Architectural preservation is playing a key role in the city's renewal.All photos courtesy Paul Clemence

After 60 years of unrelenting decline, Buffalo is prospering in ways few would have predicted even five years ago. The population has finally stabilized, as children of the suburbs move into repurposed factories and Gilded Age hostelries. Since January 2013 alone, the metropolitan unemployment rate has dropped almost two full percentage points.

It is hard to believe now, but less than a century ago, Buffalo was among richest cities on the planet, with more millionaires per capita than any other place in America. And they used their wealth to hire the starchitects of the age—Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frederick Law Olmstead, Daniel Burnham, Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Remarkably, Buffalo has consciously decided to deploy this architectural heritage to drive the city's renewal—and attract visitors like me.

Downtown Buffalo, seen from above

Buffalo is using its great buildings "to counter the conventional storyline about Buffalo as a city in irreversible decline and to tangibly, visibly demonstrate that this city has a future—one built on a truly impressive armature of great American buildings and city planning," says Edward J. Healy, vice president of Visit Buffalo Niagara......Continue Reading

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