Lackawanna: Steel Town at the Edge of Buffalo

Lackawanna was built around a single industrial decision. In the early nineteen hundreds, the Lackawanna Steel Company chose a site on the southern shore of Lake Erie, just outside Buffalo, to build one of the largest steel plants in the world. The company relocated from Scranton, Pennsylvania, taking its Lackawanna name with it, and the city that grew around the works inherited that name.

At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the plant employed more than twenty thousand workers and produced a significant share of American steel. Polish, Italian, and African American workers settled in neighborhoods shaped entirely by the mill. When Bethlehem shuttered the plant in nineteen eighty-three, Lackawanna lost its economic reason for existing.

The population fell sharply in the decades that followed. The steel plant site has since been redeveloped into a mixed industrial park.