Bruce Jackson: “Killing a Grain Elevator: A Buffalo Crime Story”

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Bruce Jackson, an American photographer.  Bruce’s photographic, filmic, and written work over the last 60 years provides windows into prisons (notably Death Row and Killing Time), interactions with poets and creative writers, inquiries into folklore, and other social texts.

His films with Diane Christian include Death Row,which is archived on VASA’s platform for viewing (https://vasa-project.com/video/jackson/).  His contributions to the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology and the humanities is vast and consistent.

 

Killing a Grain Elevator: A Buffalo Crime Story

(Based on a talk at the opening of a photo exhibit—The Life and Death of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator—at the Buffalo History Museum, June 5, 2024. The talk and exhibit derive from text and images in The Life and Death of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator 1897-2023, SUNY Press, 2024).

This is as much a memorial service as it is a photo exhibit. A memorial to an important piece of Buffalo history, industrial history and architectural history forever, and

gratuitously, lost. It is a loss, as architectural historian Frank Kowski put it, on a par with the demolition in 1950 of Frank Lloyd 1906 Wright’s Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo to make room for as parking lot.

There are many people who, over the past 14 years, helped me understand the history, character and significance of Buffalo’s grain elevators. I want to name one in particular: Tim Tielman, not only for his help in this project but more for his unwavering dedication to saving the Great Northern. If they ever put up a plaque at that now-vacant site, like the ones they put up at battlefields where people needlessly died, Tim’s name ought to be inscribed on it.

 These photos

I thought I was through photographing Buffalo’s grain elevators when American Chartres: Buffalo’s Waterfront Grain Elevators was published in 2016. I’d taken all the photos I needed to document the grain elevators then; I’d written all I had to say about them.

By the time I finished that work, the scene was already changing: there was a bar (Duende) and new fences at Silo City, the group of elevators on Childs Street. The street had been renamed Silo City Row. And work had begun on Riverworks, what is now a huge entertainment complex that, in large part, makes use of several other grain elevators.

On December 11, 2021, a vicious winter wind blasted a hole in the brick curtain surrounding the Great Northern. When I went down to photograph, it was to get a post-script photo, just for me and for the group of prints that I’d one day give the Buffalo Historical Society.

At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Almost exactly the same thing had happened once before: in 1907 a similar chunk popped out of the south wall of the same brick curtain in an 87mph windstorm. It was repaired as soon as warm weather returned and that was the end of the matter.

But this time would be different, very different.

 THE BRICK CURTAIN

 The surviving Buffalo grain elevators show you what they are from the outside—the partial cylinders you see at Silo City and Riverworks are the exteriors of the actual silos. There are working spaces at the tops and bottoms, but nothing separates the concrete silos from the world.

The Great Northern was different. Its silos were made of steel and they were entirely hidden behind a brick curtain. That curtain served no structural function whatsoever. It supported nothing. Its only job was to keep foul weather away from the huge steel machine inside and the workers who tended it.

In Spring 2022, as I watched demolition crews destroy more and more of that brick curtain and began tearing away at the steel structure within, something seemed amiss. The huge machine that was being ripped apart seemed unlike the fragile structure described in the demolition stories I’d read online and in the Buffalo News.

Sometimes when I crossed the train tracks between Ganson Street and the Great Northern, and tried photographing through the chain link fence surrounding the whole complex, a security vehicle would appear from nowhere. Usually, the driver would just sit and stare at me. Sometimes the driver would shoo me away. They could chase me from the tracks and along the fence; they couldn’t keep me off Ganson Street, although sometimes one of the cars would pull up nearby and the driver would start the staring routine.

I got to know some people who were regulars there. They came to watch the
demolition. Two had worked in elevators in the area. They talked with sadness
about structures that had been demolished previously, and more sadness
about a way of life that was all but gone. There aren’t many of them left, but there are
people in Buffalo for whom a vital grain industry exists in living memory.

The more I watched the demolition, the more what I saw became inconstant with
news reports about the demolition order. The brick curtain that was said to be so fragile by Archer, Daniels, Midland consultants (ADM owned the Great Northern) and Buffalo city officials never fell and never collapsed. The bricks that came down after that December 11 failure were all pulled or knocked down. The huge steel elevator that the ADM consultants and Buffalo’s fire commissioner insisted was in precarious condition never gave way on its own; all the steel that came down was steel ripped from secure moorings. The workhouse atop it all that ADM’s consultants and Buffalo’s fire marshal claimed was supported by the brick curtain were obviously supported—as the preservationists had clearly documented
in court hearings and as had been noted by an earlier US Government report on the
Great Northern (it was in evidence)—by dozens of steel beams, all of them firmly
attached to the silos and anchored deep in the ground. You can see them in the
photographs.

Buffalo’s Great Northern Elevator was, when it was built in 1897, the largest grain elevator in the world. It was the first grain elevator powered by electricity. When it was torn down, its structural integrity was uncompromised. When its silos were ripped apart by a 165’ ultra-high demolition wrecking crane, the interior steel glistened in the sun: after 126 years, they were still watertight.

I read the documents, the reports, the court decisions. And I came to understand that what I was documenting with my camera wasn’t demolition of an unstable structure of no value whatsoever. I was documenting a methodical architectural murder. I wasn’t doing a photo series; I was working on a crime story.

These photos are some of what I saw; there are more of them in the book. The
book tells the story of what I learned. I’ll summarize some of that now.

GRAIN ELEVATORS

The modern grain elevator, with its movable marine leg, invented in Buffalo by
Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar in Buffalo in 1842, is a huge machine with a single
function: to move grain from one form of transportation to another, and, in the
process to keep it dry and free of vermin. Because of Dart’s and Dunbar’s
invention, which permitted rapid unloading of grain ships plying the Great Lakes,
and because of Buffalo’s location at the eastern end of Lake Erie and western end
of the Erie Canal, Buffalo was for a century, beginning in 1850, the largest grain
port in the world.

Steel elevators were a transitory phase in the world of grain elevators. They
replaced elevators made of wood, which had a propensity to blow up and burn
down. They preceded elevators made of reinforced concrete, which could be built more cheaply in less time. Reinforced concrete and steel elevators were amazingly stable. You can see a dozen of the former on Buffalo’s waterfront now. Most have received no maintenance of any kind for decades. The only time they come down is when they’re knocked down—as happened to the H-O Oats elevator in 2006 (it was destroyed to make room for a gambling casino parking garage that was never built) or part of the GLM complex (demolished in 2011 to make space for Riverworks’ skating rinks and bars), or when they are ripped apart, as happened to Buffalo’s Great Northern.

WHAT USE ARE THEY?

Some people involved in cultural affairs here loathed the grain elevators, all of
them. My late friend Robert Kresse, one of the directors of Buffalo’s largest
foundations, spent more than a million dollars of Wendt Foundation money
restoring the Roycrofters Inn in nearby East Aurora, but he insisted the elevators
were a Buffalo eyesore. It may be that some of the people who sought and
facilitated the demolition of the Great Northern are of that persuasion. We’ll never
know about that unless some choose to come out and tell us, which hasn’t yet
happened.

More people think they are of value but haven’t a clue what to do with them.
They’re so damned BIG.

Some grain elevators have been repurposed. That’s difficult and expensive; it
requires vision. But it can be done. In 2009, Baltimore’s Locust Point Grain
Elevator was converted to a gorgeous high-rise residential complex. On May 11,
2024, in Kristiansand, Norway, Kunstsilo opened. It houses the world’s largest
private collection of Nordic art. It is spacious—3 floors with 35,000 feet of
exhibition space. The very top provides a splendid panoramic view of the city.

The most cynical suggestion for preserving the Great Northern came from Ted
Kruse, president of ADM Milling, which owned the Great Northern. Kruse
published op-eds in the Buffalo News on January 21 and February 12, 2022. Both
attempted to justify the demolition. Both were full of untenable or arguable
assumptions and assertions: the Great Northern endangered citizens (it didn’t), it
was beyond repair (the elevator didn’t need repair), so (he insisted) the only
responsible action was demolition. “The best way to preserve the legacy of the
elevator, is to dismantle it and preserve artifacts that can be displayed in a museum
for members of the community and visitors to enjoy for years to come.” Enjoy? How nice. I haven’t been able to find out what or where these “preserved artifacts” or even if they exist. Kruse’s promise to sequester them is like the murderer saying,
“I saved you a kidney and a femur. Enjoy.”

But repurposing—seriously as in Baltimore and Kristiansand, or cynically as in
Krouse’s offer of probably nonexistent trinkets—isn’t the only answer to the
question: What is to be done with the elevators? And neither is it necessarily “the
best way to preserve the legacy of the elevator.”

A viable alternative is: do As little as possible. Make the most important of them as safe as possible for visitors and otherwise leave them alone. Many large architectural works—public, private, and industrial—are significant enough architecturally and historically to be preserved in their own right. Every preserved structure doesn’t have to DO something. Some can just BE. Nobody does anything athletic in Rome’s Coliseum, no one lives in the cliff houses of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon or Machu Picchu; no new internments have taken place in the Great Pyramid of Giza outside Cairo in over 4600 years.

TWO WORDS

Two words doomed Buffalo’s Great Northern grain elevator, both of them used
erroneously or disingenuously by three public officials. One is “emergency”; the
other is “reasonable”.

On December 15, 2021, four days after that fierce winter storm took out a section
of the northern part of the brick curtain surrounding the steel Great Northern Grain
elevator, James Comerford Jr, Buffalo Commissioner of Permit and Inspection
Services, received from Archer Daniels Midland a “Submission Concerning
Emergency Demolition Order Due to Safety.” It consists almost entirely of brief
statements that had been used in three earlier ADM attempts to demolish the Great
Northern—attempts that had been rebuffed by the Common Council and the
Buffalo Preservation Board. None of them involved actual inspection of the Great
Northern.

Two days after that, on December 17, Buffalo’s Fire Commissioner, William
Renaldo, writes Commissioner Comerford that the Great Northern is a fire hazard
(it wasn’t), at risk of immediate collapse (it wasn’t), and its movable marine towers
might topple at any time (they weren’t). It is, he writes, an emergency situation.
Bear in mind that Reynaldo knew so little about grain elevators that, when shown a photo of the Great Northern’s marine towers in court he identified them as “storage
containers.”

Reynaldo’s letter ends: “After reviewing aerial drone footage along with still
photos, the Buffalo Fire Department has determined that the risk versus reward is
simply too high and is therefore recommending that the building be taken down via
emergency demolition”.

The same day, Permits Commissioner Comerford issues a two-page “Notice of
Condemnation.” The primary justification he gives is the fire commissioner’s
letter.The word “emergency” is key. It appears only once in Comerford’s Condemnation
Notice, in the final sentence of the penultimate paragraph: “Due to emergency
conditions, we request that the ten-day notification be waved.”

That one word is what permitted Comerford and ADM and the city of Buffalo to
keep the entire case away from the city’s appointed Preservation Board.
There were voices for the Great Northern. Developer Douglas Jamal said the
structure was in far better condition than many he’d totally restored, and that the
only problem was maintenance neglect by ADM. Prominent architects wrote letters
about the elevator’s importance. A union urged a more thoughtful and considered
approach. A congressman offered tax breaks if ADM was interested in
preservation. The letters and the offer were ignored.

And there were court hearings. Campaign for Greater Buffalo History, Architecture
and Culture sued to block the demolition. State Supreme Court Judge Emilio
Colaiacovo got the case. At one hearing, he took testimony only from consultants for ADM. He ruled the demolition could go forward. A review court told him he had to hear from both sides before rendering a decision. He did that, then came to the same conclusion.
At another he said that he gave great weight to ADM’s paid consultant because that
consultant, he said, was objective, and that he gave little weight to the testimony of
one of Buffalo’s most prominent architects because that architect was biased. The
nature of the architect’s bias? He was interested in and actively advocated for
preservation of important works of architecture.

The judge used the word “rational”, or some variant of it, almost like a mantra. It
came up again and again in his opinions, many times in the same document. “…the
only issue before this court is whether Commissioner Comerford’s decision to issue
the emergency order had a rational basis.” he wrote. Elsewhere he wrote, “As previously noted, the Court’s decision rests squarely on whether there was a rational basis to the demolition order”

In his first ruling in the case (December 30, 2021), he wrote that the hearing he scheduled “will be limited to the issue of how the city reached its decision and,
specifically, whether the Commissioner had a rational basis for issuing the Order for the demolition. The authority to issue such an order is vested solely with the
Commission. As such, what other witnesses or experts would opine is of no moment.”

This is astonishing. The judge excludes from consideration the fact that the information Comerford had was wrong as was the justifying document, the fire commissioner’s letter, which is full of factual error and wild speculation. It excludes from consideration Comerford’s failure to amass adequate expert information before setting about making his “rational decision.” It excludes all information submitted in testimony about the stability and historical significance ofthe Great Northern. It excludes everything but John Comerford’s presumed state of mind on December 17, 2021.

While these court hearings dragged on, the Great Northern was still, other than that
hole in the north wall, in fine shape. In all those months, no chunks of wall fell, no
pieces of roof detached, no segments of steel separated. This was not like a murder
case, where all the facts are in the past. It’s not like those “stand your ground”
acquittals in the South: “I believed the ham sandwich in the black guy’s hand was a
gun so I shot him.”

In the case of the Great Northern, the gun hadn’t been fired yet. Commissioner
James Comerford’s demolition order was the equivalent of picking up the gun up.
It could not be fired—the building could not be destroyed—until Judge Emilio
Colaiacovo said it was okay to do so. Which, on September 15, 2022, nine months
after that December 11, 2021, winter storm, he did. Demolition began the next
day.

The Campaign for Buffalo History, Architecture & Culture and the Great Northern
Grain Elevator had their days in court, but they never had a chance.

WHAT THE GREAT NORTHERN SAID

I want to end this with “What the Great Northern Said,” the final text section of the
book:

The Great Northern is demolished; the tons of steel and millions of
bricks have been shipped elsewhere—the steel to be melted down and reused,
the brick to restore old brick buildings like the Great Northern or for new buildings trying for a certain look.

But, in a way, the building itself had the last word on all the self-
serving ADM reports, on Comerford, on the judge who sought reason but not
facts, on the fire commissioner who generated a key letter full of imagined
dangers.

In the ten months from December 11, 2021, to the commencement of
demolition on September 16, 2022, nothing happened. Even though that
gaping hole made the brick wall more vulnerable to wind, rain and snow, to
summer heat and winter cold than it had been since it went up 126 years
earlier, none of it fell to the ground; there were no reports of new cracks
appearing or old cracks widening. The cupola, which ADM and Comerford
insisted was supported by the brick wall didn’t tilt, slip or dip. If there really
was an emergency situation when Comerford signed his December 17, 2021,
demolition order, it slipped out of town in the dark of night.

And stayed out of town. During the eight months of demolition, the
only parts of the wall that fell to the ground were the parts that were knocked
or pulled down. The only parts of the steel elevator itself and the cupola
above it that fell to the ground were pieces that were ripped out by the 165-
foot crane.

The demolition was a noisy affair: in addition to the usual mechanical
noise from the mill and the honks and screeches from the geese and gulls,
there was the chatter and clanking of the 165’ Ultra High Demolition
Excavator tearing at the steel and two or three smaller devices moving the
torn steel pieces to mounds a hundred yards away, there were also the
screams and groans from the Great Northern itself as chunks of bent and
twisted steel were ripped from the elevator’s rivets and welds.
On April 3, 2023, there was another sound: a shriek, like the gulls, only
far louder. It wasn’t the chattering shriek of the gulls; it seemed anguished
and angry. It continued the entire time I was there that day, almost without
pause. It grew louder every time the UHD Excavator dropped a piece of steel
and moved back in for another bite of steel. I finally located it in the small portion of the cupola still standing. It was probably an eagle—the only bird around here capable of so loud a cry—protecting its eggs or nestlings. After all, what could be a safer place for a nest than the far corner of a space nearly 150’ above the ground that no human had visited for decades?

The final part of the elevator to come down was the south marine leg,
which the Fire Commissioner had insisted was in imminent danger of
toppling into the City Ship Channel. It crashed to the ground eleven minutes
after noon on April 26, 2023. It didn’t fall. Earlier that day, workers with
torches had cut large notches in the elevator’s east supporting beams. When
they were done, two thick steel cables attached to the upper part of the leg
were connected to two pieces of construction equipment to the north of the
elevator. The equipment backed up slowly. Pulleys let their northward motion
pull the cables attached to the marine leg eastward, toward Ganson street.
The time between the first of my photographs showing the tower beginning
to tilt and the last showing it on the ground with bits of metal and brick in the
air was six seconds.

When that tower came to ground there was the sound of a large crash.
No surprise there. But there was something else, a subsonic wave that I didn’t
hear, but felt in my bones, in my teeth. I don’t know if it moved through the
air or, like the subsonic rumble of some earthquakes, though the ground. I’ve
never felt anything like it; it was awesome, uncanny. My audio recording of
those last minutes has chatter among the dozen or so of us inside the barriers
on Ganson Street blocking traffic during the pull-down. After the crash there
are several seconds of silence, then someone says, “Wow!” Someone else
says “Yeah.” There is more silence, then the sound of vehicles as the barriers
are moved away and traffic resumes.

That was the Great Northern’s last word. If I had to translate it, it would
be something like this: “Those guys lied. They used all kinds of legal
maneuvers to get what they wanted and they got it. What are the rest of you
going to do to keep this kind of atrocity from happening again?”

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