The history of Western New York is rich with innovation, extending back to the early nineteenth century:  Buffalo was the first city to establish a free public school system (Lockport, 30 miles northeast, was the first to organize a union school district);  Maria Love, an Episcopalian in Buffalo, founded the first daycare in 1881 and the Visiting Nurse Association was founded here in 1885.  Eden manufactured the first metal kazoo; LeRoy is the birthplace of JELL-O, and Buffalo is the birthplace of the now-famous Buffalo chicken wings.  Buffalo's origin as a thriving transportation and industrial center point to what it has become today:  a longstanding home to creativity, culture, and design.

Buffalo is New York's second largest city.  Tradition tells us that its name derives from the French description of the Niagara River:  beau fleuve (beautiful river).  With a population of about 275,000, Buffalo combines the cultural richness and ethnic diversity of a large city with the sense of community one finds in a small town.  It doesn't take long to discover why it is called "The City of Good Neighbors."

Buffalo's foundations date to 1804, when Joseph Ellicott completed plans of the Village of Buffalo for the Holland Land Company.  Although the city was almost destroyed during the War of 1812, the map of present-day downtown remains similar to Ellicott's original layout.  The system of major arteries radiating from a central hub-what is now Niagara Square-was copied from the design of Washington D. C.  With postwar reconstruction, Buffalo's economy and future prospects were revived by the 1820s, due in no small part to its selection in 1822 as the western terminus of the Erie Canal.

1833 Lighthouse and Buffalo Harbor entrance

The largest undertaking of its time in American civil engineering, the Erie Canal opened in 1825 with fanfare and excitement.  Stretching from Albany to Buffalo, the inland canal made it possible to travel to New York City by water, expediting both freight shipments and passenger travel with dramatically lower costs.  It was to make Buffalo, incorporated in 1832, one of the country's major transportation hubs.   It also led to one of the most important innovations of the time:  Joseph Dart created the first steam-powered grain elevator in 1841, making it possible to unload 1,000 bushels of grain per hour and thereby radically reducing the port time of cargo boats. Buffalo became the nation's largest grain port.

Buffalo led other industries with commercial innovations throughout the nineteenth century.  Brewing was a budding industry beginning in the 1860s.

Darwin D. Martin house

Architectural innovation characterized much of Buffalo's growth during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral was designed in 1849 by the renowned architect Richard Upjohn.  The Buffalo Gas and Light Company, the first gas company in New York, was also established mid-century, which allowed Buffalo's streets to be illuminated at night.  To offset the increasing congestion of the burgeoning city, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York City, worked from 1868-1898 on an elaborate interlocking system of parks and parkways that continue to provide islands of tranquility amid Buffalo's industrial traffic.

In 1901, the centerpiece of Olmsted's landscaping, Delaware Park, became the site of the Pan-American Exposition.  Buffalo was able to fend off bids from other cities largely because of the flow of electricity from Niagara Falls, twenty miles to the north, beginning in 1896.   Attracting nearly eight million people to Buffalo, the fair featured the latest technological innovations, including an Electric Tower that was illuminated by night with thousands of colored bulbs.  Another innovation on display at the exposition was a two-horsepower "horseless carriage" driven by entrepreneur and businessman George Pierce.

After the fair Pierce's newly opened automobile company, the Pierce Arrow Motor Company, became popular in Buffalo and throughout the United States, and car manufacturing soon became an integral aspect of Buffalo's commerce and trade.  In 1917, a Buffalo theatre manager named John R. Oishei formed a partnership to market an invention by an electrical engineer in Buffalo that would become the first automated windshield wiper; incorporated in 1921, Trico (now a subsidiary of Stanton Corporation) remains the world's largest manufacturer of windshield wiper systems.  The aerospace and steel industries developed alongside the automotive industries.

During both World Wars, Buffalo's economy prospered with its expanding steel, automotive, aerospace, and ship-building industries, and the city became a thriving hub for retail and wholesale distribution.  A number of important architectural and cultural projects were realized as a byproduct of the city's success.  One, the Kleinhans Music Hall, completed in 1940, is regarded as one of the most acoustically perfect music halls in the world. (St. David's Episcopal Church in West Seneca was designed by the same architect.)  Another, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, houses one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary art anywhere in the world.

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