Presentation in Wichita, Kansas, 22 February 2010

From 2-3 pm on Tuesday, 23 February 2010, I will be giving a presentation at the Grain Elevator and Processing Society's 81st Technical Conference and Trade School, which will be held at the Century II Performing Arts 
and Convention Center
 in Wichita, Kansas. Entitled "The Mechanized Grain Elevator: How Did We Get Here?" my presentation will be part of a session coordinated by Kathy Reading, Vice President of Sales at the Seedburo Equipment Co., Des Plaines IL.

The mechanized grain elevators of today have their roots in American history. This session, by the author of a new book, will discuss how we got here, and why an understanding of the past may be useful to us in the future. What necessities led to the invention of the mechanized elevator? How did it work?  How did grain elevators become so important to the development of the U.S.? How did they influence grain handling in other countries? And what happened to the old American classics?

For more information, visit GEAPS Exchange 2010.

Mark Sommer reviews my book

“American Colossus: The Grain Elevator, 1843 to 1943,” is a provocative, thought-provoking and informative must-read for grain elevator aficionados.

Most Buffalonians today know these hulking structures as largely dilapidated ruins, detached from the critical role they once played in bringing prosperity to Buffalo, the city of their invention in 1843.

The book—so named by author William J. Brown for the elevators’ towering bulk and unapproachable facade —examines them and their forgotten role in developing Buffalo and the nation over a 100-year period.

Brown became interested in writing “American Colossus” while pursuing master’s and doctorate degrees in American literature at the University at Buffalo in the 1980s. The freewheeling book—exhaustively researched and amply footnoted, but weak in the proofreading department—doesn’t hesitate to add an unlikely array of voices to Brown’s ruminations, from Zane Grey and Karl Marx to Thomas Hobbes and William Shakespeare.

The author acknowledges a debt to the late architecture critic Reyner Banham, and repeatedly refers to “A Concrete Atlantis,” his landmark 1986 book on grain elevators. But Brown is sure to ruffle feathers by bludgeoning the revered former chair of UB’s School of Architecture for errors in scholarship.

Brown frequently cites and sometimes spars with Banham’s work while examining how the grain elevator came to be embraced by European Modernists and influence the Bauhaus style of art and architecture.

“American Colossus” is available at www.amazon.comand the Buffalo& Erie County Historical Society. It includes an appendix that lists some 122 grain elevators once in Buffalo, of which only about 15 remain. —Mark Sommer

Buffalo News, 20 December 2009.

R. Alan Wight reviews my book

American Colossus represents a unique weave of important, but often unconnected threads of American Imperialism. From waterways and railroad monopolies to oil conglomerates and Cargill, Brown discusses the evolution of the modern American grain transportation and storage system. His poetic narrative illustrates how the American Colossus (the grain trade) is used as an economic force to export the American diet and culture, along with our particular form of hegemonic capitalism. This project on the grain “system” of market dumping and local farmer destabilization that threatens our planets ecological stability goes hand in hand with the work of prominent authors such as Dr, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollen, and Bill McKibben.

Brown walks the reader through the history of the grain elevator. He poses important questions about the classification of these hybrid “building-machines,” traces the many architectural and industrial innovations brought together to “fire proof the tinderbox,” compares and contrasts the architectural and systematic differences of America to Europe, and does this all by neatly structruing his arguments on the shoulders of such renowned historians as R. Banham and W. Cronon. Also, Brown challenges existing historical works for their accuracy regarding pictures and names of grain elevators.

In addition, this research uses poetry, cultural mythology, and religion, with a hint of autoethnographic material to relate the beginnings of our American Colossus to the reader. Brown’s voice can be heard loud and clear has he describes his first hand experiences exploring the now silent, hybrid building-machines of Buffalo, NY. From the huge grain elevators admits our concrete metropolises, to the skyscrapers of the plains, to the thousands upon thousands of local nodes spread across this vast continent; Brown uncovers one of the foundations of our Modern American Empire.

-- R. Alan Wight M.A., Sociologist, University of Cincinnati

Henry Baxter reviews my book

AMERICAN COLOSSUS
William J. Brown
Colossal Books

This book reviews one chapter in mankind's oldest industry, the processing and storage of grain, which extends at least back to 9500 BC.

The story is taken up in 1842 with the building of Dart's grain elevator which was the first storage and transfer grain elevator powered by a steam engine. This innovation reduced the number of workers by 80%, speeding up the process of transferring grain from lake boats to canal boats and so solving a serious congestion problem in the Port of Buffalo. This, combined with the Erie Canal, permitted rapid development of the Midwest and the Port of New York. The trade increased from 1,500,000 bushels in 1841 to 20,000,000 bushels in 1854.

By the standards of the day these elevators were huge, up to 200' long by over 100' high, with almost no windows or doors, and painted black resulting in an almost sinister look. In the words of English visitor Anthony Trollope, "The grain elevator is as ugly a monster as has yet been provided," an so we learn the source of "Colossus" in this book's title.

This book also considers the influence of Buffalo's grain elevator designs on European architecture. For instance German architect Walter Gropius visited Buffalo and was so impressed by the almost pure functionalism of Buffalo's elevator designs that he used the idea at his Bauhaus School of Architecture which produced designs of great simplicity and elegance.

The principal promoter of the idea that Buffalo’s elevator designs greatly influenced European architecture was Reyner Banham, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Buffalo. Banham in his book “A Concrete Atlantis” compares the elevator designs to those of Richardson and Wright. Brown however is critical of “A Concrete Atlantis” due to its many factual errors.

A useful appendix lists every grain elevator ever built in Buffalo. 140 are included to which in fact a few more should be added. One of them, the Cargill (Urban Mill) elevator, consisted of 4 free standing steel bins serviced by bucket elevators and conveyors which were not in enclosures. So this elevator did not include a building. And you wonder what the German architects would think of how the purely functional approach which produced the buildings they so admired went a step further and eliminated the buildings themselves.

-- Henry Baxter

Western New York Heritage, Volume 12 Number 3, Fall 2009, p.18-19.

Availability through Amazon.com

American Colossus: the Grain Elevator, 1843 to 1943 is now available from Amazon.

Diet Soap interview

In March 2009, I was interviewed at length on the telephone by Doug Lain. This interview has just been "podcast" and can now be heard on the "Diet Soap" website. Doug also conducted an interview with me by email, which has been available here here since 18 March 2009.

The Consolidated Grain & Barge Co. grain elevator in South Cumminsville, Ohio

Today Isaac took me to the grain elevator formerly operated by the Consolidated Grain & Barge Company in South Cumminsville (west part of Cincinnati). It was a remarkable experience and seems to have laid the groundwork for future collaborations between us.

In ruins since October 2008, when the "top" or northern section of the structure was demolished, this grain elevator (photographed from ground-level by Joe Wessels and from space by Google Maps' satellites) is quite an oddity: it stands in complete isolation. (For more photographs of the elevator before and during this stage of demolition, visit the Queen City Disco.)

As one can see, it was once a large facility, built in at least two stages, and probably capable of storing more than two million bushels of grain in bulk. The elevator is in fact so big that one might suspect that it was originally built to receive grain for a nearby flourmill, animal-feed mill or brewery that was subsequently demolished. Positioned along the banks of Mill Creek, the elevator was in fact built to transship grain from rail cars (farms in Indiana and Ohio) to barges (markets in St. Louis or News Orleans). But there are no barge-loading facilities (nor ruins of them) on the water-side of the elevator. Furthermore, on the elevator's other side (the one visible in Joe Wessel's photo), there is only a single track laid down by the old Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad. Such a massive elevator would normally service a train shed into which four or five train tracks or "spurs" would feed.

Not surprisingly, there is very little public information about the Consolidated elevator, which bears no corporate signs or logos upon it. Its address, 3180 Beekman Street, is no longer listed. (Try 3100 Beekman, instead.) In 2000, a photographer named Casey Walker wrote that "In the background, under the viaduct, [there] is a very big grain elevator. From closer I could see huge cracks in the concrete grain elevator; I heard that it had failed as soon as it was built and was never used." Never used? Impossible. The blue plastic (!) grain-bucket that I kept as a souvenir of today's visit still had grain in it. But this fellow was certainly responding to something that is really there: this particular grain elevator is remarkably isolated from its surroundings, a true island.

Based upon my preliminary research, it seems that the first section (now destroyed) was probably built as a rail-to-barge transshipping elevator in the 1920s or 1930s, used for a while, and then abandoned in the 1940s, when the Queensgate rail terminus was built on the other side of Mill Creek. Perhaps the second section was constructed in the early 1970s, right after the formation of the Consolidated Grain & Barge Company (known today as "CGB Enterprises"). The entire facility was abandoned in 1993, when CGB transferred its operations to a facility at 3164 Southside Avenue, which is on the Ohio River, and not a narrow, minor tributary to it. Despite being left out in the rain and snow to rot, the elevator's second section is still in remarkably good condition. Though someone has taken care to prevent access to anything that might serve as stairs to the top, the reinforced-concrete structure itself is as handsome and solid as ever.

Where to buy a copy

American Colossus still isn't available on Amazon, but I'm sure it will be by October of this year. In the meantime, you can still buy it through Lulu. The price will be the same ($29.99) in either case.

To date, 34 copies of the book have been sold. Two-thirds of them (22 copies) were purchased by Colossal Books (which re-sold 15 of them and gave 7 of them away to potential reviewers); and one-third (12 copies) were purchased by others through Lulu. To all those people who have bought a copy of American Colossus: thank you very much!

Adaptive Reuse: A Practical Proposal

On pages 401-404 of American Colossus, I discuss the various ways in which grain elevators that have recently been abandoned by their owners can be "adaptively reused," that is, not used as grain elevators or grain-storage warehouses, but as something else. As I've noted before, the most common way to adaptively reuse a grain elevator is to transform it into a home, a house or a hotel. Old grain elevators have also been transformed into in-door rock-climbing facilities, planetariums and museums about grain elevators.

But what about grain elevators that have been abandoned and become derelict, even dilapidated? These are buildings that can't be reused without first spending massive amounts of money to clean them out, fix whatever damage has occurred, re-wire them for electricity, etc. On the other hand, these are, generally speaking, large buildings made of reinforced concrete, which means they are expensive to demolish. But be demolished they must, that is, if the land upon which they stand is to be sold to a buyer who doesn't want to adaptively reuse an old building, but build a new one.

Such is the "stand-off" or state of paralysis one sees in Buffalo, New York. The waterfront area is full of long-abandoned elevators made out of reinforced concrete. As time goes by, they continue to rot, get vandalized, etc. Though there are many individuals, groups and institutions in Buffalo who are involved in the documentation, appreciation and lamentation of the passing of the city's grain elevators, few of them are able to come up with truly practical solutions to the problem of adaptively reusing ruined buildings.

(Not all of the elevators in Buffalo are in the dilapidated state that renders the Superior, the Concrete Central, the Great Northern and the Connecting Terminal difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim. But those that remain in or near operable condition are more likely to be sold to ethanol-producers than reused as houses or museums, for which there is much less market demand.)

When the city has proposed or agreed that one of Buffalo's abandoned and derelict elevators be destroyed -- in the hope or with the contractual provision that the buyer of the "cleaned" property builds something valuable to the community on it -- the "preservationists" have found themselves in an untenable position. They had have no workable proposals for what to do with the Eastern States, Meyer Malting, Kreiner Malting, and, last but not least, the H & O Oats, all of which have been demolished since 2000, but without being replaced with a "new" building of any kind. The worst of both worlds: no elevator, no new building, just a vacant lot no one wants.

The demolition the H & O Oats is the most recent and most painful example. Between 2005 and 2007, there were those who wanted to demolish this abandoned and derelict grain elevator in the name of building something that would hopefully provide jobs and attract tourists/money to the area (a casino); and there were those -- the "preservationists" -- who wanted to save the elevator because Buffalo is the city in which the grain elevator was invented and developed. Both sides had strong cases: title to the land, in the case of the former (the Seneca Nation of Indians), and a pattern of indifference and neglect on the part of the city in the protection of these buildings, in the case of the preservationists. And yet both sides also had weak cases: respectively speaking, the casino could be built in such a location on the property that the H & O Oats need not be demolished, and there was in fact little else to do with the elevator (or, rather, what remained of it in the aftermath of a devastating fire in 1987) other than demolish it. In the end, the elevator was demolished and the casino was not built due to lack of capital funds.

And so, here is my proposal: commission internationally-known artists to paint gigantic murals upon these abandoned elevators, make a movie of the process, and then hold an exhibition, perhaps in tandem with a July 4th fireworks display and a projection of the aforementioned movie upon an elevator that had been painted all-white for the occasion. The effect would be truly spectacular!

Of course, the murals chosen for -- temporary? permanent? -- display would have to be much better than the one in Midland, Ontario (see below).



Gary Friesen wrote a piece about this, "North America's largest outdoor mural," in the 14 April 2001 edition of The Globe and Mail.

Painted on the side of a century-old grain elevator, the mural depicts a Jesuit missionary and a Huron-Ouendat native overlooking Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, the Jesuit mission and the first permanent European community in Canada west of the Ottawa River. Built in 1639, Sainte-Marie was the headquarters of the Jesuits sent to preach among the Huron-Ouendat natives. In 1649, after years of deadly attacks by the invading Iroquois to the south, the remaining Jesuits and Huron-Ouendats burnt Sainte-Marie to the ground and eventually returned to New France (Quebec).

Visitors can easily see the mural from anywhere along the waterfront, although the pier to the far right offers the best face-on view. Binoculars and a lawn chair would allow the viewer to experience and really appreciate the extremely detailed workmanship by artist Fred Lenz. The weather dictates when work begins as the concrete walls must be totally dry for the special mural paints to properly adhere and maintain their vibrant colours. Visitors and residents delight in watching the progress through the warmer and drier months. The mural is scheduled to be completed in time for the dedication ceremonies during Midland's annual Waterfest Weekend in early August.

The gigantic waterfront mural is the crowning achievement of artist Fred Lenz's career and the highlight of Midland's outdoor historical mural project. Over 30 huge murals splash colour and local history throughout the downtown commercial core. Sponsored by the Midland Business Improvement Association, the mural project plays a major role in an overall downtown revitalization program. With a descriptive brochure and guide map, visitors can easily stroll through almost 400 years of local history. These brochures are available throughout the community. The exquisite craftsmanship will impress you as will your appreciation of Midland's rich and unique heritage.

This outdoor historical mural project is a great idea, and could easily be brought to a place like Buffalo, but this particular mural is just awful. "Extremely detailed workmanship"?! The left arm of the Huron-Ouendat, presumably gesturing to the settlement and not extending his hand in friendship to the missionary (whose hands are hidden), is clearly deformed. This is especially poignant, given that -- in 1930, almost 25 years before the preserved remains of two of the missionaries were discovered at the site -- the eight "Canadian Martyrs" of Sainte-Marie were canonized by the Pope. Inevitably, the canonization of these missionaries meant the demonization of their killers, who weren't simply Iroquois, but members of the Seneca Nation. I hope that I'm wrong, but I sincerely doubt that any of the murals sponsored by the Midland Business Improvement Association document the displacement and devastation of both the Hurons and the Senecas.

A really strong pro-Seneca mural would be perfect for Buffalo. Some old wounds have still not healed there. To recall the last few lines of an article published in The Buffalo News on 6 December 2005, in the midst of the battle over the H & O Oats elevator:

Several critics of the project said the Senecas were showing insensitivity by not including the public in its decisions.

John Laping, chairman of the Buffalo Preservation Board, regretted there has been none of the scrutiny or public input required in Buffalo. "It's too bad the Seneca Nation does not feel the same kind of civic responsibility," said Laping.

Richard Lippes, the attorney filing the lawsuit against the purchase of the DL&W site on the grounds that it violates state and federal law, agreed. He hopes the Senecas will reconsider its decision to destroy the H-O Oats complex.

"The Senecas, perhaps more than most, should understand the importance of our history and our environment, and respect these historic structures," Lippes said.

To state the obvious: the "insensitivity" here is among those who do not know or simply refuse to admit that hundreds of years before this "historic" elevator was built -- indeed, hundreds of years before the founding of Buffalo itself -- the Senecas lived on these precise tracts of land, and that thereupon they had their own "history" and "environment." They want some of that land back? They have every right to it: not you, not me. Put that on your mural.

(Note added 23 December 2011: see the Stored Potential Project in Omaha, Nebraska, which used abandoned grain elevators to display silo-length scrolls of art on a temporary basis.)

When to stay away

One of the major themes in my book is "the problem of properly positioning yourself with respect to a colossal building [...] Kant notes that '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.' [...] In Derrida's words, 'So one has to find a middle place, a correct distance for uniting the maximum of comprehension [aesthetic pleasure] with the maximum of apprehension [mathematical understanding]" (American Colossus,pages 335-336). To show that this positioning of oneself in the middle isn't simply a mental or psychological process -- more than a way of enjoying that which is disturbingly large -- but also a physical one, I quote the photographer Frank Gohlke (p. 337). As I have noted before, Gohlke claims:

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.

I have had a hard time reconciling all this with the example/rhetoric of Reyner Banham, the author of A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Architectural Modernism, 1900-1925 (MIT Press, 1986). In this pioneering work on the "Daylight" factories and grain elevators that were built out of reinforced concrete in Buffalo and elsewhere, Banham insists on the importance of moving in closer, getting out of the car and exploring such buildings oneself. "Although it is still possible, at some risk to life and limb, by climbing across railroad bridges and the like, to see Concrete Central from the other side [...] Closer views are not normally to be had, unless one goes up river to it or is prepared to undertake an adventurous and circuitous safari on foot [...] That journey is worth it, however" (Banham, pages 165-166).

Banham made sure his readers knew that, worth it or not, the "journey" would or could not be undertaken by anyone. Only the tough or courageous could or should do so. "My foot crashed through a rotten plywood cover that had been laid over an open culvert [...] Had I sustained an incapacitating injury, rather than mere scratches, in that fall, even those who knew approximately where I was would have no idea how to reach me, after they had finally decided that they had waited too long for my return" (Banham, p. 351).

My friend Orrin and I fancied ourselves to be just as tough and/or courageous as Reyner Banham was, and so, between 1989 and 1992, we not only asked for and were granted "official," guided tours of the Eastern States, the Perot, the Standard, and the Great Northern; we also took it upon ourselves to explore and even climb to the top of the Concrete-Central, the Superior, the Marine "A," and the GLF (all of which were abandoned and derelict). Those journeys were certainly "worth it."

But on page 405 of American Colossus, I humbly insist that "the most accurate description of our urban explorations in Buffalo would not be 'we risked life and limb,' but 'we knew when to stay away.'" I provide two examples, which I reproduce and illustrate below. In both cases, "staying away" meant "saying goodbye."



The picture above shows Meyer Malting, which was a small grain elevator built out of reinforced concrete by Monarch Engineering in 1914. Originally built to unload barley from vessels on the Erie Canal, which it faced, Meyer Malting was modified in the 1950s, when the canal was paved over and turned into railroad tracks and highways. By continuing to receive grain by truck, the malt house stayed in business until the late 1980s, when it was abandoned. Orrin and I got inside of it once. We only stayed a few minutes: the air was full of trapped car exhaust.

One day, we returned to Meyer Malting to take notes and photographs of what we'd seen the first time, but heard a noise from inside. If there had in fact been someone living inside it, or even simply visiting it, our presence might have been (mis)interpreted as invasive, hostile or unwanted. We knew from experience how difficult it was to get in and out of the building, and decided that it simply wasn't worth the risk. We left, never to return. In 2005, Meyer Malting was demolished by the City of Buffalo.



The picture above shows what remained after the fire of 1987, which destroyed most of the vast H & O Oats Milling complex in Buffalo, New York. Founded in 1893, H & O Oats built its first cereal mill on the site in 1914; it was designed by the A.E. Baxter Company. In 1931, the company added a set of grain tanks, which were made of reinforced concrete. The complex was closed in 1983 and temporarily used for the storage of tires. The fire of 1987 apparently destroyed grain tanks of all kinds: wood, steel and reinforced concrete.

When we visited the reamains of the H & O Oats in 1992, the basement looked to be permanently flooded. Someone had used a series of wooden planks to create a dry route to a staircase that presumably led to the upper levels. One of us remembered seeing a local TV news story about the rescue of a stray dog that had managed to get to the top of the 70-foot-tall structure, but couldn't get back down. We decided to stay away, and never returned. In 2006, the remains of the H & O Oats were demolished by the City of Buffalo to make way for a casino that was to be operated by the Seneca Nation. It hasn't been built.

Safe as houses: the Fallout Shelter in Kansas

It is most unfortunate that I didn't know this when I was writing American Colossus, because it fits so well into my extended discussion of dwelling in/on grain elevators.

In the 1960s, a certain grain elevator in Hutchinson, Kansas -- then known as the Far-Mar-Co Grain Elevator and today recognized as the biggest grain elevator in the world -- was equipped by the U.S. Army to serve as a fallout shelter, indeed, the biggest fallout shelter in the country, capable of housing an incredible 8,720 people (an entire town!). The photos above were taken by the US Army and placed on-line by the Civil Defense Museum.

Safe as houses: Hamburg, Germany, during the War

On page 403 of American Colossus, I mention my visit to the grain elevators (die Getreidespeichern) in Hamburg, Germany, in early 1994. I expected to see what I'd previously seen at the EuroSilo in Ghent, Belgium, and throughout the French countryside: grain elevators built after World War II and in the classic American style of elevator design (rows of gleaming-white cylindrical tanks made out of reinforced concrete). Instead, I saw a long line of elevators that had been built in a variety of styles and using a variety of building materials. There were big windowless brick buildings with flat roofs; big brick buildings with windows and pitched roofs; big windowless towers painted white; some unpainted reinforced-concrete silos; and several buildings that looked like enormous houses. Curious, I asked someone who worked at the Getreideterminal Hamburg (GTH) and was told that the some of the elevators that looked like houses were deliberately disguised to look that way, during the war, so that they wouldn't be bombed. Evidently the ruse had worked.

Safe as houses: adaptive reuse in Baltimore, Maryland

"The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest habitations in Europe that are frankly and amply habitations--not mere shafts for machinery of the American grain-elevator pattern." -- Henry James, Italian Hours (1909).

On pages 401-404 of American Colossus, I note that the most common way to adaptively reuse an abandoned grain elevator -- that is, one that has been "reclaimed" soon after it has been abandoned and hasn't experienced any significant damage in the interim -- is to convert it into a house or a hotel. This has been done, and quite successfully, in Akron, Ohio, where a Quaker Oats Elevator & Mill was transformed into a hotel in 1980; in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the Cereal Grading Company's elevator and warehouse was made into a condominium complex called Calhoun-Isles in 1982; and in Baltimore, Maryland, where the Baltimore & Ohio Grain Terminal -- note the horizontal gantries, which were typical of elevators that loaded ocean-going grain tankers (see picture above) -- was turned into SiloPoint in 2007 (see picture below).



Similar projects have recently been undertaken in Philadelphia (condominiums called "the Granary"), Minneapolis (low-income housing at "Van Cleve Court Apartments East") and Harburg, Germany.

The Eastern States Elevator

On pages 395-396 of American Colossus, I evoke the fear I experienced when I first visited the Eastern States Farmers' Exchange Feed Mill & Grain Elevator on Military Road in Tonawanda, New York. (Tonawanda is just north of Buffalo.) Located "out in the suburbs" and alongside a set of railroads tracks -- not next to a canal, river or lake -- the Eastern States was designed and built by the A.E Baxter Engineering Company in 1934. During the mid-1940s, a second set of grain bins was added and a new flour mill was built; both structures were designed by A.E. Baxter and/or Henry Baxter, A.E.'s son. In the aftermath of changes made in the preferential railroad rates allowed by the federal government, the Eastern States -- like so many other grain elevators in Buffalo -- closed down in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Left abandoned and derelict, the Eastern States became the scene of accidental injuries, deaths and "animal sacrifices." It wasn't until the late 1980s that it was locked and sealed.

The pictures reproduced above were originally taken by the Historic American Engineering Record in the early 1990s. They capture the Eastern States from its southern side, which is the side of the elevator I first saw. Quite obviously, I was immediately struck by the great height of the elevating tower, which is almost twice the size of the bins adjacent to it. No elevator in Buffalo had a tower so tall. But what I found truly daunting about the idea of exploring this colossus was the large flour mill next to it (on the right in both pictures). Not only was this building full of broken windows, empty spaces, echoing sounds, birds, foul/fowl smells and cold, dank air, but it was also positioned such that it completely blocked the grain elevator -- and whatever was taking place in or around it -- from being seen from Military Road. I got the fear and left.

When I returned, several months later and in the company of a local councilman, a photographer and Henry Baxter himself, I got to see inside the elevator's basement. One of the first things I saw was a graffito that proclaimed: FRANKENSTEIN LIVES HERE. Though there was something silly about this proclamation, it resonated with my own fears and other people's associations of grain elevators with monsters. And so, in the summer of 2001, when the Eastern States was demolished, but not replaced by anything, I found myself wondering: "Where is Frankenstein living now?"

Grain elevators in Brooklyn, New York

Though the elevator in Gowanus still stands, the vast majority of the grain elevators built in Brooklyn, New York, over the years were not built on or near the Gowanus Canal, which was dug at the end of the 1860s. Instead, as the map reproduced above shows (circa 1880), most of the stationary elevators and grain warehouses in Brooklyn were built close to Manhattan: either in Brooklyn Heights, which is on the East River facing Manhattan's Lower East Side, or in the Atlantic Basin, which is along Buttermilk Channel. When necessary, grain facilities were also built in the Erie Basin (at the tip of or within the huge J-shaped breakwater).

By contrast, the Gowanus Elevator is far from Manhattan. Located in Upper New York Bay, it can't be seen in the map above. If it did appear, it would be in the upper-right-hand corner. To get a sense of the distances involved here, but without getting lost, see the map below. The green arrow is pointing towards the location of the Gowanus Elevator.



To complete our panorama, below is a picture of the Gowanus Elevator, as seen from the Red Hook Playground and photographed by the Historic American Engineering Record in 1985.

The Grain Elevator in Gowanus, Brooklyn

On pages 380-384 of American Colossus, I mention that, in an attempt to stimulate grain shipments on the recently completed New York State Barge Canal System, the Port Authority of New York built two large grain elevators: a lake-to-barge transshipping elevator in Oswego, New York (a port city on Lake Ontario), and a barge-to-tanker transshipper in Gowanus, Brooklyn. For a variety of reasons, the elevator in Brooklyn was designed and built by State of New York engineers and was completed first, in 1922, while the one in Oswego was designed by the James Stewart Engineering Company and finished in 1925. Both elevators were abandoned and left derelict in 1965. Though it was partly demolished in 1987, the elevator in Gowanus still stands, while the one in Oswego was completely demolished in 1999.

Above is a photograph of the Gowanus Elevator that was published in the Supplement to the Annual Report of the State Engineer and Surveyor for the Year Ended June 30, 1921. It shows a facility that looks like it was inspired by elevator design in Montreal, Portland or Baltimore, where there must be sufficient room (and machinery) for ocean-going vessels to be loaded with grain. At the Gowanus Elevator, two elevated horizontal gantries and a transfer tower combined to bring grain a total of 1,221 feet away from the main house, which faced away from Gowanus Bay and towards a short slip in which the barges were unloaded of their cargoes.



The photograph above shows the Gowanus Elevator as it appears today. Note that all three of its marine towers are made of solid reinforced-concrete. At the grain elevator in Oswego, by contrast, both of the marine towers were made of steel and iron, and were "loose legs," that is, capable of being moved.

In 1990, the Chicago Tribune reported that:

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) in its monthly magazine reports that The Eggers Group in New York, after completing an inventory for state officials of the 7,500 jail cells in the state, advanced the idea of transforming a 1.8-million-cubic-foot grain elevator in Brooklyn into a 1,000-cell jail. 

The concept would create small blocks of semicircular cells within the elevator, cells that could be monitored from central control points. The architectural firm points out that the silos, made of 6-inch thick concrete, are exceptionally secure. 

``It`s a pity that so many of these monumental buildings, often built with the solid construction techniques of the 1920s and 1930s, should be unused, particularly when they have such excellent potential to help relieve prisons that are bursting at the seams,`` Eggers` partner, Robert Kleid, told ULI. 

Kleid noted that cities such as Minneapolis, Buffalo, Albany, N.Y., Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orleans, Duluth, Toledo and Houston, have vacant grain elevators ranging from 500,000 to 4 million cubic feet.

Fortunately this plan was never realized.

Margaret Bourke-White

On pages 367-368 of American Colossus, I discuss Say, Is This the USA, a collaboration between the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and the writer Erskine Caldwell. I call upon this remarkable book, which was first published in 1941, to show that grain elevators aren't simply symbols of wealth and abundance, but also symbols of misery, poverty and hunger amidst and despite abundance. "This America is a jungle of men living in the extremes of good and bad, heat and cold, wealth and poverty. . . . All these people, all this abundance, all these things, is this America we live in; but none of us knows what to do about it."

"In the midst of grain elevators bulging with food, man dies of hunger; and supplied with whirring looms, he goes without adequate covering against the icy blasts of winter; and surrounded by the products of the best minds of three thousand years, he is so poorly educated that he cannot explain the simplest natural phenomena." (The Salaried Man: The Story, in Two Episodes, of an Every-Day Person, Rand School of Social Science, 1920).

Unfortunately for admirers of Ms. Bourke-White's photographs, one of them (see above) has been mistitled "Smoke Stacks, Great Lakes region, Michigan, 1930." This famous photograph might well have been taken in the "Great Lakes region" in 1930, but it certainly shows grain silos, not smokestacks. Except for Detroit, no port-city in Michigan has ever been known for its grain elevators. It is far more likely that this photograph was taken in Minnesota or another state on the Great Plains.

The Dart Elevator, continued

On page 354 of American Colossus, I mention the plaque that was erected by the Industrial Heritage Committee and the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society in 1990 to commemorate the building of the Dart Elevator, the world's first mechanized (steam-powered) grain elevator. An entry on Waymarking displays this plaque's precise location, which is indeed on the very spot upon which the Dart and, later, the Bennett elevators stood. Note well that, in the intervening years (between 1842 and 1900), the Evans Slip was filled in, paved and called Erie Street.

Welcomed though it is, this plaque is open to nitpicking. It is true that work on the Dart began in the autumn of 1842; but the elevator wasn't ready to unload its first ship until June 1843. Furthermore, while it is true that the basic principles of the Dart "are still used in elevators along Buffalo's waterfront," these basic principles are also still used in elevators all over the world.

The Frontier Elevator, continued

On pages 305-307 of American Colossus, I discuss the second marine tower that the James Stewart Engineering Company designed and built for Washburn-Crosby, the flour milling company that owned and operated the Frontier Elevator. Made out of reinforced concrete in 1912, the new Frontier Elevator was photographed (see above) by the German modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn during a trip to Buffalo in 1924. This second marine tower was accompanied by a new set of grain bins made of reinforced concrete; yet another set would be added in 1925.

In stark contrast to the first marine tower (on the right), the second one (on the left) is shaped like a silo, not like a marine tower, that is to say, it is cylindrically, not rectangularly shaped. The statement is clear; it is a statement of mastery. With the advent of the new building material (reinforced concrete), grain-elevator designers need not be constrained by (certain) past practices, and can create new ones. In this particular case, a marine tower doesn't have to "look like" a marine tower, but can look like a grain tank. In general, form can -- but need not always -- "follow" function. Form and function can also pursue (slightly) different paths.

And yet none of this was apparent to Erich Mendelsohn, who claimed that his photograph caught "Childhood forms, clumsy, full of primeval power, dedicated to purely practical needs" (Amerika). What could Mendelsohn have said if someone told him that the cylindrical marine tower of the Frontier Elevator was in fact an instance of form following aesthetics, not "function" or "purely practical needs"? How could he, as an artist, admit that he had failed to recognize a work of art (a deliberate, sophisticated and witty attempt to make a pun on visual resemblances)?



Above: David Plowden captures the Frontier Elevator (aka known as "the General Mills Elevator") in action in 1985.

The Frontier Elevator

On pages 294-295 and 305 of American Colossus, I allude to but do not directly discuss the Frontier, a large wood-binned elevator that was built in Buffalo (on the south side of Kelley Island) in 1886. As we can see from the postcard reproduced above, the Frontier (on our right) stood next to the steel-binned the Dakota Elevator (on the left) and utilized a single stationary marine tower. In the picture reproduced below, we can see that this marine tower was attached to a very long and tall warehouse that was also made out of wood.



It seems from this second photograph that the Frontier Elevator (on the left) communicated with other structures in the area through a long, horizontal conveyor-belt system. (Behind this conveyor, in the very middle of the photo, we see the Marine Elevator.) On the right, we can see the nine bins made of hollowed-out tile that the Barnett-Record Company built for the Washburn-Crosby Company in 1903.

By 1909, this area looked entirely different. The Frontier had been demolished. Its wooden marine tower was replaced by one made out of steel and corrugated iron; and its wooden-bins had been replaced by bins made out of reinforced concrete.