Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism

This chapter begins with a background on the demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin building in 1950 which proved ominous for Buffalo. It sketches Buffalo's impending socioeconomic decline by citing several landmark events from the decade, such as the relocation of the prominent Technical High School from the black East Side to the white West Side in 1954. It also follows five decades of decline that halved Buffalo's population and hastened its transformation into a rust belt cornerstone. The chapter focuses on Buffalo in the present time, which looks to refugee resettlement as a means to rejuvenate its distressed neighborhoods, starting with 11,000 refugees who have resettled in Buffalo since 2008. It stresses how Buffalo continues to receive the highest number of refugees in New York State, which afforded the city with a much-needed urban stimulus and jolted its lethargic public systems reeling from decades of regression.

“In the Thought of the World”

This chapter focuses on the Larkin Building, which is firmly entrenched in histories of architectural modernism, such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration of 1929. It cites Hendrik Petrus Berlage's Amsterdam Stock Exchange, Peter Behren's AEG Turbine Factory, and Otto Wagner's Post Office Savings Bank as buildings that rival Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin commission for architectural distinction at the turn of the twentieth century. It also reviews the origins of Wright's Larkin Building in the company's history, its material characteristics, and its principal functions. The chapter weighs the Larkin Building against similar considerations of three European buildings in order to identify the ideas and qualities that all four architects shared while also demonstrating characteristics in Wright's building. It describes the Larkin Administration Building that was modern in the abstractness of its blocklike forms and its many innovations.

Anticipating Images

This chapter begins with a newspaper ad placed at the beginning of the previous century that depicted the newly constructed George N. Pierce manufacturing plant at Buffalo. It describes the plant as a new kind of industrial architecture that 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 century. It also talks about the growth of US industry in the early twentieth century that coupled market capitalism with scientific optimization moderated by Progressive Era reforms. The chapter reviews the industry that came into being in the United States in the wake of a “Second Industrial Revolution,” which was produced by the architecture firm of Albert Kahn Associates. It considers the historical resource that photographs constitute from the archives of the US industrial architecture under construction between 1905 and 1945 in the Detroit area collections.

Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes

This chapter talks about the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected Buffalo and New York City although they are almost four hundred miles apart. It explains how the canal, which was built to create a navigable east–west waterway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, transformed New York into what became known as the Empire State during the nineteenth century. It also mentions cities of the East Coast and Great Lakes, midwestern farmlands, and Canadian, British, and European port cities where industries soon settled along the thriving waterfronts of Buffalo and New York, making them prosperous centers for manufacturing and trade. The chapter recounts the construction of the interstate highway system, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, that rendered the Erie Canal completely obsolete by the 1950s. It illustrates how Buffalo and New York City struggled to rebuild in the post-industrial era.

Lake Effect

This chapter talks about Buffalo as a once booming industrial city that enjoyed a prolonged modernist golden age, beginning with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. It describes that the Erie Canal was midway en route between New York City and Detroit and linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, which brought an influx of new opportunities to the region and earning Buffalo the moniker of “the Queen City.” It also cites the 1901 Pan-American Exposition that placed Buffalo in the international eye. The chapter explains how Buffalo had become the butt of jokes in the opening monologues of late-night comedians by the 1970s after the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 made the Erie Canal system obsolete for moving freight. It mentions that 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.

Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses

This chapter describes the interior of Marine A, one of Buffalo's many disused grain elevators that is saturated with visual interventions animating the barren space. It talks about small graffiti tags that occupy concrete walls and rusty metal chutes, spray-painted portraits of fantastical creatures wrap around columns, and a sculptural constellation of cogwheels is suspended from the ceiling of a silo shaft. It also mentions a series of chalk drawings depicting a landscape of miniature grain elevators that is connected to the ground by a dense networks of roots. The chapter examines epithets that have been assigned to Buffalo in past eras, which gesture toward Buffalo's economic prowess at the beginning of the twentieth century and later to its state of industrial decline. It captures the poetic melancholia of Buffalo's postindustrial landscape of decay and abandonment.

Coda

This chapter mentions Nicolai Ouroussoff, former architecture critic for the New York Times, who published an editorial entitled “Saving Buffalo's Untold Beauty” at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. It discusses how Ouroussoff depicted Buffalo as 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. It also examines Ouroussoff's article delighted many local officials and cemented some of the very clichés that have trapped Buffalo in a fugue of “ruin porn.” The chapter points out how Buffalo ardently remains a dynamic city that neither begs pity nor romance from its inhabitants. It highlights Buffalo's traits of being quotidian, emblematic, and archetypal as part of a larger effort to move beyond facile depictions of Buffalo and show how its lessons are transposable by being allegorical.

In the Buffalo Community, but Not of It

This chapter cites that Europeans who migrated to the United States had the goal of securing industrial jobs in the rapidly growing Northeastern and Midwestern urban centers between 1871 and 1910. It talks about the sheer magnitude of the transatlantic wave that triggered a debate over who was a desirable and, more importantly, who was an undesirable immigrant. It also refers to the large number of immigrants that came from East Central and Southern Europe. The chapter mentions how several citizens perceived the European immigrants that settled in urban areas to be a threat to American cities and, by extension, to the American nation. It discusses the European settlement and its relationship to poverty spreading in urban industrial centers that became a key point in the intense debate over the new immigrants.

The Peace Bridge and the Rhetoric of Hospitality at the US-Canada Border

The chapter discusses the Peace Bridge that traversed the Niagara River and connected Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario. It recounts how the Peace Bridge was inaugurated in 1927 in celebration of one hundred years of peace between the United States and Canada. It also looks at the official rhetoric around the bridge's construction in both the United States and Canada that stressed the themes of neighborliness and hospitality, which two nations had embraced for a century as friends. The chapter includes a poem by Elijah Holt, a local Buffalo lawyer and amateur poet, that was commissioned for the Peace Bridge's inauguration. It explores Holt's romantic portrayal of the bond of US–Canada relations that glossed over a more complicated geopolitical relationship that bore witness to the emergence of a cultural juxtaposition, which the Peace Bridge served to both thwart and emphasize at the same time.

Max Abramovitz’s Temple Beth Zion

This chapter refers to Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo, a significant example of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture that was designed by prominent New York architect Max Abramovitz. It describes the Temple Beth Zion as a four-part complex that consists of the synagogue, a two-story religious school building, a multipurpose auditorium, and a chapel. It also talks about how Abramovitz turned to the aesthetic of neo-expressionism and brutalism for Temple Beth Zion, which is termed the antirational trends that appeared in postwar modernism. The chapter recounts the deep roots of Temple Beth Zion in the Buffalo community, tracing its origin to the late 1840s and referencing it as the fourth reform congregation in America.