Towering

The other day I posted this shot to the Buffalo-centric Reddit, and it got some praise (yay!) as well as generating some discussion of Buffalo’s downtown and whether Buffalo is a beautiful city or not. I didn’t get too far into those discussions, but it should be pretty obvious from my general content here that I fall squarely in the “Buffalo is beautiful” camp, even if Buffalo is an often maddening place.

One interesting side discussion happened, though, when a user quipped that you could take the three tall buildings pictured here–Seneca One Tower, Main Place Tower, and the Liberty Building–and stack them up to make one super-tall and there would still be 73 buildings in NYC taller than that. Someone asked how they had time to look that up, and the person who made the quip admitted that they made it up.

But it feels true, as someone who lives here and has been there.

Well, I was not one to let an intriguing idea pass me by, so I did the math and looked things up.

Seneca One Tower is 529 feet tall. Main Place Tower is 350 feet tall. The Liberty Building is 333 feet tall. (I took these heights right off Google, so I’m assuming they’re correct, or at least very close. I did not do any serious verification.) Add that all up, and you get a supertall building that’s 1,212 feet tall.

Off I went then to Wikipedia, which contains a nice and useful list of NYC buildings by height. It turns out that there are only eight buildings in NYC that would be taller than a supertall made by sticking the Liberty Building on top of Main Place Tower, and then sticking that on top of Seneca One. The shortest of the eight buildings is none other than the Empire State Building.

I looked this up out of curiosity, not out of any desire to mock the person who made the quip…and it did point out something about downtown Buffalo that I think profoundly illustrates something key about the local economy and what things have been like in Buffalo for decades. On Buffalo’s own list of tallest buildings, we see that Main Place Tower and the Liberty Building are, respectively, fourth and fifth locally for height. (Two and three are the Rand Building and Buffalo City Hall.) Seneca One, originally called Marine Midland Center for Marine Midland Bank, was built in 1972…which means that while there have been newer buildings erected in downtown Buffalo since then, the skyline’s maximum height has not budged in more than fifty years. It’s a symbol, in a lot of ways, of the largely static nature of Buffalo’s local economy since the steel and manufacturing dried up in the 1970s.

Am I clamoring for new construction? Well, downtown could certainly use it. Obviously right now there is no need for anything taller than Seneca One, but downtown Buffalo is a mishmash of wonderful old buildings on mothballs, newer buildings on their own plazas, and way more parking lots than the city really needs.

But yes, I would like to see some new towers being built in a Buffalo that had enough economic activity to fill them. That would be a nice thing to see.