THE EIFFEL TOWERS OF BUFFALO
Are the grain elevators the Eiffel Towers of Buffalo? These monstrous concrete silos along the Niagara River were built in the nineteenth century to collect and store grain as it was shipped throughout the country. They are higher than the city’s office towers and longer than its blocks.
The elevators have the careless grace of structures that grew from need rather than pride, and were engineered rather than designed. They are bare in form. Their silos are poured concrete, their headhouses red brick or corrugated steel. They are brutal in scale. They dwarf the modest residential neighborhoods behind them so dramatically that they feel, from the street, like apparitions, pictures hanging in the air.
Perhaps the grain elevators are more properly thought of as machines than as buildings. Inside there are retractable chutes that can siphon grain from ships and then pour it into others. In patent drawings describing their workings, they look like insects, packed with folding limbs and tubes, and interconnected chambers.
In A Concrete Atlantis, Reyner Banham compares the inside of the Great Northern grain elevator to “the abandoned cathedral of some sect of iron men." These structures, mostly abandoned, have a gorgeous ruined feeling. Yet they survive intact and rule the city, presiding over its rivers. Can they be left in place, just as they are, for centuries more?