WE ALL KNOW THAT CHICAGO was once the “City of the big shoulders,” as immortalized by Carl Sandburg. It was also the city whose citizens the architect Daniel Burnham supposedly challenged to “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Though times have changed, Chicago and its satellite burgs across the Indiana border still conjure up apocalyptic images of raw industrial power. So, too, does Pittsburgh, which someone once described as “Hell with the lid off.” And so does Cleveland, which the writer John G’fcnther said reminded him of the “inside of a dynamo.” He meant it as an unflattering remark, but places like Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh really were our dynamos when America was abuilding. And there was another among them, which, though never as much in the limelight, has an industrial heritage every bit as grand and deserving of its rightful place in the sun, a place that has managed to keep more of the monumental relics of that heritage intact than any of its more famous cousins—Buffalo.
For years my vision of Buffalo was of a city in the night seen from a train window. From that point of view it was a quagmire, where all the trains seemed to founder in a tangle of switches and tracks that led away in every direction, twisting and complaining as they threaded between factories and warehouses. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but an unrelenting industrial landscape. One enormous, mysterious shape after another would loom up outside the window and disappear again into the night. Some I easily recognized as grain elevators, blast furnaces, and refineries of one sort or another. Others, some quite ominous-looking, passed by without so much as a clue to their purpose. The view was constantly interrupted by the unbroken brick walls of factories close by the tracks. Then there were the bridges, staunch steel trusses mostly, built to carry the heaviest freight trains. There was also feral forgotten land filled with the debris of industry, a never-ending trail of obsolescence.
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