Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum

The story

Before Detroit settled the argument, Buffalo made cars. The George N. Pierce Company started with birdcages and ice chests, moved on to bicycles, then motorcycles, then cars, and broke ground in April 1906 on a 1.5-million-square-foot Elmwood Avenue plant laid over the old Pan-American Exposition grounds; Pierce-Arrows served as the White House car from Taft to Franklin Roosevelt. Across town at Broadway and Elm, E.R. Thomas Motor Car sold roughly 7,000 automobiles at $3,750 to $6,000 apiece before bankruptcy took it in 1913.

Jim Sandoro started collecting in the 1940s, as a boy fixated on a neighbor's Pierce-Arrow; he and Mary Ann Sandoro incorporated the museum as a nonprofit in 1997 and installed it in a former Mack Truck showroom and repair shop. More than seventy vehicles built in Western New York are in there now: a 1902 Buffalo Electric Stanhope, a 1913 Lad's Car that families ordered by mail for $148, and Charles D. Thomas's 1938 Rocket Car from Batavia, a 'Car of Tomorrow' with a periscope in the roof. Sixty bicycles hang overhead.

The strangest object here was never a car. In 1927 the Larkin executives Darwin Martin and William Heath commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a filling station for Michigan Avenue and Cherry Street: copper roof, two 37-foot poles Wright called totems, an upstairs observation room with a fireplace, another fireplace for the attendant, and gasoline gravity-fed down overhead lines through glass-and-copper bells rather than out of a tank under the pavement. Nobody built it. Sandoro and the architect Patrick Mahoney found the drawings at Taliesin West in 2002, and the museum raised it full scale inside a 30,000-square-foot atrium tall enough for the totems, neon TYDOL sign included; it took a copper-architecture award in 2014.