Off Limits (2011) s01e06 Episode Script
Buffalo
The wind is picking up.
Let's see if that thing holds.
It's only 100 years old.
Prepared to be blown away by Buffalo.
- It's a place where modern life switched on.
- Stripped wire.
I'm glad there's no electricity flowing in this wet tunnel.
And home to the first superhighway in the U.
S.
So this is the erie canal.
I mean, this is pretty cool.
America's forgotten town is full of surprises.
Nice.
What's going on in here? - Heads up - Those are falcons.
This is Buffalo off limits.
In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm don wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
off limits s01e06 I'm heading up into the spire of what's called the "electric tower.
" It was among the first fully electrified structures in the whole world.
It's a shining symbol of a city of great wealth, sophistication, and taste.
Welcome to Buffalo, New York! Buffalo city of the future 100 years ago.
In the 19th century, the people here found ways to turn the water that flowed around them into cold, hard cash.
It's famous today mostly for natural wonders like niagara falls and a winter that never quits, but it was a man-made marvel, the erie canal, that transformed a little lake town into a modern Metropolis.
Thanks to the erie canal, there was now a straight shot from the Western U.
S.
, which is right thataway across lake erie, through the canal, and off to the bustling east coast of America.
And Buffalo was dead center, perfectly positioned to become, almost overnight, one of the most significant port towns in the world.
The erie canal originally stretched over 360 Miles, connecting Buffalo to Albany, building cities like Rochester and Syracuse along the way, and made New York City the biggest port in the U.
S.
It transformed forests and swamps into farmland and factories, building New York into a modern state.
Most of it's been paved over here in the city, so I'm heading northeast to lockport.
It's the best place in the area to see the engineering triumph of the 19th century.
Thomas Callahan is an expert on the water staircase that got boats up a cliff, a lock system known as "the flight of five.
" In lockport, we're fortunate to have a bit of what I call "americana, " where it's nothing like this anywhere in the world.
This is a huge chamber down here.
This looks much more modern than I expected.
It is.
This is, uh, the erie barge canal, completed in 1917.
And on the other side is the old original canal, uh, circa 1817.
- Okay, so this is wild frontier out here at that point.
- It is.
I mean, America hasn't gone much further than Buffalo.
Not at all.
There was literally nothing here.
When construction started in 1817,it was jeered as a boondoggle.
It took 9,000 laborers to carve a 40-foot-wide channel out of the wilderness.
The canal took seven years to complete and cost hundreds of lives.
In 1820,the crews got to lockport and faced their final and greatest challenge A 60-foot rise in elevation.
They devised an ingenious solution, one that had not been tried before, carving a series of five chambers, like steps, out of solid rock.
It's a really good chance to see this because they've emptied out the water for the wintertime so the ice doesn't break it.
I mean, this is pretty cool.
So this is the erie canal.
These locks are some of the 5-flight locks.
And you can really get a sense of how the mechanics of the operation work.
It's basically about moving a barge to a different elevation.
Whether the traffic was headed uphill or down, the process was the same.
A barge was towed into the first chamber by mules.
Then using a pull-chain attached to a lever, hatchways in the walls were opened, and the water raised or lowered to match the level in the next lock.
If the gate was open, the barge moved forward and the process was repeated.
That's pretty cool.
This hatchway leads to one of the channels that moved the water from lock to lock.
Watch your head.
What's that? Old weights.
Today, boats move through the modern barge canal in just 20 minutes, but it took over three hours to get through the flight of five.
Back in the 1800s, there were traffic jams in lockport that lasted for days.
Just imagine the traffic down here, as all these barges waited for their turn.
When you had boats who were waiting a week to go through You know, people need food, and they need all the things to survive while they're here.
- The town sort of benefits, doesn't it? It grows up around it.
- It did.
It bustled.
The story was the same all along the canal.
In Buffalo, the population quintupled in the 20 years after the waterway opened.
People flooded the area, because the canal wasn't just moving barges, it was powering factories, too.
When the locks were built in the 1820s, crews also dug a bypass channel, or a raceway, to siphon off excess water and send it further down the canal.
Because of the drop, the difference in the elevation, ingenious men said, - "wait a minute,"we can use that water - Sure.
For mechanical power with leather belts and turbines.
" Local businesses tapped into the raceway to power simple waterwheel turbine engines for flour and cotton mills.
In the 1850s, the raceway was expanded to power a growing industrial complex.
So these walls that I'm seeing - This is the foundation of an enormous factory, yes? - Yes.
- The holly manufacturing company.
- Huge.
It was a huge complex with several thousand employees.
The man who turned canal water into very big business was birdsill holly.
Holly was a friend of Thomas Edison and held 150 patents.
He was the man behind pressurized water systems.
Every time you open a tap in your house or firefighters use the hydrant, that's holly's genius at work.
And this was the first company that used the water through this tunnel for power.
Tom's getting me special access to one of the last remnants of holly's raceway power systems.
So this would have all been filled up with water? It was filled with water.
Water diverted from the canal ran through this tunnel, powering massive factories overhead.
All of it blasted out back in the 1800s, still intact.
2,000 feet later, the water ended up right back where it started in the canal.
There we go.
The system worked so well that the underground of lockport is now a labyrinth of water tunnels and factory foundations, and tom thinks he's found one of the oldest parts of this whole canal system.
Yeah, I can hear the rushing water down there.
This is the old electric building.
- You ever been in here? - Many years ago.
There we go.
Okay, there we go.
What is this place? This was the lockport light, heat and power company.
This is a very shaky floor here.
Can we go down here? We're now gonna pull this trapdoor up.
All right.
Be very careful.
This has been sealed up since roughly 1940.
No kidding.
Man, there's a world down here.
Holy.
The original raceway is somewhere down inside, and once we get a ladder, we're gonna go down and look at it.
Old parking gate, huh? I think that the contents of the building is probably one of the most historically significant finds in the entire erie canal system in state history.
The stone walls that were built back in 1817 are all still here.
We have found an 18 What's the age we're in? I would think that this was part of the 1817 to 1825 mill.
No kidding.
And nobody knows this is here.
Right.
And there's the old arch right over on the other side.
This would have been one of the archways where the water went out.
There's another one on the other side.
Yeah, covered up for almost 200 years.
This is the early, early days.
Nobody ever gets to see this.
Basically, this is the raceway, right? The water is coming down here.
They built all these structures along the way to draw water off so that the businesses, these factories, could use the water in order to power their their machinery.
It just seems sort of crazy that underneath of 21st-century America, you find something from, you know, 200 years ago that people didn't even know was here.
Originally built for transport, the canal's power was harnessed by brilliant men to build businesses, too.
Its glory days are over now, but as fuel prices rise, boat traffic and cargo shipments are growing steadily.
The final chapter of the erie canal and the cities it built has yet to be written.
Don't slip.
Big business becomes one big death trap.
It's only 100 years old.
That is one mysterious structure.
And luxury resort or torture chamber? "Percussion hose"? Like every city, Buffalo has signature monuments, statues, towers, and something even more impressive.
It's called "silo city.
" You can see just a-a massive amount of these these behemoth concrete structures.
Today, most of them are sleeping giants.
But back in Buffalo's heyday, this would have been just buzzing with activity, with boats and men everywhere shipping millions and millions of bushels of grain to To destinations all around the world.
I'm on a bend in the Buffalo river, near the point where it flows into lake erie.
Buffalo has over a dozen abandoned silo complexes, known as grain elevators, that tower ten stories above the landscape.
I'm here to meet the man who keeps an eye on them "Swannie" Jim Watkins.
- How you doin'? - Don, how you doin'? - Good to see you.
Welcome to silo city.
- You, too.
Thank you.
How far are we from the erie canal here? We're about 1/2 mile.
The shipping I mean, we would have seen ship after ship here, the whole thing was lined up.
The presence of the water here originally That was the reason this was even here.
Yeah, the most economic way to move the grain was by ship, and given Buffalo's location, it was the perfect place.
When the erie canal opened in 1825, it unlocked the midwest's fertile grasslands, transforming it into the world's breadbasket, and all its riches passed through Buffalo.
The cost of freight dropped from $100 a ton to $10 a ton.
And what started out as a trickle fast became a tidal wave of wheat.
The huge Great Lakes cargo ships were too big to sail down the erie canal, so they offloaded grain here in Buffalo and stored it in these Titanic structures until it could be shipped out on smaller canal barges.
Jim is getting me inside to see the ingenious 19th-century engineering that gave birth to an industry.
- All right.
There we go.
- All right.
So where are we going? We're finally gonna get to go inside.
This was built in 1906.
We'll come into, I think, one of the best parts of all the elevators.
This is called the feed floor.
Right now, we're inside a silo.
So above our heads 120 feet of silo all filled, on a good day, with grain.
With grain.
I just want to point out, I'm seeing, I mean one, two, three, four, five, - six silos right here on this side.
- Right.
- I guess the same in the middle and the same after that.
- It's all symmetrical.
- 'Cause we're underneath of each silo here - Yes.
Tons and tons of grain being help up by this hopper here.
It could handle 900,000 bushels of grain.
- In ea the whole thing, - total.
A bushel is roughly 56 pounds.
Each one of these silos would hold roughly 35 bushels.
- What's the math? Okay, I - Yeah, I don't do that math well, either.
From the hoppers, grain was shipped out of the complex, loaded on barges or train cars.
Gravity was the only power needed to empty the silos, but filling them up was a different story.
The key to that operation was a mechanically simple but remarkably efficient device The bucket elevator.
Those buckets are what does all the work.
So it's on a belt going straight up to the top and then sort of turning over.
They loop back and come right back down.
Buckets on a revolving belt seem low-tech today, but in 1842,this was breakthrough engineering.
Merchant Joseph dart built the first grain elevator.
It was made of wood and used a steam-driven belt.
Before dart's elevator, men with strong backs, mostly Irish immigrants, took seven days to unload a ship.
The elevator could do it in seven minutes.
In the complex I'm exploring, one bucket elevator was used to pull grain off the huge cargo ships, and another located inside the rectangular headhouse was used to distribute grain already stored in the complex.
The headhouse buckets went up 150 feet, lifting their precious cargo to a web of conveyor belts that carried the grain to the storage silos.
The same basic technology was also used to move people around this immense work site.
Look at how these guys got around up here.
Pretty cool.
It's called a man lift.
Let's see if that thing holds.
It's only 100 years old.
So look at that.
It's a little elevator system, just like the grain.
Everybody's going around in every direction in this place.
So you hold on, and these little platforms take you up to the next level.
It's a very efficient little elevator system.
The man lift hasn't worked in a long time, so if I want to follow the path of the grain, I'll have to hoof it.
This is a long ways up.
Jim and I are climbing up 140 feet inside the headhouse.
Just to give you a perspective, you can see where we were and where we are.
- Isn't it an amazing sight? - That's crazy.
- We're not even all the way up here.
- No, no, we could go up about another 60 feet.
- You have to come here to understand how big it really was.
- That's true.
Of all the equipment in this vast complex, none was more important than the rig that unloaded the boats - The marine leg.
- Isn't that amazing? Look at these A pulley and these ropes and pulleys basically controlling this enormous arm that goes out over the water and gets the grain out of the ships.
I wonder if I can Can I get out there? Yeah, sure I can.
The wind is picking up.
If you look at that That's the gigantic wheel that's essentially controlling this thing, this gigantic marine leg it's called, this huge conveyor arm that basically swings out over the water below me here.
Into this huge freighter with all its grain.
This is the only way they could possibly expand this operation to the magnitude that it eventually became.
Wheat and barley pulled in by the marine leg would eventually end up on a conveyor belt like this one.
So but wait.
So the grain is being poured onto this conveyor belt here.
- Correct.
- And what happens after that? Well, we're coming up to it now.
This is called a tripper car, and it would drop the grain right into the silo.
- So the grain is coming up this belt - Right.
Pouring into there, and on either side I want to take a look over here - This chute is delivering the grain.
Can I open this up? - Sure.
I think I can.
So that is what it's falling down into.
And you can actually decide which one of these silos this goes to by moving the whole mechanism down into each one of the silos.
Back and forth, yes.
Oh, there.
I just noticed that this goes like this, doesn't it? Right, it drops down over, so - Like so.
- You basically you minimize the dust a little bit.
When vast amounts of grain are moved, tiny bits get scraped off, forming clouds of deadly flammable dust.
There was a lot of dust in the air.
It's a very fine dust, and it's very easy, if you have a spark, for it to just explode.
- Basically like a bomb.
- Absolutely.
In 1882,a fire in silo city caused damages that ran over $10 million in today's dollars and killed five men.
By the turn of the century, the wooden silos were being replaced by poured concrete structures, built to last for centuries and handle an endless river of grain.
It looks like just time stood still here.
The grain just stopped flowing at one point.
For a century, this whole area was the place to store your grain, move it along in the marketplace.
- What changes that that ends? - You had the St.
Lawrence seaway open up, which allowed larger-capacity ocean bulk freighters to come in, directly load into port, and take out.
They skipped this part.
They could skip it.
By the 1960s, the silos began to fall silent.
Today, there are only two in business.
The rest remain as evidence of a time when this town changed the world.
Damn.
Don't slip.
That is vertigo looking down there.
The height of this thing, I mean, all of what you see around you It gives you a-a sense of how important Buffalo is to the story of America.
This place built America, built the agriculture of America.
If you're gonna feed the world, this is what it takes.
The grain industry is all but gone here in Buffalo, but the silos are too tough to crumble away, just like the city they helped build.
Electrically speaking, this changes everything.
- Buffalo turns on the world.
- Tubes every direction, electricity going everywhere.
In Buffalo, the winter nights seem to stretch on forever.
But it would be a lot colder and darker without the 19th-century genius who turned on the lights by harnessing the awesome power of nature.
Niagara falls a rare display of nature's raw force.
But there was one guy, an immigrant American, a genius, who looked at that force and figured out how to harness it.
It was a system he developed that would alter this region forever, and then the country, and eventually the world.
In the 1800s, inventors were racing to light up the world, and two men led the pack Thomas Edison and Nikola tesla.
Today, I'm heading to the place where tesla, a serbian immigrant, crossed the finish line The first major electric power plant in the world.
North of Buffalo on the Canadian border, spitting distance from niagara falls, it's been shuttered for 50 years and basically forgotten, - much like the man himself.
- Peter? Niagara falls native Peter fontanarosa bought the only part of the station that's still standing The transformer house.
But he's not using it to make electricity.
- You got a lot of boats.
- Yeah.
- So you're using it for storage for now.
- Yep.
Peter bought the building because he thought it looked cool.
But he soon discovered the story behind it was even cooler.
When I bought this place, I didn't know anything about Nikola tesla.
It was never taught in school.
We always heard about Thomas Edison.
So in the day, large pieces of equipment would be in here, transforming units I suppose, all the way, lining this whole building.
Yeah, they were flanked on each side, all the way down.
Fed by water from the niagara river, tesla's generators sent electricity to the transformer station.
Here, it was stepped up from 2,200 to 11,000 volts so it could be sent long distances.
A.
C.
Travels better.
Alternating current travels better.
Therefore, - you could have more centralized power plants.
- Right.
- That's tesla's breakthrough.
- Yes.
Technologically speaking, electrically speaking, this changes everything, what happens in this building.
What happened here was the culmination of a war that pitted tesla against America's most influential inventor, Thomas Edison.
Edison built a power station in Manhattan that generated D.
C.
, or direct current.
It could only transmit juice for 1 square mile because it was weaker than tesla's alternating current.
A.
C.
Had the potential to go a whole lot further, but Edison declared it was too dangerous for American homes.
He mounted a vicious campaign to prove it, staging public executions of animals and even commissioning the first electric chair.
But when the switch was flipped here in 1896, electric streetlights came on in Buffalo, safely and harmlessly.
By the turn of the century, there was no doubt that tesla had won the war of the currents.
That's where the power took off.
- Those are the insulators.
- The insulators, yes.
That was the final stage of letting the power out of this building.
Electricity is being produced at the power plants and then being sent through here, transformed, stepped up in voltage, and sent out through those guys.
Cables traveled high over the complex on their way to Buffalo, but they also ran through a hidden underground here.
- We should be good there.
- All right.
And deep in one of those tunnels, you can actually see one of those cables left over from the day.
That's a big hole.
All right, I'll see you down there.
There's pretty generous space.
And look, right away, you can see where the, uh, wires were going right here.
Dozens of wires used to crisscross these rooms along with massive fans that cooled the hot transformers above.
These are all racks for all the wires that must run along here, going into these honeycombs in every direction.
Look at this one.
Ohyeah, these are like tubes that go all the way down.
Electricity going everywhere.
- Look at this tunnel.
- Now here Oh, boy, look at that.
That is great.
This was all blocked in with cinder block.
Did you smash this down? Yep, okay.
So in we go.
I believe this tunnel goes a couple thousand feet.
Oh, boy.
Unbelievable! Look how far this goes.
All right, so now we're seeing what these holes are used for.
- These are cables with a lead lining - Lead lining, yes.
All the way extending back into that pl that, uh, honeycomb over there, that ceramic.
This network of cables fed the fast-growing industrial center that sprang up here, thanks to tesla's brainchild.
It gets a little little deep.
Look at that some stripped wire.
Big cables running down here I'm glad there's no electricity flowing now in this wet tunnel.
After the success of tesla's plant, America turned to a.
C.
And though tesla was a genius, he was a poor businessman who died penniless.
Boy, this place couldn't be more symbolic of the man who even thought of the system tesla.
You know, it should be a great symbol of his achievement, and it was.
Alternating current changed the world.
We live with it still today.
This is where tesla laid the cornerstone for modern life, and his legacy shines bright whenever you turn on a light or your tv.
Try not to fall into what is slaking the thirst of Buffalo.
Serving up water for half a million on the rocks.
His job was to go out and chop that ice.
Buffalo was built by water.
Lake erie, the niagara river, and the erie canal have all been pipelines for wealth.
H2o is the city's greatest benefactor, except for six months out of the year.
Despite appearances, this is spring.
Weather has always been a major factor here in Buffalo.
I mean, in the winter months, the whole body of water you're looking at here is basically frozen solid.
You can walk straight to Canada across it.
But it's also the reason why this is such a good source of drinking water.
The ice sort of lays on the top and keeps everything below nice and calm and clear.
But back in the day, as much as that ice was a blessing, it was also a curse, especially to the guys working in that structure right out there on the horizon whose job it was to make sure that that drinking water made its way back to Buffalo.
And that's where I'm headed.
To get there, I'm driving to the South side of town to Buffalo's outer harbor.
This is where the niagara river meets lake erie and the spot where a 100-year-old structure still sucks in every ounce of Buffalo's drinking water today.
The intake building is just over a mile offshore and has never been open to the public.
- Peter.
Don, how you doing? - I'm good.
- Thanks for meeting me.
- Welcome to engine 20.
Peter merlo is getting me access, and a sweet ride on the oldest operating fireboat in the U.
S.
, the "Edward cotter.
" There we go.
All right.
0 man, she is she is a beauty.
0 yes, she is.
Look at that.
Man, look at this boat.
This boat is over 100 years old.
This goes back almost to the beginnings of, you know, modern Buffalo.
The "Eddie cotter" patrolled this shore, protecting the steel mills and grain elevators packed tight along the port, industries that drew hundreds of thousands to Buffalo.
So late 19th century, Buffalo is booming.
In fact, at that time, Buffalo's population hit almost 600,000, - almost double what it is today.
I-it's amazing, - really? Huge amount of population coming in you need water.
In the 1870s, the city built a water intake facility in the niagara river, conveniently near the shoreline, accidentally unleashing deadly typhoid epidemics that claimed hundreds of lives.
The city was serving up water tainted with pollution and runoff.
And by 1900,the public was demanding a change.
So they wanted to move the water intake offshore To avoid all the runoff and all the stuff that was hugging the shoreline there.
And that's what you see right off there.
That's the emerald channel intake.
Using gravity power alone, the station can suck up to 125 million gallons of water a day, as long as it stays ice-free.
All that line those are steel logs that are actually tied together.
That creates one long barrier that keeps the ice on lake erie over there and not over here.
If the ice came this way, it would be a big problem for the intakes.
So now we're up on it.
You can tell it's a much bigger structure than what you see from the from the shore.
A century old this place.
Cool.
- You got the key? - I got the key.
Man, it's a big old structure when you get up close, isn't it? It's a lot bigger than I'm sure you envisioned.
Well, welcome, don.
Look at that, man.
That is a piece of engineering.
It's 100 feet in diameter.
The walls itself are 20 feet thick of concrete.
The building towers 80 feet in the air because it doubled as a lighthouse and has small rooms along the walls to accommodate a crew.
These were the boilers that provided heat.
They had different rooms.
They had three floors.
They stayed here.
They actually used to walk across the ice to come and man this facility.
No kidding.
In fact, that's the center shaft.
That's where all water comes into this facility through gates on the outside, and then there's four gates that it comes in here and goes down 70 feet.
I see.
Can I get down in there? - Yes, you can.
- All right.
I will try not to fall into what is, slaking the thirst of Buffalo.
That's pretty amazing.
So this am I seeing openings underneath the water? Yes.
There are four openings that allow the water from the center wall to come into the shaft in and of itself.
The water appears still because it's not being pumped in, just flowing steadily from the outside, drawn by gravity alone.
It enters the shaft from hatches in the outer wall of the structure and travels down 70 feet to a concrete tunnel under the riverbed that leads to the water treatment and pumping plant onshore.
To build the intake house in 20 feet of water, divers laid a foundation using concrete that could harden underwater.
The structure's steel shell was built on land, then towed out here and lowered onto the foundation.
Finally, the central shaft was sunk down until it reached the pumping plant tunnel.
I mean, it's easy to say, well, let's go get the water offshore, but I mean, you've got to build a facility like this.
We'll look at pictures of history and when things were constructed, and you never see anyone smiling in those photos.
And it's really just a testament of the time, of the conditions, the working environment.
They were grim.
One of the hardest jobs came after construction Preventing the ice from blocking the intake doors.
This is a 20-foot-thick concrete wall.
On the outside of that are the openings to all these gates that go around into here.
His job was to go out there and chop, chop, chop that ice, making sure that those openings kept on flowing with water.
The men stationed out here were just a mile from a raucous city of 600,000, but they might as well have been a world away.
I'm not sure, but I think that we can get out there.
There's a little door up here.
That is a great lake.
All of Buffalo This way.
Look at that.
Think of what it was like to be this guy out here without any communications, waiting for somebody to come and relieve you.
And in the meantime, there's the enormous pressure of dealing with lake erie ice stopping the flow of water, 600,000 people totally depending on you.
I mean, that's a lot of pressure and a lot of loneliness.
This station has survived over 100 tough winters, and all it took to make that happen was ingenuity and self-sacrifice.
Luckily, Buffalo has always had a plentiful supply of both.
Hole, hole, fall through, die.
The perfect getaway could be hazardous to your health.
Shock treatments.
Nice.
Walking around Buffalo today, you can forget that this was once a city of incredible wealth.
Thanks to the erie canal, people here had the ultimate luxuries Spare time and money to burn.
The erie canal started with bold, innovative thinking.
And once it succeeded, money, prestige, and a sense of endless possibilities spread across upstate New York.
New ideas were welcome here.
I'm driving southeast of the city to the rural genesee valley.
It's a classic vacation getaway spot for urban new yorkers, and it's home to the abandoned castle on the hill, a luxurious, sometimes scandalous retreat for the rich and famous.
David? Local historian David Gilbert is helping us get inside the building that's been off-limits to the public for decades.
Look at that place.
That is one mysterious structure.
So, David, why this spot? Well, the answer to that is right here next to us, this creek that's flowing down from east hill.
In the 1850s, locals believed that waters at breakout creek had healing powers.
Zealous health care reformer j.
Caleb Jackson agreed.
He built a deluxe vacation spa here to share this water cure and encourage wealthy patrons to take a break from fatty foods, alcohol, and tobacco.
- So this is a top-notch luxury hotel - Yes, it was.
Dedicated to the well-being of the human body.
Back in the 1800s, people were just beginning to understand that some foods were better for you than others.
You you had to do more than just fill your belly.
- You had to pick and choose.
- Exactly.
Guests had to live without caffeine, sugar, or booze, but they suffered in style.
I'll try not to fall through a floor.
That's amazing.
Vast space in here.
No expense was spared building this rambling, 5-story resort and its lounges, grounds, and rooms for over 150 guests.
From 19th-century businessmen to 20th-century celebrities like Lucille ball, thousands checked in here for a healthy getaway.
Big, beautiful windows.
Yeah, gorgeous.
I mean, we're in the the last part of winter here, so there's not many leaves, but this place is a spectacularly beautiful area.
Wow, look at that hallway.
In 1929, new owner bernarr macfadden gave the place a radical makeover.
Macfadden was a self-made, brawny he-man who built an empire around weight lifting, cold baths, and minimal clothing.
By 1905,he was the proud owner of "physical culture, " a successful and racy magazine, and had been convicted of public lewdness for hosting a scantily clad bodybuilding competition.
At the heart of his radical self-improvement program was the hotel's basement spa.
Well, that looks like a little bit of a treacherous - There are better steps than others.
- Descent.
Okay.
Well, this is where all the health takes place, and here's the remnants of one of their old massage tables.
Oh, there you go, of course.
There must have been quite a menu of options in terms of a massage - and all the things available.
- Certainly.
They liked to send electric voltage through you, thinking that might be, - uh, of therapeutic value.
- Shock treatments.
- That was all the rage back then.
- Nice.
That's pretty interesting.
So this is one of the treatments you're talking about, yeah? This is one of the famous thermoelectric cabinets.
You would sit inside.
Allow me.
As you can see, there's, um, sockets for about a good dozen light bulbs in there.
Set me up, David.
Nice.
- There we go.
- Then you would be bathed in the, uh, the healing power of electric incandescence.
What do you mean? What's going on in here? Uh, basically, you're just having a whole bunch of light shone on you.
This would have been a center of innovation in a world of innovation that was Buffalo, New York.
All this culture up here sort of inspires new ways of thinking.
"Bernarr macfadden, castle on the hill.
Special measures.
" I'll say.
"Electric cabinet bath.
- That's what - That's what we were in.
The electric cabinet Always popular for $1.
50.
"Enemas.
" Nice.
$1.
Cheap.
Cheaper the price "Percussion hose? " I-I I don't even want to know.
I wouldn't even dare to guess what that percussion hose might be.
Macfadden died in 1955, after he tried to cure an infection with fasting.
But the hotel kept going strong for another 20 years.
Oh, this is nice hole, hole, fall through, die.
Wow, look at that I mean, a perfect place for a health spa, right? And it all begins with this creek here that gives people back in the 1800s the idea to build this hotel, bernarr macfadden's castle on the hill.
The details of treatment here seem eccentric or quaint today, but the next time you exercise and eat right, you could say you're paying tribute to the kings of this all-American castle.
Oh, man, look at this thing.
It's a cathedral.
- Boom times jump the tracks.
- That's a statement in itself, isn't it? Buffalo is packed with remnants of its former glory.
Some may soon be gone for good.
Others are poised to spring to life again, weather permitting.
Springtime in Buffalo.
So all this building here, this long, derelict building, is actually a part of this incredible structure in front of me.
Look at that thing the central railroad terminal, built to welcome the The world to Buffalo.
Located 2 1/2 Miles outside downtown on a rail line that connected Chicago and New York, the terminal sent notice that Buffalo was playing with the big boys.
- Now it's an empty shell.
- Hey, Marty.
Historian Marty biniasz is gonna get me inside and out of the storm.
So this is not normally open to the public, I assume.
It's not, no.
We're, uh, we're beginning the restoration project of a building that was pretty much abandoned and left for dead.
I've never been happier than now to go inside.
Come on in.
Oh, man.
Damn, look at this thing.
It's a cathedral, isn't it? It was it was meant to impress.
It's astonishing.
This was a time when rail travel was really an adventure, wasn't it? When you were preparing to get on a train, whether you were arriving or departing, you got off at these grand palaces, and it was Buffalo's primary transportation hub for 50 years.
This was built by the New York central railroad, one of the most fabulous and lavish railroads in America.
This is Vanderbilt, right? I mean, this is the original days of railroads.
It was.
This is when, uh, this is when the railroads ruled America.
The terminal was designed to handle up to 3, 200 passengers an hour and 200 trains.
Construction started in 1927, and the doors opened in June of 1929.
New York central rail went all-in, sparing no expense on this ultramodern station.
Oh, look at that.
This is the control room.
Just like air-traffic controllers sit at the desk and watch the planes coming in and out You would have followed the movement of the trains.
Just a few months after the station opened, the stock market crashed, and the great depression hit.
It was the beginning of the end of Buffalo's boom times.
The station lost money for 40 years and finally went out of business in 1979.
Wow, that's, uh, that's a statement in itself, isn't it? All the old paperwork just piled up.
When the building was shuttered, all the filing cabinets were dumped and thrown out the windows to be hauled away as scrap.
A whole era of America all piled up on the floor, rotting away.
But there's more here than old stories and wreckage.
We're heading up to the top of the tower to get a vantage point on its possible future.
He's unlocking the door The gate that gets up to the top of the tower.
Man, Marty, this is a gigantic building.
Needless to say, the elevators are out of order.
Yeah, right.
It's amazing.
This is a huge, huge landmark building in Buffalo.
People look at this all the time.
It's shut down, boarded up.
And they all look at this tower.
Nobody ever gets to go on it.
Pretty neat, especially in a driving snowstorm.
From near the top of Buffalo's most elegant ruin, there's hope that the terminal, like the city, may be getting its second wind.
There's plans right now in new York state to use these tracks, these same tracks that go from New York City to Chicago as part of a high-speed line that would link New York City, Buffalo, to Toronto and you know, guys, we got some, uh, hawks that are gonna attack us here.
Those are falcons.
We're somewhere near their nest, and they are angry at us.
He's saying, "get off my my perch.
" Okay, okay, okay.
I think it's time to go.
This is this is a different kind of off-limits.
This terminal could be seen as a monument to lost glory, or it could be a reminder that Buffalo is a city where people make the impossible happen.
on the surface, it might seem like America's forgotten city, a boomtown from another era.
But it's survived tough times and even tougher weather and is moving forward into the 21st century, because Buffalo was built to last.
Let's see if that thing holds.
It's only 100 years old.
Prepared to be blown away by Buffalo.
- It's a place where modern life switched on.
- Stripped wire.
I'm glad there's no electricity flowing in this wet tunnel.
And home to the first superhighway in the U.
S.
So this is the erie canal.
I mean, this is pretty cool.
America's forgotten town is full of surprises.
Nice.
What's going on in here? - Heads up - Those are falcons.
This is Buffalo off limits.
In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm don wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
off limits s01e06 I'm heading up into the spire of what's called the "electric tower.
" It was among the first fully electrified structures in the whole world.
It's a shining symbol of a city of great wealth, sophistication, and taste.
Welcome to Buffalo, New York! Buffalo city of the future 100 years ago.
In the 19th century, the people here found ways to turn the water that flowed around them into cold, hard cash.
It's famous today mostly for natural wonders like niagara falls and a winter that never quits, but it was a man-made marvel, the erie canal, that transformed a little lake town into a modern Metropolis.
Thanks to the erie canal, there was now a straight shot from the Western U.
S.
, which is right thataway across lake erie, through the canal, and off to the bustling east coast of America.
And Buffalo was dead center, perfectly positioned to become, almost overnight, one of the most significant port towns in the world.
The erie canal originally stretched over 360 Miles, connecting Buffalo to Albany, building cities like Rochester and Syracuse along the way, and made New York City the biggest port in the U.
S.
It transformed forests and swamps into farmland and factories, building New York into a modern state.
Most of it's been paved over here in the city, so I'm heading northeast to lockport.
It's the best place in the area to see the engineering triumph of the 19th century.
Thomas Callahan is an expert on the water staircase that got boats up a cliff, a lock system known as "the flight of five.
" In lockport, we're fortunate to have a bit of what I call "americana, " where it's nothing like this anywhere in the world.
This is a huge chamber down here.
This looks much more modern than I expected.
It is.
This is, uh, the erie barge canal, completed in 1917.
And on the other side is the old original canal, uh, circa 1817.
- Okay, so this is wild frontier out here at that point.
- It is.
I mean, America hasn't gone much further than Buffalo.
Not at all.
There was literally nothing here.
When construction started in 1817,it was jeered as a boondoggle.
It took 9,000 laborers to carve a 40-foot-wide channel out of the wilderness.
The canal took seven years to complete and cost hundreds of lives.
In 1820,the crews got to lockport and faced their final and greatest challenge A 60-foot rise in elevation.
They devised an ingenious solution, one that had not been tried before, carving a series of five chambers, like steps, out of solid rock.
It's a really good chance to see this because they've emptied out the water for the wintertime so the ice doesn't break it.
I mean, this is pretty cool.
So this is the erie canal.
These locks are some of the 5-flight locks.
And you can really get a sense of how the mechanics of the operation work.
It's basically about moving a barge to a different elevation.
Whether the traffic was headed uphill or down, the process was the same.
A barge was towed into the first chamber by mules.
Then using a pull-chain attached to a lever, hatchways in the walls were opened, and the water raised or lowered to match the level in the next lock.
If the gate was open, the barge moved forward and the process was repeated.
That's pretty cool.
This hatchway leads to one of the channels that moved the water from lock to lock.
Watch your head.
What's that? Old weights.
Today, boats move through the modern barge canal in just 20 minutes, but it took over three hours to get through the flight of five.
Back in the 1800s, there were traffic jams in lockport that lasted for days.
Just imagine the traffic down here, as all these barges waited for their turn.
When you had boats who were waiting a week to go through You know, people need food, and they need all the things to survive while they're here.
- The town sort of benefits, doesn't it? It grows up around it.
- It did.
It bustled.
The story was the same all along the canal.
In Buffalo, the population quintupled in the 20 years after the waterway opened.
People flooded the area, because the canal wasn't just moving barges, it was powering factories, too.
When the locks were built in the 1820s, crews also dug a bypass channel, or a raceway, to siphon off excess water and send it further down the canal.
Because of the drop, the difference in the elevation, ingenious men said, - "wait a minute,"we can use that water - Sure.
For mechanical power with leather belts and turbines.
" Local businesses tapped into the raceway to power simple waterwheel turbine engines for flour and cotton mills.
In the 1850s, the raceway was expanded to power a growing industrial complex.
So these walls that I'm seeing - This is the foundation of an enormous factory, yes? - Yes.
- The holly manufacturing company.
- Huge.
It was a huge complex with several thousand employees.
The man who turned canal water into very big business was birdsill holly.
Holly was a friend of Thomas Edison and held 150 patents.
He was the man behind pressurized water systems.
Every time you open a tap in your house or firefighters use the hydrant, that's holly's genius at work.
And this was the first company that used the water through this tunnel for power.
Tom's getting me special access to one of the last remnants of holly's raceway power systems.
So this would have all been filled up with water? It was filled with water.
Water diverted from the canal ran through this tunnel, powering massive factories overhead.
All of it blasted out back in the 1800s, still intact.
2,000 feet later, the water ended up right back where it started in the canal.
There we go.
The system worked so well that the underground of lockport is now a labyrinth of water tunnels and factory foundations, and tom thinks he's found one of the oldest parts of this whole canal system.
Yeah, I can hear the rushing water down there.
This is the old electric building.
- You ever been in here? - Many years ago.
There we go.
Okay, there we go.
What is this place? This was the lockport light, heat and power company.
This is a very shaky floor here.
Can we go down here? We're now gonna pull this trapdoor up.
All right.
Be very careful.
This has been sealed up since roughly 1940.
No kidding.
Man, there's a world down here.
Holy.
The original raceway is somewhere down inside, and once we get a ladder, we're gonna go down and look at it.
Old parking gate, huh? I think that the contents of the building is probably one of the most historically significant finds in the entire erie canal system in state history.
The stone walls that were built back in 1817 are all still here.
We have found an 18 What's the age we're in? I would think that this was part of the 1817 to 1825 mill.
No kidding.
And nobody knows this is here.
Right.
And there's the old arch right over on the other side.
This would have been one of the archways where the water went out.
There's another one on the other side.
Yeah, covered up for almost 200 years.
This is the early, early days.
Nobody ever gets to see this.
Basically, this is the raceway, right? The water is coming down here.
They built all these structures along the way to draw water off so that the businesses, these factories, could use the water in order to power their their machinery.
It just seems sort of crazy that underneath of 21st-century America, you find something from, you know, 200 years ago that people didn't even know was here.
Originally built for transport, the canal's power was harnessed by brilliant men to build businesses, too.
Its glory days are over now, but as fuel prices rise, boat traffic and cargo shipments are growing steadily.
The final chapter of the erie canal and the cities it built has yet to be written.
Don't slip.
Big business becomes one big death trap.
It's only 100 years old.
That is one mysterious structure.
And luxury resort or torture chamber? "Percussion hose"? Like every city, Buffalo has signature monuments, statues, towers, and something even more impressive.
It's called "silo city.
" You can see just a-a massive amount of these these behemoth concrete structures.
Today, most of them are sleeping giants.
But back in Buffalo's heyday, this would have been just buzzing with activity, with boats and men everywhere shipping millions and millions of bushels of grain to To destinations all around the world.
I'm on a bend in the Buffalo river, near the point where it flows into lake erie.
Buffalo has over a dozen abandoned silo complexes, known as grain elevators, that tower ten stories above the landscape.
I'm here to meet the man who keeps an eye on them "Swannie" Jim Watkins.
- How you doin'? - Don, how you doin'? - Good to see you.
Welcome to silo city.
- You, too.
Thank you.
How far are we from the erie canal here? We're about 1/2 mile.
The shipping I mean, we would have seen ship after ship here, the whole thing was lined up.
The presence of the water here originally That was the reason this was even here.
Yeah, the most economic way to move the grain was by ship, and given Buffalo's location, it was the perfect place.
When the erie canal opened in 1825, it unlocked the midwest's fertile grasslands, transforming it into the world's breadbasket, and all its riches passed through Buffalo.
The cost of freight dropped from $100 a ton to $10 a ton.
And what started out as a trickle fast became a tidal wave of wheat.
The huge Great Lakes cargo ships were too big to sail down the erie canal, so they offloaded grain here in Buffalo and stored it in these Titanic structures until it could be shipped out on smaller canal barges.
Jim is getting me inside to see the ingenious 19th-century engineering that gave birth to an industry.
- All right.
There we go.
- All right.
So where are we going? We're finally gonna get to go inside.
This was built in 1906.
We'll come into, I think, one of the best parts of all the elevators.
This is called the feed floor.
Right now, we're inside a silo.
So above our heads 120 feet of silo all filled, on a good day, with grain.
With grain.
I just want to point out, I'm seeing, I mean one, two, three, four, five, - six silos right here on this side.
- Right.
- I guess the same in the middle and the same after that.
- It's all symmetrical.
- 'Cause we're underneath of each silo here - Yes.
Tons and tons of grain being help up by this hopper here.
It could handle 900,000 bushels of grain.
- In ea the whole thing, - total.
A bushel is roughly 56 pounds.
Each one of these silos would hold roughly 35 bushels.
- What's the math? Okay, I - Yeah, I don't do that math well, either.
From the hoppers, grain was shipped out of the complex, loaded on barges or train cars.
Gravity was the only power needed to empty the silos, but filling them up was a different story.
The key to that operation was a mechanically simple but remarkably efficient device The bucket elevator.
Those buckets are what does all the work.
So it's on a belt going straight up to the top and then sort of turning over.
They loop back and come right back down.
Buckets on a revolving belt seem low-tech today, but in 1842,this was breakthrough engineering.
Merchant Joseph dart built the first grain elevator.
It was made of wood and used a steam-driven belt.
Before dart's elevator, men with strong backs, mostly Irish immigrants, took seven days to unload a ship.
The elevator could do it in seven minutes.
In the complex I'm exploring, one bucket elevator was used to pull grain off the huge cargo ships, and another located inside the rectangular headhouse was used to distribute grain already stored in the complex.
The headhouse buckets went up 150 feet, lifting their precious cargo to a web of conveyor belts that carried the grain to the storage silos.
The same basic technology was also used to move people around this immense work site.
Look at how these guys got around up here.
Pretty cool.
It's called a man lift.
Let's see if that thing holds.
It's only 100 years old.
So look at that.
It's a little elevator system, just like the grain.
Everybody's going around in every direction in this place.
So you hold on, and these little platforms take you up to the next level.
It's a very efficient little elevator system.
The man lift hasn't worked in a long time, so if I want to follow the path of the grain, I'll have to hoof it.
This is a long ways up.
Jim and I are climbing up 140 feet inside the headhouse.
Just to give you a perspective, you can see where we were and where we are.
- Isn't it an amazing sight? - That's crazy.
- We're not even all the way up here.
- No, no, we could go up about another 60 feet.
- You have to come here to understand how big it really was.
- That's true.
Of all the equipment in this vast complex, none was more important than the rig that unloaded the boats - The marine leg.
- Isn't that amazing? Look at these A pulley and these ropes and pulleys basically controlling this enormous arm that goes out over the water and gets the grain out of the ships.
I wonder if I can Can I get out there? Yeah, sure I can.
The wind is picking up.
If you look at that That's the gigantic wheel that's essentially controlling this thing, this gigantic marine leg it's called, this huge conveyor arm that basically swings out over the water below me here.
Into this huge freighter with all its grain.
This is the only way they could possibly expand this operation to the magnitude that it eventually became.
Wheat and barley pulled in by the marine leg would eventually end up on a conveyor belt like this one.
So but wait.
So the grain is being poured onto this conveyor belt here.
- Correct.
- And what happens after that? Well, we're coming up to it now.
This is called a tripper car, and it would drop the grain right into the silo.
- So the grain is coming up this belt - Right.
Pouring into there, and on either side I want to take a look over here - This chute is delivering the grain.
Can I open this up? - Sure.
I think I can.
So that is what it's falling down into.
And you can actually decide which one of these silos this goes to by moving the whole mechanism down into each one of the silos.
Back and forth, yes.
Oh, there.
I just noticed that this goes like this, doesn't it? Right, it drops down over, so - Like so.
- You basically you minimize the dust a little bit.
When vast amounts of grain are moved, tiny bits get scraped off, forming clouds of deadly flammable dust.
There was a lot of dust in the air.
It's a very fine dust, and it's very easy, if you have a spark, for it to just explode.
- Basically like a bomb.
- Absolutely.
In 1882,a fire in silo city caused damages that ran over $10 million in today's dollars and killed five men.
By the turn of the century, the wooden silos were being replaced by poured concrete structures, built to last for centuries and handle an endless river of grain.
It looks like just time stood still here.
The grain just stopped flowing at one point.
For a century, this whole area was the place to store your grain, move it along in the marketplace.
- What changes that that ends? - You had the St.
Lawrence seaway open up, which allowed larger-capacity ocean bulk freighters to come in, directly load into port, and take out.
They skipped this part.
They could skip it.
By the 1960s, the silos began to fall silent.
Today, there are only two in business.
The rest remain as evidence of a time when this town changed the world.
Damn.
Don't slip.
That is vertigo looking down there.
The height of this thing, I mean, all of what you see around you It gives you a-a sense of how important Buffalo is to the story of America.
This place built America, built the agriculture of America.
If you're gonna feed the world, this is what it takes.
The grain industry is all but gone here in Buffalo, but the silos are too tough to crumble away, just like the city they helped build.
Electrically speaking, this changes everything.
- Buffalo turns on the world.
- Tubes every direction, electricity going everywhere.
In Buffalo, the winter nights seem to stretch on forever.
But it would be a lot colder and darker without the 19th-century genius who turned on the lights by harnessing the awesome power of nature.
Niagara falls a rare display of nature's raw force.
But there was one guy, an immigrant American, a genius, who looked at that force and figured out how to harness it.
It was a system he developed that would alter this region forever, and then the country, and eventually the world.
In the 1800s, inventors were racing to light up the world, and two men led the pack Thomas Edison and Nikola tesla.
Today, I'm heading to the place where tesla, a serbian immigrant, crossed the finish line The first major electric power plant in the world.
North of Buffalo on the Canadian border, spitting distance from niagara falls, it's been shuttered for 50 years and basically forgotten, - much like the man himself.
- Peter? Niagara falls native Peter fontanarosa bought the only part of the station that's still standing The transformer house.
But he's not using it to make electricity.
- You got a lot of boats.
- Yeah.
- So you're using it for storage for now.
- Yep.
Peter bought the building because he thought it looked cool.
But he soon discovered the story behind it was even cooler.
When I bought this place, I didn't know anything about Nikola tesla.
It was never taught in school.
We always heard about Thomas Edison.
So in the day, large pieces of equipment would be in here, transforming units I suppose, all the way, lining this whole building.
Yeah, they were flanked on each side, all the way down.
Fed by water from the niagara river, tesla's generators sent electricity to the transformer station.
Here, it was stepped up from 2,200 to 11,000 volts so it could be sent long distances.
A.
C.
Travels better.
Alternating current travels better.
Therefore, - you could have more centralized power plants.
- Right.
- That's tesla's breakthrough.
- Yes.
Technologically speaking, electrically speaking, this changes everything, what happens in this building.
What happened here was the culmination of a war that pitted tesla against America's most influential inventor, Thomas Edison.
Edison built a power station in Manhattan that generated D.
C.
, or direct current.
It could only transmit juice for 1 square mile because it was weaker than tesla's alternating current.
A.
C.
Had the potential to go a whole lot further, but Edison declared it was too dangerous for American homes.
He mounted a vicious campaign to prove it, staging public executions of animals and even commissioning the first electric chair.
But when the switch was flipped here in 1896, electric streetlights came on in Buffalo, safely and harmlessly.
By the turn of the century, there was no doubt that tesla had won the war of the currents.
That's where the power took off.
- Those are the insulators.
- The insulators, yes.
That was the final stage of letting the power out of this building.
Electricity is being produced at the power plants and then being sent through here, transformed, stepped up in voltage, and sent out through those guys.
Cables traveled high over the complex on their way to Buffalo, but they also ran through a hidden underground here.
- We should be good there.
- All right.
And deep in one of those tunnels, you can actually see one of those cables left over from the day.
That's a big hole.
All right, I'll see you down there.
There's pretty generous space.
And look, right away, you can see where the, uh, wires were going right here.
Dozens of wires used to crisscross these rooms along with massive fans that cooled the hot transformers above.
These are all racks for all the wires that must run along here, going into these honeycombs in every direction.
Look at this one.
Ohyeah, these are like tubes that go all the way down.
Electricity going everywhere.
- Look at this tunnel.
- Now here Oh, boy, look at that.
That is great.
This was all blocked in with cinder block.
Did you smash this down? Yep, okay.
So in we go.
I believe this tunnel goes a couple thousand feet.
Oh, boy.
Unbelievable! Look how far this goes.
All right, so now we're seeing what these holes are used for.
- These are cables with a lead lining - Lead lining, yes.
All the way extending back into that pl that, uh, honeycomb over there, that ceramic.
This network of cables fed the fast-growing industrial center that sprang up here, thanks to tesla's brainchild.
It gets a little little deep.
Look at that some stripped wire.
Big cables running down here I'm glad there's no electricity flowing now in this wet tunnel.
After the success of tesla's plant, America turned to a.
C.
And though tesla was a genius, he was a poor businessman who died penniless.
Boy, this place couldn't be more symbolic of the man who even thought of the system tesla.
You know, it should be a great symbol of his achievement, and it was.
Alternating current changed the world.
We live with it still today.
This is where tesla laid the cornerstone for modern life, and his legacy shines bright whenever you turn on a light or your tv.
Try not to fall into what is slaking the thirst of Buffalo.
Serving up water for half a million on the rocks.
His job was to go out and chop that ice.
Buffalo was built by water.
Lake erie, the niagara river, and the erie canal have all been pipelines for wealth.
H2o is the city's greatest benefactor, except for six months out of the year.
Despite appearances, this is spring.
Weather has always been a major factor here in Buffalo.
I mean, in the winter months, the whole body of water you're looking at here is basically frozen solid.
You can walk straight to Canada across it.
But it's also the reason why this is such a good source of drinking water.
The ice sort of lays on the top and keeps everything below nice and calm and clear.
But back in the day, as much as that ice was a blessing, it was also a curse, especially to the guys working in that structure right out there on the horizon whose job it was to make sure that that drinking water made its way back to Buffalo.
And that's where I'm headed.
To get there, I'm driving to the South side of town to Buffalo's outer harbor.
This is where the niagara river meets lake erie and the spot where a 100-year-old structure still sucks in every ounce of Buffalo's drinking water today.
The intake building is just over a mile offshore and has never been open to the public.
- Peter.
Don, how you doing? - I'm good.
- Thanks for meeting me.
- Welcome to engine 20.
Peter merlo is getting me access, and a sweet ride on the oldest operating fireboat in the U.
S.
, the "Edward cotter.
" There we go.
All right.
0 man, she is she is a beauty.
0 yes, she is.
Look at that.
Man, look at this boat.
This boat is over 100 years old.
This goes back almost to the beginnings of, you know, modern Buffalo.
The "Eddie cotter" patrolled this shore, protecting the steel mills and grain elevators packed tight along the port, industries that drew hundreds of thousands to Buffalo.
So late 19th century, Buffalo is booming.
In fact, at that time, Buffalo's population hit almost 600,000, - almost double what it is today.
I-it's amazing, - really? Huge amount of population coming in you need water.
In the 1870s, the city built a water intake facility in the niagara river, conveniently near the shoreline, accidentally unleashing deadly typhoid epidemics that claimed hundreds of lives.
The city was serving up water tainted with pollution and runoff.
And by 1900,the public was demanding a change.
So they wanted to move the water intake offshore To avoid all the runoff and all the stuff that was hugging the shoreline there.
And that's what you see right off there.
That's the emerald channel intake.
Using gravity power alone, the station can suck up to 125 million gallons of water a day, as long as it stays ice-free.
All that line those are steel logs that are actually tied together.
That creates one long barrier that keeps the ice on lake erie over there and not over here.
If the ice came this way, it would be a big problem for the intakes.
So now we're up on it.
You can tell it's a much bigger structure than what you see from the from the shore.
A century old this place.
Cool.
- You got the key? - I got the key.
Man, it's a big old structure when you get up close, isn't it? It's a lot bigger than I'm sure you envisioned.
Well, welcome, don.
Look at that, man.
That is a piece of engineering.
It's 100 feet in diameter.
The walls itself are 20 feet thick of concrete.
The building towers 80 feet in the air because it doubled as a lighthouse and has small rooms along the walls to accommodate a crew.
These were the boilers that provided heat.
They had different rooms.
They had three floors.
They stayed here.
They actually used to walk across the ice to come and man this facility.
No kidding.
In fact, that's the center shaft.
That's where all water comes into this facility through gates on the outside, and then there's four gates that it comes in here and goes down 70 feet.
I see.
Can I get down in there? - Yes, you can.
- All right.
I will try not to fall into what is, slaking the thirst of Buffalo.
That's pretty amazing.
So this am I seeing openings underneath the water? Yes.
There are four openings that allow the water from the center wall to come into the shaft in and of itself.
The water appears still because it's not being pumped in, just flowing steadily from the outside, drawn by gravity alone.
It enters the shaft from hatches in the outer wall of the structure and travels down 70 feet to a concrete tunnel under the riverbed that leads to the water treatment and pumping plant onshore.
To build the intake house in 20 feet of water, divers laid a foundation using concrete that could harden underwater.
The structure's steel shell was built on land, then towed out here and lowered onto the foundation.
Finally, the central shaft was sunk down until it reached the pumping plant tunnel.
I mean, it's easy to say, well, let's go get the water offshore, but I mean, you've got to build a facility like this.
We'll look at pictures of history and when things were constructed, and you never see anyone smiling in those photos.
And it's really just a testament of the time, of the conditions, the working environment.
They were grim.
One of the hardest jobs came after construction Preventing the ice from blocking the intake doors.
This is a 20-foot-thick concrete wall.
On the outside of that are the openings to all these gates that go around into here.
His job was to go out there and chop, chop, chop that ice, making sure that those openings kept on flowing with water.
The men stationed out here were just a mile from a raucous city of 600,000, but they might as well have been a world away.
I'm not sure, but I think that we can get out there.
There's a little door up here.
That is a great lake.
All of Buffalo This way.
Look at that.
Think of what it was like to be this guy out here without any communications, waiting for somebody to come and relieve you.
And in the meantime, there's the enormous pressure of dealing with lake erie ice stopping the flow of water, 600,000 people totally depending on you.
I mean, that's a lot of pressure and a lot of loneliness.
This station has survived over 100 tough winters, and all it took to make that happen was ingenuity and self-sacrifice.
Luckily, Buffalo has always had a plentiful supply of both.
Hole, hole, fall through, die.
The perfect getaway could be hazardous to your health.
Shock treatments.
Nice.
Walking around Buffalo today, you can forget that this was once a city of incredible wealth.
Thanks to the erie canal, people here had the ultimate luxuries Spare time and money to burn.
The erie canal started with bold, innovative thinking.
And once it succeeded, money, prestige, and a sense of endless possibilities spread across upstate New York.
New ideas were welcome here.
I'm driving southeast of the city to the rural genesee valley.
It's a classic vacation getaway spot for urban new yorkers, and it's home to the abandoned castle on the hill, a luxurious, sometimes scandalous retreat for the rich and famous.
David? Local historian David Gilbert is helping us get inside the building that's been off-limits to the public for decades.
Look at that place.
That is one mysterious structure.
So, David, why this spot? Well, the answer to that is right here next to us, this creek that's flowing down from east hill.
In the 1850s, locals believed that waters at breakout creek had healing powers.
Zealous health care reformer j.
Caleb Jackson agreed.
He built a deluxe vacation spa here to share this water cure and encourage wealthy patrons to take a break from fatty foods, alcohol, and tobacco.
- So this is a top-notch luxury hotel - Yes, it was.
Dedicated to the well-being of the human body.
Back in the 1800s, people were just beginning to understand that some foods were better for you than others.
You you had to do more than just fill your belly.
- You had to pick and choose.
- Exactly.
Guests had to live without caffeine, sugar, or booze, but they suffered in style.
I'll try not to fall through a floor.
That's amazing.
Vast space in here.
No expense was spared building this rambling, 5-story resort and its lounges, grounds, and rooms for over 150 guests.
From 19th-century businessmen to 20th-century celebrities like Lucille ball, thousands checked in here for a healthy getaway.
Big, beautiful windows.
Yeah, gorgeous.
I mean, we're in the the last part of winter here, so there's not many leaves, but this place is a spectacularly beautiful area.
Wow, look at that hallway.
In 1929, new owner bernarr macfadden gave the place a radical makeover.
Macfadden was a self-made, brawny he-man who built an empire around weight lifting, cold baths, and minimal clothing.
By 1905,he was the proud owner of "physical culture, " a successful and racy magazine, and had been convicted of public lewdness for hosting a scantily clad bodybuilding competition.
At the heart of his radical self-improvement program was the hotel's basement spa.
Well, that looks like a little bit of a treacherous - There are better steps than others.
- Descent.
Okay.
Well, this is where all the health takes place, and here's the remnants of one of their old massage tables.
Oh, there you go, of course.
There must have been quite a menu of options in terms of a massage - and all the things available.
- Certainly.
They liked to send electric voltage through you, thinking that might be, - uh, of therapeutic value.
- Shock treatments.
- That was all the rage back then.
- Nice.
That's pretty interesting.
So this is one of the treatments you're talking about, yeah? This is one of the famous thermoelectric cabinets.
You would sit inside.
Allow me.
As you can see, there's, um, sockets for about a good dozen light bulbs in there.
Set me up, David.
Nice.
- There we go.
- Then you would be bathed in the, uh, the healing power of electric incandescence.
What do you mean? What's going on in here? Uh, basically, you're just having a whole bunch of light shone on you.
This would have been a center of innovation in a world of innovation that was Buffalo, New York.
All this culture up here sort of inspires new ways of thinking.
"Bernarr macfadden, castle on the hill.
Special measures.
" I'll say.
"Electric cabinet bath.
- That's what - That's what we were in.
The electric cabinet Always popular for $1.
50.
"Enemas.
" Nice.
$1.
Cheap.
Cheaper the price "Percussion hose? " I-I I don't even want to know.
I wouldn't even dare to guess what that percussion hose might be.
Macfadden died in 1955, after he tried to cure an infection with fasting.
But the hotel kept going strong for another 20 years.
Oh, this is nice hole, hole, fall through, die.
Wow, look at that I mean, a perfect place for a health spa, right? And it all begins with this creek here that gives people back in the 1800s the idea to build this hotel, bernarr macfadden's castle on the hill.
The details of treatment here seem eccentric or quaint today, but the next time you exercise and eat right, you could say you're paying tribute to the kings of this all-American castle.
Oh, man, look at this thing.
It's a cathedral.
- Boom times jump the tracks.
- That's a statement in itself, isn't it? Buffalo is packed with remnants of its former glory.
Some may soon be gone for good.
Others are poised to spring to life again, weather permitting.
Springtime in Buffalo.
So all this building here, this long, derelict building, is actually a part of this incredible structure in front of me.
Look at that thing the central railroad terminal, built to welcome the The world to Buffalo.
Located 2 1/2 Miles outside downtown on a rail line that connected Chicago and New York, the terminal sent notice that Buffalo was playing with the big boys.
- Now it's an empty shell.
- Hey, Marty.
Historian Marty biniasz is gonna get me inside and out of the storm.
So this is not normally open to the public, I assume.
It's not, no.
We're, uh, we're beginning the restoration project of a building that was pretty much abandoned and left for dead.
I've never been happier than now to go inside.
Come on in.
Oh, man.
Damn, look at this thing.
It's a cathedral, isn't it? It was it was meant to impress.
It's astonishing.
This was a time when rail travel was really an adventure, wasn't it? When you were preparing to get on a train, whether you were arriving or departing, you got off at these grand palaces, and it was Buffalo's primary transportation hub for 50 years.
This was built by the New York central railroad, one of the most fabulous and lavish railroads in America.
This is Vanderbilt, right? I mean, this is the original days of railroads.
It was.
This is when, uh, this is when the railroads ruled America.
The terminal was designed to handle up to 3, 200 passengers an hour and 200 trains.
Construction started in 1927, and the doors opened in June of 1929.
New York central rail went all-in, sparing no expense on this ultramodern station.
Oh, look at that.
This is the control room.
Just like air-traffic controllers sit at the desk and watch the planes coming in and out You would have followed the movement of the trains.
Just a few months after the station opened, the stock market crashed, and the great depression hit.
It was the beginning of the end of Buffalo's boom times.
The station lost money for 40 years and finally went out of business in 1979.
Wow, that's, uh, that's a statement in itself, isn't it? All the old paperwork just piled up.
When the building was shuttered, all the filing cabinets were dumped and thrown out the windows to be hauled away as scrap.
A whole era of America all piled up on the floor, rotting away.
But there's more here than old stories and wreckage.
We're heading up to the top of the tower to get a vantage point on its possible future.
He's unlocking the door The gate that gets up to the top of the tower.
Man, Marty, this is a gigantic building.
Needless to say, the elevators are out of order.
Yeah, right.
It's amazing.
This is a huge, huge landmark building in Buffalo.
People look at this all the time.
It's shut down, boarded up.
And they all look at this tower.
Nobody ever gets to go on it.
Pretty neat, especially in a driving snowstorm.
From near the top of Buffalo's most elegant ruin, there's hope that the terminal, like the city, may be getting its second wind.
There's plans right now in new York state to use these tracks, these same tracks that go from New York City to Chicago as part of a high-speed line that would link New York City, Buffalo, to Toronto and you know, guys, we got some, uh, hawks that are gonna attack us here.
Those are falcons.
We're somewhere near their nest, and they are angry at us.
He's saying, "get off my my perch.
" Okay, okay, okay.
I think it's time to go.
This is this is a different kind of off-limits.
This terminal could be seen as a monument to lost glory, or it could be a reminder that Buffalo is a city where people make the impossible happen.
on the surface, it might seem like America's forgotten city, a boomtown from another era.
But it's survived tough times and even tougher weather and is moving forward into the 21st century, because Buffalo was built to last.