Buffalo Rising Online

That is an absolutly amazing picture(s) the change that has occured to this fair city over the years can never really be thought of unless you take that outward look. Thank you for that submission as it really makes you look at the city and see how much we've changed over the years (and how much more to come!)

I was thinking just the complete opposite. Its kind of pathetic how little has changed. Isn't it 60 years instead of 40 as well? 60 years and the skyline is pretty much the same. The biggest change would be that there were alot more people down there in 1948 than now. That is what is most depressing.

60 years later?

I've seen pictures of down town from the 40's and 50's too. I can’t believe how filthy all the buildings were! City Hall was nearly black. I'm glad we've cleaned up our air so much

god I hate the Rath building. Can we Dulski that mofo?

Like I said our skyline had not changed in over 30 years......it actually looked better in 1948.

Ground hogs day!

Go Bills!

I can't see too many people in that picture so I am going to focus on what is shown. It is really amazing how clearer the sky is. Look at the smog in the first image. One of the major reasons that people give for leaving the city initially (when trying to be PC) was pollution. And there is truth there that industrial cities are dirty gritty places. Something I think has been a positive change, even if it happened by default instead of intentionally.

There also does seem to be many more medium sized buildings in downtown. Probably due to the changes in building style and type. We demolished our densely packed streets of 2-5 story structures for towers in a park(ing lot). type of development. IMO that has been, in many instances a mistake because it essentially reduced the breathe of ownership and destinations in downtown.

Either way it is really a neat image. To the author, how resolution did you scan that slide in? Might be worth creating a high resolution archive of it for the historical society or someone else.

It is interesting to note the water level stains on the steel there. Looks a little low.

Andrew, I was struck by the same thing. In the BT docent training, we have a lecture about terra cotta in which we tell trainees how the glazed terra cotta buildings such as the Electric Tower tended to be self-cleaning in the rain and didn't accumulate the soot the way that many of the other buildings did. Wow - the top photo shows that so clearly.

They should swerve the camera a bit to the right and then you would see the difference. The top photo would show prosperity, the lower photo would show a dying city. As much as you hate the "filth" (especially that coming from the factories and steel mills) it meant prosperity.

Keep in mind, you cannot see several of the newer buildings. Such as Key towers, M&T Center, Hyatt, etc. Also, mid-rises in the Medical Corridor. Also, I cannot believe how dark city hall was.

I have a print in my office that i bought from poster Art several years ago titled Buffalo, Late 40s. It shows a bustling Main Street view complete with cable cars, and a nice view of the Liberty Building. It was from a time when Buffalo had people downtown. That seems to be the only change from the 1940s, people, not structures.

Beauty??? I guess it is in the eye of the beholder.

believe it or not people actually like buffalo because its NOT like NYC...i know...a hard concept to swallow

It explains why white terra cotta which could be washed was so popular.

Also, the old Bell/AT&T Building which can be seen...was fully white....today it is only partially white.

And you can see the air pollution but the water pollution from back then would be much worse...strangely...there was more fishing back then and more fish (now why is it that our water is cleaner but the fisheries are largely absent). Alot of the fish on fish fry was locally caught right in Lake Erie and if Im not mistaken so were clams that were served along Niagara Streets once well know Seafood Restaurants and Clam Bars.

Buffalo really is a beautiful city...the old gal has great bones...but she is naked to a great degree. Sorry but Lafayette Square will never be what it was with that empty space fronting that modern library and that hulking hotel that looks nearly abandoned.

The German American Insurance Building, Erie Savings Bank, original art nuveaux hotel statler and Larkin Adminstration Building are really huge architectural losses.

The Liberty Building had east and west wings celebrating the trade along the Railroads and Canals between NYC/Boston and Chicago. Today we owe a great deal of our renaissance to north and south commerce between the US and Canada. One day a brilliant architect will design two towers 2x the size of the liberty tower to celebrate that our city as an international corridor of trade and commerce. Already the rest of the nation is imploding while Buffalo is being moderated by canada and because of decades of being under built and under developed.

Heathersmiles> I spent this past week in Denver because I am transferring there for work in the very near future. I hear about all the phenomenal development that has taken place in that city, I heard from many people how progressive and contemporary the city is. As I took a tour and drove with my soon to be colleagues, I wasn't nearly as impressed as I thought I should be. Denver is nice, but it is far from the progressive museum of architectural splendor that most residents seem to believe that it is. When I told people that I was from Buffalo it was usually met with a comment about snow or how dirty the city is. This is from people who live in a city where it snows consistently through April, and has had blizzards in May and September.

As a Buffalonian who lived in Denver for several years, I gotta' say you got a pretty bad first impression of the city.

Weather: there's a longer snow season, but winters tend to be milder overall. There's often a brutal blizzard in October, and then ... no big deal. Side streets aren't plowed, because the sun melts the snow after a day or two. Denver has sun for over 300 days a year. The sun, along with temperatures, make

Architecture: Denver's not a museum of classic architecture, but remember that until the 1960s the population of the region was smaller than the Buffalo metro. Before WWII, Denver had the stature of Syracuse or Akron. I would argue that there are far more examples of outstanding modern architecture in Denver than in Buffalo. Good architecture reflects a city's period of influence and affluence. For Buffalo, it was the 1800s and early 1900s. For Denver, it's today.

Because the majority of housing in Denver that was built before WWII is brick, there's more historic integrity in the city's vernacular residential architecture than back home. Sadly, most examples of Buffalo's indigenous vernacular architecture -- worker's cottages, semi-bungalows and two-flats -- have been subject to insensitive "improvements" such as decorative Italian-style metal railings and ornamentation, Insulbrick ("ghetto brick") or vinyl siding, window openings that were awkwardly shrunk to accommodate standard-sized vinyl or aluminum windows, and so on. There's far more everyday houses in Denver that look almost exactly the same as they did when they were first built than what would be found in Buffalo.

Pop-tops, punchouts and teardowns are doing some damage today in Denver's pew-WWII neighborhoods, but it's a sign of prosperity; people are making additions to the city's small bungalows, or replacing them entirely, rather than having them rot thanks to lack of demand. The person who bought my circa-1925 Craftsman bungalow in northwest Denver did a punchout and poptop, and I'm not happy with the thought of it, but still ...

Nightlife and neighborhood vitality: sorry, but Denver's got Buffalo beat on this one. Downtown and LoDo are fairly active most days throughout the year, even on Sundays and weekday nights. There's no equivalent to Elmwood Avenue, but there are a LOT of neighborhood business districts in Denver that remind me of one of the nodes on Elmwood, such as South Gaylord or Alameda in Washington Park, 32nd in West Highlands, and Tennyson in Berkeley.

FWIW, if you get homesick in Denver, check out Luciano's Pizza and Wings. Real Buffalo-style pizza and wings, just like what you might find back home.

Andrew> I've seen pictures of down town from the 40's and 50's too. I can’t believe how filthy all the buildings were! City Hall was nearly black. I'm glad we've cleaned up our air so much

Not just that, but the smells, too. I grew up in the 1970s, and there were a lot of grimy, dirty buildings throughout the city, caked in years of soot. On Sunday drives, there were many parts of the Niagara Frontier where we'd all plug our noses from the smell. Supposedly the Southtowns never developed to the same extent of the Northtowns because of the steel mills and refineries in South Buffalo and Lackawanna. On a bad day, even Orchard Park would reek.

Perhaps that is one major reason so many buildings downtown were torn down. Besides being functionally obsolete and in need of major repair, they were so grimed up that nobody could envision what they looked like when they were new.

rubygreta> Perhaps that is one major reason so many buildings downtown were torn down. Besides being functionally obsolete and in need of major repair, they were so grimed up that nobody could envision what they looked like when they were new.

Something I wrote a few years ago, in response to a question about the trend in the 1950s and 1960s to put gawdawful modern facades on old buildings. Emphasis mine.

Facades of older structures were usually covered over for the following reasons:

* You know how in the eyes of many today, commercial architecture from the 1960s and 1960s seems tacky, ugly and dated in a not-so-good-way? Now, take that mindset, and go back in time 50 years. A building built in 1957 is literally as old to us as a structure built in 1907 was to those living in the Nifty Fifties.

* Downtown businesses of the area realized that new plazas and malls in growing suburbs were a threat, but they didn't know how to respond. There was a prevalent attitude of "newer is better" in the era, and that the detailed facades of pre-War structures weren't in keeping with a jet-age nation. To compete with the shiny new plazas and malls, property and business owners believed that updating their buildings to look newer would help downtown and neighborhood shopping districts compete.

>* The facade of that renovated building might look spectacular, but it didn't look anything like that in the 1950s and 1960s, before it was covered up. Grime and soot permeated brick, mortar, terra cotta, and other architectural details. Faded turn-of-the-century era painted signs often covered ever exposed surface. Peeling paint covered doors, window mullions and elsewhere. Thanks to the economic crisis of the Depression and material shortages of WWII, decades of deferred maintenance took their toll on older structures.

rubygreta> Perhaps that is one major reason so many buildings downtown were torn down. Besides being functionally obsolete and in need of major repair, they were so grimed up that nobody could envision what they looked like when they were new.

Something I wrote a few years ago, in response to a question about the trend in the 1950s and 1960s to put gawdawful modern facades on old buildings. Emphasis mine.

Facades of older structures were usually covered over for the following reasons:

* You know how in the eyes of many today, commercial architecture from the 1960s and 1960s seems tacky, ugly and dated in a not-so-good-way? Now, take that mindset, and go back in time 50 years. A building built in 1957 is literally as old to us as a structure built in 1907 was to those living in the Nifty Fifties.

* Downtown businesses of the area realized that new plazas and malls in growing suburbs were a threat, but they didn't know how to respond. There was a prevalent attitude of "newer is better" in the era, and that the detailed facades of pre-War structures weren't in keeping with a jet-age nation. To compete with the shiny new plazas and malls, property and business owners believed that updating their buildings to look newer would help downtown and neighborhood shopping districts compete.

>* The facade of that renovated building might look spectacular, but it didn't look anything like that in the 1950s and 1960s, before it was covered up. Grime and soot permeated brick, mortar, terra cotta, and other architectural details. Faded turn-of-the-century era painted signs often covered ever exposed surface. Peeling paint covered doors, window mullions and elsewhere. Thanks to the economic crisis of the Depression and material shortages of WWII, decades of deferred maintenance took their toll on older structures.

Back in then early 1980s, an unbroken row of late 1800s/early 1900s commercial buildings used to front Main Street where the Goldome building (or whatever it's called today) now sits. Those buildings were in really rough shape; some had their brickwork painted over in horrible colors, a few had upper floor windows bricked up or otherwise sealed, and there was years and years of grime and soot in practically every nook and cranny. Chippewa Street around the corner looked much the same; gorgeous buildings, but basically unmaintained since the 1920s. Downtown today might not have the shoppers than it did in the 1980s, but it's a few orders of magnitude cleaner and better maintained.

Buffalo is still a dirty city with trash and graffiti everywhere. Does anyone care enough to pick up after themselves?

What's with the giving one star to anyone who says anything negative about Buffalo or even positive about another city like Denver? Grow up already!

I would love to hear just ONE environmentalist admit that the we are in much better shape than where we were 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago. The teachers at my school have my 12-year-old daughter in a tizzy about things like global warming and plastic bags in landfills. I should just show her the two photos from this post.

PaulBuffalo - Yes, I give lots of credit to the EPA and environmentalists. But would you rather be where we are today or where we were 40 years ago? I remember as a kid the late 60's driving along the NJ Turnpike in Elizabeth. You had to put your headlights on and the stench was overwhelming. The Hudson River was an open sewer. NYC, LA and other cities had smog alerts all the time. Leaves were burned in the fall. Gasoline had lead. Apartment buildings burned their garbage. On and on and on.

No, those were not the good old days. We are living in a comparable paradise.

rubygreta> I would love to hear just ONE environmentalist admit that the we are in much better shape than where we were 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago.

I'm a pino bleeding-hearti liberal environmentalist, and I agree with you. In the past 30 to 40 years, there's been the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, stronger emissions controls, much greater recognition of the role of wetlands and watersheds, and even quite a bit less littering and dumping. I have problems believing statistics that the US is the world's major polluter when I see China, a nation of 1.2 billion people, and it's near lack of environmental regulations, soot and smog hovering over every city, rivers that make the Cuyahoga in 1968 look like a pure mountain book in comparison, and so on. I think it's knee-jerk anti-Americanism when folks outside of the country say we don't care about the environment, while in fact the environmental movement got its start here. Granted, we don't say the word "green" in every sentence like in the Netherlands or Sweden, but consider that automobile emissions standards is still much stronger than those of the EU; it's one reason why so many great European cars aren't available in the US market. (Our safety standards are also stricter.)

However, some things have gotten worse. As a society, we've grown much more affluent since the 1960s, and thus consume and throw away much more than in the past. Materials such as glass and paper used to be much more common for packaging; now plastic is common. (My city has plastic recycling -- anything clean with a number can go in a blue plastic shopping bag -- but such programs are very rare.) Visual pollution is increasingly a problem, especially in Southern states where cities tend to have far more permissive sign and billboard regulations than in the Northeast. (Compare a drive on the Thruway to one on I-75 through Georgia or I-80 across Missouri.) There's cell towers and high-tension power lines that increasingly intrude on the landscape. Urban sprawl increases fuel consumption and uses resources inefficiently; a section of roadway, sewer line and water line that would serve six residences in the city may serve one in Clarence. Vast expanses of paved parking, often required by zoning codes that are written to anticipate a 500-year parking event, divert and increase the natural flow of stormwater runoff, and keeps rainwater from recharging the underwater water table.

(Obligatory five-star bait: Buffalo is the most authentic, real, genuine and honest city in the country, and everything beyond the city line is plastic, sterile, corporate, and fake. Buffalo blah blah blah FULL OF WIN, Charlotte blah blah blah WHARRGARBL FAIL.)

rubygreta> I would love to hear just ONE environmentalist admit that the we are in much better shape than where we were 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago.

I'm a pinko bleeding-heart liberal environmentalist, and I agree with you. In the past 30 to 40 years, there's been the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, stronger emissions controls, much greater recognition of the role of wetlands and watersheds, and even quite a bit less littering and dumping. I have problems believing statistics that the US is the world's major polluter when I see China, a nation of 1.2 billion people, and it's near lack of environmental regulations, soot and smog hovering over every city, rivers that make the Cuyahoga in 1968 look like a pure mountain book in comparison, and so on. I think it's knee-jerk anti-Americanism when folks outside of the country say we don't care about the environment, while in fact the environmental movement got its start here. Granted, we don't say the word "green" in every sentence like in the Netherlands or Sweden, but consider that automobile emissions standards is still much stronger than those of the EU; it's one reason why so many great European cars aren't available in the US market. (Our safety standards are also stricter.)

However, some things have gotten worse. As a society, we've grown much more affluent since the 1960s, and thus consume and throw away much more than in the past. Materials such as glass and paper used to be much more common for packaging; now plastic is common. (My city has plastic recycling -- anything clean with a number can go in a blue plastic shopping bag -- but such programs are very rare.) Visual pollution is increasingly a problem, especially in Southern states where cities tend to have far more permissive sign and billboard regulations than in the Northeast. (Compare a drive on the Thruway to one on I-75 through Georgia or I-80 across Missouri.) There's cell towers and high-tension power lines that increasingly intrude on the landscape. Urban sprawl increases fuel consumption and uses resources inefficiently; a section of roadway, sewer line and water line that would serve six residences in the city may serve one in Clarence. Vast expanses of paved parking, often required by zoning codes that are written to anticipate a 500-year parking event, divert and increase the natural flow of stormwater runoff, and keeps rainwater from recharging the underwater water table.

(Obligatory five-star bait: Buffalo is the most authentic, real, genuine and honest city in the country, and everything beyond the city line is plastic, sterile, corporate, and fake. Buffalo blah blah blah FULL OF WIN, Charlotte blah blah blah WHARRGARBL FAIL.)