Toronto writer Michael Cook and Montreal photographer Andrew Emond have created a unique publication that examines the assemblage of grain elevators in Buffalo’s First Ward, an area long known colloquially as Elevator Alley. Cook and Emond spent five years researching, exploring and photographing these enduring industrial structures, some of which are now over a century old and in dire need of repair. Elevator Alley pushes beyond their concrete forms, to reveal the elevators’ place in Buffalo today and in the city’s future. The urban explorers’ photo documentation and critical analysis of the Childs Street grain elevators tackles the history, present and future of the giant structures that played a central role in Buffalo’s industrial development and subsequent decline.
Says Cook, “We had a strong desire to present Buffalo’s elevators as more than just ruins or monuments to the past. The most fascinating aspect of these buildings isn’t their history, but their presence in an urban and social landscape that remains productive despite the economic reversals the city has experienced.”
Based in part on interviews with former workers and repeated visits to the buildings themselves, Elevator Alley offers a look inside both the elevators’ physical workings and their influence on the surrounding communities.
Emond notes, “I wanted to expose, not only the beauty of their mechanical details of the elevators, but also some of the objects and spaces that are reminders of the work that once occured inside of them.”
In its vision of Buffalo’s grain infrastructure as a working landscape, the book offers an alternative both to calls for the elevators’ demolition and to reuse proposals that often radically reimagine the buildings’ function and place in the city. As the recent rehabilitation and sale of the Lake & Rail Elevator suggests, the most viable proposal for the elevators may simply be to keep them available as functional components in the trade and storage of grain.
As Cook says, “It’s easy to see these buildings as dilapidated ruins, but there is still a lot of value and opportunity in this part of Buffalo’s landscape. Hopefully the book can reveal the relevance of the elevators to the city today, and help secure the continuation of their story as a unique part of Buffalo’s identity.”
Elevator Alley. Words by Michael Cook, Photographs by Andrew Emond. Published by Furnace Press, November, 2010. Trade Paperback, 8 x 7.5″, 60 Pages, color photos. ISBN 978-0-9772742-2 – $20.00
ORDER HERE
About the Author and Photographer
Michael Cook uses words and photographs to explore the presence and possibilities of infrastructure in urban landscapes. He maintains a website at http://www.vanishingpoint.ca.
Andrew Emond has specialized in photographing overlooked landscapes, from asbestos mines to shuttered storefronts to the Montreal sewer system. His work can be found online at http://www.andrewemond.com.