Plans for future expansion, recorded in concrete projections at the eastern facade of the A & P Warehouse at 518 Hamburg Street, reveal optimistic prophesies of Buffalo’s continued industrial expansion from the early 20th century. The projections, forming a fine geometric pattern, are concrete supports for floor slabs of an expanded building that does not, and will likely never, exist.
The repetitive concrete stubs reveal an upbeat attitude about the city’s seemingly limitless economic growth, though an anticipated building expansion never came to pass. The building is the last, and only remaining, of eight warehouse structures constructed in the Hydraulics by the Keystone Warehouse Company from 1903 to 1917, when this building was completed.
The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a chain grocery known in Buffalo as A & P for short, was the long-term lease holder for the 250,000 sq. ft. warehouse, occupying the structure until the chain’s closure in 1975.
The Keystone Warehouse Company did make one final expansion long after the completion of A & P, indicative of changing economic fortunes in the Hydraulics and a regional deemphasis away from the central city. In 1958, the same year as the opening of the East Buffalo section of the Niagara Thruway, the company announced the construction of a new warehousing facility, but not in Buffalo: in Cheektowaga.
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