Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism

63 Chapter 3 Of Silo Dreams and Deviant Houses Uneven Geographies of Abandonment in Buffalo, New York Julia Tulke The interior of Marine A, one of Buffalo’s many disused grain elevators, is saturated with visual interventions that animate the barren space. Small graffiti tags occupy concrete walls and rusty metal chutes; spray-painted portraits of fantastical creatures wrap around columns; a sculptural constellation of cogwheels is suspended from the ceiling of a silo shaft. In one corner, a series of chalk drawings depicts a landscape of miniature grain elevators, connected to the ground by dense networks of roots. Among them, a faint inscription written in red letters reads City of Ghosts. Similar epithets have been assigned to Buffalo in past eras, gesturing toward the city’s economic prowess at the beginning of the twentieth century (Queen City of the Lakes) and later to its state of industrial decline (City of No Illusions). The present ascription, impromptu and anonymous, powerfully captures the poetic melancholia of Buffalo’s postindustrial landscape of decay and abandonment, a material condition that has come to be understood as characteristic of rust belt urbanism.1 A struggling city in a region marked by decline, Buffalo parallels in its historical trajectory many other former industrial centers in the northeastern US: from economic success to deindustrial depression, from bustling metropolis to shrinking city, from the progress narrative of modernity to postmodern abandonment and disintegration . Presently, the city is littered with the debris and ruins of its industrial past, and burdened with the effects of residential abandonment left behind as 64 CHAPTER 3 Figure 3.1 “City of Ghosts,” inscription inside the Marine A grain elevator at Silo City, Buffalo, 2015. Photo credit: Julia Tulke. the city lost more than half its population since the 1950s. Within this spatial constellation, abandoned structures occupy the imaginary geography of the city as the “living dead who endlessly haunt the landscape, preventing it from ever becoming peaceful again.”2 Along with a number of other rust belt cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh , Buffalo has in recent years been implicated in a process of economic and cultural revitalization. According to this “rust belt revival,” the ruptured spaces of former industrial centers are regaining significance as sites of innovation , aestheticization, and commodification: “Old industrial towns are realizing that they have a vital asset: cheap property. Disused mills and warehouses , with their high ceilings and exposed bricks and beams, can make attractive homes and workspaces for knowledge workers.”3 This narrative has a strong hold in Buffalo, where websites such as Buffalo Rising document the civic ambition that is carrying the aspirational revitalization of the city.4 As of 2019, the slogan “Keep Buffalo a Secret,” which has been printed on T-Shirts and given a permanent presence in the city through a mural on Main Street, captures this burgeoning energy and new-found confidence in Buffalo.5 Yet, as critical voices such as local blogger and photographer David Torke have noted, this development is a highly uneven “tale of two cities .”6 Another observer describes, “One half has been reborn like a phoenix [18.116.62.45] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:37 GMT) OF SILO DREAMS AND DEVIANT HOUSES 65 from a graveyard of industrial ash—experiencing an economic and cultural resurgence that has transformed many previously barren areas into bustling centers of commerce and entertainment. Yet the other half sits in a state of utter disrepair—its streets manifest a palpable level of poverty, blind to the recovery and optimism growing across town.”7 Taking this critical perspective on rust belt revitalization as a point of departure, this chapter offers a close reading of what I call Buffalo’s uneven geographies of abandonment. I will stage a dialogic encounter between two specific sites, the abandoned grain elevators scattered along the Buffalo River, and Buffalo’s East Side, a neighborhood marked by residential abandonment, tracing the following questions: How do the two sites figure within the imaginaries of Buffalo’s past, present, and future? Which sites are folded into the narrative trajectory of rust belt revivalism, and which remain excluded? How are political power and precarity distributed differentially in both contexts? Based on an ethnographic approach, I discuss the postindustrial landscape of Buffalo as both a material condition for everyday life and a site of affective and symbolic attachment. As a case study of a prototypical rust belt city, this chapter analyzes the politics and poetics of abandoned space within the...