Buffalo has lots of them – and great ones at that. Nicolai Ouroussoff in today’s NYT:

Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven not by Disney-inspired developers but by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city’s history a deeply personal mission. At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities. Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.

The city’s rise began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which opened trade with the heartland. By the end of the 19th century the city’s grain silos and steel mills had become architectural pilgrimage sites for European Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, who saw them as the great cathedrals of Modernity. In their vast scale and technological efficiency, they reflected a triumphant America and sent a warning signal to Europe that it was fast becoming less relevant.

Yet it is the parade of celebrated architects who worked here as much as the city’s industrial achievements that makes Buffalo a living history lesson. Daniel Burnham’s 1896 Ellicott Square Building, with its mighty Italian Renaissance facade, towers over the corner of Main and Church Streets. Just a block away is Louis Sullivan’s 1895 Guarantee Building, a classic of early skyscraper design decorated in intricate floral terra-cotta tiles.  Across town, Henry Hobson Richardson built his largest commission: the 1870 Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, composed of a pair of soaring Romanesque towers flanked by low brick pavilions. Light and air poured in through tall windows; spacious 18-foot-wide corridors were designed to promote interaction among the inmates, an idea that would be refined by Modernists in their communal housing projects decades later. But it was Wright who made the decisive leap from an architecture that drew mainly on European stylistic precedents to one that was rooted in a growing cultural self-confidence. Wright built two of those great pillars of American architecture here, the 1904 Larkin Building and the 1905 Darwin D. Martin House.

I’ve been a Buffalo fan since I got to experience its great architecture as a young visiting professor in the University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture in the early 1980s. Now combine this gift with the economic heft of the mega-region and there is a great deal of potential. The Bills are already playing some games in Toronto; cross-border trade and commerce is substantial. The economic crisis will likely spur once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure projects to connect the Canadian hubs of the mega-region – imagine a new super-high-speed tail line spanning Windsor, Toronto, and Quebec City. Is there a way to extend that kind of connectivity across the border to Buffalo and other U.S. cities? That could be just the spur that would activate the market for Buffalo’s tremendous history, authenticity, and quality of place.

Readers of the blog know I’m a huge Buffalo fan. Visiting the city on “homecoming” weekend, New York Magazine’s Adam Sternbergh tells us why that city and others like it – and no, not his adopted home of NYC – is the new frontier.

New York will always offer you the singular opportunity of testing yourself against the best, of sharpening yourself against the city’s fabled grindstone. Hopeful people will always scrape together their savings to come here, to split a one-bedroom apartment with five other people, whether that’s in Greenwich Village (then) or Bushwick (now). But New York, for all its mythology, is no longer a frontier. Buffalo is a frontier. And when you think of the actual frontier, you’ll recall that no one ever packed up and moved West to a gold-rush town because they heard it had really good local theater. They moved looking for opportunities. They moved for the chance to build a new life for themselves.

This, ironically, has always been the siren song of New York City: the chance to turn yourself into someone new, to live the life you’ve always imagined. But what a city like Buffalo offers is a very different promise of what could be. It offers the chance to live on the cheap and start a nonprofit organization, or rent an abandoned church for $1,000 a month, or finish your album without having to hold down two temp jobs at the same time, or simply have more space and a better view and enough money left over each month to buy yourself a painting once in awhile. A city like Buffalo reminds you that, beyond New York, there are still frontiers.

And Adam, if you’re out there reading: your piece is the No. 3 story on the Buffalo morning TV news (yes, they rank them everyday). Buffalo is our other, local TV market here in Toronto.

Over at Burghdiaspora, Jim Russell uses the very same story to take me to task:

Somehow the urban frontier effect has eluded Richard Florida. He’s busy chasing yesterday’s city stars. The rise of places such as Austin also had a lot to do with providing a frontier experience. In the Sun Belt, blank slate geographies abounded (see Houston for the best example of a frontier political geography). And then the scene of opportunity shifts as the hipster cities mature (i.e. get more expensive). This is the fickle fortune of geographic mobility.

Huh? The Rustbelt elude moi? I am a big believer in observed locational preferences: let’s look at mine. Save for three years in Washington, D.C. and a sabbatical at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I’ve lived since the early 1980s in: Buffalo, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and now Toronto (and yes, it qualifies too). I met my wife in Detroit. Rustbelt cities are fantastic places – filled with history, authenticity, real messy urbanism, abundant garage spaces, spectacular interplay between the built and natural environments and great universities. What has kept them down – caused their own sons and daughters to move out and kept talent away? Simple. In addition to economic trauma, it is a long legacy of close-minded and intolerant leadership – squelchers. I’ve seen it firsthand in so many of these places. That’s now starting to turn around in Buffalo, as Sternbergh’s story shows, and in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Go Tor-Buff Bills!