Buffalo

Buffalo existed because the Erie Canal ended here in 1825. Everything grown west of the Appalachians that was going to New York came through this harbor, and by the 1860s Buffalo was the largest grain-transfer port in the world.

The grain elevator was invented here in 1843 — Joseph Dart's steam-powered marine leg, which lifted grain out of a ship's hold mechanically instead of by men with shovels. The concrete elevators that followed are among the most photographed industrial structures in America, and European modernist architects treated them as revelations. Le Corbusier published photographs of Buffalo elevators as examples of pure form.

The Pan-American Exposition of 1901 was lit by hydroelectric power from Niagara, twenty-five miles away, and that was the point of it. The Electric Tower carried forty thousand bulbs. Visitors came specifically to see a place lit at night, and the photographs of it are the reason the fair is remembered.

It is also where President McKinley was shot, on 6 September 1901, in the Temple of Music. He died eight days later and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in at a house on Delaware Avenue. Photographs of the Temple of Music are ordinary until you know, and then they are not.

Frederick Law Olmsted designed a park system here — not a park, a system, with parks connected by landscaped parkways, and he considered it his best work of that kind. Delaware Park, the Parade, and the circles and avenues linking them appear throughout the residential photography.

The architecture is unusually good for the city's size. Sullivan's Guaranty Building of 1896, Richardson's Buffalo State Hospital, and later Wright's Darwin Martin House. Buffalo was rich and knew what to spend it on.

Around five hundred and eighty images name Buffalo.

The Harbor, the Hotel and the Fair That Built a Park