horizontal conveyor-belts, continued

Caption for Figure 6: “Detail of concrete bin bottom and conveyor.”

The Standard Elevator, Buffalo, New York. Located in the building’s basement, the hopper conducts grain from the bin above it onto a horizontal conveyor-belt. Note the long corridor-like crawl-space at the lower right.

Photographed by Jet Low, 1990.
Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Engineering Record.

Built in 1928 and extended in 1942, the Standard Elevator can store a total of five million bushels in a structure that is completely made out of reinforced-concrete. The elevator remained in operation until just a few years ago. It would transship grain from lake vessels to rail cars destined for a nearby flourmill that was owned by Pillsbury and later by Archer-Midland Daniels.

horizontal conveyor-belts

Caption for Figure 5: "Close-up view of tripper."

At the Standard Elevator, Buffalo, New York. Located on the bin floor, the tripper (sometimes called a trimmer) sweeps grain from the horizontal conveyor-belt into the top of a grain bin through a chute. Note the great length of that conveyor-belt. Each of those small circles along the left-hand side is the capped opening to a towering grain silo made of reinforced concrete.

Photographed by Jet Low, 1990.
Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,
Historic American Engineering Record.

From pages 198-199 of American Colossus:

Prior to 1868, when the pioneering Niagara Elevator was built, some grain elevators in Buffalo had horizontal conveyor-belts installed in their “basements,” that is, below their grain bins. Such conveyors brought grain dumped down on them to a boot, from which a lofting leg elevated the grain to the top of structure. It wasn’t strictly necessary to have such a conveyor – the spouts and chutes could simply send their grain directly from the bottoms of the bins to the boot – but this might involve a great tangle of spouts and chutes, if not the need for a second (or third!) lofting leg to accommodate them all.

At the Niagara Elevator, which was designed by George H. Johnston, horizontal conveyor-belts were installed both above and below the grain bins. The walls and foundations of the building were able to accommodate all that weight – the combined weight of the grain bins themselves, their contents, and two floors’ worth of machines – because they were laid down upon newly driven piles, more than a thousand of them, which secured a solid place for the Niagara on the otherwise weak, marshy banks of the Buffalo River. Like the Bennett Elevator before it, the Niagara had a solid masonry foundation and ironclad wooden walls and grain cribs. But unlike the Bennett, it could store 800,000 bushels, not 600,000.

The key feature of the steam-powered conveyor belt that ran alongside the tops of the grain bins was the “trimmer” or “tripper,” a device that deflected the flow of grain off the belt, and down and into a particular grain bin. (See figure 5.) The ingenuity, that is, the usefulness, of the trimmer lay in the fact that it could be unlocked, moved up or down the line, and then locked into position above a different grain bin. This meant that the number of big turn-heads and spouts previously needed to conduct the grain down from the garner and scales in the marine tower to the tops of the bins could now be drastically reduced; the whole procedure could be simplified. Same thing for the basement of the elevator, even though the trimmer didn’t play a part down there: thanks to the steam-powered conveyor belt, the number of spouts and chutes leading down from the bins to the boot of the lofting leg could be reduced. The cramped space of such basements could now be “freed up.” But “freed up” spaces came with a cost: conveyor belts exposed more grain to the air, and thus created more fugitive grain dust than did the spouts, unwieldy though they were.

As a result of the lateral “reach” of the new conveyor-belts, elevator operators and designers began to re-conceptualize the way that grain bins might be organized. Instead of locating the bins close to or even around the spouts that came down from the marine tower – which was a spatial practice that tended to make and keep the elevators’ main houses tall and boxy (sometimes even round) – the designers began to array the bins in long straight rows that led away from the marine tower. This meant that large-scale elevators no longer needed to be centralized like the Watson or oriented along conflicting lines, as in the case of the Bennett Elevator (one line ran from the marine tower at the Evans Slip side of the elevator to the other end of the building, i.e., along the Buffalo River, while another line ran from the boiler room and the primary marine tower to the Buffalo River). New elevators could now be built in a long, narrow and tall row, perpendicularly to the river, which not only “freed up” space along the wharf, but also created space for the railroads to lay down little feeders that led to their trunk lines. These new elevators could not only transship grain from lake to canal, but from lake to rail, as well.

The City Ship Canal, continued

Caption to Figure 4.

Along the City Ship Canal. From the left: the Dakota Elevator; the new structure, made of reinforced concrete, that replaced the old Frontier Elevator; the Washburn-Crosby's unique cylindrically shaped marine tower; the complex's workhouse; a marine tower in the more conventional style (rectangularly shaped); and a flour mill, later operated by General Mills.

Photographed by Marjory Collins, 1943.
Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,
Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information.

From pages 305-307 of American Colossus:

Given all these changes [at the Washburn-Crosby complex], it is understandable that Mendelsohn might have overlooked a single, spectacular “detail”: the windowless cylindrical form, evidently made out of reinforced concrete, that stood on its own, directly in front of the reinforced concrete bins that were constructed in 1912, and that was almost as tall as the colossal workhouse built in 1909. If Mendelsohn saw that cylinder or, rather, if an adherent to the form-follows-function credo saw it, he/she/they might reasonably think that it was just another grain silo. After all, grain silos are cylindrical because the cylinder is the best form for containing grain, which is a grain silo’s function; this thing is cylindrical, just like the grain silos right behind it; therefore this thing must also be a grain silo. But the informed observer can discern that this cylinder is in fact the only cylindrical marine tower ever built in Buffalo. It is full of the machinery that elevates the grain, but no grain is stored inside it.

“Whoever did that leg,” Banham writes, “the conceptual leap is striking; and the idea that the concrete cylinder might simply be a constructional device that could be used to support or contain matters other than grain was to be widely exploited.” It was in fact exploited to the maximum at the Annex to the Electric Elevator, built in Buffalo in 1942, that is, at the very end of the line begun by Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar in 1843. “All this, of course, has a curious effect on one of the persistent themes of the present study – the common notions of ‘functionalism,’ ” Banham writes. “It is no longer so immediately clear to the passerby what the various parts of the structure mean […] since a cylinder might be a bin or a leg, might contain grain, machinery or men. […] At Washburn-Crosby and its progeny, engineers […] were making nonsense of that treasured concept.”

But this just scratches the surface. A visitor to the site in question and yet completely ignorant of what he saw there, Erich Mendelsohn had spoken of the Washburn-Crosby in the most condescending terms: “Childhood forms, clumsy, full of primeval power, dedicated to purely practical needs. Primitive in their functions of ingesting and spewing out again. Surprised by the coinciding needs, to some extent a preliminary stage in a future world that is just beginning to achieve order.” What could he have possibly said if someone had told him that the cylindrical marine tower at the Washburn-Crosby was in fact an instance of form following aesthetics, not function? How could he admit that he had failed to recognize a deliberate, sophisticated and witty attempt to make a pun on visual resemblances?

The City Ship Canal

Caption for Figure 3.

“The Canal Harbor, Buffalo, New York.” The entrance to the City Ship Canal, circa 1920. From the left: part of the Great Eastern; all of the Dakota; a wooden marine tower (part of the old Frontier Elevator) that would soon after be demolished and replaced; part of Washburn-Crosby’s unique cylindrically shaped marine tower; and (behind the raised bridge) the Great Northern.

Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company.

First excavated in 1850, the Blackwell Ship Canal, later known as the City Ship Canal, cuts into the strip of land that separates Lake Erie from the mouth of the Buffalo River. Grain elevators have stood along its banks ever since the 1860s.

Made of steel in 1901, the Great Eastern was demolished in 1948. Also made of steel in 1901, the Dakota was demolished in 1966. Photographs of the Frontier Elevator (demolished in 1923) are hard to come by, but I will try to locate one and post it here. A clearer view of the Washburn-Crosby's unique marine tower can be had in Figure 4.

The Connecting Terminal

Caption for Figure 2, which depicts the old Conntecting Terminal Elevator (made out of iron and wood in 1882, not the one made out of reinforced concrete and built to replace the first one in 1914).

“An Old Timer at C.T.T. elevator, Buffalo, NY.” Unloading grain at the Connecting Terminal Elevator, designed and built by Robert Dunbar. The elevator leg that has been lowered down into the storage compartment of the “old time” steam-powered, wood-hulled vessel owned by the Lackawanna Green Bay Line is part of the world’s first mobile marine tower. Its height can be suggested by the great height of the marine tower(s) at the neighboring structure, which is in fact the Marine Elevator (originally built 1848, burned 1879 and rebuilt in 1884). Note as well the congestion of the harbor and the various sizes of the vessels competing for access to the wharves.

Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company.

The mobile marine tower, also known as a "loose leg," was invented in 1882 by Robert Dunbar, the same engineer who had designed the Dart Elevator back in 1843. Originally powered by steam engines, loose legs became very popular after the electrification of power at the end of the 19th century. A tall building set atop wheels, the loose leg was originally a solution to the overcrowding of Buffalo's harbor. The idea was that, instead of moving the grain-bearing vessel closer to the grain-elevating "leg," the leg could be moved closer to the vessel.

The same idea had been used in the construction of the floating grain elevator, which was an elevator leg installed on a tug-boat that could be pushed or pulled into position between a ship in need of being unloaded of its cargo and a boat that was waiting to be loaded up. First used in the late 1840s, the floaters became widely used in the 1860s and 1870s in ports such as New York, Buffalo and New Orleans.

Below: both elevators as depicted in Buffalo's Waterfront, by Leary & Sholes (Arcadia, 1981), p. 28:

The Concrete-Central

Pages 334-337 of American Colossus concerning Figure 7, taken in 1919, and depicting the Concrete-Central Elevator, built in Buffalo, New York, in three stages, between 1914 and 1917. (Note: this image, reproduced here courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company, was originally intended to be the book's cover, wrapped front to back.)

What’s striking about Taut’s uncredited photo of the Concrete-Central (not reprinted in A Concrete Atlantis for some reason) isn’t so much the grain elevator itself, but the fact that the entire, thousand-foot-long complex – everything from the freestanding transfer tower on the far right to the last of the three “loose legs” on the far left – was captured by it. No “fish eye” or other specialized lenses were apparently used. The photographer had to be positioned in just the right place for such a shot to be taken. It is telling that Patricia Bazelon, who provided excellent “present condition” photographs for Reyner Banham, wasn’t able to find such a position for her photograph of the Concrete Central, in which everything except for the transfer tower is captured.

The problem of properly positioning yourself with respect to a colossal building was familiar to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Calling upon Claude-Etienne Savary’s Lettres sur l’Égypte, first published in 1785, Kant notes:

We must keep from going very near the Pyramids just as much as we keep from going too far from them, in order to get the full emotional effect from their size. For if we are too far away, the parts to be apprehended (the stones lying one over the other) are only obscurely represented, and the representation of them produces no effect upon the aesthetical judgment of the subject. But if we are very near, the eye requires some time to complete the apprehension of the tiers from the bottom up to the apex; and then the first tiers are always partly forgotten before the Imagination has taken in the last, and so the comprehension of them is never complete.

But this section of the Critique, entitled “The estimation of the magnitude of natural things requisite for the idea of the sublime,” wasn’t intended as practical advice to aspiring photographers, whom of course did not yet exist. It was in fact intended to illustrate the difference between the two different forms of human imagination: intellectual apprehension (Auffassung) and aesthetic comprehension (Zusammenfassung). Jacques Derrida writes: “The former can go to infinity, the latter has difficulty following and becomes harder and harder according as the apprehension progresses. It quickly attains its maximum: the fundamental aesthetic measure for the evaluation of magnitudes […] The mathematical evaluation of size never reaches its maximum. The aesthetic evaluation, the primary and fundamental one, does reach it; and this subjective maximum constitutes the absolute reference which arouses the feeling of the sublime.”

And so, unlike the beautiful, the sublime arouses what Kant calls the “negative pleasure” of feeling oneself overwhelmed or being “too close” to the colossal (Section I, Book II, SS 23). It calls for a step backwards. In Derrida’s words: “So one has to find a middle place, a correct distance for uniting the maximum of comprehension to the maximum of apprehension, to take sight of the maximum of what one cannot take and to imagine the maximum of what one cannot see. And when the imagination attains its maximum and experiences the feeling of its impotence, its inadequacy to present the idea of the whole, it falls back, it sinks; it founders into itself.” But this fall from the elevated heights of the sublime is not without its own pleasure: it “does not leave [the imagination] without a certain positive emotion: a certain transference gives it the wherewithal to feel pleased at this collapse which makes it come back to itself.”

Should one fear stepping back too quickly or not quickly enough, one can simply let one’s foot on the accelerator set the pace. Frank Gohlke, a photographer of grain elevators, writes,

For me, the essential grain elevator view is obtained through the windshield of a car or truck while traveling on a highway in Kansas or Oklahoma or the Texas Panhandle. It is not a static view, but one that begins just as the elevator becomes visible above the center line, above five miles out of town, and continues until it disappears in the vibration in the rearview mirror. In the minutes that pass as the speck grows to colossal size and then shrinks to rejoin the horizon, many contradictory messages are created: we are powerful, we build for centuries, our monuments rival those of other heroic ages; we are insignificant, our hold on this landscape is tenuous, nature and time erode our greatest creations as if they were dust. What lingers is the memory, though, is the image of a solitary, upright form in the middle distance of an endless plain.

Frontispiece, continued

From p. 256 of American Colossus:

If we compare the photograph that George Barker took of the entrance to Buffalo’s harbor in 1883 and the anonymous illustration that was based upon it in 1885, we see a clear slide towards darkness. In Barker’s photograph, it is daytime, and the sky is partly sunny. There is plenty of light to see the words WATSON ELEVATOR written upon the immense, cupola-topped combination grain elevator and small island of that name, and to see that a smaller elevator (the unmarked Union Transfer Tower) stands upon dry land in the foreground. There is a lot of thick, dark smoke in the air, but it is clearly coming from the various steam-ships that are in the water. But in the illustration, it is a very cloudy day: neither “blue” (clear) sky nor sun can be seen. In this darkness, all one can see of the Watson Elevator is huge blurry slab of oddly shaped darkness (the Union has become part of it) from which black smoke is billowing and mixing with or causing the equally dark clouds in the sky. One is immediately put in mind of William Blake’s “dark, satanic mills.”

Barker's photograph was not included in the book because I didn't think it would look good enough.

Note the other two grain elevators that are visible: in the center, we see the Marine Elevator, and on the right, we see the Bennett, both of which were designed by the mechanical engineer Robert Dunbar, the designer of the Dart, the world's first steam-powered grain elevator.

Built in 1848, the Marine exploded and was rebuilt around 1881. The rebuilt Marine Elevator would remain standing until the 1920s, when the grain elevator now known as the Marine "A" was built. Because it seems small in comparison with its neighbors, the Marine Elevator captured here is probably the first one, that is, the one that exploded, not the one built as a replacement. This suggests that the dating of the picture as "1883" (which is based on a notation concerning this photograph I found in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division) is mistaken, and that it was more likely taken in 1879 or 1880.

Built on the site of the "old" Dart Elevator (which was built in 1843 and exploded in 1862), the Bennett was one of the greatest elevators ever built in Buffalo. It was immense, well-built and symmetrical, and thus "appealing" to "the artistic eye." It would remain standing until 1912, when it was finally taken down.

Frontispiece

Published in Jane Meade Welch, "The City of Buffalo," Harper's Monthly, July 1885, p. 197, this illustration depicts the entrance to the harbor of Buffalo, New York, which was dominated by the Watson Elevator.

Reproduced courtesy of the Maritime History of the Great Lakes.

Illustrations

In my post dated Wednesday March 18 2009, I included one of the eight black-and-white illustrations that appear in my book, to be precise, Figure 1. There are a total of 7 of these figures, not including the frontispiece. As I mentioned at the outset, I will eventually upload all of these images, none of which are under strict copyright control. In this particular instance, the image is reproduced courtesy of the Maritime History of the Great Lakes.

Published by A. T. Andreas (Chicago) in 1884 and depicting an event from 1830 (the first shipment of grain in bulk from the Port of Chicago, undertaken by the "Osceola" of Buffalo, New York), Figure 1 was attached to my comments about the society of the spectacle because of its insistence that no one was there to witness this historic event, that Chicago's docks were virtually empty (spectacular) at the time, when in fact these docks were teeming with workers, supervisors, grain merchants, farmers, et al, and would remain so until the 1850s.