In 1842 a Buffalo merchant named Joseph Dart told people he was going to unload grain ships with a steam engine. A dealer in the trade gave him the advice everyone else was thinking:
Dart, I am sorry for you. It won't do. Remember what I say: Irishmen's backs are the cheapest elevators ever built.
Dart built it anyway. The machine at the mouth of the Buffalo River is why this city has a skyline made of concrete cylinders, and why a stretch of that riverbank is now called Silo City.
The invention was a bucket on a belt
Dart was a Connecticut-born businessman in his forties. His engineer was Robert Dunbar, a Scot out of Black Rock who wasn't yet thirty. Their idea was borrowed from flour mills and pointed at ships: a continuous belt of buckets, steam-driven, lowered on a swinging arm (the marine leg) straight down into a schooner's hold.
Construction started at the end of the 1842 shipping season and finished the following spring. The first vessel was unloaded on June 12, 1843, the schooner Philadelphia.
The numbers settled the argument fast. A gang of men with shovels and baskets could move at most 2,000 bushels in a day. Dart's elevator did 1,000 bushels an hour, and cleared over 229,000 bushels in its first year. A ship could now arrive, unload, and leave the same day.
Within fifteen years there were ten elevators around the harbor holding more than a million and a half bushels between them. By the end of the Civil War, Buffalo was the largest grain port in the world. Not everyone was charmed. Anthony Trollope, visiting in 1861, called the elevators "as ugly a monster as has yet been produced," with "great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws."
Elevator Alley
Wood gave way to steel, steel gave way to slip-formed reinforced concrete, and the Buffalo River filled up with the results. The stretch became known as Elevator Alley, and what stands there today is one of the largest surviving concentrations of concrete grain elevators anywhere.
The Silo City parcel holds several of them. The American Elevator complex dates to 1905-06 with a 1931 annex; the Perot Elevator and Malthouse is next door, connected since 1922 by an overhead conveyor; Marine A and the Lake & Rail elevator stand nearby, the latter running until 2017. Sources disagree about which structures are formally "in" Silo City and how big the site is. You will see everything from fourteen acres to twenty-seven, depending on which parcels are counted. Treat any single number you read with mild suspicion, including that one.
The American Grain Complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
June 2001
The grain kept moving for a century and a half, and then it didn't. The St. Lawrence Seaway had already let ships bypass Buffalo entirely, and the mills went one by one.
ConAgra closed the elevator and mill in June 2001. That was the end of commercial grain handling at the site. Several million cubic feet of storage, some of the most consequential industrial architecture in the country, and nothing to put in it.
What happens there now
Rick Smith bought the property in 2006, which is the hinge the entire modern story turns on. He did not flatten it, and he did not seal it off. He opened it.
Today there are guided tours through the elevators. There are concerts in bins that turn out to have astonishing reverb, poetry readings, art installations, theater, and a long run of use as a film location. Duende operates on site as a bar and music venue. City of Night filled the place with thousands of people in the dark.
The strangest and best part is the ecology. Silo City runs a native plant nursery growing wetland and water-tolerant woody species from wild-collected local seed, on a two-year-plus cycle, for habitat restoration around the region. Grain elevators built to strip a landscape are now propagating it back.
Adaptive reuse construction is underway as well: the American mill and warehouse buildings are being converted to apartments, with more phases planned. Check ahead before you visit; parts of the site are an active job.
Wear it
Our Silo City tee is the row of cylinders against the river, drawn plainly, because the buildings were never trying to be pretty and it would be dishonest to make them so.
It's part of the ALL America City collection. If you want the two other things Buffalo built in concrete and Deco at the height of its confidence, there's Central Terminal and City Hall, and the rest of the region is in the full town-by-town guide.
Every skyline is somebody's invention. This one was Dart's, and the dealer who told him it wouldn't do was wrong by about 180 years.