Buffalo Central Terminal: An Art Deco Palace That Missed Its Moment

On the east side of Buffalo stands a seventeen-story Art Deco tower attached to an enormous vaulted concourse, and its story is one of the most perfectly tragic in American architecture. Buffalo Central Terminal opened on June twenty-second, nineteen twenty-nine, with a luncheon for twenty-two hundred guests hosted by the Chamber of Commerce. The New York Central Railroad designed it to handle more than two hundred trains and ten thousand passengers every single day.

Four months later, the stock market crashed.

The terminal was the work of architects Fellheimer and Wagner, who built it as a prototype, a test of ideas they would later refine for Cincinnati's union station. Every detail of the Art Deco style is present here: setback massing, Indigenous American decorative motifs, soaring vertical lines, and a concourse large enough to swallow several city blocks. Along with Buffalo's City Hall, built two years later, it is considered one of the two definitive Art Deco landmarks in western New York.

But the Depression gutted passenger revenue by sixty percent within four years of opening. The automobile came next, then the airplane, then the Interstate highway. By nineteen fifty-five, the terminal was down to ninety-nine daily trains. Amtrak took over service in the seventies and finally abandoned the building entirely on October twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-nine, after fifty years of use.

The terminal sat empty for decades. Pigeons nested in the concourse. Rain came through the roof. Efforts to redevelop the site repeatedly collapsed. A nonprofit acquired it in nineteen ninety-seven. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-four, and a serious new development effort launched in twenty twenty-four. The building has survived longer abandoned than it ever ran trains. Buffalo has not given up on it.