The Last of Its Kind: The Demolition of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator

ByAndrew Walsh

Buffalo’s waterfront along the City Ship Canal was once one of the most important grain handling corridors in the world. Grain elevators were invented in Buffalo in the 1840s, and at its peak the city was one of the biggest grain ports in the world, receiving tons of wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great Lakes.

Cereal and flour companies blossomed — locals would even joke that the city “smelled like Cheerios” (New York Times). The massive grain elevators that lined the canal defined the city’s economy and its skyline for nearly a century. Most are gone. A handful survive, some converted to housing or event spaces. One of the most significant was demolished in 2022 and 2023 and the story of how it happened is worth understanding.

Buffalo’s Grain Elevators and the Industrial Economy That Built Them

When European modernists first encountered Buffalo’s grain elevators in the early twentieth century, the structures profoundly influenced the avant-garde architectural movement. “The grain elevator is what we contributed to architecture on the world stage,” said Jessie Fisher, executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara. Gregory Delaney, a clinical assistant professor at the University at Buffalo’s architecture school, called them “the cathedrals of the modern age — a building that is at the same scale as a great medieval cathedral, with a similar kind of monumental power” (New York Times).

The Great Northern Grain Elevator was completed September 29, 1897, built for the Great Northern Railroad, part of railroad magnate James J. Hill’s transportation empire, by bridge engineer M. Taltz and elevator engineer D.A. Robinson of Chicago (Library of Congress, survey drawings).

View looking up in the silos

At completion it was the largest grain elevator in the world, described by the American Elevator and Grain Trade as “the largest and most complete grain handling plant ever put under one roof.” (Library of Congress).

It was also among the first grain elevators to run on electricity generated by Niagara Falls.

During its prime it hummed continuously as grain arrived from rail cars and boats, pulled up and into the silos by hoppers and conveyors, essentially turning the entire building into a machine.

World’s Largest — and Buffalo’s Last Brick-Box Grain Elevator

What made the Great Northern structurally distinctive — and historically irreplaceable — was its construction method.

Rather than the poured concrete that became standard in the twentieth century, the Great Northern used cylindrical steel bins for grain storage enclosed within a 2.5-foot-thick brick curtain wall.

The building stood 181 feet tall, held 2.5 million bushels across 48 steel bins, and operated continuously until closure in 1982 (Library of Congress).

As the LOC survey documentation notes, “the nest of main, inner space, and outer space bins were a precursor to the form adopted later in the classic concrete elevator (Library of Congress).

“Full length view of marine leg from top floor of tower”

By the time of its demolition, the Great Northern was considered one of the last, if not the last, brick-box grain elevators in the world (New York Times). The surviving grain elevators along Buffalo’s waterfront that continue to draw architects and historians are almost all concrete construction built later.

It was sold by the Great Northern Railroad to a consortium of eastern trunk railroads in 1903 and renamed The Mutual. In 1923 Pillsbury established a flour mill on adjoining land and converted the elevator to serve the mill the following year. (LOC HAER NY-240) The building was recognized as a City of Buffalo landmark in 1990.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the world’s largest agricultural commodity processing companies, acquired it in 1992 along with the still-active flour mill next door.

Thirty Years of Demolition Attempts and One Convenient Storm

ADM’s effort to demolish the Great Northern was not new. Previous owner Pillsbury had first sought a demolition permit in 1989 (Greater Buffalo Substack). ADM made demolition requests in 1996 and 2003, both denied. Preservationists accused the company of “demolition by neglect,” essentially leaving the building to bear the brunt of brutal weather without maintenance.

On December 11, 2021, a windstorm tore a hole in the building’s north-facing brick curtain wall. Six days later, with no public hearings, the City of Buffalo issued an emergency demolition order (Buffalo History Museum). A state appellate judge granted a temporary restraining order. The Buffalo City Council passed a resolution asking ADM to explore options to collaborate or sell rather than demolish. Washington D.C. developer Douglas Jemal offered ADM $100,000 to repair the hole in the wall, which was declined. (New York Times). Preservation Buffalo Niagara offered to take a long-term lease of the site at no cost to ADM, saving the company an estimated $3.6 million in demolition costs. ADM declined to engage. (Buffalo Rising).

Preservationists made a point that would prove accurate: the collapsed brick wall was purely decorative and supported nothing. The steel structure was intact. During the months of demolition that followed, the building withstood the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Buffalo’s history and two major winter storms without any unplanned collapse. “That building, even as they were beginning demolition, withstood the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Buffalo history,” said Tim Tielman of the Campaign for Greater Buffalo. “Nothing fell down”.” (WBEN, April 2023)” (WBEN).

But despite all this, the State Supreme Court ultimately sided with ADM and the city. Demolition began September 16, 2022 and was completed April 26, 2023.

A Parking Lot Where a Landmark Stood

ADM’s plan for the nearly one-acre site: 93 employee parking spaces and a small 6,000-square-foot wheat-receiving building. (Buffalo News, October 2024)

The building that was the world’s largest grain elevator in 1897, one of the last of its structural type anywhere, a city landmark, and the subject of a years-long preservation fight, replaced by employee parking and a small grain transfer structure.

The Buffalo History Museum opened an exhibit in 2023: “The Life and Death of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator: 1897-2023.”

Other grain elevators along Buffalo’s waterfront, most built of concrete in the decades that followed, survive. The Great Northern, last of the brick-box steel bin design it pioneered, does not.

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