What Happened to Buffalo? | Grain Elevators, Beef on Weck & the Rise and Fall of an American City

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]out of my carowway seeds came off. All right, so I put a buttload more on here.

[00:00:04]>> In this episode, I take you on adventures with horseradish.

[00:00:10]>> Invented the grain elevator.

[00:00:11]>> A ride to see giant grain elevators >> as had been done for >> and we take a look at where Buffalo went wrong and what we could do to make this place better. Oh yeah, and did I mention beef on whack? It's not just and sliced with some rotary. And there goes all this radish.

[00:00:44]Buffalo is a beautiful place. I can imagine what this must have looked like when the first French explorers came through here in the 1600s.

[00:00:54]uh minus the skyscrapers of course.

[00:00:59]The lake surface is like glass. The fishermen are already coming out and it really is an amazing location with the most stupendous freshwater supply. Now, keep in mind this is a slightly different place during wintertime that looks like the Arctic in January.

[00:01:25]But take a walk down here and you can see the evidence of what happened to this place.

[00:01:45]Half the people are gone and half of the jobs that built this place are gone, too.

[00:01:56]So the question is, what happened to buffalo?

[00:02:01]Did it kill itself or did something else kill it? The Great Lakes and the canal made this place a natural stopping off place for people who were heading west, making this location perfect for a young city to grow.

[00:02:21]So, what happened to Buffalo? Did we kill ourselves with crime, high wages, and bad choices?

[00:02:31]Was it outside influences beyond our control? Who or what is to blame?

[00:02:43]Our story begins here. Anthropologists will tell you that to understand a people, you need to understand how they eat. And in the case of buffalo, it begins with a sandwich.

[00:03:07]>> I've been here for about three probably going on four years now.

[00:03:11]>> Yep. Most of them when they come out, we'll have a well done to medium well in the back like judging by it and then just take all this extra stuff off, all the skin and fat.

[00:03:20]>> And so how do you guys cook these? You cook them in the back and then >> um Yeah, we have we have a cook that cooks them in the back. I'm pretty sure they're cooked overnight to like a certain temperature and then they're in a hold and they just stay at that temperature. Yep. We just pull them out of there, >> right?

[00:03:35]>> Cool. All right.

[00:03:40]And finally, it's time for me to sit and eat the sandwich made for me. Remember, like Anthony Bourdain said when he ate here with my friend Zamir, handcarved beef is better because it doesn't change the level of dness of the meat.

[00:03:59]So, I'm here at Travels today trying out the famous beef on wet and it's authentic in the sense of it's actually buffalo. So, come on in. And uh thanks for delivering food. Oh, look at this.

[00:04:13]And we got German potato salad, right?

[00:04:16]And uh then we got our roast beef.

[00:04:20]So, one of the things that I love about the roast beef is it's cut thick.

[00:04:32]So, it's not just thin sliced with some rotary kind of machine.

[00:04:38]I like that because I like stuff that's a little more well substantive. Uh if you got bad teeth, maybe not so much. Um but one of the things about the history of beef on wack is this is protein. This is working food. This is something you eat before you go out to the grain mills or loading uh trains, unloading trains at the dock. With no further ado, I think I'll uh try it.

[00:05:14]What I love about this I shouldn't say love.

[00:05:20]Yeah, I should say love. I love this because it's substantial and the kummel roll has the chunks of salt and the carowway seeds in it and it's just for me I guess you call it comfort food but it's real working man's food. That tradition goes back to the German immigrants who came here as early as the 1840s, but a lot of them came in uh 1840s,50s and60s and they brought with them their old world traditions.

[00:05:53]This being one of them. If you think about what Buffalo is in its essence was working class, this was a city filled with factories. You would walk down and see the smoke stacks dotting the horizon and church steeples. And that working class was what really built this city.

[00:06:16]So many people say the great men that built this tall building or that tall building, the important man. It was the common man that made this place great.

[00:06:30]Top that off with some local beer. In this case, flying bison.

[00:06:37]This place is more than just these sandwiches.

[00:06:42]Real German potato salad.

[00:06:45]And this is something that you really can't get anywhere else in town that I know of is it's it's homemade.

[00:06:52]To me, sandwiches like this and meals like this represent the quintessential industrial factory worker. That is what we found historically here in Buffalo.

[00:07:05]It was something that got you through the day in a cold winter environment such as working on the docks, unloading trains, loading trains. The beef on wet is Buffalo's most legit food, not the chicken wing. And it goes back more than 100 years.

[00:07:24]This sandwich fed Buffalo's working men, and in turn, they transferred the grain and forged the steel that made this city great.

[00:07:36]Buffalo wasn't just a city. It was a choke point, a machine, and it worked.

[00:07:45]And it all started with a ditch in the ground called the Eerie Canal.

[00:07:54]Speaking of canals, a few weeks ago I was in Amsterdam where I got an idea after unexpectedly wandering the streets there for a few days.

[00:08:06]And a week later, I found myself in Seattle riding the public transit direct from the airport into the city.

[00:08:16]It was simple, not intimidating, >> easy.

[00:08:22]And when I got back to Buffalo, that inspired me to try something I haven't done in years.

[00:08:36]>> This is harder.

[00:08:39]>> I thought, >> well, we'll see how this goes.

[00:08:43]>> Well, seeing the comedy of me trying biking for the first time in decades got me thinking.

[00:08:51]Could we make my hometown of Buffalo or any American city for that matter a more bicycle friendly city like Amsterdam?

[00:09:01]Can it be done? Maybe that's what this place needs.

[00:09:06]But we'll talk about that a little more a little later.

[00:09:11]Like most cities, Buffalo was built here because of one thing, water.

[00:09:19]Today I'm riding with my friend Mark and local historian Tim Talman, who's planning to teach me a few things about Buffalo's largest landmarks, the grain elevators. During uh the 19th century after Joseph Dart invented the grain elevator in 1842, you would store grain as had been done for uh quite some time in wooden bins.

[00:09:48]>> Oh.

[00:09:49]>> And uh the the problem with the wooden bins was that you know gradually number one they were susceptible to moisture.

[00:09:58]You're dealing with grain dust which is explosively flammable.

[00:10:03]>> Yeah. It's also spontaneously combustible.

[00:10:05]>> This is a great illustration of a marine tower. The marine leg, you know, hidden behind those hinge doors here. And then it was built in, you can see it was built in two phases. This is the earlier phase, that's the later phase. And then the installation of the vacuum system which rendered the uh grain scooping obsolete.

[00:10:28]>> Oh, okay. So that silvery pipe is the vacuum.

[00:10:32]>> Yeah.

[00:10:33]>> So they don't need the right buckets.

[00:10:35]>> And you can see you can see here these are multimodal facilities. So of course lake freigherss can come in, canal boats can come in and also railroad cars. And the railroad cars are very handy um during uh the winter time >> when navigation that keeps the supply going. Yeah.

[00:10:54]>> So um these uh elevators could store uh you know in total over 300 million bushels of grain and each of those bushels >> yeah each of those bushels could do you know 50 60 loaves of bread. So multiply that you could s supply the eastern seabboard with every household with a loaf of bread per day for you know uh months with just the storage capacity here. So here uh this is uh the lake and rail elevator built in uh four stages over a number of years but you can see how this works. Those marine towers go back and forth on rails and each of those could move 18,000 bushels of grain an hour. So you could turn around one of these ships in less than a day if it held 600,000 bushels.

[00:11:54]>> This is a truly wonderful place to be on a boat ride in the summertime with my friend Mark. And around the next bend is what was once the biggest baddest grain elevator in the world. It's called Concrete Central.

[00:12:17]There are no roads and no way to get to see this enormous structure except by water.

[00:12:25]And when you look at it, it's hard to explain just how big this thing really is.

[00:12:32]Video just doesn't do it justice.

[00:12:45]We live in an era that romanticizes our industrial past.

[00:12:52]We idolize the factory.

[00:12:55]We idolize the workers who spent their lives toiling inside them as part of this giant machine we call industry.

[00:13:07]But places like this are being relegated to the dust bin of time, abandoned and forgotten.

[00:13:16]To understand what Buffalo was, all you have to do is look around and you'll see these huge reminders of who we are based on who we were.

[00:13:28]Some of these things are obvious and sometimes you need to read a history book or hit up a website to understand some of the more subtle factors that affect this place.

[00:13:43]Now, don't get me wrong, Buffalo is not all bad. In fact, we're the city on the lake. It's great. We have amazing summers, colorful fall foliage, great sports teams, and even the wings of chickens to eat.

[00:14:03]Tender on the inside.

[00:14:06]I mean, if you think about it, eating only the wings of half a dozen chickens is kind of strange.

[00:14:14]>> That's part of what makes us great.

[00:14:17]>> And now we have an amazing variety of international foods brought to us from people from all over the world coming to settle here and opening up restaurants.

[00:14:29]>> Did I mention it's spicy?

[00:14:33]And the truth is that no ethnogastronomic analysis of this city would be complete without a visit to this place which is located right along the Eerie Canal in a little town called Tanowanda.

[00:14:48]>> So if you're in Buffalo, well this is actually Tanowanda.

[00:14:53]>> And on this stop I was in for a little bit of an overwhelming surprise. You come to this place, Swiston's Beef and Keg.

[00:15:03]>> You know, come to think of it, I should have called my friend Mark. It would have been handy to have him here right about now with his boat. And yes, I'm eating a second beef on wet for this show.

[00:15:18]>> I think it's because I really like it.

[00:15:20]Beef on wet is one of these things where you got to have the most important ingredient besides the roast beef. And that is horseradish. Pop the lid off here.

[00:15:34]And try not to make too much of a mess, but I want you to take a good look at that. So that is the stuff. And >> and you remember that surprise I told you about >> top of these rolls. so spectacular, you know, it's just something that you just don't see everywhere. And the salt takes a lot of getting used to, but I love these. I guess they're carowway seeds or rice seeds.

[00:15:59]Anyway, here's what you do.

[00:16:04]You take this stuff and you put it on here.

[00:16:10]note to everybody out here, horseradish, if you've never had it, is um kind of dangerous and that's why I like it.

[00:16:19]So, what I do, put it right on the top.

[00:16:22]This is probably a full teaspoon.

[00:16:24]Depending on how fresh it is. Oops, I just made a mess. I'll put that over there.

[00:16:31]It can make it difficult to eat.

[00:16:36]>> You squish it. And they a lot of times they'll put this toothpick in there to kind of keep it from sliding around on you. All right.

[00:16:44]As you see, a lot of my carowway seeds came off. All right. So, I put a buttload more on here.

[00:16:57]And there goes all this radish.

[00:17:03]Horseseradish.

[00:17:16]So horseradish hits you when you're not expecting it. It gets you here in your sinuses. Your eyes start watering.

[00:17:26]Your nose flares open. And I wouldn't call it a burning feeling, but when you eat it, you don't know what to do with yourself. you want to just run around in circles going I'm on. So don't get it confused with a hot sauce type thing. It's just something that only lasts maybe 10 seconds then it goes away and you feel like that's passed. But there's something rewarding about the experience of horseradish.

[00:17:54]I love it.

[00:17:57]And as for what really killed Buffalo, well, it was all of us, the human race, outside economic expansion, foreign competition that made products cheaper, and employee wages, and increasing taxes. But probably the biggest blow to our local economy was the opening of the Wellen Canal. Then we were hit by the decline of the auto industry in the 1970s and the 1980s caused by foreign competition and embargos.

[00:18:37]>> It was all of these things that drove the nails into the coffin holding buffalo's former glory.

[00:18:45]So yes, the buffalo I knew growing up is dead. It's gone. But that's just the past and it's not our future.

[00:18:56]Oh yeah, and I forgot to talk about that. Maybe part of our future could be in the ideas that I learned from visiting Amsterdam.

[00:19:06]Bicycles.

[00:19:09]They did it. Why can't we?

[00:19:13]>> This is harder. This is footage of me after I had just gotten back from my trip to Amsterdam and I went out on my bike for the first time in uh I don't know 30 years. Anyway, I don't know if this type of thing will work in Buffalo, but what I'm finding out is there are already bike lanes here on Niagara Street down by the Canadian border.

[00:19:40]There's lanes and everything.

[00:19:43]So, there's more going on here than I had thought. It's kind of cool.

[00:19:51]>> It's windy. It's cold.

[00:19:55]>> This is pretty wonky. I haven't ridden a bike in.

[00:19:58]>> And that is a reality of Buffalo. Yes, it gets cold in Amsterdam, but not cold like Buffalo.

[00:20:07]>> It's harsh.

[00:20:09]>> Temperature right now is probably 35°.

[00:20:14]And I'm feeling like a freaking fool talking to myself on this thing.

[00:20:20]>> Well, if nothing else, this whole adventure has got me out again on my bike. And uh I kind of like it.

[00:20:30]And that's the end of my test run.

[00:20:34]So I guess I'm asking myself, could bicycles work in Buffalo?

[00:20:44]35 years ago, I was a bicycle racer and I don't know, I gave it up for some reason. I guess the car was easier.

[00:20:55]But throughout Buffalo's history, we had canals that was part of the canal era.

[00:21:04]Then the railroads came in and that killed the canal.

[00:21:09]And then the highway system came in with trucking which hurt the railroad system.

[00:21:17]And then the automobile came in.

[00:21:21]But I see these bike paths and I gain heart.

[00:21:28]So maybe there is some chance for this despite our epic weather here, our blizzards.

[00:21:36]To find out more about the possibility of making Buffalo a more bike friendly city, I contacted Kevin Heferman. He's the interim director of a thing called Go Bike Buffalo. Biggest challenge is getting people out there to try it. You know, driving a car is comfortable and it's so comfortable that you're willing to tolerate all the frustration that comes with it. You know, it is always easier to get people to choose to walk and bike places in a city that was built before cars existed. And Buffalo is one of those places. It's possible that Buffalo can have better. It deserves better than what we have. And you look at Minneapolis, you look at Montreal, it snows there. And yet they ride, they walk, they take transit, and they drive.

[00:22:25]>> Yeah. Utra Netherlands, too. To top out our day, we took an early spring ride down a thing called the Niagara Street bike path. As we rode, I told him about my dad who taught me about bike riding.

[00:22:40]He rode his bike from Buffalo to the UB Amherst campus every day for 40 years.

[00:22:48]And while doing research for this episode, I learned about a thing called Bicycle Week, which started in the 1890s and ran all the way until the late 1920s.

[00:23:00]Buffalo was once a canal city like Amsterdam. It also had extensive train and trolley infrastructure.

[00:23:09]This was a city that had so many bikes moving around it that special police squads had to be set up to keep things safe. Can bicycles be brought back to the popularity like they were a century ago?

[00:23:24]Perhaps the better question is, do people want bikes back in Buffalo? What will it take to make Buffalo more of a bicycle city?

[00:23:36]And this thing that I'm riding on right now that we call Martin Luther King Park used to be a huge bicycle racing track a 100 years ago right here in our city.

[00:23:50]I must say we've come a long way since I was a kid here in the 1970s. I think there's so much more that we can do to make our public transportation more userfriendly and simple for tourists.

[00:24:05]like, you know, connecting that subway we have to the airport so that maybe we could just ride one train from the airport all the way downtown. You know, like I saw in Seattle.

[00:24:18]The bottom line is it's up to us to make it happen. That's if we really want it.

[00:24:28]Let us know in the comments your ideas that could help make Buffalo a better place.

[00:24:36]Thanks for watching.