The Rise and the Reckoning

There is a shape to Buffalo's history that you can trace without too much difficulty. The city was founded at the western end of a canal. The canal made it the transfer point between the Great Lakes system and the Hudson River, between the interior of a continent and the ocean. Everything that the interior produced had to move through here. Grain, lumber, iron ore. The canal made Buffalo rich.

The grain elevator changed the economics of grain handling so completely that Buffalo became the dominant port for the entire Great Lakes basin. Other industrial processes followed the grain. Steel came in the early nineteen hundreds, steel that employed twenty thousand workers in one plant alone. By nineteen fifty, Buffalo's population was approaching six hundred thousand. The city was the fifteenth-largest in the United States.

Then the shape changed.

The Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in nineteen fifty-nine, allowing ocean-going vessels to reach the Great Lakes directly. Ships from Buffalo were no longer the necessary intermediary. The canal trade that had built the city became less relevant. At nearly the same moment, the interstate highway system began routing traffic and commerce around industrial cities rather than through them. Buffalo's geographic advantage, being at the intersection of lake and canal, began to work against it. The city was positioned for a system of commerce that was being dismantled.

The steel mills closed through the nineteen seventies and eighties. The grain trade diminished. Jobs left. People left. The population fell below three hundred thousand by two thousand.

What remains is a city that has been reckoning with those decades since. The waterfront, where the grain elevators still stand, has been converted to parks and events spaces. The canal district has been re-watered and is an active destination. Neighborhoods that emptied have been filling again, drawing artists and immigrants and people priced out of larger cities. The architecture is extraordinary, built for a city that believed it had a great future, which it does, though a different one than the builders imagined.

Buffalo has always rebuilt. It rebuilt after the burning of eighteen thirteen. It rebuilt after the canal trade ended. That capacity is, at this point, a documented fact about the place.