Peter H. Christensen (editor) - Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism

Peter H. Christensen

On September 5, 1901, Buffalo, relishing its new moniker as The City of Light, emblematized the ascendant and prosperous American city. The city had risen to the status of Americas eighth largest city, its peak, behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland.

One of the gems flanking the tower was the so-called Temple of Music, a concert hall and auditorium designed by the architects August Esenwein and James Johnson that served as the expositions main staging ground for all its large public performances and speeches. The ornate, if stylistically confused, building was also draped amply in lights, gleaming at night for all to see and boasting, like the Electric Tower, of Buffalos ample supply of electric power at a time when electrification was both exciting and synonymous with modernity. On that early fall day, William McKinley, a popular US president credited with bringing the American economy back from crisis several years earlier and into its second gilded age (replete with new colonial holdings like Puerto Rico and the Philippines), delivered a speech on tariffs and foreign trade. In it, McKinley, responding to the fairs hemispheric purview, outlined a vision of a United States that would lead not only its own people but its neighbors in the Americas into a new century of power and prosperity. Like the Electric Tower, the country was to act as a beautiful beacon. His vision, projected out from Buffalo to the rest of the world at the dawn of the twentieth century, is one that would come true, at least for the United States. Buffalo, at the geographic crossroads of Americas agricultural, financial, and political power, marked also the United States chronological crossing from an upstart nation with growing pains into a country that confidently assumed the role of the worlds greatest political power.

Amid the throngs of visitors, however, not all was bathed in light and economic optimism. One visitor, Leon Czolgosz, the child of first-wave Polish immigrants, himself a devout Catholic and a steelworker from Michigan, had lost his job from the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company in the economic crash of 1893. Czolgosz was unable to find sufficient support in the church and developed an interest in radical socialism and ultimately anarchism. On September 6, the day after McKinleys speech, Czolgosz traveled to the exhibition grounds with a.32-caliber revolver to find McKinley on a greeting line at the Hall of Music. At 4:07 p.m., McKinley extended his hand to Czolgosz, which Czolgosz slapped aside before shooting the president in the abdomen twice at point-blank range. McKinley would die eight days later in a Buffalo hospital, to be succeeded as president by Theodore Roosevelt. On October 29 Czolgosz was electrocuted by three eighteen-hundred-volt jolts at nearby Auburn prison. It was hoped that this spectacle of electricity, seen by far fewer people but followed by many in the news, would bring cold comfort to a grieving nation.

In Buffalo, the horrible event cast a dark pall over the City of Light. Margaret Creighton has noted that the citys newspapers and various voices from the Buffalo community had considered the assassination to be an assault on the city, as much as it was on the president. The growing American railway network and the rapid growth of Chicago, in particular, displaced much of the original economic power of the city. For the following decades good jobs in Buffalo went from being plentiful to being scarce. The quality and quantity of new construction and urban development declined, with some very important exceptions featured in this book. Buffalo, once at the crossroads of Americas geography and prosperity, was now at the intersection of the woes wrought by both deindustrialization and the growth of the suburbs. One could say that those, too, paralyzed Buffalo.

This book is a story about a representative city, not a delimited one. To this end, a fuller portrait of Buffalo must move beyond its relatively small city limits to tell the full story that the Erie Canal, hydroelectric power, international trade (particularly with Canada), and suburbanization play in the vicissitudes of the citys history. As such, this book is centered on both Erie and Niagara Counties from the eighteenth century to the present.