The name of this collection isn't a compliment we paid ourselves. The All-America City Award has been given out by the National Civic League since 1949 to communities that fix their own problems together. Greater Buffalo won it in 1996. The Buffalo-Niagara region won it again in 2002.
Twice. And not for a skyline, but for the people spread across every town that shares the area code.
So we drew them. Every design in the ALL America City collection is one real, standing, drive-past-it-on-Tuesday place. Here's the whole map, town by town, with what's actually behind each one.
Buffalo
City Hall
Thirty-two stories of Art Deco at Niagara Square, finished in 1932 for just under $6.9 million, one of the largest municipal buildings in the country, built right as the Depression arrived. Its 1,520 windows all open inward, deliberately, so nobody ever has to wash them from the outside, and the tower was designed to cool itself by pulling Lake Erie wind straight through. The 28th-floor observation deck is still free.
Central Terminal
Opened June 1929 with a fifteen-story tower and a concourse 225 feet long and nearly 59 feet tall, built to move 3,200 passengers an hour. It never came close to those numbers; the last train pulled out at 4:10 in the morning on October 28, 1979. The bison in the concourse has had three lives: a real taxidermied animal, then a plaster cast destroyed during the abandoned years, and today a fiberglass replacement donated in 2011.
Silo City
The densest collection of concrete grain elevators anywhere on earth, on fourteen acres of the Buffalo River. It exists because Joseph Dart and engineer Robert Dunbar opened the world's first steam-powered grain elevator here in June 1843. By 1887 the city had 43 of them moving four million bushels a day. Rick Smith bought the site in 2006 and opened it to the public in 2012; it now hosts concerts, tours and poetry readings among the silos.
The Guaranty
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's 1896 skyscraper on Pearl Street, thirteen stories of steel wrapped in terra cotta so ornate it reads as woven. It's the built argument for "form follows function," and a National Historic Landmark since 1975. The man who commissioned it, Hascal Taylor, died during construction and never saw it finished, which is why it doesn't carry his name.
Lockport
Flight of Five
Five stone chambers climbing sixty feet up the Niagara Escarpment, engineered by Nathan Roberts and completed in June 1825. It was actually built as a double flight, ten chambers, so up-bound and down-bound boats never had to wait on each other. Three of the surviving five are restored and watered today, and volunteer lock tenders still work them by hand.
Upside-Down Bridge
A single-track railroad bridge whose trusswork sits below the deck instead of above it, so it looks like somebody flipped a normal bridge over. The practical reason is headroom: it has one of the highest clearances on the canal. The local legend is that the railroad built it that way to spite the canal boats, which is a much better story and almost certainly not true.
Big Bridge
The 1932 state marker puts it plainly: one of the widest bridges in the world, 399 feet in width, 129 feet in length, built 1914. It carries Main Street, Saxton Street, Cottage Street and two parking lots at once, at a hard angle, which is why most people driving over it have no idea they're on a bridge at all.
Palace Theatre
Opened July 18, 1925, designed by Leon Lempert & Son, with murals for Literature, Music and Tragedy and a gold dome set with 150 lights. Its president said on opening night that it was "built not for the aristocracy, but for all the people." Saved from demolition in 1972, community-owned since 2003, and still running.
North Tonawanda
Riviera Theatre
An Italian Renaissance movie palace from 1926 with a Mighty Wurlitzer Model 235 installed that November, one of only two original Wurlitzer demonstrator organs in existence. During a 1928 redecoration, painters covered the organ console with the murals locals have called the "Naked Ladies" ever since. The 1974 chandelier is ten feet across and set with 15,000 crystals.
Herschell Carrousel Factory
One of the last carousel factory complexes still standing in the United States. Allan Herschell, a Scottish immigrant, came out of retirement in 1915 to start the company that carried his name; the operation and its predecessors turned out more than 3,000 hand-carved wooden carousels and shipped them to Mexico, South Africa and India. You can still ride a working 1916 machine, and the museum holds the only functioning Wurlitzer perforator left anywhere.
Gateway Harbor
The western terminus of the Erie Canal, roughly a thousand feet of dockage shared between two cities in two different counties that run it as one park. It's the home of Canal Fest of the Tonawandas, eight days across about two square miles of waterfront, the largest festival of its kind on the canal.
Williamsville
Water Mill
The Williamsville Water Mill Complex on East Spring Street went on the National Register in 1983 as a rare surviving water-powered seat of local industry in Western New York. It milled until 1903, made cider after 1908, and since 2014 has been an ice cream shop, which is about as good an afterlife as a mill can get.
Glen Falls
A roughly thirty-foot drop on Ellicott Creek where the Onondaga Escarpment cuts through, now the eastern edge of ten-acre Glen Park. This is the falls that made the town: Jonas Williams ran mills on both banks, and the settlement was called Williams Mills before anybody called it Williamsville.
The Mill Village
The village that grew up where the Buffalo to Batavia road crossed Ellicott Creek, incorporated in 1850. During the War of 1812 it held a field hospital and log barracks treating American soldiers and British prisoners alike, and General Winfield Scott headquartered here in the spring of 1813 with five to six thousand troops in town.
East Aurora
Roycroft Campus
Elbert Hubbard founded Roycroft in 1895 as an Arts and Crafts community of printers, binders, furniture makers and metalsmiths; by 1910 nearly 500 people were part of it. Fourteen original buildings survive, and it's been a National Historic Landmark since 1986. Hubbard and his wife Alice, a prominent suffragist, died together when the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915.
Aurora Theatre
Opened June 2, 1925 with Gloria Swanson on the screen and seating for over 650. The men who built it included Irving Price, who would go on to co-found Fisher-Price, and Elbert Hubbard II, son of the Roycroft founder. Two of this town's other landmarks are literally in the theatre's founding paperwork.
Millard Fillmore House
A modest 1826 clapboard house where the future thirteenth president lived until 1830, and where his son was born. It's been moved twice: pushed back on its lot in 1915 for a theater, then relocated entirely in 1930 by Margaret and Irving Price. Same Irving Price. A National Historic Landmark since 1974.
Orchard Park
Eternal Flame Falls
A grotto behind a small waterfall in the Shale Creek Preserve vents natural gas that stays lit most of the year, and goes out often enough that hikers carry lighters. A 2013 study traced the gas to shale about 1,300 feet down and found it shouldn't be forming at those temperatures at all, which means something is happening under Western New York that nobody had accounted for.
Chestnut Ridge Park
Acquired by Erie County in 1926 and still the largest park in the system at 1,213 acres, largely rebuilt by the WPA in the 1930s. From the top of the sledding hill you can see the stadium and the city, and Niagara Falls on a clear day. The toboggan chutes run all winter.
Friends Meeting House
The oldest house of worship in Erie County: built starting in 1820, occupied in September 1821, framed with hand-hewn beams pegged with wood. The Quakers who built it also started the area's first lending library in February 1823, and the building saw activity in both the Underground Railroad and the women's suffrage movement. Still an active congregation.
Hamburg
Erie County Fairgrounds
The fair traces back to 1820 on the Buffalo waterfront and moved to Hamburg in 1868 when Luther Titus offered up the driving park. It's now the fourth-largest county fair in North America, on 275 acres, with a record 1,238,456 people through the gates in 2019, and it's been cancelled only twice since 1841, for the war in 1943 and the pandemic in 2020.
Main Street
Two blocks with 62 contributing buildings on the National Register since 2012, spanning roughly 1870 to 1967: the Bank of Hamburgh from 1907, the Walters Building from 1917, People's Bank from 1926. The village incorporated in 1874 and took its name from Hamburg, Germany.
Eighteen Mile Creek
Named for its distance south of the Niagara River, not its length. The Seneca called it Koughquaugu. It cuts a sixty-foot gorge through shale packed with Devonian fossils, corals and trilobites included, and runs one of the region's serious steelhead fisheries from October into May.
Lackawanna
Our Lady of Victory Basilica
Father Nelson Baker started building in 1921 and said the first Mass on Christmas 1925: $3.2 million of white Georgia marble and more than forty kinds of Italian marble, finished completely debt-free. Two months after its consecration, Pope Pius XI elevated it to a Minor Basilica, an extraordinarily fast turn. Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 angels are worked into the interior.
Bethlehem Steel Plant
Lackawanna Steel came to the lakeshore in 1900 and blew its first steel in 1903; Bethlehem took it over in 1922. By the 1940s it employed more than 20,000 people and was the largest steel plant in the world. Steelmaking ended October 15, 1982, and more than 6,000 people lost their jobs on the last day.
Steel Winds
Fourteen turbines, 35 megawatts, standing on thirty acres of the old Bethlehem brownfield. Eight went online in 2007, six more in 2012. It's one of the largest urban wind farms in the world, and it's built on slag heaps. The site came through a Superfund cleanup in 2006 and reused the mill's own infrastructure to keep costs down.
Wear your town
Every design above is available on a tee, printed when you order it rather than sitting in a warehouse. If your town isn't here yet, it probably will be. The map keeps getting bigger.
Shop the ALL America City collection →
Or if you'd rather represent the whole region at once, that's what ALL Together is for.