Today’s urban scene of the week (er, scene of the month?) brings us to 567 Exchange Street, an alluringly spare, rustic loft building at the banks of Buffalo’s most historic and longest-enduring rail line, the Buffalo & Attica, first built in 1843 and later subsumed into the New York Central rail empire that connected the city to New York, Chicago, and the vast reaches of the continent beyond.

The four-story structure was not constructed at this site in 1900 for no reason. The Buffalo Lounge Co., for which the building was erected, chose this precise location because of the geography of the Hydraulics at the intersection of several rail lines, including the Erie and New York Central. The Buffalo Lounge Co. was directly linked to both lines via a rail bed that once existed behind the building. Read the rest of this entry »

The best public view of the Hydraulics, where nearly every major industrial building can be witnessed in a single, striking panorama, is from the Hamburg Street bridge looking east over Exchange Street. Read the rest of this entry »

Meteor Alley is one of the whimsically named spaces of Buffalo. Running over a two-block stretch parallel to North and South Division streets between Emslie and Lord, it is also one of the cool, hidden spots of the Hydraulics. Meteor Alley, renamed in 1893 from Anderson Alley to avoid confusion with Anderson Place, still has a pretty cosmic feel.

While the reason the name “Meteor Alley” was chosen is lost to history, it’s established that typically the City polled residents on a name choice. Perhaps kids in the neighborhood, fresh off reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, insisted it would be a neat idea, and their preferred name change prevailed. Either way, meteors and meteor showers invigorated the fascination of the public in the 1890s, as scientific theory on their nature and origin advanced considerably. The renaming of the space to “Meteor Alley” would have been very timely. Read the rest of this entry »