Future redevelopment in the Hydraulics neighborhood was given a lift when a Multiple Property Documentation Form (MPDF) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, helping property owners to designate buildings in the neighborhood as historic. Owners of listed buildings are eligible for Historic Preservation Rehabilitation Tax Credits. Jennifer Walkowski, an Architectural Historian with Clinton Brown Company Architecture, prepared the MPDF document (see background here). Below are excerpts from the MPDF documenting the history of the area.
While the boundaries of the neighborhood are now indistinct due to later adjacent growth and development, the Hydraulics area today is bounded by East Eagle Street to the north, Fillmore Avenue and Smith Street to the East, the I-190 Niagara branch of the New York State Thruway to the South and Hamburg and Spring Streets to the West. The East Eagle Street and Fillmore Avenue/Smith Street boundaries reflect the historic boundaries of the Village of Buffalo at the time of the establishment of the neighborhood in 1827.
The Hydraulics neighborhood is significant as one of Buffalo's earliest, distinct neighborhoods, and Buffalo's first manufacturing district. Founded in the 1820s when Buffalo was still a humble village of fewer than 3,000 residents, the Hydraulics area became an important self-contained neighborhood which contained a mix of industrial, commercial and residential architecture. Within just a few decades of its founding, residents could live within walking distance of their local grocery, post office, schools, churches and their places of employment. The type of manufacturing and industrial growth which Buffalo is generally associated with originated in the Hydraulics neighborhood, and started the city on the path towards its role as one of the nation's most prosperous and thriving cities at the turn of the twentieth-century. At the zenith of its success during this age, the Hydraulics neighborhood, which contained one of the nation's largest and most successful industrial endeavors, the Larkin Company, was a microcosm of the prominence of the City of Buffalo as a whole. The neighborhood is also sometimes referred to as the Larkin District due to the neighborhood's association with its most prominent industrial giant.
Origins of the Hydraulics Neighborhood (1790s-1820s)
This area of Buffalo has a long history as a region which harnessed water power for industrial development. As early as the late-eighteenth century, Captain William Johnston erected a sawmill on the Little Buffalo Creek. Long since gone underground, the Little Buffalo Creek originated in a marshy pond near William Street east of Babcock Street, crossed Seneca Street at Hydraulic, and turned westward below Exchange Street, entering the Big Buffalo Creek near the terminus of Main Street. While generally a calm stream, where the waterway ran near the present Seneca Street the creek flowed more swiftly through a deep gorge, and this would have been a likely location for Johnston's mill, the exact location of which is unknown. When Holland Land Company officials arrived in the region in 1798 to begin laying out the village of Buffalo, they found Johnston's mill in operation and a small settlement with a few cabins and a store operated by the trader Cornelius Winney on the Little Buffalo Creek's north shore. This humble settlement was the first in what would become the Hydraulics neighborhood.
The Hydraulics neighborhood traces its moniker to 1827 when the Buffalo Hydraulic Association, a private endeavor, was incorporated with a capital of $25,000 with the option of increasing it to $50,000. The corporation was formed for the purpose of creating waterpower for a manufacturing district in the village of Buffalo, attempting to capitalize on the village's newfound industrial potential. Where the Erie Canal had been established as an easy, fast and inexpensive shipping route between the East Coast and the Great Lakes region, the Hydraulic Canal was designed primarily to serve as a source of power to drive the machinery of the industrial development of the area.
The Buffalo Hydraulic Association began their canal project by erecting a dam on the Big Buffalo Creek, diverting some of its water through a canal to Johnston's ravine. At the time of its construction, this canal (with the exception of its final terminus) was located wholly within the Buffalo Creek Indian Reservation, and permission for a fifty-foot right-of-way was obtained from the Ogden Land Company associates who owned the rights to the reservation land at the time. Excavation of the canal began in 1826 and was completed in 1828.
Rise of the Hydraulics Neighborhood (1830s-1840s)
By 1832 when Buffalo was incorporated as a city, the Hydraulics, as the neighborhood was known, had flourished to become a community of approximately 500 people. Industry based around the Hydraulic Canal also thrived and the area boasted "a saw mill, grist mill, pail factory, woolen mill, shoe last factory, hat body factory, and brewery." Given the thriving industrial and residential component in the Hydraulics neighborhood, support industries also boomed. Businesses like a grocer, drygoods store, meat markets, blacksmith shops, shoemakers and other commercial enterprises grew during this period, supporting the needs of the mill workers. At the time, the neighborhood was a pointed projection at the eastern edge of the City of Buffalo, formed from East Eagle Street at the north and the Buffalo Creek Indian Reservation to the west.
As the area flourished, the Buffalo Hydraulic Association oversaw the growth and organization of the Hydraulics area. By 1836, accounts indicate three saw mills, a woolen factory, a pail factory, a factory for turning bed posts, a grist mill, a brewery, and a tannery were in operation at the Hydraulics, and a village of 500 inhabitants grew up around them.
During this era, Buffalo constructed several canals in the city, many linking Lake Erie, the Erie Canal and the Big Buffalo Creek into a network of waterways. In the early 1800s, canals were seen as the most modern transportation technology available. Roads in the period were often crude, unreliable, rough dirt paths which could easily turn to mud in the rain and snow of the northeast through much of the year, causing wagon traffic to slow to a crawl and costing valuable time and money. Canals provided a better alternative for reliably, inexpensively and quickly transporting bulk goods between vast distances. The first and most prominent of Buffalo's canals was the famous Erie Canal, which served as a primary artery for quickly, cheaply and reliably transporting goods, raw materials and people between the East Coast and the developing Great Lakes region. Following the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the Hydraulic Canal in 1828, in the 1830s Buffalo began exploring the idea of linking these two waterways together. In 1833 initial cost estimates to connect the Erie Canal terminus at Main Street to the Hydraulic Canal was put at over $8,000, and by 1835 the city had taken control of the necessary land for the new canal project. After legal issues arose, including the claims by the City Attorney that the City of Buffalo did not have the right to excavate the new canal, the state assumed control of the project around 1840. Finally in the spring of 1852 the Main and Hamburg Canal was opened to navigation. This waterway, which connected directly to the Hydraulic Canal via the Mill Race, provided a solid, navigable course between the industrial areas to the east and the unlimited shipping potential which the Erie Canal at the western end represented.
End of the Canal Era in the Hydraulics Neighborhood (1840s-1880s)
Despite the prosperity which the Hydraulic Canal brought, the canal era lasted only a few decades in the Hydraulics neighborhood. The completion of the Buffalo & Aurora Plank Road in 1849 served to connect the city to its neighboring towns and villages, acting as a turnpike connecting the city line (then the eastern boundary of the Hydraulics at what is today Smith Street) to the village of East Aurora. This new road acted as an improved conduit for the farming traffic entering the city from the southern tier of Erie County, and challenged the canal as a source of local transportation. Serious design flaws in the canal, coupled with the rise of new transportation technologies such as the railroad, spelled the demise of the Hydraulic Canal in the mid-nineteenth century.
Despite the founding of a woolen mill by James Durick of Heacock and Durick in the 1840s, Buffalo's textile and mill industry never was able to reach the level of several New England towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts. Buffalo's mills dwindled in the face of competition from other local towns, including the Hydraulic Canals built in Lockport and Niagara Falls and were further crippled during the nation's devastating economic recession from 1837 to 1842.
Perhaps the most devastating blow to the Hydraulic Canal was its infamous link to disease and pestilence. No longer thought of as the height of modern transportation technology following the growth of the railroad industry, the canals were frequently seen as breeding grounds of illness and disease in the city such as the cholera epidemic.
The enthusiasm for the entire canal system in Buffalo rapidly waned towards the end of the nineteenth century. The dirty, stagnating water of many of the poorly-designed canals led many of Buffalo's canals to be closed and infilled. The large Main and Hamburg Canal was itself deemed a public nuisance in 1855, facing similar stagnation issues as the adjoining Hydraulic Canal. In the 1870s, various plans for the abatement of the Hydraulic Canal included building ditches, connecting the canal into the Buffalo River and other ideas were considered. By 1883 the Hydraulic Canal and its ponds were filled in and incorporated into the subterranean sewer systems. North Canal and South Canal Streets, which had flanked the canal path just north of Seneca Street became reincorporated into the neighborhood as Seymour Street, whose oddly angled layout is today one of the few reminders of Buffalo's second canal. Much of the right of way became integrated into the growing railroad network in the area. The Hydraulic Canal had disappeared from the Buffalo urban landscape.
As the Hydraulic Canal faded from memory, the rise of the railroads began to dominate the development of the Hydraulics neighborhood. This new transportation system played a significant role in shaping the industrial and commercial growth of the Hydraulics neighborhood in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
Next: The Larkin Company
Love reading about our history, thanks for the article and photos.