Love 'em and leave 'em.
BR's latest ARTiculate podcast was produced on location in the vicinity of Buffalo's grain mills. While the crew recorded the audio, I jumped in my car and took a drive around the various mills snapping some shots of the city's hulking industrial legacy. It was a really incredible experience just driving around the structures while navigating the streets using the mills as visual guides. The excursion led me out along Lake Erie where the recently added boardwalk allows anyone to walk along and enjoy views of the beach and our industrial heritage.
This location on the lake (photo) is just minutes from downtown Buffalo, and is such an incredible place to visit. While I was there, I ran into joggers, photographers, dog walkers, parents with strollers as well as sightseers driving by in cars and curiosity seekers approaching the mills. At one point I met a foreign couple who are currently attending UB. They were there taking photos of each other standing in front of the water's edge where one of the towering mills lay dormant. The two were fascinated with the sight of the structure and asked me if they could go inside. I told them that they could not legally enter, but that for the first time cities are looking to showcase the elevators by lighting them up, painting them, building parks around their perimeters, making climbing walls out of them, along with countless other ideas... many of which Westcoast has pointed out in a past slideshow.
Take a look at the slideshow and keep your eyes open for the couple as they are dwarfed by the grain mill. The two left that day keeping their minds open as to the possible re-use of the structures and told me that they would continue to pay visits to the incredible spectacles.
Make sure that you play Westcoast's previous slideshow and imagine the possibilities.
I've always been sort of mixed on the whole grain elevator issue. I think some saved would be nice but....
Watching this slideshow was really eye-opening. It reminds me of a place in Alaska named Kennicott. It's an abandoned copper mining center that just turned ghost town. Nearby is the town of Mccarthy, Ak. Tourists come from all over to see the structures and walk around them. The kicker is that you have to drive down about 50 miles of washboard dirt road to get outside of Mccarthy. People still flock there.
In any case, the grain elevators can and should be a part of our future waterfront in some shape.
thanks for the slideshow!
Beautiful! Imagine what this area would look like at night under a full moon....or bathed in dramatic lighting.
I'm like MSA, mixed on the grain elevator issue. Not all should be saved but anyway......how about some paint with funky bright colors in the meanwhile? Or some murals? Don't know how much it would cost but no electric bill. As they are, they are a bit despressing. Well, that's my idea. Done.
Should say 'depressing' not 'despressing'
people are catching on...paint them and light them up...
i would consider it a horrible affront to Buffalo's aesthetics to paint- with murals or othewise- our historic grain elevators. the whole appeal of those structures, to myself and many others, is the sense of history that they instill upon onlookers. exploring the old First Ward on foot transports even the most uninterested, passive observe to another place and time, an era where colossal grain elevators dominated the buffalo landscape. they are some of the only visual symbols that we have left of a time when buffalo reigned supreme as the center of a nationwide shipping and storage industry, a time when buffalo was one of the most up and coming cities in the world. we have already lost so many of these buildings for no valid reason it would be a shame to destroy the few that remain standing. walking through or around the cargill 'S' wouldnt exactly be the same if it was painted a garish orange or green; leave it rusted and crumbling. leave it natural.
right on!