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 a massive grain port, receiving wheat from Midwestern farms via the Great Lakes. Cereal and flour companies blossomed, and…
In 1950, a wrecking crew spent six months tearing down a 5-story office building in Buffalo, New York. The demolition took so long that the Buffalo Evening News remarked the building “was built to stand forever.” It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first major commercial commission, and today, all that remains of it is a single…
On March 29, 1926, more than 3,000 people gathered in downtown Miami to celebrate the opening of a new 15-story tower built for the city’s real estate industry. Over the next few decades, the building would house an illegal gambling operation, an office for the American Nazi Party, and eventually nothing at all but squatters,…
In downtown Richmond, a 14-story tower built in 1923 that once anchored one of Virginia’s largest banks is being torn down to make way for a new courts building. The Pocahontas Building has stood at 900 East Main Street for more than a century, but as of August 2026, its demolition is in progress despite…
Horace Tabor made his fortune in silver, and in 1881 he decided Denver needed an opera house worthy of the city’s growing prosperity. The Tabor Grand opened that year at 16th and Curtis Streets, and opening night newspapers described it as “perfection.” More than $800,000 went into the building, an enormous sum for the time…
The southeast corner of Fourth and Vine Streets in Downtown Cincinnati has featured something significant for most of its history. In 1859, Samuel Pike built one of the country’s most ambitious opera houses there, but it burned down in 1866. He rebuilt it, even grander than before, but it burned again. As of the early…
By the 1880s, Denver’s 17th Street had established itself as the financial center of the region, earning it the nickname of the Wall Street of the Rockies. Major banking institutions, brokerage firms, and law firms lined the corridor, and the multi-story commercial buildings that housed them gave the street a dense, canyon-like character that was…