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Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is another relic city of the Industrial age. The empty waterfront sits devoid of its past purpose transporting goods and settlers between New York and the Great Lakes. Buffalo thrived when the Erie Canal “Marriage of the Waters” success gave Governor Clinton the long awaited chance in 1825 to pour water from his maligned Clinton’s Ditch into the Atlantic.
The United States needed a psychological boost in those early days. The Erie brandished the growing power of America by matching the canal engineering in Europe. The Erie breached the Appalachians following a relatively natural route that connected Lake Erie with the Hudson River. With the canal’s success, New York established itself over Philadelphia as the major port and largest city in the land from that time forth. Philadelphia tried to match the advantages of the Erie Canal, but was unable to find an easy path through the Appalachians to the Ohio River.
The Erie Canal decreased transportation costs to the east coast by 90 percent. Previously grain was barged down the Ohio and Mississippi River to New Orleans before it made its way to the East Coast or Europe, or the grain went overland via impossibly rutted roads over the Appalachians. Either route was long, arduous and expensive, which often resulted in spoiled, infested grain. But the terminal Erie port at Buffalo would grow to meet the demands of its new importance as the largest grain handlers in the world.
The monumental concrete grain elevators held the grains arriving from the west, and today it seems impossible that they sit idle, empty, but impressive monoliths nonetheless. These concrete elevators are the progeny of the first wood elevators, which burned, were replaced by steel and brick before the concrete sentinels.
Buffalo lost its domination of the grain trade as transportation shifted once again in the 1850s. Railroads were not limited to lakes and rivers. They could travel anywhere.
Buffalo’s population peaked in 1950 (580,000) and declined to half by 2010. The decline accelerated when the St Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 and connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic.
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