The Connecting Terminal Elevator

The Connecting Terminal Elevator stands on the west side of the City Ship Canal just upstream from its meeting with the Buffalo River. The present facility is the second elevator built there. The first, built in 1882, was destroyed by fire in 1914 after serving as one of the largest wooden elevators on the waterfront, with storage capacity of nearly one million bushels. Its loss left the city without enough grain elevators to handle the massive grain loads bound for Buffalo, so its owner, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, immediately moved to replace it with a concrete structure. Concrete offered strong fireproofing, helped keep grain dry, and protected it from rodents. Harry R. Wait, who designed many of Buffalo's concrete elevators including the Concrete Central, designed the new elevator. Its slip form construction method, in which the form was raised by jacking rods as the tower was poured, allowed quick construction. The Connecting Terminal received its first grain shipment in February 1915 and had a capacity of just over one million bushels. In 1954, an annex was built slightly south of the existing structure, adding more than 600,000 bushels of storage, and this addition was the last concrete elevator built in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New York · United States