarian, and lovely community here at the foot of the Great Lakes.” Similarly, the Buffalo News declared, “It’s not only the best free joyride in town and a special pleasure to anyone who ever got tangled up in any of the traffic jams below—but also gives a completely new and breathtakingly sweeping panoramic view of what somehow seems a much greater city from ‘way up there.’ ” The Skyway was conceived of as a thoroughfare of George Jetson–like utopian progressive technology. Massive reinforced concrete piers beneath the structure provided almost invisible support for the long-span bridge and allowed for breathtaking views as the road seemed to float magically above the waters of Lake Erie. But the proximity to the lake also made it treacherous to drive over during the winter, as blinding snow and gale winds challenged the skills of even the most experienced drivers (and terrified me as a teenager newly positioned behind the wheel of the family’s faux-woodpaneled Country Squire wagon). Moreover, as part of the massive highway

Figure 10.4  View of the Buffalo Skyway in the 1950s. Source: Western New York Heritage.

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project supported by Robert Moses’s New York State Department of Public Works, the raised four-lane highway system, of which it was a part, bifurcated neighborhoods and destroyed communities in the name of progress. It also divided, in the service of automotive expediency, the green space designed by Olmsted in his unified plan for the city’s park system. Nevertheless, from the top of the Skyway, one had magnificent views of downtown Buffalo, and beyond it Canada, when headed north, and of the city of Lackawanna and its vast industrial landscape when going in the opposite direction. I have heard that Lackawanna, New York, is the only city on the Great Lakes without a view of a lake. Originally part of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the area was not open to settlement until 1842 when the Seneca Indians began to sell the land for development, forming the town of Seneca in 1851. In 1899 the Lackawanna Steel Company, originally founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, purchased the land along the eastern shore of Lake Erie in Seneca and began construction of a large steel mill on the site. In 1902, the company moved its operations from Pennsylvania to this new complex in what then became Lackawanna, New York. The Lackawanna plant soon emerged as the leading manufacturer of sheet piling and steel rails and drew thousands of workers to the area for jobs in steel manufacturing. The massive industrial complex expanded in 1922 when Bethlehem Steel purchased the plant from the Lackawanna Corporation for $60 million. Bethlehem Steel invested another $40 million into the facility to expand production, creating, in effect, a massive steel town. My grandfather’s family settled in Lackawanna when they emigrated from Lebanon at the turn of the last century. My great-grandfather, a merchant, opened a dry-goods store on Ridge Road, the city’s main thoroughfare. After my grandfather finished medical school, he located his practice in an office beneath his stately home further down Ridge Road, catering primarily to steelworkers and their families, many of them relatives of my maternal grandmother’s extended family. Lackawanna was a thriving industrial city with green parks, busy shops, two hospitals, and the imposing Our Lady of Victory Basilica, which was part of a larger complex built by Father Nelson Baker in 1921 (Father Baker’s initiatives included an infant home, a home for unwed mothers, a boys’ orphanage, a boys’ protectory, a hospital, a nurses’ home, and a grade and high school). Because of Baker’s high profile in the international Catholic community, he was able to build the massive white marble building without taking on any debt, by soliciting donations through a direct-mail fund-raising club of over $3.2 million (the equivalent of roughly $45 million today). With its soaring towers and large copper dome, second in size only to the Capitol dome in Washington, DC, the church and shrine

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to the Virgin Mary soon became a popular pilgrimage site for believers in search of divine intervention. When I was growing up, however, Lackawanna was nothing like it had been in its heyday. Father Baker’s orphanage and home for unwed mothers had closed, and the mere idea of the place provided fodder for my childhood nightmares. Boarded-up storefronts, OTBs, and dive bars with chipped paint and broken windows marked the main thoroughfares of the once-grand streets. My grandparents left Ridge Road for permanent residence in what had been their summer house, an old rambling farmhouse on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and my parents ultimately moved to the tony enclave of North Buffalo, escaping the southern suburbs and the worst part of the snow belt and leaving Lackawanna to the poor and increasingly dispossessed.

The Forgotten Ones Yet despite its economic decline, Lackawanna and its industrial landscape continued to serve both as subject and as object for area artists. The optometristturned-photographer Milton Rogovin, for example, spent decades shooting images of what he called “the forgotten ones” across Buffalo and the surrounding areas, including a multipart series entitled Portraits in Steel. Born in New York City and trained in optometry at Columbia University, Rogovin, whom the Buffalo News in 1957 called “the Top Communist in Buffalo,” began taking photographs after being blacklisted and called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which essentially destroyed his optometry practice.10 Refusing to be silenced, he found a new political tool with his camera, documenting workers and their living conditions across the region. He conceived of the series as sets of paired images of workers in their places of employment—in front of furnaces, working heavy machinery, in protective clothing—and at home, surrounded by family and personal belongings. As he explained: I wanted to do a series in the steel plants and photograph the people who do the tough work. It occurred to me that I should try to shoot the steelworkers both at work and at home. It seems like a simple concept but no one had ever done it. Most workers were happy to have me come to their homes, especially when they knew I was going to give them a photograph. I started at Atlas and then went to the Republic, Bethlehem and Chenango steel plants. I never asked any questions. I had decided not to take up too much time of the working person because he had to produce a certain

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amount each day and if I brought the usual umbrellas and paraphernalia, it would have taken half an hour just to set it up. I wouldn’t take more than 4 shots and I was finished. Because I didn’t have time to measure, I would correct any errors I had made in the darkroom.11 The steel series photographs create nuanced and multifaceted portraits of the workers by including intimate snapshots of scenes from their daily lives alongside images of them on the factory floor. By chronicling their lives over many years, Rogovin provides a visual narrative of how the steel belt slowly became the rust belt in an increasingly postindustrial economy that left places like Buffalo and Lackawanna behind as companies like Bethlehem Steel shut down or drastically reduced their workforce. In one triptych of images featuring steelworker Joseph Kemp, for example, Rogovin captures Kemp in three different scenarios over an eleven-year period: the first, from 1976, depicts him shirtless, shovel in hand and protective goggles atop his head, sweating in front of the massive Hanna Furnace. His scarred body is illuminated by the flash of the camera in an otherwise dark environment. The next image, taken two years later, pictures him surrounded by family members in front of a white plastic Christmas tree. The final image, from 1987, shows him with a female companion in front of a zebra-skinned bookshelf. Now in a wheelchair and missing a leg, his one bare foot draws the viewer’s gaze and subtly underscores the absent limb on the other side of his body. In 1993 Rogovin collaborated with University of Buffalo professor Michael Frisch on a book project that paired his steel photographs with Frisch’s analysis. In the text accompanying the Joseph Kemp series, Frisch explains that Kemp had lost a leg to “medical complications” two years before his service at the plant qualified him for a company disability pension. He quotes Kemp, who advises the reader, “Well, the only thing I can tell them: get you some education, try to learn you a skill, because you will never see this industrial movement no more . . . that’s the reason I say the future is, they won’t be using their muscles, they’ll be using their brain.”12 Like Rogovin, Frisch treats Kemp and the other subjects with respect. He allows them to tell their own stories, in their own voices. Regarding his collaboration with Rogovin he writes, The book proceeds from a belief that all portraiture involves, at its heart, a presentation of self. It also does not deny that artifice, interpretation and even manipulation are necessarily involved in arranging the portrait session, rendering the images presented, and conveying them to others in some form or other. . . . Portraits do represent and

Figures 10.5–10.7  Milton Rogovin, Working People, Buffalo New York. Source: ©Milton Rogovin, Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation.

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Figures 10.5–10.7 (Continued)

express a collaboration of their own between subject and image maker, a collaboration in which the subject is anything but mute or powerless, a mere object of study. . . . Stories given, rather than taken.13 Similarly, the New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer writes of Rogovin’s practice that “he sees something else in the life of this neighborhood— ordinary pleasures and pastimes, relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business, celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of individuals’ existence.”14 As Kramer notes, Rogovin endows his subjects and their worlds with dignity, elevating industrial work in the steel mills and factories to matters worthy of artistic representation without either glorifying or denigrating them.

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Bingo Rogovin was not the only artist to take the industrial landscape of western New York as a source of creative inspiration. Gordon Matta-Clark chose another dying western New York site for his 1974 piece Bingo. Created out of a condemned house along the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, Bingo focuses on the toxic landscapes that remain when companies abandon the area. Love Canal was named for the area’s developer, William T. Love, who purchased the land in the 1890s, intending to build a model city along the banks of the river to be powered by the hydropower of the falls. The panic of 1907 and the advent of cheap electric power, however, curtailed Love’s vision, and he ultimately declared bankruptcy, leaving only the canal, not the model city, at the site. In 1943, the town of Niagara Falls allowed the nearby Hooker Chemical Corporation to use the canal, which had filled with water, as a dump site. Over the course of a decade, the company disposed into the canal more than twenty thousand tons of chemicals, mostly “caustics, alkalines, fatty acid and chlorinated hydrocarbons resulting from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins.”15 Hooker subsequently converted the site into a landfill and in 1953 sold it to the city of Niagara Falls for one dollar. Subsequently, a school and about a thousand housing units were built at or adjacent to the site. Writing in the Environmental Protection Agency Journal in January 1979, Eckardt C. Beck described the horrors caused by the toxic landfill for the inhabitants: I visited the canal area at that time. Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.16 Many of those who could afford to leave did, abandoning their homes and property. When Matta-Clark visited the area in 1974, the extent of the environmental catastrophe at Love Canal was not yet known, although many of the abandoned houses had been boarded up and slated for demolition. Matta-Clark negotiated the use of one such property as the site for Bingo. Matta-Clark, the son of the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, studied architecture at Cornell and developed an artistic practice devoted to

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what he called “anarchitecture,” a conflation of the terms architecture and anarchy. Earlier that year, he completed the project Splitting, which involved manipulating an investment property owned by his dealers, Holly and Horace Solomon, at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey. For this project, Matta-Clark elevated one end of the Humphrey Street house by removing a layer of cinder blocks. He then cut through the building, inside and out, with electric saws. Finally, he lowered the building onto the remaining blocks, leaving a visible gap, or cut, in the property. Matta-Clark filmed the process, giving the lead role in the performance to the house. There “was a real moment of suspense,” he said, about how the house would react, but it responded ‘like a perfect dance partner.” Regarding this practice of making cuts, Matta-Clark explained, “Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more a challenging medium? A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components.”17 For Bingo, he continued his anarchitectural cut work. In this piece, MattaClark divided one side of the house into nine equal five-by-nine-foot sections to resemble the card in a Bingo game. Using his electric saw cutting technique, he removed all but the center section from the structure, leaving the frame of the nine-part grid intact. Matta-Clark had originally named the work “Been-Gone by Ninth,” but he retitled it Bingo, he claimed, in reference to “the typical American church function,” popular in Niagara Falls and its surrounding area. Like its namesake, this Bingo was also a game of chance—leaving the house to decide, once again, how it would react in this performance. In this case, it held up until later in the day when the town bulldozers came to raze the property. The impending demolition of the structure had forced Matta-Clark and his team to work quickly. As part of his contract with the city of Niagara Falls, he had ten days before the scheduled demolition of the house. He described the frenetic pace that he and his team kept during the creation of the work: During the allotted working period the pace was a succession of twelve-hour days, nonstop and at times involving as many as five other workers. The measuring, cutting, and removing of the wall sections was continued right up to the hour the demolition crew arrived to tear down the house. . . . Five of the eight crates were judiciously dumped, and with the forces of natural reclamation, these building parts became eternally mysterious remnants of an elaborate celebration of abandonment.

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Matta-Clark dumped the fragments at nearby Artpark, where they became integrated into the natural landscape as a long-term land art reclamation project. He claims to have chosen the Love Canal site in keeping with the area’s “history of construction debris.” Like much of the creative history of the Buffalo area, with Bingo, Matta-Clark found creative inspiration in the industrial decay of the work’s site and the history of destruction that marks much of the region. Bingo, with its precarious cuts in the infrastructure of the condemned house, calls attention to the tenuous nature of not just that place at that time, but the larger history of disappointment and failure that had come to mark places like Buffalo in the 1970s. There is no nostalgia for a bygone era in the work, but rather a moment of creative potential, and even beauty, in the most despondent of places, Love Canal.

Love Canal The story of Love Canal is both infuriating and inspiring. As a child myself during the actual crisis, I did not know many of the specific details until I was much older. But I was aware of the story playing out on the local news, and I knew it involved kids my age. I also knew, and today am awed, that the resistance movement was led by a local mother named Lois Gibbs whose children attended the 99th Street School, which was built on the hazardous waste site abandoned by Hooker Chemical years before. Gibbs lived in the neighborhood, but she was unaware of the chemicals in the land until she read an article by reporter Mike Brown in the local Niagara Falls Gazette. Recalling her first response to Brown’s piece, she later wrote, At first, I didn’t realize where the canal was. Niagara Falls has two sets of streets numbered the same. Brown’s articles said Love Canal was between 99th and 97th streets, but I didn’t think he meant the place where my children went to school or where I took them to play on the jungle gyms and swings. Although I read the articles, I didn’t pay much attention to them. One article did stand out, though. In it, Mike Brown wrote about monkeys subjected to PCBs having miscarriages and deformed offspring. Gibbs’s five-year-old son Michael was repeatedly sick; he had recently been diagnosed with epilepsy, and his white blood cell count was dropping. After consulting with a number of doctors and scientists at SUNY Buffalo, one of whom was her brother-in-law, she approached the Niagara Falls School Board asking that they transfer her son to another school. But the board refused to do so, arguing that if it was unsafe for her son, then it was unsafe

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for all the children, and they were not going to close the school because of one concerned mother with a sickly child.18 In response, Gibbs began to canvass her neighbors, going door to door to see if others suffered from similar maladies. The more I heard, the more frightened I became. This problem involved much more than the 99th Street School. The entire community seemed to be sick! Then I remembered my own neighbors. One who lived on the left of my husband and me was suffering from severe migraines and had been hospitalized three or four times that year. Her daughter had kidney problems and bleeding. A woman on the other side of us had gastrointestinal problems. A man in the next house down was dying of lung cancer and he didn’t even work in industry. The man across the street had just had lung surgery. I thought about Michael; maybe there was more to it than just the school. I didn’t understand how chemicals could get all the way over to 101st Street from 99th; but the more I thought about it, the more frightened I became—for my family and for the whole neighborhood.19 Gibbs created the Love Canal Parents movement in June 1978. Shortly afterward, a group of residents formed the Love Canal Homeowners Association. The group consisted of approximately five hundred families, primarily blue-collar workers with an average annual income of $10,000 to $25,000, who lived within a ten-block area surrounding the Love Canal landfill. On August 2, 1978, the New York State Department of Health issued a health order recommending the immediate closure of the 99th Street School and the evacuation of pregnant women and children under the age of two. It also suggested that residents not eat food grown in their gardens and that they spend limited time in their basements. A few days later, the state agreed to purchase all 239 homes in the first two rings of homes closest to the canal. After years of continued grass-roots activism, 833 families finally were evacuated, and a massive cleanup of Love Canal began. When President Jimmy Carter created the EPA’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, also known as the Superfund, he heralded Gibbs as a national hero for spearheading the movement that ultimately led to the creation of both the legislation and the fund.20

Ending: Generative Tension For me, in hindsight, the efforts by Gibbs and her neighbors mark the significant moment that Gracos alludes to in his text for the Wish You Were Here

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show at the Albright-Knox in 2012, when, as he writes, “the City of Good Neighbors, increasingly known for its resourcefulness and its collaborative spirit in the face of economic hardship,” came together, not only as a “creative hub and incubator for the art world’s newest ideas,” but also to enact grassroots political change. Indeed, the generative tension between moments of creative potential and deep decay is what defines much of Buffalo’s history. From the contests over the site of the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 to the idealized plans for the soaring Skyway that dissected the workingclass neighborhoods beneath it, to the Snow Show at Hallwalls that tried to encourage art from environmental disaster, Buffalo’s creative landscape has been marked by often surprising reactions to instances of chance. Like Rogovin’s Steel Series photographs that bestow dignity on both industrial work and working-class identity, Buffalo is a city marked by complications and often surprising juxtapositions. While the Wish You Were Here exhibition may at times have bordered on the nostalgic, it did not whitewash the harsh realities of what made Buffalo in the 1970s a “mecca” of sorts. Instead, it looked back at a place that for many who lived there was coded as bleak—and had become a joke for those outside it—yet was celebrated for its sense of possibility and the things it made. It provided a template for those of us who may not have witnessed what made Buffalo great at that moment, to draw upon our collective past as a source of inspiration rather than embarrassment. Today, Buffalo is in the midst of a renaissance of sorts. The Skyway has been dismantled, the brownfields around Lackawanna are being cleaned up, and dead fish no longer float atop Lake Erie. The industrial wastelands created when the steel mills closed in the 1970s and 1980s have become the thriving Canalside area with packed restaurants, music venues, full hotels, and prosperous retail shops; the Albright-Knox is building an $80 million addition; and the State of New York has pledged “the Buffalo Billion” to develop cutting-edge nanotechnology and medical engineering facilities at the University of Buffalo’s once-derelict downtown campus. People still joke about the snow in Buffalo and the failure of the Bills to win a Super Bowl, but now national news outlets regularly run articles about why millennials should move to Buffalo, and how today we all should not just wish we were there, but actually go and visit.

Ch a p ter 1 1

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

The demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building in 1950 proved ominous for Buffalo. While the following decade would be an economic crest in the city’s history, longtime Buffalonians can promptly sketch the city’s impending socioeconomic decline by citing several landmark events from the decade: the relocation of the prominent Technical High School from the black East Side to the white West Side in 1954, the termination of SS Canadiana trips to Canada after a racially charged incident in 1956, the splintering of Delaware Park and neighborhoods by the expressway construction program starting in 1958, and the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which rendered the Erie Canal obsolete.1 The following five decades of decline would halve the city’s population; and each episode of isolation would hasten Buffalo’s transformation into a rust belt cornerstone. Today, Buffalo looks to refugee resettlement as a means to rejuvenate its distressed neighborhoods. Over eleven thousand refugees have resettled in Buffalo since 2008; and between 2006 and 2013, the foreign-born population of the city almost doubled. While it is usually surpassed by Syracuse in per capita terms, Buffalo continues to receive the highest number of refugees in New York State.2 For a city of about a quarter million, these demographic changes are significant, but also problematic. The newfound character as a haven for displaced thousands has afforded the city with a much-needed 235

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urban stimulus and jolted its lethargic public systems reeling from decades of regression. Nevertheless, Buffalo is still grappling with questions of equitable urbanism to address the needs of not only its new inhabitants, but also its existing disadvantaged communities. In fact, despite the aggrandized rhetoric on the city’s “comeback,” Buffalo has yet to confront its crippling problems of poverty and segregation. How will “New Americans” fit in this picture? The twenty-first century has been labeled “the century of people on the move,” but also characterized by a persistent “turn against immigration.”3 In the context of contested immigration politics and nativist backlash, can American pluralism—that much-touted mainstay of American democracy—provide an adequate framework for integration, when the destitute newcomers are less white and their destination cities poorer?4 This question has fundamental consequences for the future of Buffalo and other resettlement cities of the rust belt. As the economist Edward Glaeser suggested, struggling cities attract poverty.5 Critics of the national resettlement program find convenient grounds for criticism here. They claim that as an institutional mechanism that brings in more poverty and low-skilled labor, resettlement exacerbates the plight of impoverished regions and drains public resources.6 It is often little help to counter this argument with the assertion that, aside from its immediate urban benefits, the long-term economic advantages of resettlement are well established.7 Nevertheless, it is intellectually careless to validate resettlement solely on economic terms. A cosmopolitan ethical framework and its inherent humanitarian underpinnings are necessary. Indeed, global faith-based institutions espousing universal ethical principles factor prominently in caring for the displaced. Five of the nine national voluntary agencies—private intermediaries contracted with the US State Department—are faith-based organizations; and all of the four local resettlement agencies in Buffalo also have emerged from faith-based origins.8 Studies also show a positive correlation between the education attainment level of a host city and its hospitality for immigrants.9 Resettlement has been a viable, albeit imperfect, force for rebuilding distressed cities. Within the 2010s, the post-arrival resettlement apparatus has emerged as a discernible urban force, in addition to the actors of market-driven, nonprofit, and public development. This apparatus consists of a number of institutional entities with expertise in diverse fields, such as public health, law, social work, education, and housing, funded through grants and limited public monies. As vocal resettlement advocates, they play instrumental roles in influencing the city to increase its cultural competence. Resettlement urbanism is a byproduct of these multifaceted practices—an

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opportunistic form of unpremeditated urbanism that relies on, transforms, and amplifies as-found urban assets, like affordable housing and commercial space, institutions, and public transit—to name a few. As opposed to placebased approaches, it is improvisational and agile; it spatializes support systems, but without an overt obsession with traditional place-making. It is thanks to the effectiveness of these lean practices that Buffalo is considered to be a “preferred community” for resettlement.10 In the absence of adequate welfare structures and empathetic urban models designed to effectively serve disadvantaged communities, these practices project a modest cosmopolitan disposition that could inform new ways of thinking about the city’s future. The urbanism they condition gives glimpses of a more socially oriented approach, providing a lens to look back on normative modes of city making. By deliberately embracing a well-articulated mode of cosmopolitanism, rust belt cities could transform their conceptions of urban institutions and their development paradigms. To understand the significance of this emerging institutional landscape, let us briefly compare it with the workings of the American Progressive assimilation machine of the previous eras.

Buffalo’s Pluralist Legacy and Its Limitations In the 1920s and ’30s, Buffalo was on the rise. The city’s confidence was evident in its aspirations, as represented by the Regional Plan of the Niagara Frontier, which envisioned a cross-border region extending to Canada.11 Works Progress Administration projects and the transition of the region’s economy from goods transshipment toward heavy industry helped the city navigate the adverse effects of the Great Depression. Several major landmarks that characterize the city were completed during these decades: the Peace Bridge (1927), Central Terminal (1929), City Hall (1931), and Kleinhans Music Hall (1940). A new Chevrolet plant designed by Albert Kahn was built to the north of Buffalo in 1937 after much anticipation.12 Capital accumulation nurtured a globally connected culture in the city, as exemplified by the Albright Art Gallery’s emergence as a premier institution of radical art with the opening of the Contemporary Room in 1939, featuring an exhibition of modernist works from Europe.13 As the Albright was connected with major European capitals, such as Paris and London, Buffalonians maintained contacts with Warsaw, Budapest, and Palermo.14 Buffalo’s boom, like the other industrial powerhouses of the Great Lakes, was powered by successive influxes of European immigrants. By the 1950s, most sections of Buffalo had established ethnic identities.15

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Figure 11.1  “Nationality settlements in Buffalo around 1900,” in Stephen Gredel, People of Our City and County (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 1971). Source: Buffalo History Museum.

In the city where public life was largely limited to “church and tavern,” ethnic groups seldom mixed.16 Deeply rooted in a ward-based system of governance, neighborhoods preserved relative autonomy, with their own institutions and commercial amenities—churches, shops, restaurants, banks, and so forth. When immigrant communities were forced to participate in

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mandatory public systems that they deemed culturally incompatible with their mores, they devised ways of working around or weakening them.17 Nevertheless, as in the rest of the northern cities, even the descendants of “inassimilable,” non-Protestant groups failed to outlast the assimilation machine, achieving upward mobility and becoming “white Americans” by the 1970s.18 Except for brief episodes of modest coexistence, the racial groups continued to lead their lives in distinct cultural spheres.19 The African American community that gained visibility in East Buffalo by the 1920s became the dominant group there by midcentury as their white neighbors moved to North Buffalo and the surrounding suburbs. The immigrant experience around the turn of the twentieth century was largely shaped by growth economics. The immigrant workforce was a requisite for economic expansion, and the factory floor provided a setting that encouraged basic conditions of tolerance among diverse groups. Furthermore, while inclusivity was hardly the defining characteristic of Progressivism, Progressive institutions sought to alleviate social fragmentation.20 Progressive pressures would lead not only to the transformation of existing public systems, but also to the conception of new institutional forms such as settlement houses. From the 1890s to the 1920s, hundreds of settlement houses—also called “social settlements” or “settlements”—emerged in the northern cities. Based on British precedents, the houses supported immigrants and the urban poor through social work, educational programs, and the development of crafts-based skills. Settlements also contributed to their neighborhoods by organizing ethnic cultural events, performances, and debates.21 Buffalo had six settlements: Westminster House, Welcome Hall, Watson House, the Memorial Chapel Social Center, the Jewish Community House, and the Remington Settlement.22 These institutions were promoted widely. For example, the New Citizens’ Handbook: A Manual of Information for Buffalo Immigrants Who Wish to Become American Citizens, published by the Civic Education Association of Buffalo, listed their addresses under the heading “Where to Go for Social Service.” The document urged that “every Immigrant should, as early as possible after his arrival, become acquainted with the Organizations of his people, his church and opportunities that are given to know his American neighbors in the various schoolhouses and settlements.”23 It also listed “One Hundred Facts that Every New Citizen of Buffalo Should Know,” and further resources for immigrants, such as the seven public schools that provided language and citizenship lessons.24 Sprinkled with photographs of the city’s landmarks, such as the Albright Art Gallery and County Hall, the document highlighted points of pride such as the city’s generous parklands and paved

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roads. It also explained in detail voting rights, the party system, city governance, and primaries and elections. The Westminster House Report of 1900 provides insight into the workings of a Buffalo settlement house. The organization sought to meet the educational and social needs of all age groups, with a specific focus on children. Forty-five students enrolled in the kindergarten enjoyed a child-centered pedagogy, featuring games and activities designed to improve their physical and reflective skills and support their “spiritual growth.” They celebrated holidays and the birthday of Friedrich Froebel (father of the kindergarten concept) and took trips to parks and the countryside.25 The report made little explicit mention of its immigrant attendants and neighbors, other than a short remark on English classes held in the Women’s Club and numerous German books “in constant circulation,” lent by a branch of the Buffalo Public Library hosted by the settlement.26 A chart at the end of the report, prepared by a house resident from Istanbul, gave an idea of the larger context, listing the numbers of dedicated German and Polish establishments, such as restaurants, clubs, hotels, gymnasia, and music and lecture halls. According to this chronicle, the only spaces that welcomed every Buffalonian were a free library and news reading room. Other ethnicities of lesser numbers, such as “Syrians,” as Lebanese immigrants were known at the time, also had some visibility: The E. B. Green–designed Welcome Hall was offering “Syrian classes” in 1903, and hosted a play in Arabic in 1913.27 Many services offered by settlements were later taken up by organized public institutions such as schools, and delivered in a highly bureaucratized fashion. By the 1920s, as the immigration numbers declined significantly because of nativist politics and exclusionary laws, settlements failed to transform their ethnically oriented pluralistic vision to address issues of race and segregation.28 Settlement houses were products of civic responsibility. In The Making of an American Pluralism, a study of immigration politics in Buffalo in the mid-nineteenth century, the historian David Gerber associates this responsibility with the resident groups’ desire for moral authority over newcomers. He states that, although problematic, this sense of obligation ultimately led the way to civic improvements in infrastructure, parks, and public schools.29 In fact, Gerber deliberately moves away from framing the immigrant experience primarily in isolated group dynamics. Instead, he pays attention to “overlapping social solidarities” articulated through specific top-down political and institutional configurations, transformed by bottom-up social reactions.30 Gerber emphasizes that civic interventions played a crucial role in bringing “native and foreigner together in common activities, institutions,

Figure 11.2  Undated photo from the roof terrace of the Westminster House, in Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers Photographic Collection. Source: Buffalo History Museum.

Figure 11.3  Old Westminster House, now known as Westminster Community House and owned by its successor, the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

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and aspirations” and simultaneously facilitated both assimilation and ethnic group formation.31 He points out that without the effectiveness of these mechanisms in easing potential tensions among different groups, social stability would have been untenable. Nevertheless, the benefits different social groups received from these structures varied greatly. While European immigrants enjoyed an intergenerational path toward economic and social prosperity, resident and newcomer groups of color lagged behind. Unless they are drastically reformed, our contemporary institutional structures are unlikely to fare better. Indeed, comparing the integration trajectory of the descendants of the turn-of-the-century and post-1965 immigrants, the sociologist Pyong Gap Min has indicated that the latter group— primarily people of color from third-world countries—would be more likely to integrate with the resident disadvantaged communities of color. They would also have to confront significant obstacles to achieve social mobility.32

Buffalo as a “Landscape of Ethnic Arrival” Just as Buffalonians eagerly awaited the opening of the General Motors plant in the 1930s, they have anxiously anticipated the opening of SolarCity—a solar panel production facility. Eager for development, the city has enthusiastically embraced the recent economic improvements, however tenuous. Some even consider Buffalo to be in the throes of an economic comeback; Buffalo’s “renaissance,” “rebirth,” and “rise” get referenced often, and the state government touts the city as a model for other struggling upstate cities.33 Yet this view is contested: income levels continue to trail the national average; poverty, income inequality, and child poverty persist at alarming rates. The most clear-cut positive indicators have been stable home prices and increased market-driven urban development.34 Other demonstrable gains have come in terms of educational attainment, a flattening rate of population decline, and growth of key demographic segments, such as the twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year bracket.35 This demographic stabilization owes much to Buffalo’s growing refugee population. These groups have contact not with Europe as their predecessors did in the 1930s, but Yangon, Kinshasa, and Baghdad. Nowhere are their impacts more evident than in the West Side’s “Little Burma.” The formerly embattled district now hosts various immigrant-owned businesses. Property values have gone up, and the streets are active—displaying the material conditions of a “landscape of ethnic arrival.”36 Surface-deep changes on storefronts chronicle transient immigrant-run businesses; few become lasting. Most stores feature easily applied and inexpensive signage, such as

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Figure 11.4  A grocery store on Grant Street. Photograph by Erkin Özay.

vinyl banners and hand-painted signs, often exhaustively listing the diverse array of goods and services furnished. Food and smartphones dominate— the former for settling in, the latter for keeping in touch with the home country. New collective habits are gaining visibility. Easily accessible from the Black Rock neighborhood, Unity Island on the Niagara River has become a prominent recreation destination for immigrant families. The long-neglected island features a water treatment plant and two parks, one capping a former landfill. The northern entry is marked by the International Railroad Bridge, crossing to the Canadian side. As families enter the park for long weekend picnics, they pass by a US Customs and Border Protection vehicle patrolling the bridge. Broderick Park, on the south end—once the site of the Black Rock ferry that connected Buffalo with Ontario until the mid-twentieth century and a last stop on the Underground Railroad—is today a popular fishing site for immigrants, despite warnings of the risks of consuming fish from the river, issued in Burmese-, Spanish-, and Chinese-language pamphlets.37 Ethnic festivals and solidarity events are frequent. LaSalle Park, where Lake Erie narrows into the Niagara River, serves as the setting for World Refugee Day activities. Alongside a vast array of long-running ethnic

Figure 11.5  A grocery store on West Ferry Street. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

Figure 11.6  Fishermen at Broderick Park on Unity Island, with the International Railroad Bridge in the background. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

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festivals, the Burmese Water Festival is now a staple summer celebration. Taking place in June around the Burmese New Year, it is a well-attended and playful spectacle featuring Burmese folk, pop, and hip-hop performances. Soccer is surpassing American football as the primary sport in the public schools. The International Preparatory High School—“I-Prep,” a public high school—where 35 percent of students are English-language learners and 90 percent are minority, has become a soccer powerhouse after dissolving its football program owing to lack of interest.38 The transformation of programs at I-Prep is part of a district-wide reorientation to meet the needs of a changing demographic. As enrollment has increased for the first time since the 2000s, the school district has concentrated and expanded its resources to better serve a student body that speaks over sixty languages.39 Other organizations have instituted new practices as well. Health-care providers have devised ways to better communicate and address the specific needs of refugees, with a special focus on trauma and torture survivors. The Partnership for the Public Good, a local nonprofit organization, disseminates fact sheets on the primary immigrant groups to assist with building cultural competence. There is a “Mayor’s Office for New Americans” in City Hall; and the Buffalo Police Department has introduced new communication plans.40 Still, there are issues. The turnaround of the West Side due

Figure 11.7  Masjid Zakariya, former Holy Mother of the Rosary Cathedral in East Buffalo, was established in the 1990s and serves as the anchor of a growing Muslim community. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

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to increased housing demand has accelerated development pressures there, while East Buffalo struggles to attract interest. There are signs that some of the segregation tendencies between different ethnic and religious groups are reproduced in Buffalo, as Buddhist and Muslim groups split between the east and west.41 Asians make up some of the poorest immigrant groups in the city, often working low-wage jobs that force them to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Erie County’s social service expenditure has gone up.42 As this brief account shows, the resettlement program has had significant impacts on the city’s institutional and cultural landscape. While public debates on refugees tend to be dominated by larger policy issues—the number of admissions, screening processes, national allotments, and so forth— the post-arrival phase is much less understood.43 Compared to the pre-arrival stage involving strict vetting and security procedures, this phase is significantly less formal, running through a loosely organized network consisting of resettlement agencies, city institutions, public health groups, and religious organizations.44 Resettlement agencies are responsible for a period of one to three months after arrival, in which the refugees are placed in rental housing, using modest start-up funds. The agencies are expected to follow fair housing practices by identifying affordable units, complying with stringent unit conditions criteria, and avoiding the steering and segregating of refugees. Nevertheless, resettled groups seek access to social support structures facilitated by shared linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. To facilitate acculturation, agencies organize language courses and also hold workshops on the basics of day-to-day living in a new country. Ultimately, the primary intent of this brief episode is to help new inhabitants secure employment as promptly as possible. After this stage, the safety net for refugees gets weaker, primarily consisting of some form of temporary income benefits and basic health-care assistance programs common to all low-income individuals. In order to extend their services, Buffalo resettlement agencies offer additional programs to facilitate further transition and acculturation. These include mental health care, survivor and trauma support services, and job training and placement.45 Many of these services are open to all Buffalonians. To amplify their capacities, the agencies also collaborate with private and public entities, such as the Jericho Road Community Health Center. Founded in 1997 with the goal of providing affordable health care to underserved Buffalonians, the center has quickly developed expertise in matters of resettlement. Jericho’s Hope Refugee Drop-In Center also provides social work and legal advice, as well as work training and education through its own partners.46

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Figure 11.8  Jericho Road, Hope Refugee Drop-In Center. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

The City between Two Institutions Two very different institutions mark the center points of the western and eastern halves of Ferry Street. The West Side Bazaar, located at the West Ferry and Grant Street intersection, is a small business incubator. Vive, located behind the abandoned St. Matthew’s Church at the East Ferry and Wyoming Avenue intersection, is a shelter serving asylum seekers. The Bazaar is the centerpiece of the West Side’s transformation. About fifteen small retail and food businesses rent space at below-market rates in an unassuming single-story building. It is operated by Westminster Economic Development Initiative (WEDI), a nonprofit entity established in 2007 by Westminster Presbyterian Church—the institution behind the old Westminster settlement.47 WEDI provides micro-loans, business training, and strategic resources for start-up businesses. One of the most important resources is a code-compliant commercial kitchen shared by the food vendors. A highly popular dining destination offering a wide sampling of various cultural cuisines, the Bazaar attracts a diverse clientele and serves as a mixing chamber for different social groups. In East Buffalo, Vive offers a very different setting. Established in 1984 by Catholic nuns to assist displaced Central and South Americans who sought asylum in the US and Canada, the shelter occupies an inconspicuous school

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building, offering safe space, food, and legal advice for about two thousand refugees and asylum seekers annually.48 The shelter has served a contested role since 2004, when the Third Safe Country Agreement between the US and Canada went into effect. The agreement compels asylum seekers to make an application in the first country of their arrival, unless they satisfy some narrow conditions.49 Working with Canadian immigration authorities, Vive ensures that asylum seekers in transit have their papers in order before they arrive at the border. Because of the increased stringency of US immigration policy and the high risk of detention since the 2016 general election, the shelter has served as a beacon for a new wave of asylum seekers trying to reach Canada. There have been reports of a surge in the number of people trying to cross the border by traveling all the way across New York to Lake Champlain, or even over the heavily guarded International Railroad Bridge.50 In contrast to the porosity of the Bazaar, Vive is a closed box. The residents share meals in a basement cafeteria and sleep in classrooms furnished with bunk beds. The small playground in front is screened with a six-foothigh fence. The residents rarely leave the shelter. The Bazaar serves those who are here to stay; Vive primarily assists those who are transient, having little chance of rebuilding their lives in the US. In their own ways, both institutions have constructed highly specific practices addressing larger social, economic, and political pressures. Not only does the Bazaar provide a setting

Figure 11.9  The West Side Bazaar. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

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in which members and visitors can take part in a shared space where cultural diversity is respected, it also navigates the scarcity of welfare funds by investing in shared resources to support business enterprises.51 Vive, on the other hand, mitigates the burdens inflicted on the displaced by providing refuge on a tenuous legal basis. Both institutions mediate their environments in different ways, while practicing particular modes of cosmopolitanism. The Bazaar serves as an anchor in the midst of the haphazard streetscape. It functions, in the words of sociologist Elijah Anderson, as a cosmopolitan canopy, where newcomer and resident groups can share meaningful encounters, enabling the possibility of “a more cosmopolitan appreciation of difference.”52 The cosmopolitan practice of the Bazaar consists in the local; it provides a shared ground that encourages civic performance. Vive, on the other hand, is a translocal space. It inhabits the charged space of the border, decoupled from the city ground. The cosmopolitan act comes at the expense of the local; it too facilitates resettlement, only elsewhere. The Bazaar and Vive are the bookend practices of the resettlement apparatus. While there are parallels to the charitable practices of previous eras, there are significant differences. Settlements practiced a form of passive pluralism, where sympathy for the plight of disadvantaged individuals prevented a deeper, empathetic understanding. In contrast, the contemporary apparatus seeks a more dialogic framework through advocacy for expanded cultural competence and humility.53 Settlements were guided by a belief in their moral authority, and they fashioned their practices with an explicit intent to fix the ills of the city and unbecoming social behavior. As Progressive institutions, they were also deeply suspicious of the very idea of the city itself. In contrast, the resettlement apparatus advocates for increased refugee admissions; and while acknowledging the challenges, it views resettlement as a force for positive transformation of the city. As opposed to separation of ethnic groups through ostentatious multiculturalism, it is open to constructing spaces of encounter between residents and newcomers. Finally, eschewing an introverted focus, the apparatus builds and cultivates transnational connections, best exemplified by the work of Vive, as well as Jericho Road’s developing practices in Africa and Asia.54 The pluralist framework and the assimilation machine it powers have fallen short in crucial respects; they are likely to become more problematic in the absence of growth economics. According to the historian David Hollinger, “pluralist multiculturalism” calcifies the established cultures and homogenizes minority groups by trivializing their differences. Hollinger, instead, urges us to adopt a “cosmopolitan multiculturalist” attitude, predicated on a

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notion of solidarity—one that actively engages with the voluntary formation of new communities as opposed to shortsighted categorizations based on descent.55 Forgoing dialogical exchange and relying on top-down sympathy, orthodox pluralism hinders the possibility of a broad humanitarian perspective: the commonalities between the new and resident social groups are overlooked, and the disadvantaged communities further isolated.

City of Solidarity—Three Strategies Several observers criticize the post-arrival stage and its haphazard organizational structure as a symptom of neoliberal and neoconservative immigration policies that devolve responsibilities to the lower tiers of government without adequate decision-making power.56 The resettlement apparatus is indeed a fragile formation: poorly funded, politically contested, and devoid of formal organization. It has emerged in the absence of an adequate resettlement system complete with a productive bureaucratic hierarchy, funding, and support structures.57 Yet the localization of resettlement presents opportunistic tools for spatial practices, such as directing growth, rejuvenating existing institutions, and activating the local economy and city ground. Furthermore, as in the case of Vive, it allows for the formation of new entities that enable the city to connect with transnational networks in ways outside—or at least at the edges of—the prescribed means of capital, and disenfranchising legal frameworks such as the immigration regime. Below are three strategies that could be gleaned from the practices of Buffalo’s resettlement apparatus. To ground this argument, I will rely on provocations by the sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone and the geographer Don Mitchell, who have addressed conditions of global marginalization, weak markets, and urban development in two different contexts—the former in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the latter in the American rust belt. Their provocations are highly relevant because of their keen focus on a multiplicity of scales to gauge the local implications of global forces, and for their activist disposition in pointing to alternative directions of urban practice. Reaching out to the World by Building Up Institutional Capacities

Writing months before the market crash of September 2008, the urban theorist Richard Florida criticized the way Buffalo’s future was reflexively considered to be about “shrinking into greatness.”58 Instead, in a manner reminiscent of the city’s cross-border aspirations in the 1920s, he pointed to the scale of the Toronto-Buffalo-Rochester mega-region—the twelfth larg-

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est in the world at the time. Florida then went on to prescribe a familiar growth-economy road map, highly concerned with attracting entrepreneurs, a younger demographic, businesses, and industries.59 The notion, of course, is hardly revolutionary, and fits well within the formulaic rust belt development paradigm, which Mitchell condemns for its obsession with “footloose” capital and privileged classes.60 Regional and global visibility is nevertheless an important cosmopolitan quality. As the law scholar Rick Su observes, capable management of immigration practices can work as a “signaling function” to draw further social groups.61 Vive and Jericho perform in this manner—in the words of Simone—as resources “for reaching out and operating at the level of ‘the world.’ ”62 They demonstrate alternative ways of engaging with larger geographies, making their cities destinations by lending them dependability. They invigorate their contexts with a sense of extroversion and distinctiveness, and, as in the case of Buffalo, challenge stale urban narratives. They also help to offset exaggerated emphases on the introverted notions of locality. Moving beyond the Reductive Concepts of Community and Neighborhood, in Search of New Urban and Formal Paradigms

According to Simone, in order to adequately confront the marginalizing forces of globalism, cities need to move away from the presumption of “well-bounded communities” as their primary building block.63 Urban communities are simultaneously embedded within networks of varying scales, but normative tools of city making have uncritically elevated the elusive notion of the community scale over everything else. Reminiscent of the Progressive city ideal, neighborhood-centric approaches dominate, championing the template of discrete communities with dedicated institutions. As a relic of a city-making regime that prolonged ethnic, racial, economic, and social segregation, the neo-traditionalist enthusiasm for urban boundaries is troubling—perpetuating intolerance for higher-density affordable housing in asset-rich districts, inadequate distribution of quality assets at a macro level, and limitations on income-generating uses in residential areas.64 Ever-prevalent form-based codes all but pay lip service to spatial equity while calcifying margins between communities in the name of maintaining neighborhood integrity and character. Given the grossly uneven development and historic disinvestment in distressed urban areas, such ordinances fall short as naïve attempts to reconstruct cities that never existed, hindering opportunities for cultivating new communities as imagined by Hollinger.

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Constructing New Spaces of Encounter and Cooperation

Simone has argued that it is increasingly difficult for marginalized cities to maintain commonalities in the absence of practices that forge social solidarity.65 Given the increased propensity for self-segregation and implicit acts of exclusion, such as zoning regulations, constructing adjacencies between different social groups is crucial. Yet, in the age of conflicting public interests and cultural polarization, this is a difficult task. Going beyond customary core functions, the design of institutions should commit to incorporating spaces for cosmopolitan encounters and co-occupation as inherent components. These spaces could also serve as environments that provide grounds for economic cooperation among groups with limited means, inclusive of resident and newcomer communities.66 A good example is the aforementioned shared kitchen of the Bazaar—a modest infrastructural investment that creates economic opportunities while forming new layers of sociability. How could the architecture of such settings perform in formal and procedural terms? What are the material conditions that could enable meaningful exchanges, habits, and formation of new, layered communities?

Margin Notes for a Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages— often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.67

As Tony Judt reminds us in the above passage, we have come to associate citizenship of the world with citizenship of a world-city. Urbane metropolises, with their lenient and diverse milieus, abundant resources, and long-standing ethos of multiculturalism, are considered “centers of cosmopolitanism.”68 Yet past histories of minor cities that espoused tolerance and inclusivity demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is about how a city relates to the world at large, and how competently it can enable the representations of the world within it.69 If our perception of what it means to be cosmopolitan reflexively

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summons the image of a world-city, it is because the dominant narratives of globalism are dull, and they elevate the flow of capital over everything else. Rust belt cosmopolitanism relies on the expanded understanding of the concept. It also practices what the cultural theorist Anthony Appiah calls a “partial” mode in which the universal humanitarian conception does not treat fellow citizens with “cold impartiality.”70 Relating to the world at large compels cities like Buffalo to address the needs of multiple disadvantaged constituencies concurrently, including its own residents. Several rust belt cities attempted to build potent resettlement mechanisms that placed them on the map as prominent refugee destinations. Mayors of Pittsburgh and Allentown, Pennsylvania; Dayton, Ohio; and Syracuse, New York, joined fourteen other mayors to sign an open letter inviting Syrian refugees to their cities.71 Cleveland formed the Refugee Services Collaborative to better coordinate resettlement services in northeast Ohio. Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County moved toward an all-inclusive approach to better serve underprivileged communities through the Multi-Service Center for Community Assistance and Refugee Resettlement. The “Welcome Dayton” plan sought to facilitate better integration of immigrants by engaging a broader set of institutional actors in the city. Rust belt cities have yet to synthesize these divergent cosmopolitan acts as the foundations of a transformative urbanism and use the lens of resettlement to focus their visions for their urban futures. Many of these cities once enjoyed and benefited from their access to the larger world, evidenced by their multicultural landscapes, robust institutions, and traditions of integrating newcomers. We can frame the attempts to develop cosmopolitan practices in the region as a way of critically recovering some of those aspirations and reorienting them toward a new urban conception. Instead, the prevailing rust belt development paradigms continue to rely on fads and products of growth-machine thinking, resulting in simultaneous conditions of active disinvestment and class-based reinvestment.72 In this regard, Mitchell proposes a renewed city-making framework that would replace the exchange-value proposition with the social-use value.73 While the applicability of Mitchell’s radical idea may seem challenging, the rust belt region affords opportunities for experimentation, and resettlement practices reaffirm the long-neglected mitigating role that public institutions could play. It has been claimed that the most essential task of contemporary urban design is “cultivating new publics.”74 The futures of rust belt cities will depend on how effectively the actors of urban development will take on this provocation. These actors will be countered with the charge that larger structures of market economy will persistently inhibit conditions of equity;

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Figure 11.10  The Vive shelter. Source: Dmitry Gudkov.

that socially oriented practices are akin to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. This cynical outlook should not prevent them from pursuing “rights in the making.”75 While advocating for an inclusive and just city, they can devise ways to amplify the impacts of their interventions to better address conditions of scarcity. The resettlement apparatus demonstrates how strategically organized networks could be useful in this regard. Furthermore, in revealing possibilities for a radical redesign of institutions, the case of Buffalo also points to a new ethos for an alternative urban project—one that seeks to cultivate not only the resident publics, but also those yet to arrive.

Ch a p ter 1 2

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

The history of architecture, it still needs to be stated, is not a neutral pursuit, despite any lingering aura of archival detachment. The deployment of architectural history in Buffalo, an industrial city where the longue durée of fiscal, racial, and ethnic ghettoization has stranded some 30 percent of the population below the poverty line—and this despite current claims of an economic renaissance—demonstrates how scholarship can be used to justify policies that reify segregation. While the co-option of cultural capital by politicians and developers is easy to identify, it is less clear how disciplinary resources might be directed elsewhere to stem the growing tide of spatial injustice. Contrasting the nitty-gritty aspects of the Buffalo landscape and the abstraction of its architecture into an aesthetic discourse was a project begun by the eminent British historian and critic who taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1976 to 1980.1 That endeavor, with its hints of an alternative course for architectural history, remains unfinished.

Part I: Architecture as History Professional historians of Buffalo’s built environment have traditionally followed one of two discursive trajectories. The dominant one amplifies what 255

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is known about the city during the period when it attracted prominent American architects to build structures significant enough to be regarded as pivotal to the development of their oeuvres and modern typologies. The Guaranty Building (1896) by Louis Sullivan, its terracotta façade now meticulously restored, and the Larkin Administration Building (1906) by Frank Lloyd Wright, demolished with little foresight in 1950, are two prominent examples of works that have been evaluated along these lines.2 At the same time, attention is called to the fact that it is unusual for a place that does not serve as a cosmopolitan center to combine in its plan parks and parkways by Frederick Law Olmsted; several houses by Wright; stately mansions by McKim, Mead & White; a glazed courtyard office building by D. H. Burnham and Company that outdid its Chicago contemporaries in scale; a church of local red sandstone by Richard Upjohn; an austere concert hall by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, complete with custom furniture by Charles and Ray Eames; a psychiatric institution by H. H. Richardson on the Kirkbride system; a museum addition in the International Style by Gordon Bunshaft; and an apartment complex by Paul Rudolph—to name only some of the most familiar examples. The alternative course embarks on the other end of the built spectrum, compiling the scholarly case for the lowly buildings of American industrial architecture of the kind that has a rich heritage in Buffalo. The second trend got its momentum from Banham’s teaching in and his publications on Buffalo and is predominantly focused on the very conspicuous collection of mostly defunct grain silos that stands on its riverfront. The assemblage includes rare specimens of steel and tile construction in addition to the more famous concrete examples and is protected by the efforts of preservationists and the prohibitive cost of demolition. While the silo in any of its material iterations is not a local product, the upright conveyor belt outfitted with scoops that was used to hoist grain from the hold of a boat and deposit it at the top of a storage silo is said to have been first assembled in Buffalo by Joseph Dart in 1842. This mechanical apparatus displaced the labor of the stevedores who had hauled grain out of the holds of ships on their backs. Humans, however, were slow and unpredictable, and agriculture was big business. The grain elevator, as the vertical configuration was called, greatly expedited the flow of grain from the Midwest to the marketplaces in the East. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant—for the short time before being overtaken by the Welland Canal and the expansion of the railway—that once the grain had crossed the Great Lakes in large vessels, it had to be unloaded, weighed, and stowed in Buffalo until it was ready to continue along the canal by barge.

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The elevator also suited developments at the turn of the century in slipform concrete silo construction, the towering storage chambers of which were based on the forces exerted by grain in compression. As grain is combustible under pressure, moreover, the fire resilience of concrete quickly made it the standard material for silo composition, especially once structures in the more flammable materials of wood, tile, and steel it replaced would no longer be underwritten by insurance companies. As a result, purist rows of concrete cylinders abounded. These forms were the ones admired by European modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially after the publication of Vers une architecture (1923) when Le Corbusier famously used these structures to illustrate his universal assertion that architecture is the “play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.”3 Le Corbusier’s conclusion was that the inferior work of American architects should be passed over in favor of the honest labors of engineers in order to extract the principles of a new architecture. The fact that the forms of these structures had been generated by subjecting the behavior of grain to the needs of its transshipment rather than by recourse to the bygone conventions of architectural composition purified them from the contamination of style. Accordingly, structures of pedestrian origin were elevated from their status as mechanical contraptions to that of a generator of an aesthetic discourse— in other words, the low became high architecture. Sequestered from the discipline for the most part by the characterization of “local history,” there have also been piecemeal studies undertaken to document segments of the residential fabric that was dramatically expanded by the influx of immigrant workers who came for the employment opportunities of yesteryear. Some of these neighborhoods, like the one known as the Fruit Belt after the orchards that once lined the streets, have benefited from the recent work of housing advocates, while others endure purely by preservation through neglect. The useful Buffalo Architecture: A Guide (1981) touched on working-class neighborhoods in its cartographic layout, but expanded mostly on the areas that bore the imprint of high architecture.4 Even grassroots studies have often focused on exceptional instances, such as the workplaces and homes of the entrepreneurs of major industries, from the mail-order Larkin Company, founded 1875, to the Pierce-Arrow Motor Company, founded 1901, or on architects of local repute, such as E. B. Green

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and Louise Blanchard Bethune, the first female member of the American Institute of Architects, who had thriving careers. The housing stock from before World War I, especially that which was built in areas that have been subject to the market forces of gentrification over the last few decades, is often noted for its attention to aesthetic and construction detail. The arc of architectural history, then, has positioned Buffalo within a framework of a national, even international discourse, in which value has accrued through its affiliation with and cultivation of aesthetic discourse. The restoration of pedigreed works and the designation of historical districts have been deployed in tandem with the commonplace practice of commissioning of cultural landmarks from prestigious firms—such as a new extension to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture now under way, or the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion Visitor Center (2009) for the Darwin Martin House by Toshiko Mori Architect—to stimulate the current trend toward economic recovery. Historical scholarship, as any visitor to Wright’s meticulous, four-stage renovation of the Darwin Martin House will be aware, has been directly instrumental in the generation of cultural tourism, as well as substantial capital investment. The disparity evidenced by the investment of millions in a single restoration project is one that is not lost on residents of the economically depressed areas outside the preservationist spectrum, places where infrastructural resources are meted out in teaspoons, right down to the very basic level of much-needed pothole maintenance. Instrumentality of knowledge is a matter of consequence in a city where economic recovery from decades of decline is fueled by a framing of the past that directs the flow of private and public funds to already affluent pockets of the city. To be clear: the focus on exceptional structures is not unique to the practice of architectural history in Buffalo, as the tendency to expand on the spaces of social privilege is common to the field. Nonetheless, as a place where poverty rates, as well as stubborn divisions between neighborhoods based on ethnicity, race, and class, have remained fast over the centuries, the impact is multiplied. Even the areas recognized as significant examples of the late Victorian era fell on hard times for much of the twentieth century. As the rise and fall of the steel industry followed the Great Depression, Buffalo’s fate charted the pattern familiar from across the rust belt. The built fabric of Buffalo, including the lacunae in its construction, records the ebbs and flows of the city’s economy and population. Yet, while social histories and social justice campaigns have drawn attention to the vicissitudes of the isolated neighborhood enclaves of Buffalo, its architectural history still emphasizes the fraction of building that links the city to greater professional and

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disciplinary narratives. The focus on architecture as a high art has done nothing to mitigate the social divide that has characterized the urban landscape of Buffalo and has even exacerbated it through its own exclusionary apparatus. Even where the biographies of local architects push issues of gender or racial identity to the fore, as it must with the careers of Bethune or Robert T. Coles, historians have avoided the uneasy implications of how these carefully cultivated professional identities were able to circumvent exclusion through the enablement of class. Certain parts of Buffalo are once again experiencing an economic upswing that is reflected in the rising cost of real estate, especially in the areas designated of historical interest. At the same time, the city is accommodating an influx of immigrants who fuel the extant need for affordable housing policies. The larger political context of the moment dictates that these issues are more pertinent the ever.

Part II: History as Architecture Given the visible ways in which historical research has been put to work, why has it been so difficult to divert scholarship from an enterprise that reifies the divisions of an already segregated urban fabric? For one thing, architectural historians are mostly trained to scrutinize the singular, and what falls outside this purview is often obscured or, more damagingly, dismissed as mundane by the established academics entrusted with the cultivation of the next generation of researchers. There are, however uncommon, projects that have proved an exception to this rule, and the research conducted by Reyner Banham and his students at the State University of New York initiated such an alternative strain. This research was focused on lowly forms of industrial construction of the kind that is usually absent from canonical works of architectural history. And, despite the criticism by traditional historians, this work still resonates today well beyond local boundaries.5 In addition to the list of significant works, then, the built fabric of Buffalo has also spurred a methodology that focused on structures that were rarely treated as architecture. That approach offers an alternative to the narrative that commodifies historical value. The impact of Buffalo on Banham’s work remains nonetheless relatively unexamined. Scholarship on the American subjects that preoccupied Banham tends to focus on Los Angeles and arid landscapes. But as the dedication of Magda Cordell McHale’s copy of Scenes in America Deserta promised, the West Coast books were “something completely different.” After all, Banham left his job at University College London for one in Buffalo, at least until

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family considerations necessitated a move to the less snowy climate of Santa Cruz. It was in Buffalo that his work in both subject matter and procedure first resonated outside the echo chamber that was the London alternative scene. Displacement from the center was, after all, Banham’s intellectual comfort zone. He had begun his career writing about subjects that were marginalized by the historical literature or stranded in its blind spots. Whether he was exposing suppressed avant-garde voices or musing on the impact of air-conditioning, he explored the implications of lingering at the periphery. He championed the cause of information and digital technology already in the late fifties, including the promotion of practices, especially Archigram, that positioned the provincial as a viable source of knowledge. Moreover, he sidelined himself from the mainstream by engaging his fascination with American popular and technological culture despite the suspicion of Americanisme prevalent in the left-leaning, intellectual environment of postwar Britain. The informal tone of the bulk of his writing, as well as the scope of publics addressed by the range of venues in which his essays appeared, further compounded the accessibility of his message. In subject matter and style, then, Banham has provided an insider’s model to the outside for those seeking to avoid the conventional economy of knowledge. Most significantly, however, was the belief in the potential for history to be practiced in opposition to and as a critique of mainstream discourse that can be discerned in Banham’s writing from the very beginning of his career. This capacity was rooted in his approach to documentation as a mutable entity to which the historian added more layers through the act of interpretation. Banham, an avid amateur photographer himself, was particularly interested in the subjective role played by photography in the construction of history. Unlike a drawing, the photograph could pose as a passive record rather than reveal itself as the composition that it really was. As Banham noted, the “veracity of the camera is proverbial, but nearly all proverbs take a one-sided view of life. . . . We tend to forget that every photograph is an artefact, a document recording forever a momentary construction based upon reality.”6 Lest we think that the implications of this elision of construct and reality were restricted to the realm of scholarly discourse, Banham concluded that photography, with its “strong moral claims to truth and objectivity now over a century old, has established its manner of seeing as the currency of our time, and we come to think of the photographic experience as the equivalent of personal participation.”7 The passage of sixty years has only exaggerated the correspondence in the public eye of the photograph as a document of participation. Its “manner of seeing” is truly the currency of the age of social media.

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Since Banham knew of Buffalo’s architecture first from photographs, the topic provided him with the perfect foil to expand on the dialectic of composition and experience. A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (1986), the book Banham published based on his experiences in Buffalo, targeted the representational means through which buildings were co-opted. It wasn’t merely that the thesis explored the aestheticization of “non-architecture”: the study itself was demonstrative of the generative practice of history. Given the trade photographs of American industrial architecture used to substantiate claims of verisimilitude at the heart of the modernist agenda, A Concrete Atlantis can be read as a polemic on the uses of documentary distortion. Photography is not just vital to the case presented in, but also to the production of A Concrete Atlantis. Banham described the use of visual information in foundational texts and himself contributed to the debate through his own practice of historical writing. The significance of documentation and the manipulation of how it is read are intrinsically bound up with how one comes to know about buildings and how that affects the information they impart. A Concrete Atlantis demonstrates the process that Banham employed to mediate between the antiquarian mode of field research and the archaeology of photographic representation. When he arrived in Buffalo, Banham was struck by the immense physicality of the grain silos as compared with the abstract experience of encountering their grainy reproductions on the pages of early modernist manifestos where images of silos had influenced the way that Europeans thought about the developing aesthetic of modernism and the discussion over the future course of the discipline. The difference between how the silos were understood through these images rather than through his firsthand experience led Banham to a sustained reflection on the fact that the conduit by means of which the silos had profoundly influenced the development of a nonindustrial architectural aesthetic was a photographic construction. Trade images were thought to be devoid of contrivances and free of historical trappings—a product of optical science, as Banham writes, “supposedly free from the elements of personal selection and interpretation that must inevitably infect any artistic rendering, or even the traditional production by architectural draftsmen of finished drawings from field notes. The photographs represented a truth as apparently objective and modern as the structures they portrayed.”8 Indeed, Banham would claim that the International Style “must be the first architectural movement in the history of art based almost exclusively on photographic evidence rather than the ancient and previously unavoidable techniques of personal inspection and measured drawing.”9

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A Concrete Atlantis, while centered on the non-architecture of labor, sparked the interest of architectural tourists and historians in these kinds of buildings because they had inspired the polemics of early modernism. Admittedly, Banham was fascinated by that angle too. But Banham’s attention lingered at length on the functional details that were of no consequence to the modernist argument. He researched the mechanics of the silos, including the nitty-gritty of their slip-form construction and the workings of the belts, chutes, and pulleys that informed the internal dynamics of these outwardly stoic structures. In his seminars at SUNY, students participated in the documentation of “anonymous” works of an industrial nature in a detailed fashion that was usually reserved for structures by illustrious authors.10 In addition to the drawings, measurements, construction documents, and historical photographs collated by students, Banham undertook a process of documenting the silos with his own 35mm Pentax SLR. Banham began with the grainy reproductions that he knew so well and, photographs in hand, tried to match them with what stood before him decades later. The comparisons, which documented the transformations of the landscape over time, were often described in exhaustive detail. As Banham described in the Architectural Review: Sitting on the end of this massive I-beam that forms part of the chassis of the currently out of service No. 1 marine tower of the Standard Elevator, I can see almost exactly what Erich Mendelsohn saw when when he photographed this scene 56 years ago. He could not have sat where I sit; the Standard was not built until 1928. In fact the photo he took then cannot be repeated—even given the right width of lens angle, and the exact standpoint—because the view is cropped on both sides by main and subsidiary structures of the Standard.11 Note how the term “cropped” is applied to how the view had changed because of the accretion of buildings on the ground. Finally, Banham hired the photographer Patricia Layman Bazelon to shoot and reshoot many of the images that would appear in A Concrete Atlantis. Her photographs of the grain silos and daylight factories of Buffalo constitute an archive in their own right. The body of imagery made during the firsthand study of the silos reveals that Banham used his own photographic practice to approximate his experience, despite the caution of how easily one could be substituted for the other. Successive slides from Banham’s personal collection, for example, illustrate his repeated visits to the cluster of silos situated around where the Buffalo River opened into the Eerie Canal. The sequences illustrate a cinematographic

C r o p p i n g t h e Vi e w     263

approach, beginning with an overview of the exterior as one moves closer, followed by partial investigations that zoom in on details and interior studies. Climatic conditions and the impact of light are taken into account. When Banham photographed the Concrete Central Elevator in 1978, for example, he first shot it in context at a distance. He returned in 1979 to photograph it dramatically from below. Then he photographed it again on a brighter day outside as well as inside, to capture the scale, as well as the function of the chamfered columns. The cumulative process of photographic documentation revealed the richness of what others, since the silos had fallen into disuse, had disregarded as “tons of deserted, decaying concrete.”12 The array of historic professional and amateur photographs together are proof of a main claim of A Concrete Atlantis that the quintessence of European modernism was rooted in the “dialectical confrontation between sculptural forms [of the grain elevators] and gridded space [of American factories].”13 Photographs of the silos already had a modernist tradition of having been tweaked for greater effect. Le Corbusier famously whitewashed the image of a Buenos Aires silo so that it lost its chain of pediments (and also mistakenly captioned it as a Canadian example). Further touch-ups strengthened the purity of form to make the association with the serial uprights of ancient Egyptian and Greek architecture appear more convincing. As Banham said of such comparisons, “The photograph, being an artefact, applies its own laws of artefaction to the material it documents, and discovers similarities and parallels between the documentations, even where none exist between the objects and recorded.”14 Banham practiced a version of photographic correction too. Several contact sheets in the Bazelon archive, for example, are annotated with “post-it” notes that include requests by Banham to have images that had been taken with 35mm film redone in a 4 x 5 format. Though images taken at the larger format have a clarity and depth beneficial for their reproduction, this level of resolution was not exploited in the production of A Concrete Atlantis. In fact, imagery shot on 35mm film far outweighs that of large-format work, even in those cases where Bazelon produced superior 4 x 5 images from similar vantage points of her own accord. In these isolated cases, Banham might have been seeking the advantage of a large-format camera to more closely approximate the sensibility of two-point perspective by adjusting the vertical perspective in order to overcome the distortion of receding upright lines that is exaggerated when the focal plane is not parallel to the vertical axis of the subject. Often this correction of the vertical perspective is accompanied by the use of a close vantage point and wide-angle lens, which results in distortion toward the perimeter of the image. Indeed, the large-format images used in the book are significantly cropped, despite

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12

the fact that Banham rarely cropped photos and did not crop any of the 35mm ones even when Bazelon suggested he do so. Overt manipulation and the practice of cropping away the undesirable leads back to the main, and crucial, point of this essay: the varying costs of the historical frame. Banham resisted the clipping and trimming of images that were made to capture the gist of experience. The most staged of photographic manipulations, by contrast, from tampering with the format of the negative to excising unwanted information, were eligible for adjustment outright. By contrast, the annexation of photographs from one context to another, an act of appropriation that was further decontextualized by surreptitious corrections to the supposedly neutral image, performed an act of conceptual redlining. While the bias of constructions that passed themselves off as pictures of a reality was in itself a subject worthy of meditation, the effort remains incomplete as it stands. Banham, for example, lavished attention on the mechanisms that made up the silo but did not attend in any meaningful way to the invisible labor that was intrinsic to the workings of the machine, whether it was galvanized in the building of the silos or tied to the fate of those who once worked in them. It was the absence of this very human component that according to Lewis Mumford rendered the accounts of the very ancient monuments to which the silos were compared first by Wilhelm Worringer incomplete.15 A Concrete Atlantis is still a story of buildings whose history has been put to various ends. The adroit levels at which Banham demonstrated the balance of visual record and active participation in the making of history still needs to be extended to other forms of spatial marginalization that directly impact lived experience. Decentralized places and states can, if the opportunity is seized, offer freedoms foreclosed at the center. That is a project worthy of the endeavor.

Coda Peter H. Christensen

Nicolai Ouroussoff, former architecture critic for the New York Times, published an editorial entitled “Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty” at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis.1 In it, Ouroussoff depicted Buffalo as a hidden gem, a place replete with architectural treasures and a history of experimentation that was in outsize proportion to its population, economic health, and the resources of its preservationists. He notes that “today Buffalo is a collection of fragile museum pieces with a covey of local stewards struggling to preserve them as a means to help save the city. . . . What makes this historic revival so heartwarming, however, is that is driven by genuine civic pride in the face of daunting odds.”2 Although this was and remains true, Ouroussoff ’s article, the publicity of which delighted many local officials, cemented some of the very clichés that have trapped Buffalo in both a fugue of “ruin porn”–like pity and in the role of tragic muse to so many of the outsiders looking in. And yet Buffalo ardently remains a dynamic city that itself begs neither pity nor romance from its inhabitants. It is a special place, to be sure, but it is also quotidian, emblematic, and archetypal. The essays in this volume, seen together in their topical, disciplinary, and methodological diversity, have sought to highlight just those traits as part

265

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of a larger effort to move beyond facile depictions of Buffalo and instead to show how its lessons are transposable by being allegorical. By casting Buffalo in this way, one may bring the past to bear on the present and vice versa, and one may transpose this city’s discrete lessons into larger ones about the shared project we call the city.

Notes

Introduction

1. Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities.” 2. See Creighton, Electrifying Fall. 3. Quoted in Goldman, High Hopes, 7. 4. On Esenwein and Johnson see Buffalo as an Architectural Museum, accessed March 26, 2019, http://www.buffaloah.com/a/archs/ej/online.html. 5. “Leon Czolgosz,” in Britannica Academic, Encyclopaedia Britannica, July 28, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Czolgosz. 6. Creighton, Electrifying Fall. 7. Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities.” 8. “Testimony of Anne Hillis and Jim Clark, Joint Senate Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution and Hazardeous [sic] Waste, March 28 and 29, 1979, co-chaired by Senator Edmund Muskie and Senator Culver,” Special Collections Library of the State University of New York, Buffalo. See https://library.buffalo.edu/archives/ lovecanal/collections/pdfs/hillis1.pdf. 9. On the Three Mile Island crisis see J. S. Walker, Three Mile Island. 10. Carson, Silent Spring; The China Syndrome, directed by James Bridges and starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, was released on March 16, 1979, by Columbia Pictures. 11. See Lauck, Causes of the Panic. 12. On Love Canal see Newman, Love Canal, and Gibbs, Love Canal. 13. On the history of the EPA and the Superfund program see Hird, Superfund. 14. On the history of Hallwalls see Ehmke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives. Banham’s contributions to the famous Buffalo guidebook are found in Kowsky, Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corp. et al., Buffalo Architecture. On the emergence of a dynamic LGBT scene see Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather. 15. Creighton, Electrifying Fall, particularly the prologue. 16. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities. 17. Anna Blatto, “A City Divided: A Brief History of Segregation in Buffalo,” Partnership for the Public Good, April 2018, https://ppgbuffalo.org/files/docu ments/data-demographics-history/a_city_divided__a_brief_history_of_segrega tion_in_the_city_of_buffalo.pdf. 18. Cynthia van Ness of the Buffalo History Museum has published an excellent online primer on key Underground Railroad sites in Buffalo. See http://www.buffa loresearch.com/ugrr.html. 19. Benjamin Weiser and Jesse McKinley, “Architect of Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion Project Is Convicted in Bid-Rigging Scheme,” New York Times, July 12, 2018. 20. Teachout, Corruption in America, esp. chap. 8. 267

268    NOTES

TO PA GES 1 7 – 3 3

1.  “The Olmsted City”

1. Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere. 2. For the definitive account see Kowsky, Best Planned City. 3. Kowsky, Best Planned City, 221. 4. Olmsted Vaux & Co. to William Dorsheimer, October 1, 1868, in Beveridge and Hoffman, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1:158, 161–62. 5. “There is no one of the 90 public works in which I have been engaged which, as I visit it from time to time, gives me more satisfaction,” Olmsted said of Delaware Park in 1893. Cited in Kowsky, Best Planned City, 71. 6. Olmsted Vaux & Co. to William Dorsheimer, October 1, 1868, in Beveridge and Hoffman, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Supplementary Series, 1:166. 7. Frederick Law Olmsted to George Waring Jr., April 13, 1876, cited in Kowsky, Best Planned City, 6. 8. F. L. & J. C. Olmsted, Landscape Architects, The Projected Park and Parkways on the South Side of Buffalo (1888), in Beveridge and Hoffman, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1:580. 9. Cited in Beveridge, “Buffalo’s Park and Parkway System,” in Kowsky, Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corp. et al., Buffalo Architecture, 21. 10. J. C. Olmsted to J. T. Heffernan, October 25, 1910, photocopy, Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy Archives (BOPC). 11. For the full history of the asylum complex landscape see Heritage Landscapes, Cultural Landscape Report, https://richardson-olmsted.com/files/documents/plan ning_and_reports/Cultural_Landscape_Full_Report.pdf. 12. Buffalo Socialist, cited in Goldman, High Hopes, 190. 13. Goldman, High Hopes, 194. 14. “City Fails to Follow Its Noble Plan,” Buffalo Evening News, December 4, 1937. For a good account of Behrendt’s brief tenure in Buffalo see Goldman, City on the Edge, 120–29. 15. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Late Additions to the Plan of Buffalo,” 1876, cited in Beveridge, Meier, and Mills, Frederick Law Olmsted, 134. 16. “Once-Magnificent Front Park Being Whittled Down Anew,” Buffalo Evening News, April 4, 1957. 17. City of Buffalo Planning Commission, Report on Metropolitan Trafficways, 17–22. Available at Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. 18. Kowsky, Best Planned City, 113. 19. “City Fails to Follow Its Noble Plan,” Buffalo Evening News, December 4, 1937. 20. Goldman, City on the Lake, 22–23. 21. “Minor Change Asked in Design of Kensington Expressway,” Buffalo CourierExpress, March 21, 1958. 22. Goldman, City on the Edge, 208. 23. Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 108. 24. Allen, Olmsted National Historic Site, 18. 25. Roper, FLO. 26. Fein, Frederick Law Olmsted, ix.

NOTES TO PA GES 3 3 – 4 0     269

27. Samuel Bass Warner Jr., “Open Spaces,” New Republic, March 23, 1974; Henry Hope Reed, “Topics: The Central Park Memorial,” New York Times, December 3, 1966, 38. For a more recent interrogation of the cult of Olmsted see Scobey, Empire City. 28. Robert T. Coles, “An Architect Looks at Buffalo,” Buffalo Business 38, no. 10 (October 1963): 34. 29. For the Parkside Community Association see Goldman, City on the Lake, 49–50. 30. Frederick Law Olmsted, Plan for a Public Park on the Flats South of Buffalo, October 1888, in Beveridge and Hoffman, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1:581. 31. “Buffalo’s Beauty Fading,” Buffalo Courier-Express, August 4, 1968. 32. City of Buffalo Department of Community Development, Delaware Park, 1. 33. Unsigned, undated memorandum on the “History and Progress of the Delaware Park Plan,” Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy Archives (hereafter BOPC). 34. James J. MacDonald to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, October 4, 1977, photocopy, BOPC. 35. “Delaware Park,” undated and unsigned memorandum, BOPC; Draft of Proposal to the Delaware Park Steering Committee from the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks, n.d. [1986?], BOPC; Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks REDPP Application Attachment 1, n.d. [1993?], BOPC. 36. Elizabeth Blum, Delaware Park Steering Committee, to Joan Bozer, March 15, 1979, photocopy, BOPC. 37. National Register Bulletin 15: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation (Washington, DC: US Department of Interior, 1997), cited in Heritage Landscapes, Cultural Landscape Report, https://richardson-olmsted.com/files/docu ments/planning_and_reports/Cultural_Landscape_Full_Report.pdf. 38. Bruce Kelly, “The Art of the Olmsted Landscape,” in Kelly, Travis Guillet, and Herman, Art of the Olmsted Landscape, 69. 39. See O’Donnell, Survey. See also the National Register nomination form for the Olmsted Park and Parkway System in Buffalo, BOPC. 40. Goldman, High Hopes, 275–76. 41. For more on the fight over the magnet school in Martin Luther King Jr. Park see Levine, Beautiful Buffalo. 42. Kowsky, Best Planned City, 219. 43. “Buffalo Olmsted Parks Wayfinding Analysis,” October 1997, BOPC. 44. Buffalo Environmental Management Commission, “State of the Environment Report for the City of Buffalo,” 1989. 45. Interim Report of the Common Council’s Buffalo Parks Conservancy Task Force, April 14, 1994, BOPC. 46. Development Planning Services Inc., “Tourism Market Opportunities: Olmsted Parks Feasibility Analysis” (May 1994), BOPC. 47. “To read some of the national coverage these days,” writes one recent local blogger, “Buffalo is the new Brooklyn—a foodie-hipster-arts-preservationist haven with a vibrant refugee community.” See “Buffalo 2.0,” https://bfloboho.com/boho broad/buffalo, September 6, 2017. 48. See Shibley and Schneekloth, Olmsted City.

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TO PA GES 4 1 – 4 7

49. For more on the efforts of the Restore Our Community Coalition’s effort to remediate what they see as the “civic injustice” of the Kensington Expressway see http://roccbuffalo.org/. 50. “Once So Chic and Swooshy, Freeways Are Falling Out of Favor,” New York Times, October 21, 2017. 2. The Peace Bridge and the Rhetoric of Hospitality at the US-Canada Border

I would like to thank Cynthia van Ness at the Buffalo History Museum for her expert guidance in my research on this topic. I would also like to thank Annie Schentag, Marta Cieślak, and Eitan Freedenberg for their invaluable curatorial assistance in the initial planning phase of the Buffalo Architecture Center (now to be known as the Lipsey Center) at the former Buffalo State Psychiatric Hospital. I learned a great deal from their expertise on all things Buffalo. 1. There are books dedicated to the subject of the Peace Bridge. See Spear, Peace Bridge, and Cloutier, Peace Bridge. See also Graebner, “ ‘Ribbon of Steel and Concrete’ ”; Wolcott, “Recreation and Race”; Kowsky, “Municipal Parks and City Planning”; Shibley, Schneekloth, and Hovery, “Constituting the Public Realm.” 2. Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 12. 3. On Holt see George E. Matthews & Co., Men of New York, 422. 4. The Peace Bridge (website), accessed February 22, 2018, http://www.peace bridge.com. Numerous other facts and statistics about the Peace Bridge are published here. 5. This is not to imply that hospitality did not exist before the Enlightenment, only that it became theorized secularly at that time. Kant, To Perpetual Peace. See also Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 9. 6. Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 10. See also Derrida, Of Hospitality, 25. 7. Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 10. 8. Derrida discusses the nature of Judeo-Christian hospitality within the context of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. See Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 228–29. 9. Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 8–9. See also Code, “How to Think Globally,” 82. 10. Spear, Peace Bridge, 17. 11. See Jennings, History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy. 12. See Steckley, Eighteenth-Century Wyandot. 13. On the War of 1812 see Lord, Dawn’s Early Light. 14. Oliver Hazard Perry to Paul Hamilton, October 9, 1812. See Dudley, Naval War of 1812, 327–31. 15. On the Treaty of Ghent see Dunning and Bryce, British Empire. 16. On the Patriot War in New York State see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies. 17. Coventry and Riddell, Contemporary Account. 18. Bonthius, “Patriot War of 1837–1838,” 10–11. 19. Spear, Peace Bridge, 19. 20. See Norman Hillmer, “Statue of Westminster,” in the Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/statute-of-westminster/. 21. Saul Jay Singer, “The Plan to Establish a Jewish Homeland in America,” Jewish Press, August 23, 2017. Noah’s announcement has been published widely. See, for

NOTES TO PA GES 4 7 – 5 5     271

example, Mordecai Manuel Noah, “Ararat, City of Refuge at Grand Island,” Christian Mirror, September 16, 1825. See also Sarna, Jacksonian Jew. 22. Singer, “Plan to Establish a Jewish Homeland.” 23. The Buffalo History Museum has a stone that commemorates Noah’s plan for Grand Island. 24. Noah, Discourse on the Restoration of the Jew. 25. At the time of writing, a museum committed to the region’s role in the Underground Railroad was slated to be opened. See James Fink, “Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Museum to Open May 4,” Buffalo Business First, February 17, 2018. There are many accounts of the Underground Railroad in New York State. See Foner, Gateway to Freedom. See also Seibel and Seibel, Bridges. 26. William H. Siener and Thomas A. Chambers link Tubman and Roebling’s work in William H. Siener and Thomas A. Chambers, “Crossing to Freedom: Harriet Tubman and John A. Roebling’s Suspension Bridge,” Western New York Heritage 13, no, 1 (Spring 2010), https://www.wnyheritage.org/content/crossing_to_freedom_ harriet_tubman_and_john_a_roeblings_suspensi/index.html. 27. Siener and Chambers nevertheless note how this is not entirely proven. 28. A website with a number of sources on all things Pan-American is http:// panam1901.org. 29. “Canada’s Building. Handsome in Its Appointments. It’s a Sportsman’s Joy. There Is No Game Element in the Pan-American Exposition to Compare with It,” Buffalo Express, June 30, 1901. 30. “Canada at the Pan-Am,” Buffalo Evening News, June 22, 1901. 31. “Canada at the Pan-Am.” 32. H. V. Nelles, “Gzowski, Sir Casimir Stanislaus,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12 (Toronto/Laval: University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2003), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gzowski_casimir_stanislaus_12E.html. 33. Troyano, Bridge Engineering, 570. 34. Schneider, Cantilever Bridge. 35. See Seibel and Seibel, Bridges. 36. Seibel and Seibel, Bridges. 37. On the construction of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge see Irwin, New Niagara. 38. Marquis, Builders of Canada, 253–62. 39. Sherman Zavitz, “Life of Lady Wire Walker Shrouded in Mystery,” Niagara Falls Review, February 22, 2003. 40. Niagara Parks, “Whirlpool Aero Car,” https://www.niagaraparks.com/ visit/attractions/whirlpool-aero-car/. 41. Robert Moses printed a pamphlet outlining the Saint Lawrence and Niagara hydroelectric plan. Robert Moses, St. Lawrence and Niagara Power (New York, 1957). 42. On Mather’s monument in Fort Erie see R. Brown, Lake Erie Shore, 55. 43. Spear, Peace Bridge, 24–26. 44. Spear, Peace Bridge, 24–26. 45. Spear, Peace Bridge, 33. 46. Spear, Peace Bridge, 36. 47. Spear, Peace Bridge, 34.

272    NOTES

TO PA GES 5 5 – 6 4

48. Spear, Peace Bridge, 36 49. Spear, Peace Bridge, 36 50. Spear, Peace Bridge, 34. 51. Spear, Peace Bridge, documents the opening ceremonies in great detail. 52. Spear, Peace Bridge, 33. 53. See Cameron and Tomlin, Making of NAFTA. 54. Jackson, Peace Bridge Chronicles. 55. Jackson, Peace Bridge Chronicles. 56. This trend continues. See Peace Bridge, https://www.peacebridge.com/ index.php/historical-traffic-statistics/yearly-volumes. It should be noted that in the period of population decline in Buffalo, the population of neighboring Fort Erie continued to increase, if at a slower rate. 57. Peter Hadekel, “Stagnation City: Exploring Montreal’s Economic Decline,” Montreal Gazette, January 31, 2015. 58. Spear, Peace Bridge, 34. Regarding lake depths see Grady, Great Lakes, 13, 21–26, 42–43. The Great Lakes have also been recently dubbed North America’s “Third Coast.” See Ibañez et al., Third Coast Atlas. 59. Spear, Peace Bridge, 60. 60. Spear, Peace Bridge, 60. 61. Wolcott, “Recreation and Race,” 63. 62. Wolcott, “Recreation and Race.” 63. Wolcott, “Recreation and Race,” 69. 64. Kowsky, “Municipal Parks.” 65. As cited by Kowsky, “Municipal Parks,” 55. 66. As cited by Kowsky, “Municipal Parks,” 55. 67. Graebner, “Ribbon of Steel.” 68. Sweeney, History of Buffalo, 128–29. 69. Spear, Peace Bridge, 70. 70. See SUNY Buffalo’s historical commemoration of Baird and his family at https://library.buffalo.edu/archives/campuses/detail.html?ID=12. 71. Spear, Peace Bridge, 70. 72. See Stamp, QEW. 73. Spear, Peace Bridge, 61–62. 74. Spear, Peace Bridge, 61. 75. Spear, Peace Bridge, 62. 76. Spear, Peace Bridge, 69. 77. Spear, Peace Bridge, 69. 78. Spear, Peace Bridge, 70. 3. Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses

1. Following the work of historian Stephen High, the term “rust belt” is here used to reference a vernacular region that emerged in the 1970s as a “sweeping metaphor enclosing and structuring debate on deindustrialization in the United States.” See High, Industrial Sunset, 64. 2. Picon, “Anxious Landscapes,” 77.

NOTES TO PA GES 6 4 – 6 8     273

3. “A Rust-Belt Revival,” Economist, March 5, 2016, https://www.economist. com/business/2016/03/03/a-rust-belt-revival. 4. Newell Nussbaumer, “Looking for Proof That Buffalo Is Rising,” Buffalo Rising, April 24, 2016, http://www.buffalorising.com/2016/04/looking-for-proof-thatbuffalo-is-rising/. 5. Jeddy Johnson, “ ‘Keep Buffalo a Secret’ Mural Pops on Main Street, WKBW Buffalo, October 24, 2019, https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/keep-buffaloa-secret-mural-pops-on-main-street. 6. Cited in Ethan Powers, “The Tour de Neglect: A Cycle Ride through Buffalo’s Deprived East Side,” Guardian, November 13, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2014/oct/14/-sp-cycle-buffalo-new-york-deprived-east-side- tour-de-neglect. 7. Powers, “Tour de Neglect.” 8. This research project was conducted as part of the seminar “Buffalo: A City and Its Context,” taught by Peter Christensen at the University of Rochester during the spring semester of 2016. 9. DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 365. 10. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 9. 11. Stoler, Imperial Debris, x. For other examples of critical scholarship on ruins and ruination see Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins; Cairns and Jacobs, Buildings Must Die; Easterling, Subtraction. 12. DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 467–68. 13. On planning and urban policy-making under conditions of abandonment see Dewar and Manning Thomas, The City after Abandonment. 14. Waldheim, Landscape Urbanism Reader, 39. See also Waldheim, Landscape as Urbanism. 15. High, “Beyond Aesthetics,” 143. 16. Picon, “Anxious Landscapes,” 66. 17. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, 11. 18. DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 368. 19. High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, 2. 20. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 19, emphasis mine. 21. Brad Hahn, interviewed by Julia Tulke, April 22, 2016. 22. Kowsky, “Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity,” 20. 23. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 110. 24. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 142. 25. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 31. 26. Kowsky, “Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity,” 40. 27. Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis, 16. 28. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 175. 29. Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis, 15. 30. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 165. 31. Kowsky, “Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity,” 20. 32. Andreas Huyssen, “Prologue,” in Paeslack, Ineffably Urban, xviii. 33. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 19. 34. Catharine Callahan, “Reforesting Buffalo’s Grain Elevator District,” in Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis, 80.

274    NOTES

TO PA GES 6 8 – 7 6

35. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 154. 36. Public comments made in letters to a newspaper during a debate about the grain elevators cited in Michael Frisch, “Where’s the Fun in a Grain Elevator?,” in Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis, 125. 37. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 165. 38. For a site-specific account of uses see Marc James, “Urban Decay Central,” Concrete Aperture, October 17, 2013, https://concreteaperture.com/2013/10/17/ urban-decay-central/. 39. Dora Apel, “The Ruins of Capitalism,” Jacobin, June 5, 2015, https://www. jacobinmag.com/2015/06/ruin-porn-imagery-photography-detroit/. 40. Apel, “Ruins of Capitalism.” 41. Brian Mihok, “Can These Eerie, Abandoned Grain Silos Help Save Buffalo?,” Fast Company, March 19, 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3027703/canthese-eery-abandoned-grain-silos-help-save-buffalo. 42. Zukin, Naked City, 51. 43. Thomas Yots, “Challenging the Imagination: Adaptive Reuse of Grain Elevators,” in Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis, 116–20. 44. See Schneekloth, Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis. 45. Mihok, “Eerie, Abandoned Grain Silos.” 46. "14 Awesome Ways to Experience Silo City," Step Out Buffalo, August 14, 2014, https://stepoutbuffalo.com/7-ways-to-experience-silo-city/. 47. Campo, “Historic Preservation in an Economic Void.” 48. Hahn interview. 49. Mihok, “Eerie, Abandoned Grain Silos.” 50. Hahn interview. 51. Newell Nussbaumer, “Outer Harbor Elevator/Marina Purchased by FFZ Holdings,” Buffalo Rising, June 7, 2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/06/ outer-harbor-elevatormarina-purchased-by-ffz-holdings/. 52. James Fink, "Unnamed Bidder Pays $475K for Waterfront Site," Buffalo Business First, June 5, 2013, https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2013/06/05/ unnamed-bidder-offers-475k-for.html.  53. Carl Lee, “Excavations: Last House,” in Paeslack, Ineffably Urban, 68. 54. Silverman, Yin, and Patterson, “Dawn of the Dead City,” 134. 55. Goldman, City on the Edge, 255. 56. Goldman, City on the Edge, 256. 57. Goldman, City on the Edge, 41. 58. Goldman, City on the Edge, 41–42. 59. Powers, “Tour de Neglect.” 60. Silverman, Yin, and Patterson, “Dawn of the Dead City,” 132–33. 61. Thomas G. Scott, “East Side Posts Highest Rate of Vacant Homes, but Another 22 WNY Areas Are Above 10%,” Buffalo Business First, March 25, 2016, http://www.bizjournals. com/buffalo/news/2016/03/25/east-side-posts-highest-rate-of-vacant-homes-but.html. 62. Ken Belson, “Vacant Houses, Scourge of a Beaten-Down Buffalo,” New York Times, September 13, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/nyregion/13vacant. html?_r=0.

NOTES TO PA GES 7 6 – 8 5     275

63. Cited in Belson, “Vacant Houses.” 64. Silverman, Yin, and Patterson, “Dawn of the Dead City,” 133. 65. Janet Penska, “Mayor Brown’s ‘5 in 5’ Demolition Plan,” in Moving Buffalo Forward: Policy Briefs from the Brown Administration (Buffalo, NY: Department of Administration, Finance, Policy and Urban Affairs, 2007). 66. Penska, “5 in 5,” emphasis mine. 67. Penska, “5 in 5.” 68. Penska, “5 in 5.” 69. Silverman, Yin, and Patterson, “Dawn of the Dead City,” 134. 70. Lee, “Excavations,” 68. 71. Lee, “Excavations,” 68. 72. Geoff Kelly, “Raze the Roof,” Artvoice, July 30, 2015, http://artvoice.com/ issues/v7n31/raze_the_roof.html. 73. Cited in Kelly, “Raze the Roof.” 74. Cited in Belson, “Vacant Houses.” 75. Aaron Bartley, “ ‘Nature Resurged: Buffalo’s New Pastoral,’ ” in Paeslack, Ineffably Urban, 160. 76. Mark Fahey, “Buffalo’s $1 Homes Aren’t as Cheap as They Seem,” CNN, March 3, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/03/real_estate/buffalo-1-homes/. 77. Hahn interview. 78. “List of United States Cities by Population Density,” Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density. 79. “Buffalo, NY Real Estate & Homes for Sale,” Trulia, accessed April 27, 2016, http://www.trulia.com. 80. James Napora, “Houses of Worship: A Guide to the Religious Architecture of Buffalo, New York. Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church,” 1995, http://www. buffaloah.com/how/18/18.6/18.6.html. 81. See Peter Koch, “Fall from Grace,” Artvoice, August 2, 2007, http://artvoice. com/issues/v6n31/fall_from_grace.html; Elisabeth Licata, “Preservation Ready: Sacred Spaces under a Deathwatch,” Buffalo Spree, December 2011, http://www. buffalospree.com/Buffalo-Spree/December-2011/Preservation-Ready-Sacredspaces-under-a-deathwatch/. 82. Lee, “Excavations,” 74. 83. WCPerspective, “East Side Development Heats Up,” Buffalo Rising, March 16, 2015, http://www.buffalorising.com/2015/03/east-side-development-heats-up/. 84. Mohammed Faris, “18 Sources of Barakah!,” Islam & Productivity, January 18, 2011, http://productivemuslim.com/18-sources-of-barakah/. 85. April Figueroa, interviewed by Julia Tulke, November 28, 2017. 86. Mark Byrnes, “Riding through Poor Neighborhoods with New Urbanists,” CityLAB, June 11, 2014, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/06/ridingthrough-poor-neighborhoods-with-new-urbanists/372399/. 87. Jeff Byles, “The World According to Rubble,” in Paeslack, Ineffably Urban, 16. 88. Bartley, “Nature Resurged,” 159. 89. Bartley, “Nature Resurged,” 163. 90. Goldman, City on the Edge, 266.

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4.  “In the Thought of the World”

1. Russell Sturgis, “The Larkin Building in Buffalo,” Architectural Record, April 1909, 321. 2. See Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 128. According to Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, in a conversation with the author, Wright said that “the building had served its purpose and deserved a decent burial.” In the 1943 edition of An Autobiography, 152, Wright wrote that the Larkin family “never realized the place their building took in the thought of the world.” 3. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 18. 4. According to Larkin (in John D. Larkin, 113), in 1901 the Larkin Company added 200,304 square feet of floor space with the H building, which was approximately one-third the combined size of buildings C (1895), D (1896), D annex (1897), E (1898), and F (1898). With the construction of the R, S, and T building in 1912, the square footage of the Larkin Company floor space in Buffalo exceeded two million. 5. Larkin, John D. Larkin. Ten such groups represented New York, its most proximate eastern states, and Canada, while customers west of the Mississippi were processed at the Larkin office in Peoria, Illinois. 6. The fundamental source on Behrens’s work for AEG is S. Anderson, Peter Behrens, chaps. 5, 6, and 7. See also Buddensieg, Industriekultur. 7. Pevsner, Pioneers, 203. 8. Topp, Architecture and Truth, 100. Topp provides a thorough and insightful treatment of the Post Savings Bank based on the institution’s archival records. 9. Topp, Architecture and Truth, 102–4. 10. Topp, Architecture and Truth, 106–7. 11. Mallgrave, introduction to Semper, Four Elements of Architecture. 12. Frampton, Modern Architecture, 71. 13. Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 19–21. 14. Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens. 15. Frampton, Modern Architecture, 64. 16. Ruskin, Seven Lamps. 17. Hoffmann, Architecture of John Wellborn Root, 91. 18. John Wellborn Root and Fritz Wagner translated parts of Semper’s Der Stil in the Inland Architect 14 (December 1889): 76–78, and 15 (February 1890): 5–6. Anthony Alofsin, in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 334nn20–21, noted that Wright recommended the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel to Edward Waller Jr., a client, and to Taylor Woolley, a draftsman. On Wright’s impact on Japanese architecture see Oshima, International Architecture. 19. According to Wright (Autobiography [1943], 125–27), in the spring of 1894 Daniel Burnham offered to support Wright and his family while he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years, followed by two years in Rome. Wright declined, saying that his mentor, Louis Sullivan, a former Beaux-Arts student, had spoiled the Beaux-Arts for him. 20. On Wright and Japan see Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright. 21. Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, 17; Margo Stipe, “Wright and Japan” in Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, 24–43. 22. Aurora Wilson McClain, “Meeting in St. Louis: American Encounters with Nascent European Modernisms at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition” (master of architecture thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2015), 32.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 0 0 – 1 0 3     277

23. Barry Byrne, “On Frank Lloyd Wright and His Atelier,” Journal of Architectural Education 18, no. 1 ( June 1963): 109. 24. Alofsin writes, “Whether Wright met Wagner is unknown, but Wright at least spoke highly of him and knew him well enough to have his address three years later when Wright’s son John considered studying in Vienna”: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 58. Alofsin notes (339n141), “When John asked his father’s advice, Wright discouraged him from going,” though no reason is given. 25. In Wright, Ausgeführte Bauten, Wright describes the publication as follows: “It is without doubt the finest publication of any Architect’s work in any country—not excepting the work of the Austrian Architect, Olbrich—and necessary to the completeness and efficiency of the library of an American Architect who cares for the progress of his art in his own country.” 26. Wright, Testament, 18. 27. On the history of the Lloyd Jones family in Wales see Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 19–50. 28. Wright, Autobiography (1943), 150. 29. According to Banham, Theory and Design, 145, Berlage was preceded in the United States by Professor Kuno Francke, who encouraged Wright to seek out the publisher Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin, and C. R. Ashbee, who visited Wright in Oak Park in 1901. On Wright’s impact abroad see Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond. 30. H. P. Berlage, “The New American Architecture,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung of September 14 and 21, 1912, 165–67, published in English in Brooks, Writings on Wright, 133. 31. According to Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, 34, “The four pioneers of the Modern Movement all spent part of 1910 in Berlin, but while he was there Wright never met the others, Gropius, Mies, and Jeanneret.” 32. Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond, 34. Alofsin writes that Bruno Mohring gave a presentation on February 16, 1910, in the presence of Wright drawings at the Union of Berlin Architects, but no record of the attendees has survived. Smith, Wright on Exhibit, 250n87, writes, “This idea [that there was an exhibition of Wright’s drawings] was perpetuated in Reginald Isaacs, Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus (Boston: Bulfinch, 1991), 25. Gropius recalled attending a display of one hundred drawings . . . at the Academy of Art with his mother in 1910.” 33. Johnson, Mies, 201. 34. Peter Blake, “A Conversation with Mies,” in Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright; The Verbatim Record of a Symposium Held at the School of Architecture, Columbia University, March–May 1961 (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 101. Vincent Scully noted significant similarities between Wright’s Hotel, Mason City, Iowa (1909–1910) and Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s Model Factory at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in “Wright vs. the International Style,” Art News 53 (March 1954): 32–35. 35. Pintarić, Vienna 1900, 134. 36. Behne, Modern Functional Building, 99. 37. Hitchcock, Modern Architects, 31. 38. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 121. 39. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:1494.

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TO PA GES 1 0 3 – 1 0 8

40. Frank Lloyd Wright to Darwin D. Martin, July 14, 1904, Wright-Martin Papers, Archives of the State University of New York at Buffalo. 41. In a letter of September 19, 1902, Darwin D. Martin wrote to Elbert G. Hubbard, describing his initial impression of Frank Lloyd Wright: “A good Philistine reader, a lady whom my brother and I accidently met in Oak Park, remarked: ‘Wright is a queer fellow, like Hubbard you know,’ and then explained that ‘he noses around his new houses in silk knickerbocker breeches, etc. Yet he is no Oscar Wilde. He must be a man, every inch,’ ” Wright-Martin Papers, Archives of the State University of New York at Buffalo. 42. Smith, Wright on Exhibit, appendix A, 232. 43. Stanger, “From Factory to Family.” See also Alexander, “Larkin Technologies of Trust.” 44. Frank Lloyd Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture,” Architectural Record, March 1908, 155–221. 45. Quinan, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Reply.” 46. Quinan, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Reply.” The only known copy of Wright’s reply to Sturgis was shown to this writer by Daniel I. Larkin, grandson of John D. Larkin, in the early 1980s. 47. Wright’s essay was translated into German for him, as he did not speak or read German. However, owing to his proximity to German speakers such as Dankmar Adler and Paul Mueller in the Adler and Sullivan office, his speech was sometimes peppered with German words and phrases. 48. Wright, Autobiography (1932), 150. 49. Wright, Autobiography (1943), 474. 50. Wright, Autobiography (1932), 151. 51. Smith, Wright on Exhibit, appendix A, 233–39, provides a chronologically arranged account of all Wright’s exhibitions between 1932 and 1959. 52. Smith, Wright on Exhibit, appendix A, 233–39. 53. For Berlage’s bibliography see Polano, Berlage, 251–58. 54. Mallgrave, introduction to Wagner, Modern Architecture. 55. S. Anderson, Peter Behrens, 374–83. 56. Turner, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Young Le Corbusier.” 57. Scully, “Wright vs. the International Style,” in Modern Architecture, 57. 58. At the height of its fortunes during the 1910s, the Larkin Company had a customer base located primarily within the eastern United States, with some outreach west of the Mississippi and in Canada. Its claim to global trade—symbolized by the four globes supported by putti on the upper front and rear façade of the administration building—pertains to the acquisition of raw materials such as cacao and coffee that were obtained internationally. In that regard, apparently, King Albert I and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium visited the Larkin Administration Building on October 6, 1919, according to Larkin, John D. Larkin, 167. 59. That Buffalo’s decline persisted throughout the twentieth century is evident in a Buffalo Business First headline from January 2, 2014: “Buffalo’s Poverty Rate Tops 30 Percent, Making It America’s Third-Poorest City.” 60. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 124. 61. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 124. 62. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 128.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 0 8 – 1 1 8     279

63. In Tafel’s About Wright, 58 and 62, Maria Durell Stone is recorded saying, “I married Edward Durell Stone, who was one of Wright’s greatest admirers, and they were close friends. . . . When Edward designed the United States Embassy in New Delhi [1954], it was Wright who named it the ‘Taj Maria.’ ” 64. Rebuild it to what end? The expense would be enormous; it would be empty— its function long gone; and it would not be, could not be, authentic. 65. Wright, Autobiography (1932), 152. 5.  Max Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion

1. “A Vision of Beauty,” Buffalo Express, September 12, 1890. 2. Adler, From Ararat to Suburbia, 139. 3. “Vision of Beauty.” 4. “Vision of Beauty.” The name derived from a former Society Beth Zion that agreed to join with the new congregation if the name were retained. 5. “A Large Wooden Dome,” Engineering News 23 ( June 28, 1890): 609–10. 6. “Vision of Beauty.” 7. Kaplan, American Reform Judaism, 15. 8. John Laping, “Temple Beth Zion: From 599 to 805 Delaware Avenue; Remarks on the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the Temple Dedication, April 20, 2007,” Buffalo Architecture and History, www.buffaloah.com. 9. The land, which included a building known as the Town Club, was purchased from three owners for $640,000. 10. “New Beth Zion Delaware Site,” Buffalo Evening News, February 8, 1962. 11. The committee also contacted two Buffalo architects, R. Maxwell James and Milton Milstein (a member of the congregation), and Rochester architects Charles V. Northrup and Michael J. DeAngelis. 12. Belluschi quoted in Meier, Synagogue Architecture, 19. 13. Breuer quoted in Meier, Synagogue Architecture, 19. 14. Yamasaki quoted in Meier, Synagogue Architecture, 25. 15. Gruber, American Synagogues, 122. 16. Janay J. Wong, “Synagogue Art of the 1950s: A New Context for Abstraction,” Art Journal 53 (Winter 1994): 37. 17. “Albright-Knox Addition Is ‘Perfect’ for Museum, Japanese Architect Says,” Buffalo Evening News, January 19, 1962. 18. Yamasaki and Stone would later design two prominent buildings in Buffalo. In 1964, Yamasaki planned the present M&T Bank building, and in 1971 Stone became architect for the Buffalo News headquarters. 19. In 1965, Harrison & Abramovitz designed the International Style Main Place Tower (former Erie County Savings Bank) in downtown Buffalo. 20. “Final Synagogue Plans Promised by the End of the Year,” Buffalo Evening News, October 8, 1962. 21. See “Beth Zion Temple, Buffalo, New York, job no. N-303,” in the Abramovitz manuscript collection at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, for thirty-nine blueprints and twenty-one structural and mechanical sepia prints for Temple Beth Zion dated March 20, 1964.

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TO PA GES 1 1 9 – 1 2 7

22. Anne McIlhenney Matthews, “Clergy to Tour New Temple,” Buffalo CourierExpress, November 28, 1966. At the time he was designing Temple Beth Zion’s synagogue, Abramovitz and other architects were exploring the structural potential of reinforced concrete to create audacious architectural forms. In 1962–1963, for the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Abramovitz conceived one of the largest concrete domes in the world. Likewise, Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzo dello Sport (1960) in Rome and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center (1962) at Kennedy Airport in New York and Dulles Airport Terminal (1962) outside Washington, DC, employed concrete in adventurous ways. Abramovitz was surely aware of Frank Lloyd Wright’s recently completed Guggenheim Museum (1959). His building shares with Wright’s a wider-at-the-top-than-at-the-base profile and a truncated roofline. Later, in 1966, Abramovitz’s partner, Wallace K. Harrison, must have been fully aware of Temple Beth Zion when he designed that eccentric and exhilarating component of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, the concrete oval Lewis A. Sawyer Theatre and the Kitty Carlisle Hart Theatre, the so-called Egg. 23. Davis, “Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation,” 71. 24. Erich Mendelsohn quoted in Meier, Synagogue Architecture, 22. 25. After the completion of the Buffalo complex, the congregation formed a landscape committee and engaged local landscape architect Katherine Wilson Rahn (1946–1990) to create a garden planting scheme for the courtyard. Although she prepared detailed plans that are now preserved in the Temple Beth Zion archives at the University at Buffalo, the congregation failed to implement them, other than the current row of trees that screen the courtyard space from the view of passersby. No such element appeared in either Abramovitz’s perspective drawing or model of the complex. Other of Rahn’s papers are preserved in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University. 26. “Gallery to Display Model of New Temple Beth Zion,” Buffalo Courier-Express, November 14, 1964. 27. “Gallery to Display Model.” 28. Marshall Brown, “Jews Continue to Observe Yom Kippur Rites Today,” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 8, 1962. 29. “Auditorium Dedicated to Dr. Fink,” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 16, 1966. 30. Morse, Ben Shahn, 217. 31. Morse, Ben Shahn, 217. 32. Anne McIlhenney Matthews, “New Temple Amazing Edifice,” Buffalo CourierExpress, November 27, 1966. 33. Matthews, “New Temple Amazing Edifice.” 34. According to the Willet Hauser Architectural Glass website, “the congregation had purchased a painting of Shahn’s at a New York gallery. This painting became the inspiration and design for the bimah window. The painting was translated into a stained glass cartoon by Benoit Gilsoul, who also did the detailed acid etching of the flashed glass.” See http://www.willethauser.com/temple-beth-zion-buffalo-ny. 35. The windows were made by Willet Hauser, Architectural Glass, of New York utilizing acid-etched flashed glass, hand-painted fired glass, silver staining, and lead and mouth-blown antique glass. 36. “Temple Window Pleases Shahn,” Buffalo Courier-Express, December 8, 1966.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 2 7 – 1 3 4     281

37. Anne McIlhenney Matthews, “ ‘Cradle’ for Stained-Glass Used Here for First Time,” Buffalo Courier-Express, August 2, 1965. 38. “Temple’s Slanting Walls Create an Upwardly Directed Symbolic Form,” Architectural Record, March 1968, 133. 39. Sustaining the visual inspirational elements of light, stained glass, and monumental sculpture is the power of music. The rear of the balcony houses a large pipe organ installed at the time of construction. From the early days of the Reform movement, choir singing and music were an integral part of religious ceremonies. (They often played a more limited role in Conservative and Orthodox services.) As architect of Philharmonic Hall in New York, Abramovitz would have paid particular attention to the acoustical properties of the synagogue (they are excellent). It is likely that together with the organ master, Hans Vigeland, he had consulted on the design and manufacture of the organ itself, which was built by the firm of Casavant Frères of Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec. 40. Matthews, “ ‘Cradle.’ ” 41. Louis Kahn quoted in Meier, Synagogue Architecture, 8. 42. Harwood and Parks, Troubled Search, 140. 43. Gruber, American Synagogues, 151. 44. Peter C. Andrews, “From Russia to Lackawanna: Poet Visits Steel Workers,” Buffalo Courier-Express, November 20, 1966. 45. “Temple Window Pleases Shahn.” 6. Putting the Rust in Rust Belt

1. The term “renaissance” has frequently been used to describe Buffalo in the past four years, by local news sources as well as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Typical examples include “Buffalo’s Renaissance Is Attracting Out-of-Town Developers,” Buffalo News, September 13, 2016, and “The Wind and Sun Are Bringing the Shine Back to Buffalo,” New York Times, July 20, 2015. 2. Examples include John Bordsen, “Buffalo Builds on Architecture Tourism,” USA Today, July 28, 2017; Michael Kaminer, “Once-Dicey Buffalo Is on the Cusp of Something Big,” New York Times, July 28, 2016; Jordan Teicher, “Millennials Are Moving to Buffalo and Living Like Kings,” Gothamist (New York), January 28, 2015. 3. F. L. Koethen, “The Story of the Men Who Built the Electrochemical Industry with Niagara Power,” Paper presented at the meeting of the Carborundum Company for the Electrochemical Society, New York, 1961. The Adams Powerhouse was actually part of a larger complex of power stations that grew over time. The building referred to in this work as the “Adams Powerhouse” can also be identified as the first of the buildings on the complex (1895), Powerhouse Number One. It was demolished in 1961. Of the original complex of three buildings—two powerhouses and a transformer house—only the transformer house remains intact today. 4. Strand, Inventing Niagara, 162. 5. Strand, Inventing Niagara, 162. 6. Adams, Niagara Power, 66. 7. Irwin, New Niagara, 114. 8. Irwin, New Niagara, 65.

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TO PA GES 1 3 5 – 1 4 9

9. Adams, Niagara Power, 331. 10. Adams, Niagara Power, 67. 11. Fernald, Index Guide, 142. 12. Adams, Niagara Power, 332. 13. Adams, Niagara Power, 332. 14. Adams, Niagara Power, 65. 15. Irwin, New Niagara, 125. 16. Quoted in Irwin, New Niagara, 129. 17. Adams, Niagara Power, 66. 18. Adams, Niagara Power, 190. 19. Irwin, New Niagara, 123. 20. Littman, “Production of Goodwill,” 74. 21. MacCannell, Tourist, 57. 22. MacCannell, Tourist, 58. 23. Littman, “Production of Goodwill,” 80. 24. Irwin, New Niagara, 124. 25. Irwin, New Niagara, 124. 26. H. G. Wells, “The Future in America: A Search of Its Realities—the End of Niagara,” Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1906, 1012. 27. Sellers, “Utilization of Niagara’s Power,” in The Niagara Book, by W. D. Howells et al., 189. 28. William C. Andrews, “How Niagara Has Been ‘Harnessed,’ ” American Monthly Review of Reviews, June 1901, 15. 29. Strand, Inventing Niagara, 167. 30. Sellers, “Utilization of Niagara’s Power,” 189. 31. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, 57. 32. Irwin, New Niagara, 122. 33. Quoted in Irwin, New Niagara, 124. 34. Sellers, “Utilization of Niagara’s Power,” 189. 35. Jesse Welter, interview with the author, September 29, 2014. 36. Urry, Tourist Gaze, 117. 37. The components of Silo City include those historically known as the American Grain Complex, the Marine A, the Perot elevator, and the Perot malting house. 38. Edensor, Industrial Ruins. 39. Borden, Skateboarding, 53. See also Kidder, Parkour, 23. 40. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, xvii. 7.  Anticipating Images

My thanks to Peter Christensen, the organizers of the 2015 EAHN conference in Belgrade, Serbia, the editors of Footprint 18, Mireille Roddier, Alex Potts, and my colleagues at the University of Michigan, and in particular to Kristin Schroeder, who made many insightful comments on an early draft of this work. My sincere thanks also to Michael G. Smith for sharing the results of his recent research on Julius and Albert Kahn. The chapter epigraph is an excerpt from Benjamin’s correspondence, cited in Stanley Mitchell, “Big Ideas,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 143.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 5 1 – 1 6 0     283

1. Overy, Light, Air, and Openness. 2. For Progressive Era social reform see McGerr, Fierce Discontent; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Hofstadter, Age of Reform. 3. The Second Industrial Revolution reputedly ended in 1914; its effects, however, ramified through the rest of the century. The effects of the development of the internal combustion engine were particularly influential on the built environment. See Hull, “Second Industrial Revolution.” 4. Albert Kahn Associates also built a fourth manufacturing campus in the region: the Chevrolet Assembly Plant ( Job no. 1086, dated 1922–1923 and 1926– 1927). To my current knowledge, the photographic record of this complex is considerably more limited than that available for the Ford Motor Company. 5. The city’s population grew one hundredfold in the next sixty-five years, from 2,400 to more than 250,000. By contrast, in a similar number of years, from 1890 to 1955, the population grew by little more than a factor of two, to a peak of 580,000. 6. Zunz, in Changing Face, begins his account of Detroit’s intensive industrialization in 1880 and ends it in 1920. 7. Lackawanna Steel relocated to Buffalo from Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1899, owing to growing hostility between labor and management there and rising costs. It competed with US Steel, then the largest steel producer in the nation. See Warren, Big Steel, 24. For a timeline of Buffalo’s development see https://www.nps.gov/thri/ buffalotimeline.htm. 8. See Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 82–89. Kahn’s partners on Pierce-Arrow were Lockwood, Greene, and Co., Boston. 9. Forgotten Buffalo Facebook page, accessed November 25, 2017, https:// www.facebook.com/ForgottenBuffalo/photos/a.1568222706742389.1073741826. s1568222670075726/1712576562307002/. 10. https://tocny.org/town-history/. 11. The Bentley holds this material in partnership with Kahn Associates, who retain ownership. 12. Kahn Associates retain seven of twenty-six separate projects (all with the same job number, each with an additional subletter) that the firm executed for the Cheektowaga plant in their office in Detroit; all of these are drawing sets. 13. See HAER report on the second Kahn expansion of Glenn L. Martin Company’s Middle River Plant, accessed December 28, 2018, http://www.loc.gov/pic tures/. Two years after the 1937 assembly building for Glenn L. Martin, Kahn Associ ates erected a seaplane hangar at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, that spanned 320 feet, with one interior support. 14. See “Assembly Plant Plans for Ford and Chevrolet,” Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library. 15. Airplane engines, by contrast, were generally produced at Wright Aeronautical, not at Curtiss-Wright. 16. Curtiss-Wright employed quality inspectors throughout the firm’s production divisions. Parts and final assemblies were also subject to on-site inspection by the US military, separate from Curtiss-Wright inspectors. For interactions between these two groups, and problems that surfaced at Curtiss-Wright in the early 1940s, see Investigation of the National Defense Program.

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17. According to Rentschler, Pratt & Whitney and Curtiss-Wright together produced 85 percent of the airplane engines used in the war. Rentschler, Pratt & Whitney, 42. 18. These numbers come from the research of Buffalo historian Chuck LaChiusa. See History of Buffalo (website), accessed November 25, 2018, http://www.buffa loah.com/h/aero/curt/index.html. 19. “Westinghouse Buys Buffalo Warplant, Will Hire 6000,” Washington Post, December 12, 1945, 12. 20. Buffalo Courier-Express, August 26, 1951. 21. The Fuhrmann Assembly Plant was one of a series. Other waterside sites included Green Island, New York; Edgewood, New Jersey; Chester, Pennsylvania; Norfolk, Virginia; Long Beach and Richmond, California; and Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Seattle. Each accommodated rail and ship access for onloading and offloading tankers from dockside slips. 22. See “Assembly Plant Plans for Ford and Chevrolet,” Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 23. Trussed Concrete Steel Company, promotional brochure, The Typical Factory. 24. Packard Building #10 was completed in 1905, but Kahn’s work on the Palms Apartment Building and the East Engineering Building at the University of Michigan predated Packard #10 and are thought to be the experimental test sites for a system of reinforcing that would go on to become the centerpiece of the Trussed Concrete Steel Company, or Truscon. On Kahn’s early commissions see Meister, “Albert Kahn’s Partners.” 25. It has recently been revealed that Packard #10 was not the first reinforced concrete structure for an automobile plant in Detroit; it was preceded by at least one example by another architect and the same engineer ( Julius Kahn). See Michael G. Smith, “The First Concrete Auto Factory: An Error in the Historical Record,” JSAH 78:4 (December 2019), 442–543. 26. See Banham, Concrete Atlantis. Banham also contributed to the 1981 Guide to Buffalo, also published by MIT. 27. Hildebrand, “New Factory,” 51–55. 28. Walter Benjamin, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” In Origins of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 35. 29. See the illustration of the Krolik warehouse in Kahncrete Engineering. The original photograph is housed in the Bentley Historical Library, Albert Kahn Papers. 30. One might perhaps claim that the span from the first fixed photographic print (ca. 1839) to the mass printing of images in newspapers (ca. 1895) is less than the period from the first steel-framed building in the eighteenth century to the widespread production of steel-framed buildings around the turn of the twentieth century. 31. Banham, Concrete Atlantis. 32. See E. H. Brown, Corporate Eye. 33. To my current knowledge, there is no corresponding photographic record of these buildings in use. The photographs were taken in the process of construction administration, presumably reducing the required number of site visits by the architect. They appear to have ceased with the conclusion of construction. 34. Detlef Mertins, “Transparencies Yet to Come: Sigfried Giedion and the Prehistory of Architectural Modernity” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1996).

NOTES TO PA GES 1 6 9 – 1 7 7     285

35. See Benjamin, “Konvolut X.” 36. For the colonialist implications of Benjamin’s Arcades project see Vandertop, “Colonies in Concrete.” 37. Cunningham, “Floating on the Same Plane.” 8.  In the Buffalo Community, but Not of It

1. My thanks to Keith Griffler, who guided me through the research that served as a starting point to this chapter. I am grateful for all the inspiring discussions we have shared over the years. My thanks also to the participants of the 2018 annual meeting of the Polish American Historical Association in Washington, DC, where I presented an earlier version of this chapter. Finally, thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and very special thanks to Peter Christensen for his vision and leadership. 1. E.g., “The Undesirable Immigrant Defined by an Expert,” New-York Tribune, October 3, 1909; Hall, “Selection of Immigration”; E. Ross, Old World in the New, 26. 2. In the fifty years before 1871, around sixty thousand East Central and Southern Europeans migrated to the United States. Dillingham and Bennet, Abstracts, 1:23, 60, 64. 3. Vast scholarship on this migration wave includes Bodnar, Simon, and Weber, Lives of Their Own; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Brożek, Polish Americans; Jacobson, Special Sorrows; Morawska, For Bread with Butter; Pacyga, Polish Immigrants; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Zahra, Great Departure. 4. Bemis, “Restriction of Immigration,” 566. 5. Hunter, Poverty, 261–62. 6. Goldenweiser, “Immigrants in Cities,” 596. See also Walker, “Immigration and Degradation,” 640. 7. Goldman, High Hopes. 8. “Reports of the Municipal Officers of the City of Buffalo for the Year 1893,” 55; “Facts about Buffalo Worthy of Constant Repetition,” Live Wire 3, no. 11 (October 1912). The 1910 Census estimates Buffalo’s population at over 423,000 and the 1920 Census at over 506,000. United States Census Bureau, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990,” accessed December 19, 2018, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2005/ demo/POP-twps0076.pdf. 9. US Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Naturalization to the Secretary of Labor. Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 56; Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 3:216. 10. Goldenweiser, “Immigrants in Cities,” 596. 11. Despite challenges posed by unclear ethnic boundaries and complex geopolitical factors, historians estimate that between the 1860s and 1914 over two million Poles left partitioned Poland-Lithuania for the United States. These estimates are based on the ethnic and religious definition of Polishness. Jerzy Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem polskich do USA od lat pięćdziesiątych XIX wieku do 1918,” in Kubiak, Kusielewicz, and Gromada, Polonia amerykańska, 39–42. On Polish migrants of the period

286    NOTES

TO PA GES 1 7 7 – 1 8 0

see, e.g., Blejwas, “Polonia and Politics,” in Bukowczyk, Polish Americans; Bukowczyk, And My Children; Galush, For More Than Bread; Gladsky, Princes; Greene, For God and Country; Majewski, Traitors and True Poles; Pula, Polish Americans; Radzilowski, Eagle and the Cross. 12. Thomas and Znaniecki, Polish Peasant, 5:29–32. 13. Daniels, “Americanizing Eighty Thousand Poles,” 373. 14. “History of the Polish Colony of Buffalo: Remarkable Record of Growth and Assimilation,” Buffalo Times, July 3, 1904. Snow Avenue, parallel to still-existing Roberts Avenue, no longer exists but was located approximately where Interstate 190 cuts through Clinton Street today. Joseph R. Bien, City of Buffalo (New York: Julius Bien, 1895), at David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (website), accessed January 9, 2020, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/ RUMSEY~8~1~26308~1110071?id=1-1-26308-1110071&name=Buffalo. 15. E.g., “Our Little Poland: Sturdy Immigrants Who Make Good Citizens,” Buffalo Morning Express, June 28, 1891; Daniels, “Americanizing Eighty Thousand Poles,” 374; Jacques, “Tuberculosis Work in Buffalo,” 363; “Little Poland: City of 80,000, Strange, Foreign Locality,” Buffalo Courier, October 19, 1902; “When Little Poland Dances,” Buffalo Courier, February 28, 1904; Larned, History of Buffalo, 93. 16. I understand the category of rural working-class broadly and include in it all rural labor. Dziembowska, Pamiętniki emigrantów, 1:31; Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem polskich do USA,” 43. Cf. Fox, Poles in America, 60; Szawleski, Kwestja emigracji w Polsce, 14–15. 17. Before migrating to the United States, some workers had industrial jobs in Germany. Morawska, For Bread with Butter. On the economic conditions of the rural areas in partitioned Poland and their effect on migration see, e.g., Groniowski, Kwestia agrarna w Królestwie Polskim; Kostrowicka et al., Historia gospodarcza Polski XIX i XX wieku, 170 ff.; Łukasiewicz, Kryzys agrarny; Mazurek, Kraj a emigracja, 27–31. 18. Goldenweiser, “Immigrants in Cities,” 596. 19. Later the Buffalo School Furniture Company. 20. A report of the accident cites Ruszkiewicz’s name as Roscowitz. Roscowitz, Ninth Annual Report, 804. 21. “History of the Polish Colony of Buffalo: Remarkable Record of Growth and Assimilation,” Buffalo Times, July 3, 1904; Harrison, Political Blue Book, 14; Album pamiątkowe, 97–98. See also John Daniels, “The Poles in Business,” Buffalo Morning Express, February 20, 1910. 22. On the gradual assimilation that promoted Americanization without demanding “to give up segregation, immigrant languages, and traditions immediately upon arrival” see Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives, 129. On connections between Americanization and middle-class respectability see Walkowitz, Working with Class, 40. 23. “History of the Polish Colony of Buffalo.” 24. “Section 5, Intensive Level Historic Resources, Survey City of Buffalo: Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood,” accessed June 2, 2017, https://www.buffalony. gov/DocumentCenter/View/1918/Section-5—Annotated-List-of-Properties-PDF. 25. Ruszkiewicz died in 1933, after he was hit by a train. “Publisher Is Buried,” Buffalo Courier-Express, January 20, 1933. 26. “Les Miserables: Poverty in the Polish District of East Buffalo,” Buffalo Morning Express, February 19, 1893. George Falkowski interprets this criticism in the context of the economic depression of 1893 and notes that in times of prosperity, Poles

NOTES TO PA GES 1 8 0 – 1 8 4     287

were not discussed in such negative terms. William G. Falkowski, “Accommodation and Conflict: Patterns of Polish Immigrant Adaptation to Industrial Capitalism and American Political Pluralism in Buffalo, New York, 1873–1901” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1990), 234–35. Leaders of Buffalo’s Polish community strongly opposed the article. “A Big Indignation Meeting at St. Stanislaus’ Hall,” Esquire, March 1, 1893; “Polacy protestują,” Polak w Ameryce, March 3, 1893. 27. “Social Sahara of the Poles of Buffalo,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 12, 1911; “Good Twig, Good Tree: Works of Americanizing Pole Must Begin in Schools,” Buffalo Morning Express, May 9, 1910. See also Frederic Almy, “The Housing Awakening: The Huddled Poles of Buffalo,” Survey, February 4, 1911. 28. “Little Poland: City of 80,000, Strange, Foreign Locality,” Buffalo Courier, October 19, 1902. Others claimed that European immigrants gave alcohol to children because they were amused by their drunk “dancing and singing.” “An Unknown World beside Buffalo,” Buffalo Morning Express, April 7, 1907. 29. John Pryor, William Douglas, and William Lansing, “Tenement House Evils,” Buffalo Morning Express, December 14, 1902. 30. Frederick Almy, “The Tenement Situation,” Buffalo Sanitary Bulletin, Buffalo Department of Health, vol. 8, no. 11, November 30, 1914, 1. See also “Social Sahara of the Poles of Buffalo,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 12, 1911; “The Housing Awakening: The Huddled Poles of Buffalo,” Survey, February 4, 1911. 31. B. S. Kamienski, “Auditur et Altera Pars,” December 17, 1914, Buffalo Sanitary Bulletin, Buffalo Department of Health, vol. 7, no. 11, November 30, 1914, 3. 32. Pryor, Douglas, and Lansing, “Tenement House Evils.” 33. Album pamiątkowe, 3, 72. 34. “The Polish Night School,” Buffalo Morning Express, May 1, 1908. 35. “Social Center for the Poles,” Buffalo Morning Express, July 18, 1908. 36. “Ever Hear of a Polish Theater?,” Buffalo Morning Express, February 14, 1908. See also “A Polish Play at Dom Polski,” Buffalo Morning Express, October 11, 1908. 37. “History of the Polish Colony of Buffalo”; “Conventions Interesting Buffalo Poles,” Buffalo Times, September 11, 1904. 38. “Some Polish Market Ways,” Buffalo Courier, January 31, 1904. 39. “When Little Poland Dances,” Buffalo Courier, February 28, 1904. 40. “To Find Soul of Polish People in Their Art, Seek It in Music,” Buffalo Courier, May 29, 1921. 41. “City within a City: That’s Buffalo’s Polish Colony,” Buffalo Times, February 15, 1907. 42. “Little Poland: City of 80,000, Strange, Foreign Locality”; “80,000 Poles in Buffalo Constitute ‘Little Poland,’ ” Buffalo Times, December 28, 1902. For often dramatic and always sympathetic descriptions of Poland’s political situation see “Celebration by Buffalo Poles,” Buffalo Courier, May 20, 1907; “Polish Residents to Celebrate 125th Anniversary of Signing of Polish National Constitution on May 3rd,” Buffalo Times, April 26, 1908; “Equal Rights and Liberty,” Buffalo Morning Express, May 4, 1908; Buffalo’s Great Polish Colony, Buffalo Morning Express, May 10, 1908. 43. “Gwiazdor, the Children’s Friend,” Buffalo Morning Express, December 16, 1908; “Takes You Back to Middle Ages,” Buffalo Morning Express, January 19, 1908. 44. Caroline Hunt, “Buffalo: A City Getting Acquainted with Itself,” La Follette’s Magazine, April 9, 1910, 10.

288    NOTES

TO PA GES 1 8 5 – 1 9 0

45. Contemporary observers and historians confirm low standards in Polish parochial schools but note that before 1914, enrollment was limited. Dunikowski, Wśród polonii w Ameryce, 46; Dillingham and Bennet, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 1:146; Galush, For More Than Bread, 93–96; Pula, Polish Americans, 76–77; “Polish-American Catholicism: A Case Study in Cultural Determinism,” US Catholic Historian 27, no. 3 (2009): 6. 46. Daniels, “Americanizing Eighty Thousand Poles,” 383–84. 47. Daniels estimated the total value of Polish property in the city to be around 1.8 percent of the total value of all property, with Poles constituting around 18 percent of Buffalo’s population. John Daniels, “Progress of the Poles,” Buffalo Morning Express, February 6, 1910. See also Daniels, “Poles in Business.” 48. Daniels, “Americanizing Eighty Thousand Poles,” 376. 49. John Daniels, “The Poles in Buffalo,” Buffalo Morning Express, January 23, 1910. 50. John Daniels, “How the Poles Live in Buffalo,” Buffalo Express, April 3, 1910. 51. The Charity Organization of Buffalo estimated that the local family of five needed around $634 a year “to allow the bare decencies of life.” See “Social Sahara of the Poles of Buffalo.” In 1900, 60–75 percent of male industrial workers nationally earned less than $600 annually. Streightoff, Standard of Living, 67; Nearing, Wages in the United States, 213. John Augustine Ryan, whose ideas influenced the New Deal, called the workers making less than $600 “underpaid laborers.” John A. Ryan, “A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1906), 154. 52. John Daniels, “Polish Wage-Earners in Buffalo,” Buffalo Morning Express, March 6, 1910; “Not Paid a Living Wage,” Buffalo Morning Express, March 15, 1910. 53. John Daniels, “Question of Polish Lawlessness,” Buffalo Morning Express, April 17, 1910. 54. On Buffalo generally see Elbert Mann, “Survey of Buffalo’s Social Conditions,” Buffalo Live Wire 3, no. 10 (May 1912): 393–95. 55. Daniels, “How the Poles Live in Buffalo.” 56. Riis, How the Other Half Lives. 57. Daniels, “Poles in Buffalo.” 58. Progressive social scientists at the time grappled with the question of what determined human actions: one’s character rooted in racial, ethnic, and class background or one’s material conditions. E.g., Getis, Juvenile Court; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, chap. 1; Ross, Origins of American Social Science, esp. part 3. 59. Daniels, “How the Poles Live in Buffalo.” 60. For similar views see also “The Civic League in Buffalo,” Immigration 4, no. 1 (1912); “New Phases of Education in Buffalo, N.Y.,” Current Educational Topics, United States Bureau of Education Bulletin no. 11 (1912). 61. Thomas and Znaniecki, Polish Peasant, 2:1523–24. 62. Galush, For More Than Bread, 69; Eugene Obidinski, “Polish Americans in Buffalo: The Transformation of an Ethnic Subcommunity,” Polish Review 14, no. 1 (1969): 35; Pula, “Polish-American Catholicism.” 63. Album pamiątkowe, 53, 55–57; Kowsky et al., Buffalo Architecture, 232. 64. Saint Adalbert offers only several services a year. Information on the current status of the parishes, accessed January 8, 2020, http://saintadalbertbasilica.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 9 0 – 1 9 2     289

org/?page_id=193, http://www.saintjohnkanty.com/parish-history/, https://www. preservationready.org/Buildings/929SycamoreStreet, http://corpuschristibuffalo. org/site/?page_id=8; “Appendix C: NYS Historic Resource Inventory Form: A Street—Fillmore,” accessed December 29, 2018, https://www.buffalony.gov/ DocumentCenter/View/1922/Appendix-C---NYS-Historic-Resource-InventoryForm-A-Street---Fillmore-PDF; “Appendix C: NYS Historic Resource Inventory Form: Fox—Mills,” accessed December 29, 2018, https://www.buffalony.gov/Docu mentCenter/View/1923/Appendix-C—NYS-Historic-Resource-Inventory-FormFox—Mills-PDF. 65. Obidinski, “Polish Americans in Buffalo,” 34. Non–Roman Catholic Polish congregations included, for example, the First Polish Baptist Church at 821 Fillmore Avenue and the Holy Mother of the Rosary Polish National Church at Sobieski and Sycamore Streets. 66. “At the New Market,” Buffalo Evening News, December 20, 1890; “Little Poland: City of 80,000, Strange, Foreign Locality”; “Some Polish Market Ways.” 67. “Section 3, Intensive Level Historic Resources, Survey City of Buffalo: BroadwayFillmore Neighborhood,” accessed December 14, 2018, https://www.buffalony.gov/ DocumentCenter/View/1916/Section-3---Historical-and-Architectural-OverviewPDF; “Happy Merchants Move into New Broadway Mart,” Buffalo Courier-Express, July 15, 1956. 68. Album pamiątkowe, 124–26; “Section 4, Intensive Level Historic Resources, Survey City of Buffalo: Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood,” accessed December 17, 2018, https://www.buffalony.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1917/Section-4---Archi tectural-Summary-PDF. 69. “Section 4, Intensive Level Historic Resources, Survey City of Buffalo: Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood”; History of the Matt Urban Center, accessed December 26, 2018, http://urbanctr.org/about/history/. As of January 9, 2020, the Polish Union Hall was owned and operated by the Open Praise Full Gospel Baptist Church (City of Buffalo Property Viewer). 70. Pittas Memorial Center, accessed January 9, 2020, http://www.ststansbuf falo.com/about/about-us/pitass-memorial-center. 71. “Appendix C: NYS Historic Resource Inventory Form: A Street—Fillmore”; Al Cohen’s Bakery, accessed January 9, 2020, https://alcohens.com/. 72. “Appendix C: NYS Historic Resource Inventory Form: A Street—Fillmore.” The City of Buffalo Property Viewer lists Dyngus Day LLC as the Singing Circle Building’s owner ( January 9, 2020). The author reached out to the organization to request an update on the building but received no response. 73. This is clear in the Buffalo press coverage of Poles, starting already during World War I, when Poles would prove their loyalty and be praised for their support for their new homeland. 9. Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes

I am grateful to the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Visiting Scholars Program for making my research into the Matta-Clark Archive there possible and to Phyllis Lambert, the center’s founding director, and Maristella Casciato, then its associate director of research, for creating such a stimulating and collaborative environment there.

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1. Goldman, High Hopes, 130, 193–95, 293; John Mollenkopf, “A Changing City,” in Goodwin, New York Comes Back, 57–61. 2. Charles Clough interview, September 11, 2009, quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 86. 3. Goldman, High Hopes, 130, 193–95; Mollenkopf, “Changing City,” 57–61. 4. Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 20; Sandra Q. Firmin, “Have You Artparked?,” in Artpark: 1974–1984, ed. Sandra Q. Firmin, 27–28. 5. Pinto quoted in Firmin, Artpark: 1974–1984, 52–53. 6. Gwendolyn Owens, “Lessons Learned Well: The Education of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Sussman, Gordon Matta-Clark, 166–71. 7. Owens, “Lessons Learned,” 169–70; LeGrace Benson, October 31, 2012 lecture, in my “Mirror of the City” seminar, Cornell University. Benson’s account of Matta-Clark’s inflation in her house inspired Andrew Hart, then an M. Arch. I student at Cornell, to research and re-create it in the spring of 2013. This time the inflation was documented. 8. Owens, “Lessons Learned,” 166; Goldman, High Hopes, 255–59; Thomas Crow, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 40. 9. Matta-Clark quotation from Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 6; Gordon MattaClark to Amy Taubin, undated (1976?), Gordon Matta-Clark Archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 10. Short, Unequal City, 20–21. 11. “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, Antwerp, 1977,” in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 187. 12. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 95–97. 13. Fiore, 112 Greene Street. Chester Rapkin, an urban planner, coined the term Soho in a 1963 report he prepared for the New York City Planning Commission. 14. Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 15, 18–19. 15. Antwerp interview in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 187. 16. Matta-Clark Sketchbook, 1970, Matta-Clark Archive. 17. Jane Crawford, “Crossover References in the Work of Roberto Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark,” transcript of conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 2002, quoted in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 216. 18. Susan Greenwood, “Building Materials Become Work of Art,” Niagara Gazette, August 29, 1974, newspaper clipping, Matta-Clark Archives; “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, Antwerp, September 1977,” in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 187; the Splitting “field trip” is preserved in a thirty-three-minute film now in the Holly Solomon Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. It is also online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHuzeswiTv8. 19. Baldwin, 1963 interview with psychologist Kenneth Clark, See https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU. 20. Greenwood, “Building Materials Become Work of Art”; Dale McConathy, quoted in Firmin, Artpark: 1974–1984, 45. 21. Annie Schentag, “Building Clarity: Structural Legibility, Corporate Transparency, and Public Access in Buffalo’s Industrial Architecture, 1880–1920” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2017), 220–30. 22. Rita Reif, “Blighted Niagara Falls Works to Rebuild Itself,” New York Times, October 1, 1973, www.nytimes.com; and the “Fall of Niagara Falls,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 2, 2010, www.bloomberg.com.

NOTES TO PA GES 2 0 3 – 2 1 0     291

23. Matta-Clark, typed page, undated, Matta-Clark Archives; Gordon MattaClark, “Bingo,” in Artpark, by Artpark, 29. 24. Greenwood, “Building Materials Become Work of Art.” 25. Hallwalls: The Hallwalls Gallery Publication 1, no. 1 (September 1975): n.p., http://www.hallwalls.org/pubs/1975_9.RFS.pdf; Ronald Ehmke, “How to Use This Book,” and Donna Jordan Dusel, “A Small Circle of Friends,” quoted in Emke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives, n.p. and 12; and Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 98–100. 26. Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 61n61. Hallwalls Gallery Publication, n.p.; Ronald Ehmke, “How to Use This Book,” and Donna Jordan Dusel, “A Small Circle of Friends,” in Emke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives, n.p. and 12. 27. Clough, September 11, 2009, interview, and Sherman, quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 86, 35; Hallwalls Gallery Publication, n.p.; and Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 99. 28. Hallwalls Gallery Publication, n.p. 29. Clough, 2004 interview, and Longo, December 11, 2009, interview, quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 31, 90. 30. Hallwalls Gallery Publication, n.p.; Clough 2004 interview quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 31, 86; Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 98. 31. Debby DeStaffan, Three Photographers Document: Gianfranco Gorgoni/Babette Mangolte/Harry Shunk (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1978), www.hallwalls.org/visual/541. html; and The Piers exhibit, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 2012, https:// leslielohman.org/exhibitions/2012/thepiers.html. 32. Longo, December 11, 2009, interview, quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 90, 91. 33. Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 107. 34. Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 106–7, 111–12. 35. Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 95–96; Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 34–36. See also Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984. 36. Clough interview with Elizabeth Licata, 1994, quoted in Ehmke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives, 176. 37. Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 103–4. 38. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 97; Shkuda, Lofts of SOHO, 1–10; Matta-Clark to his mother, Ann Alpert, June 4, 1977, Matta-Clark Archive. Further research, especially interviews, may shed light on who Matta-Clark’s real estate clients were. 39. Matta-Clark, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Application, 1977; and Matta-Clark to Nina Felsin, August 2, 1976, both in Matta-Clark Archive. 40. Soffer, Ed Koch, 4–5, 149; Lee Dembart, “Koch in Inaugural Asks That Pioneers ‘Come East’ to the City,” New York Times, June 2, 1978, www.nyt.com; James R. Brigham Jr. and Alair Townsend, “The Fiscal Crisis,” and Ronay Menschel, “Creative Solutions,” in Goodwin, New York Comes Back, 29–33, 106–11. 41. Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 60n39, 100; and Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls,” 119–20. 42. Edmund Cardoni, “Why Is a Pedestal Better Than a Soapbox?,” in Ehmke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives, 119–28. 43. Florida, Rise of the Creative Class. In 2017 Florida is less sanguine about the creative classes, arguing their rise has made cities like New York unaffordable for the middle class. However, he focuses on the crisis for the middle class rather than

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the poor or working class. See Florida, New Urban Crisis. See also Moss, Vanishing New York. 44. Short, Unequal City, 1–22. 45. Jack Ding, “ ‘A Rat in the Maze’: Studying Attitudes towards the Design of UB’s Amherst Campus 1968–1985” (thesis, University at Buffalo, n.d), 6, http://his tory.buffalo.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2016/02/Ding-Thesis.pdf; Griffin quotation in Ehmke and Licata, Consider the Alternatives, 177. 46. Diane Cardwell, “The Wind and Sun Are Bringing Back the Shine to Buffalo,” New York Times, July 20, 2015, www.nytimes.com; “A Medical School for the 21st Century,” http://www.buffalo.edu/here. 47. Dennis Maher, “The Fargo House,” in Paeslack, Ineffably Urban, 21–39; Fargo House, https://www.thefargohouse.com/; “Who We Are,” Assembly House 150, https://www.assemblyhouse150.org/who-we-are-1. 10.  Lake Effect

1. Joseph, “Wish You Were Here.” 2. Carol Strickland, “Wish You Were There,” Art In America, May 25, 2012, n.p., https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/buffalo-avant-garde-58879/. 3. Louis Grachos quoted in Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 10. 4. Tony Conrad and Bill Viola quoted in Carol Kino, “Renaissance in an Industrial Shadow,” New York Times, May 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/ arts/design/buffalo-avant-garde-art-scene-revisited-at-albright-knox.html. 5. Ed Reich, quoted in WKBW.com at http://www.wkbwradio.com/blizzard.htm. 6. Pesanti, Wish You Were Here, 13. 7. Pan American Exposition Buffalo 1901 (booklet), accessed January 4, 2019, http://panam1901.org/documents/original_sources/purpose_and_plan.PDF. 8. Pan American Exposition Buffalo 1901, n.p. 9. Commentary and subsequent quotation by Carey found in Carol Kino, “Renaissance in an Industrial Shadow,” New York Times, May 2, 2012, http://www. nytimes.com/2012/05/06/arts/design/buffalo-avant-garde-art-scene-revisited-atalbright-knox.html. Subsequent commentary on Buffalo Skyway from the Buffalo News found at http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/03042015/looking-backwardskyway, accessed April 22, 2020. 10. “The Rogovin Experience,” Buffalo Spree, accessed January 4, 2019, http://www. buffalospree.com/Blogs/Talk-about-Arts/Annual-2017/The-Rogovin-experience/. 11. Milton Rogovin quoted in Philip Nyhuis, “Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer,” Buffalo Spree, September/October 1999, http:// www.buffalospree.com/buffalospreemagazine/archives/1999_0910/091099memoir. 12. Rogovin and Frisch, Portraits in Steel, 312–13. 13. Rogovin and Frisch, Portraits in Steel, 2–3. 14. Rogovin’s legacy lives on. In 2012 the Burchfield Penny Art Museum hosted a show entitled Steel: The Art of Experience and Impressions, which featured work by photographers Patricia Layman Bazelon, Robert N. Blair, Don Burns, Sherwin Greenberg, Steve Mangione, Milton Rogovin, and Louis Vastola, among others. 15. Eckardt C. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy,” EPA Journal, January 1979, https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html.

NOTES TO PA GES 2 2 8 – 2 3 6     293

16. Beck, “Love Canal Tragedy.” 17. Matta-Clark quoted in MoMA Learning (website), https://www.moma. org/learn/moma_learning/gordon-matta-clark-bingo-1974. Subsequent excerpted quotation from press release issued by David Zwirner Gallery, https://www.david zwirner.com/exhibitions/bingo/press-release, accessed May 5, 2020. 18. Lois Marie Gibbs, “History: Love Canal, the Start of a Movement,” Boston School of Public Health, 2008, https://www.bu.edu/lovecanal/canal/. Previous excerpted quotation from Gibbs found in Lois Marie Gibbs, Love Canal: My Story (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 9. 19. Lois Gibbs, “Knocking on Doors at Love Canal, 1983,” in U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Steven Stoll (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 141. 20. Vaughn, Environmental Activism, 149–50. 11. Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism

1. Kraus, Race, Neighborhoods; William H. Siener, “Buffalo,” in Encyclopedia of New York State, ed. Peter R. Eisenstadt and Laura-Eve Moss (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005); Goldman, City on the Edge. 2. In this eight-year period, 11,497 refugees resettled in Buffalo: Erie County Executive’s Office, “Erie County, New York Immigrant and Refugee Statistics 2008– 2016 through 10–7–2016,” Buffalo, 2016; City of Buffalo, “New Americans Study: A Strategic Action Plan to Advance Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Success,” 2016. According to the most recent Department of State Refugee Processing Center data (August 19, 2016), Buffalo received the highest number of resettled refugees in New York in fiscal year 2016. 3. United Nations, “21st Century Proving to Be ‘Century of People on the Move,’ Innovative Approaches Needed to Address New Patterns of Forced Displacement, Third Committee Told,” United Nations Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, November 1, 2011, www.un.org/press/en/2011/gashc4024.doc.htm; Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers. 4. The US admitted 84,995 refugees in fiscal year 2016. The majority of the refugees came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Burma, Iraq, and Somalia: see Jens Manuel Krogstad, “Key Facts about Refugees to the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, October 7, 2019, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/30/keyfacts-about-refugees-to-the-u-s/. In the same time period, of the 5,028 refugees resettled in New York State, only 6 percent ended up in New York City and Long Island, while the majority arrived in the upstate and Western New York regions. Top countries of origin were Burma, Somalia, Bhutan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Congo, Sudan, and Syria. See Bureau of Refugee Services, “BRIA Population Data for FFY 2016,” accessed September 11, 2017, https://otda.ny.gov/programs/ bria/documents/population-report.pdf (document has been replaced). 5. Edward L. Glaeser, “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? Probably Not—and Government Should Stop Bribing People to Stay There,” City Journal, Autumn 2007, https:// www.city-journal.org/html/can-buffalo-ever-come-back-13050 (article has been replaced). 6. For example, David Frum, “America’s Immigration Challenge,” Atlantic, December 11, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/refugees/419976/.

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TO PA GES 2 3 6 – 2 3 9

7. While there is a growing body of research in this regard, Utica, New York, provides a good comparison. The economist Paul Hagstrom showed that despite the upfront costs, concentrated in the first thirteen years of arrival, resettlement is a “net fiscal benefit to the community” in the long run—in this case, after twenty-three years: see Paul Hagstrom, “The Fiscal Impact of Refugee Resettlement in the Mohawk Valley,” Hamilton College, June 2000, https://www.hamilton.edu/levitt/pdfs/hagstrom_refugee.pdf. 8. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Families and Children, “Voluntary Agencies,” July 17, 2012, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/ resource/voluntary-agencies. Buffalo’s resettlement agencies are the International Institute of Buffalo, Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, and Journey’s End. Except for the latter, explicitly established in the 1970s to support Cambodian refugees, each agency evolved from charitable institutions dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 9. Better-educated cities with high unemployment rates are less likely to pass exclusionary legislation. Helga Leitner and Valerie Preston, “Going Local: Canadian and American Immigration Policy in the New Century,” in Teixeira, Li, and Kobayashi, Immigrant Geographies, 14. 10. City of Buffalo, “New Americans Study: A Strategic Action Plan to Advance Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Success,” accessed January 5, 2017, https:// www.ci.buffalo.ny.us/files/1_2_1/Mayor/NewAmericansStudy.pdf (document has been removed). 11. Palen, City Planning in Buffalo, 81. 12. Kowsky et al., Buffalo Architecture. 13. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, “The Room of Contemporary Art,” https:// www.albrightknox.org/about/our-history/room-contemporary-art. 14. Goldman, High Hopes, 211. 15. Kraus, Race, Neighborhoods, 30. 16. Howe, Across an Inland Sea, 5. 17. The experience of the Italian immigrants is a good case to get a sense of the limitations to the autonomy of different ethnic communities. While the churches were the preeminent community institution for the immigrant communities, Italians were late to establish their own parishes and viewed with suspicion the city’s religious organizations dominated by Anglo-Saxon clergy. They also resented the “outside social agency” of the public schools. Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 60, 119–21. 18. Pyong Gap Min, “A Comparison of Post-1965 and Turn-of-the-Century Immigrants in Intergenerational Mobility and Cultural Transmission,” in Gerber and Kraut, American Immigration and Ethnicity, 17–18. 19. A commonly cited example is the Lower East Side where African, Jewish, and Italian Americans lived in a “reasonably integrated” manner, lasting until the 1920s: Kraus, Race, Neighborhoods, 30; and Goldman, High Hopes, 215. Following the white flight, school district designations and redlining hardened the lines of segregation by the 1950s. Entirely separate cultural spheres emerged in which black and white Buffalonians had their own entertainment districts, stores, and spaces of socialization. For a personal account see Georgia Burnette, “Back in the Day: Remembrances of Black Buffalo from the 1940s and 1950s,” in Biehl, Right Here, Right Now. 20. Connolly, Elusive Unity, 166–69.

NOTES TO PA GES 2 3 9 – 2 4 5     295

21. Barbara Bair, “Settlement House Movement,” in Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, ed. Immanuel Ness (Armonk, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 1143. 22. Sweeney, History of Buffalo and Erie County, 455. 23. Edwin A. R. Rumball-Petre and Civic Education Association, New Citizens’ Handbook: A Manual of Information for Buffalo Immigrants Who Wish to Become American Citizens (Buffalo, NY: City of Buffalo, [1917?]), 32. 24. Rumball-Petre and Civic Education Association, New Citizens’ Handbook, 16. 25. Buffalo Westminster House, Westminster House Report, 1899–1900 (Buffalo, NY: Westminster House, 1900), 10–12. According to the Westminster Presbyterian Church website, the settlement was the second of its kind in the US. See https:// www.wpcbuffalo.org/about-us/. 26. Buffalo Westminster House, Westminster House Report, 1899–1900, 24, 38, 41. 27. Welcome Hall, Annual Reports (Buffalo, NY: Welcome Hall, 1901–1913). 28. Bair, “Settlement House,” 1144. 29. Gerber, Making of an American Pluralism, 87. 30. Gerber, Making of an American Pluralism, xiv. 31. Gerber, Making of an American Pluralism, 325. 32. Min, “Comparison,” 20. 33. Buffalo was granted the so-called “Buffalo Billion” in 2012, used for various large-scale initiatives and attracting outside capital. Convinced of its successes, the state has offered similar grants through a competitive process. See New York Upstate Revitalization Initiative, Upstate Revitalization Initiative, https://esd.ny.gov/aboutus/signature-projects/upstate-revitalization-initiative. 34. Buffalo weathered the Great Recession better than many cities, as its old housing stock never got overvalued. The average housing price has remained at a slow upward trajectory since. See Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Change in Regional Home Prices,” https://www.newyorkfed.org/home-price-index/index.html#. 35. For a concise socioeconomic account and contestation of the recovery claims see Lawrence Brooks, “Buffalo Niagara—How Are We Really Doing?,” Partnership for the Public Good, 2016, https://ppgbuffalo.org/files/documents/datademo graphicshistory-_buffalo_niagara_how_are_we_really_doing.pdf. 36. Brian J. Godfrey, “New Ethnic Landscapes: Place Making in Urban America,” in Airriess, Contemporary Ethnic Geographies, 85. 37. Montague, “Application to National Park Service.” Jerry Zremski, “For Poorer, for Richer: Burmese Change Buffalo,” Buffalo News, October 21, 2016; “Eating Fish from Great Lakes Is Risky, Immigrants Learn,” http://news.wbfo.org/post/ eating-fish-great-lakes-risky-immigrants-learn. 38. For a snapshot of the school demographics see New York State Education Department, “The International Prep School Enrollment (2015–16),” New York State Education Department, 2016, accessed October 9, 2017, https://data.nysed.gov/ enrollment.php?year=2016&instid=800000060406; Ali Ingersoll, “Soccer Booming as School and City Demographics Change,” WIVB4, August 24, 2017, http://wivb. com/2017/08/24/soccer-booming-as-school-and-city-demographics-change/. 39. Jay Rey, “Buffalo Schools Enrollment, Bucking the Trend, Is Up,” Buffalo News, October 12, 2016; Deandra Fike et al., “Immigrants, Refugees, and Languages Spoken in Buffalo,” Buffalo, Partnership for the Public Good, 2015.

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TO PA GES 2 4 5 – 2 5 0

40. City of Buffalo, “BPD Language Access Plan,” accessed November 5, 2017, http://ci.buffalo.ny.us/Mayor/Home/Leadership/Archived_Press_Releases/2016_ Archives/BPDLanguageAccessPlan (page has been removed). 41. Partnership for the Public Good, “Burman, Karen, and Chin Refugees: From Burma to Buffalo,” Partnership for the Public Good, July 7, 2015, https://ppgbuf falo.org/files/documents/data-demographics-history/populations_and_cultural_ groups/datademographicshistory-_burman__karen__and_chin_refugees.pdf. 42. Zremski, “For Poorer.” 43. For a complete picture see “Country Chapter: USA,” in UNHCR Resettlement Handbook (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2011). 44. Some observers point to the relative formalization of resettlement process since the 1940s. Haines, Safe Haven?, 57. 45. See, for example, the wide scope of services provided by the International Institute (https://iibuffalo.org/) and Catholic Charities of Western New York (https://www.ccwny.org/services). 46. Jericho Road Community Health Center, “Hope Refugee Drop-in Center,” http://www.jrchc.org/about/; and “Buffalo Programs,” http://www.jrchc.org/ programs/, accessed October 9, 2017. 47. Westminster Economic Development Initiative, “About WEDI,” accessed October 10, 2017, http://www.westsidebazaar.com/history. 48. “The Vive Legacy,” http://www.jrchc.org/vive/the-vive-legacy/; and “Vive, A Program of Jericho Road Community Health Center,” https://www.lawhelpny. org/organization/vive-inc/immigrationimmigrants/protections-for-asylees-andrefugees?ref=T9Qtg, accessed October 9, 2017. In the latter document, Vive claims to be the largest refugee shelter in the US. 49. The adoption of the agreement caused a rush to the border; Vive accepted asylum seekers from all parts of the US—as a reporter put it, “Mauritanians from Cincinnati, Somalis from Minneapolis.” Marina Jiménez, “Last-Ditch Bid for Canada’s ‘Wide Open Spaces,’ ” Globe and Mail, January 21, 2004. 50. Jake Halpern, “The Underground Railroad for Refugees,” New Yorker, March 13, 2017. 51. I agree with the criticism that the idealized notions of entrepreneurship and self-help, prevalent since the 1990s through initiatives such as block grants, empowerment zones, etc., are problematic covers for lack of adequate social spending. 52. While Anderson’s work deals with race, the observations are equally relevant to other environments where othering practices could become commonplace. E. Anderson, Cosmopolitan Canopy, 276–77. 53. Jericho Road emphasizes community participation and dialogue as important components of its practice. Jericho Road, “Our History.” 54. Jericho Road Community Health Center, “Global Work,” accessed October 9, 2017, http://www.jrchc.org/about/. 55. David A. Hollinger, “Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Solidarity,” in Robbins, Horta, and Appiah, Cosmopolitanisms, 55. Anthony Appiah also notes the importance of a “distinctively cosmopolitan commitment” to pluralism. See Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 144. 56. Leitner and Preston, “Going Local.”

NOTES TO PA GES 2 5 0 – 2 5 9     297

57. Compare with, for example, the Australian system, where a dedicated national agency—Humanitarian Settlement Services—provides “intensive settlement support through a coordinated case management approach” for up to twelve months. “Country Chapter: Australia,” in UNHCR Resettlement Handbook (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2016 [rev.]) 58. Glaeser, “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” 59. Richard Florida, “The Buffalo Mega-Region: Bigger Than We Know,” Buffalo News, June 15, 2008. 60. Don Mitchell, “Retrenchment, Revitalization, or the Right to the City? Four Theses,” in Czerniak, Formerly Urban, 92–93. 61. Su, “Immigration as Urban Policy.” 62. Simone, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” 22. 63. Simone, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” 37. 64. For example, Buffalo recently adopted a unified development ordinance—the “Green Code”—which uncritically resorts to neo-traditional formal tropes. 65. Simone, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” 17. 66. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 415, 418. 67. Judt, Memory Chalet, 206. 68. Warf, “Global Cities,” 927. 69. Van Assche and Teampău, Local Cosmopolitanism, 95–96. 70. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvii. 71. Chris Baker, “Miner to Obama: Syracuse Can Welcome More Syrian Refugees,” Syracuse.com, September 24, 2015, http://www.syracuse.com/news/index. ssf/2015/09/miner_to_obama_syracuse_will_take_its_share_of_syrian_refugees.html. 72. Mitchell, “Retrenchment,” 94. 73. Mitchell, “Retrenchment,” 98. 74. Richard Sommer, “Beyond Centers, Fabrics, and Cultures of Congestion: Urban Design as a Metropolitan Enterprise,” in Krieger and Saunders, Urban Design, 149. 75. Mitchell, “Retrenchment,” 99. 12.  Cropping the View

1. Banham came to Buffalo in 1976 at the behest of Harold Cohen, who had taught with Buckminster Fuller and John McHale at Carbondale in Illinois. Cohen was attempting to reassemble such a like-minded crowd at the State University of New York at Buffalo, though that effort never truly saw fruition. Banham taught in what was then the Art and Architecture Department at SUNY until 1980, after which he moved to Department of Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 2. See, for example, the benchmark study by Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building. 3. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. 4. Kowsky, Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corp., et al., Buffalo Architecture. 5. For a classic example of such critique see the reviews of A Concrete Atlantis by Michael Stratton in Construction History 3 (1987): 138–40; or Carney, “Grain Elevators.”

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6. Reyner P. Banham, “Photography: Parallel of Live and Art,” Architectural Review, October 1953, 259. 7. Banham, “Photography,” 261. 8. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 18. 9. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 18. 10. The notes from these seminars were to be bundled together under the heading of the “Buffalo Industrial Archive” but now exist as fragmented parts. The studies for the daylight factories that make up the Larkin complex, for example, are in the Special Collections of the University at Buffalo Libraries. 11. Banham goes on in this vein about the view of the Peavey and Electric Elevators across the Buffalo River. See Banham, “Buffalo Archaeological,” Architectural Review, March 1980, 88–93. 12. Andrew Saint, review of Banham, Concrete Atlantis, Architectural Association Files, no. 14 (1987): 107. 13. Banham, Concrete Atlantis, 3. 14. Banham, “Photography,” 261. 15. See, for example, Mumford, City in History. Coda

1. Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty,” New York Times, November 14, 2008. 2. Ouroussoff, “Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty.”

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Contributors

Peter Christensen is associate professor of art history at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses in global modern architecture and infrastructure. He is the author of Germany and the Ottoman Railway Network (2017) and coeditor of Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent through History (2014), Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City (2012), and Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (2008). Marta Cieślak is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she teaches courses in modern European and world history. Her research examines mass migration from East Central Europe to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and its impact on the societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Francis Kowsky is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. For many years, he taught the history of art and architecture at Buffalo State College. He has written books and articles on nineteenth-century American architects. His The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System examines the thirty-year association that Frederick Law Olmsted and his associates had with Buffalo. Erkin Özay is an assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University at Buffalo. His research is concerned with the architecture of institutional settings and their capacity to serve as spaces of collective experience, with a specific focus on educational environments and resettlement practices. A registered architect, Özay previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Toronto, and Northeastern University, and practiced in Boston, London, and Istanbul. Jack Quinan is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University at Buffalo. He is a founding member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and curator emeritus and a board member of the Darwin D. Martin 315

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House Restoration. His books include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building: Myth and Fact (1987), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture (2004), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo Venture (2012). A. Joan Saab is Susan B. Anthony Professor of Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies and vice provost of academic affairs at the University of Rochester. She is the author of For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (2004, 2nd ed. 2009). She is currently writing the volume on visual culture for the University of Illinois Press’s series on sensory history, entitled Making Sense of What We See, and editing the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture. Annie Schentag received her doctorate in the history of architecture and urbanism at Cornell University and a master’s in urban planning at the University at Buffalo. In addition to her academic work, Annie has extensive professional experience in the field of historic preservation, where her work has listed over one thousand properties on the National Register of Historic Places in western New York. She is currently a preservation specialist at KTA Preservation Specialists in Buffalo. Hadas Steiner is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who researches cross-pollinations of technological, scientific, and cultural aspects of architectural fabrication. She is at work on a manuscript, The Accidental Visitant, which studies the intersections of ornithology and architecture. Steiner is the author of Beyond Archigram: The Technology of Circulation (Routledge), and her scholarship and reviews have been published in October, Grey Room, New Geographies, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Architecture, and arq. Julia Tulke is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her work focuses on material landscapes of urban crisis as sites of cultural production and political intervention. In this context she has conducted extensive research on street art and graffiti as mediums of expression and dissent in the context of an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork project in Athens, Greece. Stewart Weaver is professor of history at the University of Rochester. His books include Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (2008), and, most recently, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction (2015). He is now editing The Penguin Book of

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Mountain Literature for Penguin Random House. He teaches widely in modern European and modern environmental history. Mary N. Woods teaches at Cornell University, where she was the first Michael McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory. Her publications include From Craft to Profession: Architectural Education and Practice in 19th-Century America (1999), Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment (2009), and Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi (2017). She is currently working on a book about imagery of urban renewal in Mumbai and New York. Claire Zimmerman wrote Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (2014) and coedited Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010). Current research focuses on historical analysis of US industrialization in architecture through the Kahns of Detroit, and the impact of photographic architecture on producers and users of buildings worldwide. An associate professor at the University of Michigan, she directs doctoral studies in architecture and teaches history of art.

In dex

Page numbers followed by letter f refer to figures. abandonment, landscapes of: aestheticization of, 68 – 69; avant-garde artists’ fascination with, 203, 205; in Buffalo, 63 – 64, 66 – 67, 75, 84; at Love Canal, 3f, 228; residential, 74 – 77 Abbot, Berenice, 168 Abramovitz, Max: foremost projects of, 116 – 17, 123; Temple Beth Zion, 110, 111f, 115, 117 – 25, 119f – 122f, 124f, 127, 128 – 29, 130 Adams Powerhouse, Niagara Falls, 133 – 34, 133f, 281n3; architectural tours of, 131, 132, 134 – 43, 146, 147, 148; interior of, 136 – 37, 137f; observation gallery in, 137 – 38, 139, 140 – 41, 141f; stillness and silence in, 142 – 43 Adler, Selig, 111 Adler & Sullivan, 113 AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, Germany, 89, 94 – 96, 95f, 98, 106, 108 African Americans, in Buffalo, 6, 58, 75, 195, 239. See also race relations Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 24 – 25, 25f, 237; avant-garde art at, 212, 213 – 14, 220, 232; Bunshaft’s addition to (glass house), 109, 116, 220, 221, 256; model of Temple Beth Zion at, 123; new extension to, 258 Almy, Frederick, 181 Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 89, 92 – 94, 93f, 94f, 106, 108 “anarchitecture,” 194, 229 Apel, Dora, 68 – 69 Appiah, Anthony, 253 architectural history: alternative course for, 255, 259 – 64; social divisions ignored by, 255, 258 – 59; traditional approach to, 255 – 59

architectural tourism: experiential component of, 147 – 48; historians’ role in, 149; historical tradition of, 131 – 32, 135; in Silo City, Buffalo, 132, 145 – 48, 146f. See also factory tours; industrial heritage tourism Artpark, New York, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 220, 221, 230 Ashbee, C. R., 100 Atget, Eugène, 168 avant-garde art: in Buffalo, 195, 199f, 200, 203 – 7, 211f, 212 – 14, 216 – 17, 216f, 220; deindustrialization and, 197 – 99; gentrification associated with, 209 – 10; government programs supporting, 195 – 96, 204, 209, 220; in New York City, 194, 195, 198 – 99, 204, 207, 209. See also specific artists Baird, Frank Burdett, 54 Baldwin, James, 201 Banham, Peter Reyner, 6, 7, 168, 259 – 60, 297n1; Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, 7; A Concrete Atlantis, 261 – 64; on grain elevators, 67, 68, 256, 261, 262 – 63, 264; on postwar modernism, 110 Bartley, Aaron, 85 Baumann, Frederick, 99 Bazelon, Patricia Layman, 262, 263 Beck, Eckardt C., 228 Behne, Adolf, 102 Behrendt, Walter Curt, 27, 29 Behrens, Peter: AEG Turbine Factory, 89, 94 – 96, 95f, 106, 108; architectural theories influencing, 98; training of, 102, 103; and Wright, 100, 102 Belluschi, Pietro, 115, 116 Bemis, Edward, 175

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Benjamin, Walter, 169 Benson, LeGrace, 196 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus: on American peers, 100 – 101, 107, 109; Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 89, 92 – 94, 93f, 94f, 106, 108; architectural theories influencing, 98, 99; publications of, 105 – 6; training of, 102 Bertolo, Diane, 214, 217 Bethlehem Steel Company: closure of, 219, 219f, 225; Lackawanna plant of, 223; and Peace Bridge, 55 Bethune, Louise Blanchard, 10, 109, 258, 259 Bittner, Thomas, 65 blizzard of 1977, 195, 214 – 15, 215f; Hallwalls exhibition inspired by, 216 – 17, 216f Blum, Elizabeth, 36 Borromini, 129 Bozer, Joan, 35 Breton, André, 168 Breuer, Marcel, 115, 116 bridges: across U.S.-Canada border, 49 – 54, 50f, 51f. See also Peace Bridge Broadway-Fillmore area, Buffalo: ethnographic exploration of, 78 – 84; history of, 74, 75; Polish immigrants in, 177, 180, 187, 192 Broadway Market, Buffalo, 190, 190f Broderick Park, Unity Island, 243, 244f Brown, Byron, 76, 80 brutalism, 110 Buck, Leffert, 50 Buffalo: architectural heritage of, 7, 8, 27, 131, 218, 221, 237, 256 – 58; automobile industry in, 153 – 54, 161; avant-garde art in, 195, 199f, 200, 203 – 7, 211f, 212 – 14, 216 – 17, 216f, 220; as best planned city, 23; blizzard of 1977 in, 195, 214 – 15, 215f; as city of contradictions, 6 – 9, 66 – 67; as City of Ghosts, 63 – 64, 64f; as City of Lights, 1 – 2, 4, 218; cosmopolitanism of, 237 – 46, 238f; crime and corruption legacy of, 9; decline of, 3, 18, 56, 63 – 64, 108, 154, 193 – 94, 195, 219 – 20, 219f, 221, 235; deindustrialization of, 68, 154, 160; economic and cultural revitalization of, 8, 40 – 41, 64 – 65, 131, 143, 210, 232, 242, 258 – 59, 265; heyday of, 1 – 2, 107 – 8, 153 – 54, 176, 217 – 18, 237; as laboratory for new design practices and ideas, 8; multivalency of, 6, 10; national and global currents represented in, 5; periphery of, importance of, 3 – 4; poverty

and segregation in, 6, 8 – 9, 85, 177, 186, 187, 236, 242, 258, 294n19; and rhetoric of hospitality, 45; urban homesteading program in, 77; welcome sign for, 17, 18f, 40, 40f Buffalo News Building, 108 Buffalo Psychiatric Center (Buffalo State Insane Asylum), 7, 22 – 23, 38, 221, 256 Bunshaft, Gordon: addition to AlbrightKnox Art Gallery (glass house), 109, 116, 220, 221, 256; consideration for Temple Beth Zion, 116 Burgee, John, 202 Burnham, Daniel, 218; Ellicott Square Building, 7, 221, 256; and Wright, 276n19 Byles, Jeff, 84 Byrne, Barry, 100 Cady, R. W., 55 Canada: asylum seekers trying to reach, 248; pavilion at Pan-American Exposition of 1901, 48 – 49, 49f. See also U.S.-Canada border Carson, Rachel, 4, 32 Cary, George, 24 Central Park, New York City, 18, 19, 35, 36 Central Park Conservancy, 39 churches: Italian baroque, Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion compared to, 129; Polish immigrants in Buffalo and, 80 – 81, 82f, 187 – 90, 189f City Beautiful movement, 5 Clark, Jim, 4 Clough, Charles, 200, 203, 204, 205, 207, 217; I Wear the Wall, 206 Code, Lorraine, 43 Cohen, Paul P., 115, 116 Coles, Robert Traynham, 33, 210, 259 community gardens, in Buffalo, 83 – 84, 84f Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) program, 196, 204, 209 concrete: in Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion, 118 – 19, 121, 121f, 122f, 123, 127, 280n22; in Buffalo Skyway, 222; in Corbusier’s designs, 127 – 28; in factory buildings, 166; in grain silo construction, 63, 67, 68, 119, 257; Kahn Associates’ use of, 152f, 166; in Peace Bridge, 55, 59; in Wright’s Larkin Building, 101 Conrad, Tony, 214, 220 Corbusier, Le, 99, 101; Chapel of NotreDame-du-Haut, 127 – 28; on grain elevators, 67, 257, 263; Wright’s influence on, 102, 107

I n d e x     321 cosmopolitanism: hospitality and, 43; rust belt, 252 – 54 Creighton, Margaret, 2 Crystal Beach Amusement Park, Fort Erie, Ontario, 57 – 58, 59f Cuomo, Andrew M., 41, 210 Curtin, John Thomas, 38 Curtiss-Wright Airplane Plant, Cheektowaga, New York, 154; construction photographs of, 154 – 57, 155f – 157f, 159 – 61; interior of, 157; postwar demise of, 154, 160, 167 Czolgosz, Leon, 2 Dagher, Fadi, 83 Daniels, John, 184 – 87 Dart, Joseph, 67, 256 Darwin Martin House, Buffalo, 7, 103, 258 Davis, William, 55 de Fries, H., 104 – 5 deindustrialization: and aestheticization of decay, 68 – 69; and avant-garde art, 197 – 99; history of, grain elevators embodying, 68, 74; and Larkin Administration Building, demise of, 108 – 9; and population decline, 74, 195 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, 27, 28 Delaware Park, Buffalo (“the Park”): Olmsted on, 268n5; Pan-American Exposition of 1901 at, 1, 218; plan for, 20, 21f; public buildings encroaching on, 24 – 25, 25f, 38; reclamation efforts, 35, 36, 40 – 41, 41f; roads encroaching on, 17, 27, 28 – 29, 34 – 35, 34f demolition: and creativity, in Matta-Clark’s art, 197, 200, 201, 229 – 30; in East Side, Buffalo, 76 – 77, 79f – 81f, 85; and New Pastoralism, 77; of Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, 108, 235 Dengel, Stanislaus, 191 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 270n8 Detroit: and aestheticization of decay, 68 – 69; Buffalo compared to, 10, 45; industrial “ruin” tourism in, 144, 146, 148; period of rapid expansion of, 153; and rhetoric of hospitality, 45; and rust belt revivalism, 64 Dom Polski, Buffalo, 182, 183f, 191 Dudzick, Joseph, 108 Dusel, Donna Jordan, 204 Eames, Charles and Ray, 256 Earth Art, 196 – 97

East Side, Buffalo: abandoned churches in, 80 – 81, 82f; community gardens in, 83 – 84, 84f; ethnographic exploration of, 78 – 84; future development of, expectations regarding, 77 – 78; history of, 75; residential abandonment in, 67, 74 – 76, 85; targeted demolition in, 76 – 77, 79f – 81f; Vive shelter in, 247 – 48, 249, 250, 251, 254f Edison, Thomas, 135 Ehmke, Ronald, 204 Eisenshtat, Sidney, 115 – 16 electricity: and architectural tours, 134; generation at Niagara Falls, 1, 4, 133; at Pan-American Exposition of 1901, 1 – 2, 218 Ellet, Charles, Jr., 52 Ellicott, Joseph, 19 – 20, 27 Ellicott Square Building, Buffalo, 7, 26, 221, 256 environmental catastrophes: on Lake Erie, 221; at Love Canal, 4 – 5, 6, 35, 228 environmental movement: Love Canal disaster and, 4, 5, 35 – 36, 230 – 31; and rediscovery of Olmsted, 32, 36 Erie, Lake: ecological disasters affecting, 221; Front Park on, 17, 58 – 59; Peace Bridge construction and, 56 – 57; snow accumulation around, 214 Erie Canal, 9; and Buffalo’s growth, 1, 3, 153 – 54, 217, 256; opening of Saint Lawrence Seaway and, 193, 219, 235 Evans, Sarah, 206, 209 factory tours, 131 – 32; of Adams Powerhouse, 131, 132, 134 – 43, 146, 147, 148; of Shredded Wheat Company factory, 131, 140; work and leisure reconciled through, 138 – 39 Falk, Samson, 111 Fenian Raids, 47, 61 Fernbach, Henry, 112 – 13 Figueroa, April, 65, 83 Fink, Joseph L., 114, 123 Florida, Richard, 210, 250 – 51, 291n43 Ford, Gerald, 195 Ford Motor Company: Fuhrmann Assembly Plant, 153, 161 – 66, 163f – 165f; River Rouge complex, 167; Willow Run plant, 159 Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, 20, 22, 23, 38 Fort Erie, Ontario: Crystal Beach Amusement Park at, 57 – 58, 59f; impact of Peace Bridge on, 60, 272n56

322    I n d e x

Frampton, Kenneth, 98 Friedman, Milton, 117 Frisch, Michael, 225 – 27 Front Park, Buffalo: design of, 20; Peace Bridge construction and, 26, 28, 57, 58, 59 – 60; roads encroaching on, 17, 26, 28, 29f Fuhrmann Assembly Plant, Buffalo, 153, 161 – 62, 167, 171f; construction photographs of, 162 – 66, 163f – 165f, 170f Gerber, David, 240 – 42 Gibbs, Lois, 230 – 31 Giedion, Sigfried, 169 Glaeser, Edward, 236 Glenn Martin Aircraft Plant, Middle River, Maryland, 157 – 59 Goldman, Mark, 30 – 31, 37, 75, 77, 85 Goodman, Percival, 116 Grachos, Louis, 213 – 14 grain elevators, Buffalo: abandonment of, 63, 68; adaptive reuse of, 69 – 72, 70f, 71f, 76; Banham on, 67, 68, 256, 261, 262 – 63, 264; Cargill Pool, 72 – 74, 73f; East Side residential abandonment compared to, 67, 74, 84 – 85; graffiti on, 63, 64f, 71; history of, 67 – 68, 256 – 57; images of, 144; Riverworks complex, 147 – 48, 148f; rust belt revivalism and, 66 – 69, 71, 74, 84 – 85; Temple Beth Zion compared to, 119 – 20; as tourist attraction, 131, 132, 145 – 48, 146f. See also Silo City Green, E. B., 257 Green & Wicks, Albright Art Gallery, 24 – 25, 25f Griffin, James, 210 Gropius, Walter, 67, 101, 102, 107 Guaranty Building, Buffalo, 7, 8, 256 Gzowski, Casimir Stanislaus, 50 Haacke, Hans, 196 Hahn, Brad, 65, 70, 71, 72, 78 Hallwalls gallery, Buffalo, 6, 194, 199f, 200, 203 – 7, 210, 212; funding for, 204, 220; Snow Show at, 216 – 17, 216f Harrison, Wallace K., 116, 117, 280n22 Hecht, Manfred, 201 highways: interstate system of, impact on Buffalo, 108, 193; and Olmsted Park System, 17 – 18, 26 – 32, 29f, 31f, 34 – 35, 34f, 223; Skyway, 221 – 23, 222f Hildebrand, Grant, 166, 167 Hillis, Anne, 4 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 89, 102

Hodkiewicz, Edmund, bakery of, 188f, 191 Hollinger, David, 249, 251 Holt, Elijah, 42 – 43, 61 Honeymoon Bridge, Niagara Falls, 50, 50f Hooker Chemical Company, 5, 228, 230 hospitality: cosmopolitan ethic of, 43; as duty, 43, 47, 62; vs. manifest destiny, 46; U.S.-Canada border and rhetoric of, 42 – 43, 45, 47 – 48, 55, 57 – 58, 61 – 62 Hoyt, William B., 35 Huber, Raymond, 188 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, 18, 30f; destruction of, 29 – 32, 31f; restoration efforts, 41 Hunter, Robert, 176 immigrants/immigration: in late 19th-early 20th century, 175; in late 20th century, 242; in early 21st century, 236; poverty associated with, 175 – 76, 177, 181; Third Safe Country Agreement and, 248. See also refugee resettlement immigrants/immigration, in Buffalo: early 20th-century, 6, 176, 237 – 42, 238f; early 21st-century, 235 – 36, 242 – 46, 259; contemporary institutions aiding, 247 – 49; prejudice against, 180 – 82; settlement houses for, 239 – 42, 241f. See also Polish immigrants industrial architecture: Banham on, 259; in Buffalo, 256 – 57; comparison with other types of architecture, 132; gaps in historiography of, 149 – 50; increased interest in, in postindustrial era, 144 – 45, 149; observation galleries in, 138, 139; photographs of, 152 – 57, 155f – 157f, 162 – 66, 163f – 165f, 170f – 171f, 261; rapid technological change in early 20th century and, 151 – 52; sublime in, 158 – 59; tours of, 131 – 32. See also grain elevators; industrial heritage tourism industrial heritage tourism: Buffalo’s grain elevators and, 131, 132, 145 – 48, 146f; different approaches to, 148 – 49. See also factory tours inequalities: architectural history ignoring, 255, 258 – 59; in early 20th-century Buffalo, 181 – 82; refugee resettlement program and, 236; rust belt revivalism and, 66 – 67, 74, 84 – 85, 258. See also segregation International Railroad Bridge, 50, 243, 244f, 248 International Style, 107, 110, 127, 261

I n d e x     323 Irwin, Robert, 205 Irwin, William, 136, 143 Jacobs, Jane, 7, 32 James, Mark, 65 Jericho Road Center, Buffalo, 246, 247f, 251 Johnson, Philip, 202 Kahn, Louis I., 109; First Unitarian Church, Rochester, 130; on natural light, 129 – 30 Kahn Associates (Albert and Julius): CurtissWright Cheektowaga Plant, 154 – 57, 155f – 157f, 159 – 61; Fuhrmann Assembly Plant, 153, 161 – 66, 163f – 165f, 170f, 171f; Glenn Martin Middle River Plant, 157 – 58, 159; industrial architecture by, 152f, 153, 158, 159, 237, 283n4; Packard #10 plant, 166, 284n24, 284n25; PierceArrow Automobile Plant, 152f, 153, 166 – 67; reinforced concrete used by, 152f, 166 Kamienski, B. S., 181 Kant, Immanuel, 43, 99 Kaplan, Dana, 113 Kemp, Joseph, photographs of, 225, 226f – 227f Kensington Expressway, 17, 30, 31f, 41 Kent, Edward Austin, design for Temple Beth Zion, 112, 112f, 113, 114, 129 Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, 7, 109, 124, 237, 256 Koch, Ed, 208 – 9 Kowsky, Frank, 7, 19, 29, 35, 38 – 39 Lackawanna, New York, 161, 220, 223 – 24, 232 Lackawanna Steel, 153, 283n7 Larkin, John D., 90 Larkin Administration Building, 89, 90f, 256; Buffalo’s decline and, 108 – 9; criticism of, 89, 104; demolition of, 108, 235; European buildings compared to, 92, 96, 106 – 7; European publications on, 101, 104 – 5; impact on modern architecture, 89, 106 – 7, 108, 109; innovations of, 92, 107; interior design of, 91 – 92, 91f; observation galleries at, 139; promotion of, 89, 100, 103 – 5, 107 Larkin Company, 90 – 91, 108, 257, 278n58 Lee, Carl, 83 Lescaze, William, 107, 115, 116 light, natural: in Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion, 118, 119f – 122f, 120 – 21, 128f, 129; in contemporary religious architecture,

129 – 30; in Kahn’s First Unitarian Church, 130; in Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, 91f, 92, 101 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 116, 123 Lincoln Highway, impact on Buffalo, 108 Little, H. H., 190 Littman, William, 139 Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett, 125 Longo, Robert, 6, 194, 200, 203 – 4, 217; 3 Ring Circus, 205 – 6, 206f; funding for, 196; move to New York City, 207, 209 Love, William, 5, 228 Love Canal, New York, 228; abandoned houses at, 3f, 228; creative potential in, 230; environmental catastrophe at, 4 – 5, 6, 35, 228; grassroots organizing at, 230 – 31 Lupfer, Edward, 55 MacCannell, Dean, 138 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 46 – 47 Maher, Dennis, 212; Assembly House 150, 211f, 212 Malkin, Philip, 205 Martin, Darwin, 103. See also Darwin Martin House Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Buffalo (“the Parade”), 20, 37 – 38 Masiello, Anthony, 19, 40f Mather, Alonzo, 54 Matta, Roberto, 197, 228 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 6, 194, 196 – 203, 198f, 207 – 8, 228 – 29; and “anarchitecture,” 194, 229; Bingo, 197, 200, 201 – 3, 202f, 206, 228, 229 – 30; Garbage Wall, 200 – 201; and Hallwalls, 205, 206 – 7; institutions founded by, 194; Ithaca projects of, 196; Maher compared to, 212; Pier 18, 205; public funding for, 196; Splitting, 201, 229 McKim, Mead & White, 256; Adams Powerhouse, 133, 133f, 134 McKinley, William, 2 – 3, 218 McMillan, William, 24 Mendelsohn, Erich, 102, 104, 116; B’nai Amoona, St. Louis, 129; Park Synagogue, Cleveland, 122 – 23 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 101; Martin aircraft plant as inspiration for, 158 – 59; Wright’s influence on, 102, 107 Mitchell, Don, 250, 251, 253 Morris, William, 100 Moses, Robert, 223, 271n41 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 35, 37, 56

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Native American tribal territories, 45, 46 neo-expressionism, 110, 128 Neutra, Richard, 100, 107 New Pastoralism, 77, 83, 85 New York City: avant-garde art in, 194, 195, 198 – 99, 204, 207, 209; Buffalo in relation to, 9, 193, 194; Central Park in, 18, 19, 35, 36; in postindustrial era, 193 – 94, 195; slums in, photographic record of, 6, 186; urban renewal in, 207, 208 – 10 New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), 195, 220 Niagara Falls: bridges at, 50 – 52, 50f, 51f; electricity generated at, 1, 4, 133; as tourist destination, 134 Niagara Falls, New York: Bingo project in, 197, 200, 201 – 3, 202f, 228, 229 – 30; deindustrialization of, 202. See also Adams Powerhouse; Love Canal Niagara River: bridges across, 49 – 54, 50f; Grand Island in, 47; Navy Island in, 46; U.S.-Canada border through, 45 Niagara Thruway, 28, 29f; “Welcome to Buffalo” sign at, 17, 18f, 40, 40f Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 47 – 48 O’Grady, Gerald, 220 Olmsted, Frederick Law: Buffalo Psychiatric Center design, 7, 22 – 23, 38; career as landscape architect, 19; first visit to Buffalo, 19 – 20; legacy in Buffalo, 19, 27; publication established by, 1; rediscovery of, 18, 32 – 33, 35 – 40; theory of landscape design, 22 – 23. See also Olmsted Park System, Buffalo Olmsted, John C., 24 – 25 Olmsted Park System, Buffalo, 19 – 24, 218, 256; avenues joining, 21, 21f; on National Register of Historic Places, 36, 37; original elements of, 20 – 21; Peace Bridge’s impact on, 26, 28, 29f, 57; period of significance for, 24; plan for, 22f, 23; public buildings encroaching on, 24 – 25, 25f; reclamation efforts, 18, 19, 33 – 41, 41f; roads encroaching on, 17 – 18, 26 – 32, 29f, 31f, 34 – 35, 34f, 223; threats to, 25 – 26; on “Welcome to Buffalo” sign, 17, 18, 18f, 40, 40f. See also specific parks Oppenheim, Dennis, 196 Ostertag, George A., photographs by, 155, 155f – 157f, 156 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 265

Page, Walter Hines, 1 Pan-American Exposition of 1901, 1 – 2, 217 – 18; and architectural tourism, 135; Canadian pavilion at, 48 – 49, 49f, 61; electricity at, 1 – 2, 4; “ethnographic” encounters at, 6; Love Canal as historical inversion of, 4 – 5; McKinley’s assassination at, 2 – 3, 218 Parade, the (Martin Luther King Jr. Park), Buffalo, 20, 37 – 38 Park, the. See Delaware Park, Buffalo Parkside, Buffalo, 23, 33 – 34 Patriot War, 46 – 47 Peace Bridge, 60f, 237; construction of, 44f, 54 – 55; design for, 55; environmental impact of, 56 – 61; impact on Olmsted Park System, 26, 28, 29f, 57, 58, 59 – 60; inauguration of, 42 – 43; origins of, 46, 54; and U.S.-Canada relations, 42 – 43, 46, 55 – 58, 60 – 62 Perret, Auguste, 99 Perry, Olivery Hazard, 46 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 96 photographs: Banham’s use of, 262 – 64; of industrial architecture, 152 – 57, 155f – 157f, 162 – 70, 163f – 165f, 170f – 171f, 261; of New York City slums, 6, 186; role in construction of history, Banham on, 260 – 61, 263, 264; of steelworkers, Rogovin’s, 224 – 27, 226f – 227f, 232 Picon, Antoine, 66 Pierce-Arrow Automobile Plant, Buffalo, 151, 152f, 153, 157, 166 – 67, 257 Pintaric&accent, V. Horvat, 102 Pinto, Jody, 196 Polish immigrants, in Buffalo, 6, 177, 240; anti-immigrant rhetoric targeting, 180 – 82, 184; architectural legacy of, 183f, 188f, 190 – 91, 190f; churches of, 80 – 81, 82f, 187 – 90, 189f; cultural institutions and activities of, 182 – 84; demographic profile of, 177, 184 – 87; descendants of, 192; in East Side neighborhoods, 74, 75; industrial jobs and, 154; living conditions of, 180 – 81, 186; middle-class vs. workingclass, 181 – 82; model, 178 – 80, 179f; and Temple Beth Zion, 110 Polonia Hotel, Buffalo, 191 Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna, Austria, 89, 96 – 98, 97f, 106 – 7, 108 poverty: in Buffalo, 6, 85, 177, 186, 187, 236, 242, 255, 258; in immigrant communities, 175 – 76, 177, 181 preservationist movement, 32, 35 – 40

I n d e x     325 Prohibition, and U.S.-Canada relations, 60 – 61 Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 19, 20 Pryor, John, 180, 181 Quinan, Jack, 7 race relations, in Buffalo: geography of segregation, 8 – 9, 75, 258, 294n19; Peace Bridge construction and, 58 Rattner, Abraham, 125 Reed, Henry Hope, 33 refugee resettlement: in Buffalo, 235 – 36, 242 – 46, 293n2; inequality perpetuated by, 8 – 9, 236; in New York State, 293n4; in rust belt cities, 253 resettlement urbanism, 236 – 37; apparatus for, 247 – 50 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 218; Buffalo Psychiatric Center, 7, 22, 38, 221, 256; Trininty Episcopal Church, Boston, 113 Riegl, Alois, 98 Riis, Jacob, 6, 186 Riverside, Illinois, 19, 23 Riverside Park, Buffalo, 24 Riverworks complex, Buffalo, 147 – 48, 148f Roberts, Gillian, 43 Rockefeller, Nelson, 195, 199, 200, 220 Roebling, John, 52 Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow, 36 Rogovin, Milton, Steel Series photographs of, 224 – 27, 226f – 227f, 232 Roosevelt, Theodore, 2, 9, 218 Root, John Wellborn, 99 Rudolph, Paul, 109, 256 ruin(s): as idealized representational device, 65 – 66. See also abandonment “ruin porn”: absences in, 149; deindustrialization and, 68 – 69, 85; seductive quality of, 144 Ruskin, John, 98, 99, 100 rust belt, definition of, 272n1 rust belt cosmopolitanism, 252 – 54 rust belt decline, Buffalo as symbol of, 3, 18, 56, 63 rust belt revival(ism): in Buffalo, 8, 40 – 41, 64 – 65, 131; and demolition, 76; grain elevators as symbol of, 66 – 69, 71, 74, 84 – 85; and industrial architecture, increased interest in, 144 – 45, 149; inequalities reiterated in, 66 – 67, 74, 84 – 85, 258; and refugee resettlement program, 236; vacant land and, 85

Ruszkiewicz, Franciszek (Frank), 178 – 80, 179f Saarinen, Eero and Eliel: Kleinhans Music Hall by, 7, 109, 124, 256; MIT Chapel, 130 Saint Lawrence Seaway, impact on Buffalo, 68, 108, 193, 219, 235 Saint Stanislaus Church, Buffalo, 187 – 88, 189f Scajaquada Expressway: conversion to lowspeed boulevard, 41; impact on Olmstead Park System, 17, 26, 28, 34, 34f Schindler, Rudolph, 100, 107 Schneider, Charles Conrad, 50 segregation, in Buffalo, 8 – 9, 75, 85, 236, 258, 294n19. See also East Side Sellers, Coleman, 136 Semper, Gottfried, 94, 98, 99; Dresden synagogue, 112 settlement houses, in Buffalo, 239 – 42, 241f, 249 Shahn, Ben, 125 – 27, 130 Shahn, Bernarda, 126 Sherman, Cindy, 6, 194, 200, 204, 205, 217; 3 Ring Circus, 205 – 6, 206f; funding for work of, 196; media-centric works of, 207; move to New York City, 209 Shredded Wheat Company factory, 139 – 40, 140f; architectural tourism in, 131, 140; grain silos of, 202, 202f Shunk, Harry, 205 Silo City, Buffalo, 69 – 72, 70f, 71f, 85, 145f; as tourist attraction, 132, 145 – 48, 146f Silsbee, Joseph Lyman, 99, 103 Simonds, Charles, 198 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 250, 251, 252 Singing Circle Building, Buffalo, 191 Skyway, Buffalo, 221 – 23, 222f, 232 Smith, Gordon, 123 Smith, Kathryn, 105 Smith, Rick, 69, 70, 72 Smithson, Robert, 196 Soho, New York City, 198 – 99, 204; gentrification of, 207, 209 SolarCity, Buffalo, 242 Solomon, Holly and Horace, 201, 229 South Park, Buffalo, 23 Spelterini, Maria, 52, 52f Spirn, Anne Whiston, 32 Stackpole, Robert, 203 State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, 199 – 200, 220; and avant-garde art, 200, 204; Banham at, 6, 255, 259 – 60, 262, 297n1; encroachment on Olmstead

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State University of New York (continued) park system, 38; new downtown campus of, 210, 232; social and political turmoil in 1960s, 197 steel: and Buffalo’s growth, 39, 108, 153; in Buffalo Skyway, 222; in European modernist architecture, 96, 98; in Honeymoon Bridge, 50; in industrial architecture, 143, 156, 158, 162, 163, 166; in Peace Bridge, 55; in Temple Beth Zion, 127, 128f; in Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, 91, 106 steelworkers: billboard by, 219, 219f; in Lackawanna, 223; photographs of, 224 – 27, 226f – 227f, 232 Stilgoe, John, 143 Stoler, Ann Laura, 65 Stone, Edward Durrell, 108, 115, 116, 279n18 Strand, Ginger, 133, 142 Sturgis, Russell, 89, 104, 107 Sullivan, Louis, 100, 218; Guaranty Building, 7, 256; and Wright, 276n19 Sullivan, T. O., 188 synagogues: prominent designs for, 112 – 13, 115 – 16, 122 – 23; stained-glass windows in, 125. See also Temple Beth Zion Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo: Abramovitz’s design for, 110, 111f, 115, 117 – 25, 119f – 122f, 124f, 127, 128 – 29, 130; community roots of, 110 – 11; Fink auditorium at, 124 – 25; Kent’s design for, 112, 112f, 113, 114, 129; postwar synagogue design and, 122 – 23; Sanctuary of, 118 – 21, 119f – 122f, 123; Sisterhood Chapel of, 123 – 24, 124f; stained-glass windows in, 113, 118, 125 – 27, 128f, 130, 280n34 Tesla, Nikola, 135 Torke, David, 64, 65, 77 tourism: Buffalo’s efforts to attract, 17, 18f, 39 – 40, 40f; and urban revitalization, 131. See also architectural tourism Transfiguration Church, Buffalo, 80 – 81, 82f, 189 Trico Plant No. 1, Buffalo, 8 Tubman, Harriet, 48 Turner Construction Company, 55 Underground Railroad, 9, 48 University at Buffalo. See State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo Upjohn, Richard, 256

urban revival: in Buffalo, 8, 40 – 41, 64 – 65, 131, 143, 210, 232, 242, 258 – 59, 265; in New York City, 207, 208 – 10 Urry, John, 145 U.S.-Canada border: crossings near Buffalo, 49 – 54; and cultural relations, 43 – 44; historical tensions at, 45 – 47; Peace Bridge across, 42 – 43, 46, 55 – 58, 60 – 62; Prohibition and, 60 – 61; rhetoric of hospitality on, 42 – 43, 45, 47 – 48, 55, 57 – 58, 61 – 62 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 50 Vaux, Calvert, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 37 Viola, Bill, 214 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel, 94, 98 – 99 Wagner, Otto, 101 – 2, 106; Academy of Fine Arts, 102; Post Office Savings Bank, 89, 96 – 98, 97f, 106 – 7, 108; and Wright, 100, 277n24 Waldheim, Charles, 66 Warner, Sam Bass, 33 War of 1812, 45 – 46 Washington, George, 47 Wells, H. G., 142 Welter, Jesse, 144 Westminster House, Buffalo, 239, 240, 241f, 247 West Side Bazaar, Buffalo, 247, 248 – 49, 248f Whirlpool Aero Car, 53f, 54 Wijdeveld, H. Th., 104 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 111 Wong, Janay, 116 Wright, Frank Lloyd: architectural theories influencing, 98, 99, 100; Beth Sholom Synagogue, 129; Darwin Martin House, 7, 103; European peers and, 100 – 103, 104 – 5, 277n24, 277n31; Guggenheim Museum, 280n22; legacy in Buffalo, 89, 218, 256; promotionalism of, 89, 100, 103 – 5, 107; training of, 102 – 3, 276n19. See also Larkin Administration Building Wright, John, 100 Yamasaki, Minoru, 115, 116, 279n18 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 130 Zawadzki, Wladyslaw, 191; bakery designed by, 188f, 191; Dom Polski, 183f, 191 Zetlin, Lev, 127 Zhu, Pei, 109 Zucker, Richard, 205