The 1872 Hopkins map of Buffalo reveals fascinating insights into the Hydraulics during the last throes of the Hydraulic Canal (built 1827) and the district’s transition to a center for large-scale manufacturing, connected by rail to the farthest reaches of the continent.
The location of the Hydraulic Canal is indicated by the 1872 map:
The same year the map was published, water reportedly stopped flowing altogether through the canal, a victim of technological change and two decades of neglect by the Buffalo Hydraulic Association. The canal was filled by 1882, closing an early chapter in the city’s manufacturing history. The stone walls of the canal may still exist, buried under a few layers of dirt and awaiting rediscovery.
One chapter was closing while another was being written. The Larkin Company built a small soap plant at 667 Seneca Street in 1876. By 1900 the firm was the third largest mail-order company in the world, occupying a sprawling factory complex of nearly two million square feet. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the the company’s Administration Building, one of Wright’s most influential works, in 1904. By 1915 an extensive ecology of rail-connected industries and warehouses had emerged adjacent to a convergence of three different rail corridors, present in the 1870s but not yet fully tapped by industry. In the forty years after the 1872 map was published, the Hydraulics had become an imposing capital of Machine Age architecture and technology.
The 1872 map communicates an embryo of a modern industrial precinct. (Visit this Flickr image to show a full map, courtesy of the New York Public Library, with added details and commentary.) The old water-powered mill district, Buffalo’s first manufacturing area, was dead or dying – only Noah H. Gardner’s tannery, the largest of the original water-powered mills built in the 1830s, is known to still have been operating. Tanneries, two breweries, a soap and potash factory, a steam forge, a slaughter house, and a fledgling retail corridor marked this peripheral district of post-Civil War Buffalo, but nothing yet on a monumental scale. The presence of a vast and growing rail network at the Hydraulics portended the developments to come.
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