How Buffalo Became an American Architecture Capital | S5, E44

Look up in downtown Buffalo and you’ll find two Statues of Liberty, a 10-story Gilded Age office block, and the building that gave rise to the modern skyscraper. On the final episode of Unpacked‘s four-part Buffalo series, host Aislyn Greene explores Buffalo architecture with Edward Howard, a docent at the nonprofit Explore Buffalo. From a single downtown corner with five masterworks to the grain silos that inspired Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Buffalo turns out to be one of only two U.S. cities—along with Chicago—with major buildings by Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a guide to a city whose architecture rivals anywhere in America, and how to actually go see it.

For the full series: Listen to episode one about food, episode two about the city’s culture of welcoming, and episode three about Buffalo’s Black history.

Topics discussed in this episode

• Buffalo is one of only two U.S. cities—with Chicago—to have significant works by the “Holy Trinity” of American architecture: Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
• On one downtown corner, at Church and Main, you can see five buildings by major architects, including Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1896)—the first with an all-steel frame and curtain walls.
• Buffalo’s grain silos were so revolutionary that modernists like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier held them up as the ideal of stripped-down, functional design.
• The first professional female architect in the U.S., Louise Blanchard Bethune, designed Buffalo’s Hotel Lafayette (1904), since restored into a working hotel.
• Frederick Law Olmsted designed Buffalo’s connected system of parks and parkways and called it the best-planned city in the country.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Buffalo, New York, famous for its architecture?

At the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo was the eighth-largest U.S. city, wealthy from rail, steel, and Niagara hydropower, which drew leading architects to build there. It’s one of only two cities in the country—along with Chicago—with significant works by Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

What famous buildings can you see in Buffalo?

Highlights include Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building, Daniel Burnham’s Ellicott Square Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, the Richardson Olmsted Complex, and the Hotel Lafayette by Louise Blanchard Bethune.

Can you take an architecture tour of Buffalo?

Yes. The nonprofit Explore Buffalo runs docent-led walking, bike, and bus tours—including tall-buildings and grain-silo tours—and a new architecture visitor center is expected to open in the city.

Why did modernist architects admire Buffalo’s grain silos?

Modernists like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier saw the plain concrete grain elevators as the purest expression of their philosophy: buildings stripped to their functional essentials, with no ornamentation.

Who designed Buffalo’s parks?

Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New York’s Central Park, created Buffalo’s system of parks and tree-lined parkways beginning in 1868—and called Buffalo the best-planned city in the country.

People, places & resources in this episode

• Explore Buffalo — the nonprofit behind the tours, with a database of hundreds of Buffalo buildings
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House
• Guaranty Building (Louis Sullivan)
• Richardson Olmsted Complex / The Richardson Hotel
• Hotel Lafayette
• Buffalo Central Terminal
• Duende at Silo City (bar amid the grain elevators)

Full transcript

Two Statues on Main Street (00:00)

Aislyn: If you were walking down Main Street in downtown Buffalo, New York, and you happened to look up, you might do a double take—because atop a tall historic building are what look like not one, but two Statues of Liberty.

Ed: We have a unique building here in Buffalo called the Liberty Building.

Aislyn: This is Edward Howard. He’s a docent and tour guide at a nonprofit called Explore Buffalo. And yes, the Liberty Building does indeed have two statues that look quite a bit like the ones in New York.

Ed: One statue holds a tablet, with a crown and a torch—not an exact duplicate of the Statue of Liberty, but reminiscent of it. The symbolism is this: one statue looks toward the eastern portion of the United States, which was the developed part of the country. The western statue looks to the west, to the developing portion. The Liberty Building, with its statues facing east and west, recognizes Buffalo’s pivotal position in the development of our country. That is a unique building in Buffalo. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the United States.

Aislyn: Ed’s family has roots in Buffalo that go back 100 years, so he knows a thing or two about the city. He shares all that knowledge on a tour called Reaching for the Stars: The Tall Buildings Tour, which follows the evolution of construction techniques and architectural styles in Buffalo since the 1800s.

Ed: My tour begins in the year 1841, when Buffalo was a city of only 18,000 people. You could sail up the Hudson River, take the Erie Canal across New York State, board a ship in Buffalo, and travel from New York City to Chicago in five days. Imagine that.

Aislyn: And architecturally speaking, there is nothing like Buffalo in the rest of the country. I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked. This is the last part of our four-episode series on what makes Buffalo, New York, so special, and today we’re all about the architecture. Some of the most famous buildings in all of America were designed by people who did their best work right here in Buffalo. So stick around. It’s about to get structural.

One Corner, Five Master Architects (03:00)

Aislyn: Ed says the first thing to remember is that Buffalo is about far more than football and chicken wings.

Ed: At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, Buffalo was one of the largest cities in the country—the eighth largest. It had industry, wealth, and political influence, and that attracted many brand-name architects to come and build here. What makes it somewhat unique is that Buffalo is a mid-size town. It’s easy to get around, and easy to see well-known works by famous architects all in a very accessible space.

Aislyn: Ed says you can stand on one downtown corner and, without moving your feet, see five great examples.

Ed: If you stand at the corner of Church and Main Streets, within two or three minutes I can walk to five buildings by major architects. Looking straight ahead and to my left is the Ellicott Square Building by Daniel Burnham. Back in the 1880s and 1890s, Burnham was one of the premier architects in the country—we might know him best as the architect of the Flatiron Building in New York City. He did Union Station next to the U.S. Capitol, and Marshall Field’s in Chicago. In Buffalo, his building is Ellicott Square: a 10-story building that opened in 1896, said at the time to be the largest office building in the country.

One of our most famous buildings is the Guaranty Building by Louis Sullivan, who’s known as the father of skyscraper architecture. It was built in 1896, and it was the first building to have exclusively a steel frame with curtain walls. The frame held up the building, and the walls were merely decoration and kept the weather out. That was revolutionary at the time.

Our M&T Bank headquarters opened in 1966; the architect is Minoru Yamasaki, best known for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. And our Seneca One building, at 38 stories, is our tallest. The architect is Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to this day one of the great architecture firms in the world—they were also working on what was then the Sears Tower in Chicago, at the time the tallest building in the world.

Aislyn: All that in one intersection. Ed told us the strength of the local economy is part of what brought so many architects together in Buffalo.

Ed: We had the second-largest rail yard in the United States, second only to Chicago. We had the largest steel mill. We were known as the Electric City because we had power from Niagara Falls. We had two presidents from Buffalo in the 1800s, the second being Grover Cleveland. Buffalo was a happening place. We had industrial power, we had money, and we had people interested in building significant buildings—and that attracted the best architects in the world.

The Holy Trinity of Design (06:00)

Ed: The Holy Trinity of American architecture is Louis Sullivan, Henry Hobson Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. They’re considered the Holy Trinity because in the late 1800s and early 1900s they broke away from traditional European styles—Beaux-Arts, Gothic, Roman—and tried to create an American vocabulary in architecture. One of the things that makes Buffalo special is that Buffalo and Chicago are the only two cities in the United States with significant works by all three.

Interestingly, Louis Sullivan was part of the firm of Adler and Sullivan out of Chicago, and at one time they employed a relatively unknown draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright.

Aislyn: That’s right—Frank Lloyd Wright worked for Louis Sullivan, who created the Guaranty Building and pioneered that curtain-wall technique.

Ed: Wright called Sullivan “my lieber master, my beloved master,” and he learned at the feet of Louis Sullivan. Wright went on to become a famous architect in his own right. Here in Buffalo we have the Darwin Martin House, which has undergone a great restoration—originally built for Darwin Martin, an executive at the Larkin Soap Company. We have seven Frank Lloyd Wright structures in our city, three built during his lifetime and others built later to his designs.

H.H. Richardson is the third in the triumvirate. His Buffalo State Asylum—that’s the word they used at the time—is today known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex. He built a significant hospital for the mentally ill in 1880, which also has landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted. So we have pristine examples of buildings by all three architects that you can come to Buffalo and visit today. The only other place you could do that is Chicago.

Saving Buffalo’s Fading Landmarks (10:00)

Aislyn: With so many amazing buildings, I had to know which is Ed’s favorite.

Ed: The one I really like is Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building. When it opened in 1896, it was intended to be the finest office building in Buffalo—and it was. This is a national treasure; people come from around the world to see it. Back in the 1970s, there was a threat it might be knocked down. Fortunately, a coalition headed by a man named John Randall worked to publicize it and ask for help. Ultimately he, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an investor from Cleveland, and some money from Erie County came together to restore the building in 1983. Subsequent owners have continued to restore it, such that a building that was in dire straits now looks as good as the day it opened.

Aislyn: The tradition of ambitious preservation in Buffalo extends to many other buildings.

Ed: Let me pick a couple. First, the Hotel Lafayette. The significant thing about it is that the architect was a woman, Louise Blanchard Bethune—the first professional female architect in the United States. She joined the Western Association of Architects in 1885, and the Hotel Lafayette, which opened in 1904, is her signature building: a seven-story, 225-room French Renaissance design considered one of the top 15 hotels in the country, and the finest between New York City and Chicago.

Over time, travel habits changed and downtown hotels became less attractive. The building was sold in the 1980s to an owner who neglected it, and it deteriorated to the point of becoming a single-room-occupancy hotel. Then in 2010, a local developer named Rocco Termini bought it and spent $42 million to completely restore it. Today it’s a functioning first-class hotel, part of the Wyndham chain, that readers of your magazine can stay in.

We also mentioned the Richardson Olmsted Complex, built between 1880 and the late 1890s as a hospital for the mentally ill. It, too, was allowed to deteriorate. In 1977 a corporation took control, and eventually secured a $100 million grant from the state of New York. Today, part of the building is the Richardson Hotel—a great hotel to stay in—while other parts aren’t restored yet, so visitors can take a hard-hat tour and see what a work in progress looks like.

Aislyn: The latest restoration project in Buffalo is one of its largest: the Central Terminal.

Ed: This building opened in 1929 as the gem of the New York Central Railroad—the largest train station between New York and Chicago, servicing 200 trains a day. Sadly, the best day for the Central Terminal was the day it opened, in June 1929. Four months later the stock market crashed. By the 1950s, people traveled by airplane and car, train traffic dwindled, and on October 28, 1979, the last train left the station.

After that it went through several owners, each promising to restore it, none of whom did; some vandalized it, and art deco elements found their way as far away as Hong Kong. In 1997 the Central Terminal Restoration Corporation formed to make it weather-tight, and in 2022 it received a $61 million grant. It’s now being restored for use as a community space.

Aislyn: Ed has advice for how visitors can best enjoy these buildings.

Ed: Explore Buffalo is an organization of 200 volunteers. We’re a nonprofit, and we do walking tours, bus tours, boat tours, and speaking engagements to promote the architecture and history of Buffalo. We have architecture tours, neighborhood tours, history tours, African American–themed tours, LGBTQ-themed tours, and the mob tour, which is very popular. We tell the Buffalo story in a lot of different ways.

Aislyn: Next year, you’ll even find a brand-new architecture visitor center opening in the city. Check our show notes for links to everything, including the Explore Buffalo website and a database of hundreds of Buffalo buildings.

Grain Silos and Modernism (17:00)

Aislyn: Buffalo’s grain silos are so striking that architects have flown in from around the world just to look at them. To understand why they’re here, Ed says you have to start with the Erie Canal.

Ed: The Erie Canal is what made Buffalo a prosperous city. Before it, it cost $100 a ton to get grain from the Midwest to the East Coast. Once the canal opened, that price dropped to $15 a ton, and Buffalo prospered as ships crossed the Great Lakes to unload here. In the early days, men went down into a ship’s hold and shoveled out the grain. Then in 1842, a man named Joseph Dart invented the steam-powered grain elevator: a boom lowered into the hold that could remove 1,000 bushels an hour.

The idea of the grain silo was to store grain in Buffalo until it was ready to be shipped. At one point we had as many as 48 active grain silos; today we still have 14, of which four are active. The most notable is the General Mills silo—you may know General Mills for Cheerios, and when they’re baking them, you can smell it. In fact, you can buy a T-shirt here that says, “My city smells like Cheerios.”

Why were these interesting to architects? In the modernist tradition—Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier—the ethic was to strip a building down to its bare essentials: no symbolism, no extraneous design. In these plain concrete grain silos, they saw the model. Everything was functional; you couldn’t remove one thing and still have a working grain elevator. They saw this as the ideal for modern architecture.

Aislyn: And you can still visit the grain silos today, including at a bar we also heard about from Francesca in our episode about Buffalo’s food scene.

Ed: One of our favorite places is Duende, a bar you can drive to right in the midst of the silos. Explore Buffalo does silo tours—you can walk among them, hear the story, and our tour even takes you inside. Obviously these aren’t working grain elevators anymore, but you can go inside and learn how they worked. It’s really a sight to behold.

A City Shaped by Olmsted (20:00)

Aislyn: It’s not just the buildings in Buffalo that are special. The landscape around them is striking too, thanks to another famous architect.

Ed: Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux are known as the premier landscape architects of the industry, well known for Central Park in New York City and the U.S. Capitol grounds. In 1868, a man named William Dorsheimer invited Olmsted to Buffalo to discuss the idea of a park system. Buffalo was a rising city, and Dorsheimer thought it should have a central park. What Olmsted created was a unique arrangement: starting with what was known as The Park—today Delaware Park—as Buffalo’s version of Central Park, and then a series of tree-lined parkways that carried you between his larger parks. It was a unique idea at the time, and it led Olmsted to call Buffalo the best-planned city in the country.

Aislyn: Ed says that after visiting the best-planned city in the country, people are often hungry for more.

Ed: People are surprised by how much there is to see. Locals say, “I didn’t know there was so much I didn’t know about the city.” People from out of town say, “Wow, we should come back.” There’s more here than you can take in in a weekend.

Aislyn: And we hope you’ll come back for more Unpacked by Afar. In the show notes, we’ve linked to the resources Ed mentioned, as well as the other episodes in our Buffalo series. Unpacked is a production of Afar Media and is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. This episode was produced by Nikki Galteland and me, Aislyn Greene, with music by Chris Colin.