Demolition green light at Buffalo grain elevator…

City commissioner denies injunction to stop demolition at historic industrial site

On the banks of the Buffalo River, the silhouette of one of the city’s grain elevators has distinguished the landscape since the early 1900s. Now one elevator and associated buildings will be lost. After the original demolition order was denied by the preservation board, the Commissioner of Inspections and Licenses issued an emergency permit, allowing a development company to move forward with demolition.

Built in stages from 1909 to 1961, at its peak the grain elevator complex once employed more than 330 mill workers and dozens of wheat scoopers, and was the site of the Scoopers Strike of 1953, a key example of national tension between farmers and urban labor. The Cooperative Grange League Federation bought the property in 1929. (The corporation vacated the site in the 1970s.) Among the buildings in the demolition plans are the original 1909 Wheeler Elevator with its unique monitor roof, and the gable-roofed marine tower, both of which influenced architects such as Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Erich Mendelsohn.

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