History

Buffalo’s decision to build a new city hall in the late 1920s reflected the city’s confidence in its continued growth. The city had grown rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the strength of its position as a Great Lakes shipping hub and as the terminus of the Erie Canal, and its industrial base in steel, grain milling, and manufacturing had made it one of the wealthiest cities in the United States per capita by the 1920s. The commission for a new city hall was issued as the prosperity of the decade seemed likely to continue; by the time the building was completed in 1931, the Depression had changed those prospects dramatically.

The architects Dietel, Lord and Halliday produced a design that drew on the same Art Deco tower formula being employed in New York City and Chicago at the same moment — a limestone and terra cotta tower with setback profiles and a decorative program concentrated at the lower floors and the crown. The building’s exterior reliefs, carved in terra cotta, depict the industries and history of Buffalo in a visual narrative that covers the base of the tower and the entrance sequence: grain elevators, steel furnaces, canal boats, and indigenous peoples appear alongside allegorical figures of commerce and justice in a decorative program that runs continuously across the base of the tower.

Buffalo’s economic decline in the second half of the twentieth century — as Great Lakes shipping routes and steel production contracted — left the building as a monument to an era that had passed. The National Register listing recognizes both the quality of its Art Deco design and its significance as evidence of the ambitions of a now-diminished American industrial city. Recent decades have seen investment in the preservation of Buffalo’s extraordinary stock of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture, of which City Hall is the centerpiece.