St. Lawrence Seaway at 50: A bypass for Buffalo’s port
Seaway allowed ships to avoid a stop in Buffalo
In the shadow of Bethlehem Steel’s empty coke ovens and the new towering windmills generating electricity, the crew of the Port of Buffalo was busy loading limestone onto a ship last week.
The freighter was one of the 25 to 30 vessels that dock each year at the privately owned port, which handles about 600,000 tons of bulk material a year.
About 20 miles across Lake Erie, nearly 33,000,000 tons of cargo passed through the Welland Canal in 2008, much of which once had to pass through Buffalo’s bustling port.
It was 50 years ago this week, on June 26, 1959, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II dedicated the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the course of Buffalo history changed forever. Today, area community leaders and shipping experts continue to wrestle with how Buffalo can capitalize on its water access for the next 50 years. (Click here to post your comments about the city's waterfront.)
Buffalo once was the eastbound transshipment center for the Great Lakes. Hundreds of freighters carrying grain and other commodities from the Midwest had to stop here to unload their goods, which were shipped by rail or down the state Barge Canal to ports on the East Coast.
Talk of a seaway connecting Great Lakes heavy industry to the ocean had been discussed for more than a century before its opening. While many industry leaders in Buffalo vehemently opposed the idea, when it became inevitable, they took an optimistic approach, saying the Seaway would make Buffalo a large, international seaport.
“Smart men will see the potential here and move in, and 10 years from now Buffalo will enter a period of great growth,” said Melvin Baker, chairman of National Gypsum, in a 1955 Newsweek series “Our New Inland Empire of the Sea.”
But those plans never materialized. Instead, most of the large ships that once had to stop in Buffalo continued on through the Welland Canal, which was built in 1932 but became a thoroughfare with the Seaway’s completion, to the ocean.
Canada invested more into the project to begin with: The canal cost $330 million in 1959 dollars for Canada, and the U. S. spent $145 million. Canada continues to use it more too: in 2008, 53 million tons of cargo came in and out of Canadian ports, versus 22 million tons in American ports, according to Seaway statistics.
Jennifer Nalbone, campaign director of navigation and invasive species for the Great Lakes United coalition, said only 7 percent of all current Seaway traffic comes and goes overseas, and that total tonnage has been declining since 1977.
“There were a lot of promises made,” Nalbone said. “With hindsight, it seems to have changed the way goods moved instead of bringing this new prosperity.”
Nancy Alcalde, spokeswoman for the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp., said it is not surprising that many ships chose the seaway over transferring goods in Buffalo due to cost.
“The Seaway acknowledges that the loss of Buffalo’s transshipment traffic delivered a significant economic blow to the port and indirectly to city revenues.” she said in an email. “Change, however, has long been accepted as the sole constant in commerce.”
Nowhere was that change more dramatic than in the city’s grain industry.
“You could take grain all the way from Duluth to Europe,” said Robert Gilham, a ship surveyor at the port since 1983. “That’s what you couldn’t do here.”
According to the Corn Exchange of Buffalo, the total bushels of grain exported by railroad from Buffalo plummeted from 59 million in 1956-1957 to 802,000 in 1968-1969.
Many former grain scoopers experienced the decline first hand.
Bob Grande still sees the elevators he once scooped for on daily walks by the Erie Basin Marina. The 72-year-old, who lives in the Marine Drive apartments, worked at least part time as a scooper from 1969 to 1998. He said there were boats unloading grain every day when he started, but that soon started to decline and, by the end, he spent more time painting houses than scooping.
He described the job as “dusty, dirty and dangerous,” and said the dust would get in his eyes and his throat. But he also said the scoopers were a close knit bunch who stuck up for each other.
“Sometimes I think about it and how it was,” he said. “I didn’t miss it at the end because it was hard work.”
The decline in grain and shipping also affected Vic Noonan, who towed ships in the Buffalo harbor as tugboat deckhand and captain from 1954 through 1994.
“I am the last of the Mohicans, the last of the old timers,” Noonan, 82, said.
Noonan used to tow ships up the Buffalo River, down the Black Rock Canal, near Sturgeon Point and onto the Bethlehem Steel grounds. He occasionally worked 16 hour days, and even pulled two 32-hour shifts in his career.
The basement of his Eden house is full of pictures, scrapbooks and articles of the ships he used to tow. During his first winter on the job, about 64 freighters anchored at the harbor. Noonan’s trips downtown are filled with memories of the bygone era.
“On a sunny day, I think, gee, I wish I was down there, towing a ship,” he said.
Although the Seaway devastated shipping and some industries in Buffalo, many other factors were at work that helped bring about the city’s industrial decline.
Michael McCarthy, president of the Lower Lakes Marine Historical Society, said technology advances made slaughterhouses, tanneries and dye factories obsolete. A lack of homegrown companies, heavy labor costs, and increased foreign competition also contributed to the loss of the city’s heavy industry.
“Times change, and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it,” McCarthy said.
But a vestige of Buffalo’s grain glory days remains. Grain is still shipped into General Mills, Archer Daniels Midland, and the Lake and Rail Elevator, where Whitebox Commodities of Minnesota began storing grain last year.
Greg Stevens, president of Riverwright LLC, said the demand for grain storage is up, due to increased efficiency and production in the Midwest.
His company, founded in 2005, has options on seven Buffalo grain elevators. Stevens and chairman Rick Smith have plans to store corn and other materials to convert them into biofuel in the coming decade. They see the grain elevator district as a prime location for production.
“We’re trying to get Buffalo in the forefront of the clean energy revolution by using our very large logistical advantage,” he said.
Port of Buffalo Director Jim Pfohl said the port handles shipments of coal, limestone, petroleum coke, and other raw materials for local companies, including the AES Somerset power plant. It also has spent the last several years receiving the wind turbine parts assembled throughout the area.
Alcalde, of the Seaway corporation, said the turbine parts are too large to be shipped any other way.
“As our economy diversifies, so too will the traffic on the Seaway,” Alcalde said.
Shipping in large containers, instead of bulk, might give Buffalo an advantage too.
“Ports in Western New York are well poised to play a role in the container shipping business,” she said.
John Austin, director of the Great Lakes Economic Initiative for the Brookings Institution, said the current clean energy legislation in Congress might increase taxes on fossil fuels and carbon. Those costs would trickle down to the truck industry, which might make shipping a more viable transportation option among the Great Lakes.
“The share of our nation’s wealth that comes from the Great Lakes was and still is absolutely huge,” Austin said.
But he emphasized that Great Lakes shipping will never again reach the level of its 1950s zenith, in part because the manufacturing base that once supported the shipping has since declined.
“You’re never again going to see the era where shipping things over water was the main source of economic activity,” he said.
Instead, he said cities should focus more on converting former brownfields and industrial areas into prime waterfront real estate.
In the shadow of the grain elevators in the city’s Old First Ward, those redevelopment efforts are taking shape.
Peg Overdorf, 54, executive director of the Valley Community Association, has lived in the same house there all her life. She remembers the bustling neighborhood as a kid, but sees benefits, like a cleaner river, to living there today.
“Years ago you come to the water and it was a cesspool,” she said.
She sees the neighborhood making a comeback, but in different ways.
“It’s taken a long time, but it’s happening,” she said.
Two parks, a boat launch, restaurant and amphitheater are all in the works along the shore of the Buffalo River. The “Waterfront Memories and More” museum on Elk Street opened last year, and riverside apartments are planned too.
The Buffalo Industrial Heritage Committee has offered tours of the Buffalo River and the giant grain elevators that line its shores for 23 years, proving that people remain interested in the story of Buffalo’s shipping heyday.
“There is a lot of interest in what was,” Overdorf said, “And that may be what will be.”
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