BUFFALO, New York - Pushing my way through a capacity crowd at Buffalo's Canalside park on a recent Friday evening, I couldn't get businessman Peter Florczak's words out of my head:

"As recently as five years ago, this area was nothing but a wasteland," he told me a few hours before, as we walked along the riverfront boardwalk.

What a difference a few years makes - especially on a balmy summer night, with the Buffalo Philharmonic playing in the background.

I set off for Buffalo a couple of weeks ago - it's closer to Cleveland than Cincinnati - with the purpose of exploring the city's emerging waterfront renaissance.

Cleveland and Buffalo have much in common, and not just their addresses on Lake Erie. These two once-thriving industrial towns are both fighting hard for a 21st-century reboot.

Waterfront development is seen as key to both communities' revival - important to both attracting new residents and encouraging a fledgling tourism industry.

As I chatted with residents and revealed that I was from Cleveland, the response I got surprised me. Buffalo, they said, has much to learn from Cleveland's waterfront renaissance.

I had the opposite reaction: Cleveland could learn a lot from Buffalo, particularly about embracing, and capitalizing on, its industrial past.

Canalside: Where it all started

Buffalo's early success owes much to its location as the western terminus of the Erie Canal, which linked the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.

Closed since the 1920s, the westernmost section of the canal known as the Commercial Slip was re-excavated in 2008, with the hopes of spurring new development.

It took a while, but that development continues to surprise and evolve, with new attractions opening every year.

A 2,000-foot boardwalk along the Buffalo River is the center of activity, at least in the summer. You can rent a kayak here, enjoy a beer, take a history cruise, have a cartoon caricature drawn.

For $1, you can hop aboard the bike ferry and cross the river to Outer Harbor, on the Lake Erie shore, likely the next area primed for development.

Two hotels have opened in the neighborhood in recent years, a Marriott and a Courtyard by Marriott; the Buffalo Sabres play at the KeyBank Center nearby; and the city's children's museum is moving to the area in late 2018.

"When Canalside opened four or five years ago, there was maybe one or two things to do here. Now you can spend the day," said Peter Florczak, who opened Water Bikes of Buffalo with his wife, Lisa, in 2013.

Two years later, the couple developed a patented Ice Bike, with a skate blade replacing the bicycle's front tire. Come cold weather, Buffalo's re-created canal becomes a 35,000-square-foot ice rink.

And there's plenty more to come, says Bryan Watson, with the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation. The government organization continues to seek proposals from private developers for acres of available land.

RiverWorks

About a quarter-mile downriver from Canalside is another new entertainment spot, built among the city's historic grain silos.

During the canal's heyday, Buffalo became a major player in the transportation of grain. Ships from the heartland would bring wheat and other grains via the Great Lakes to Buffalo, where the load would be transferred to smaller canal boats for travel to the East Coast and beyond.

Dozens of grain storage facilities developed along the Buffalo River at the turn of the 19th century. About 15 are still standing, including a handful still in use (one, owned by General Mills, has been making Cheerios here for 75 years).

In 2013, a group of local businessmen bought the long-vacant Grange League Federation (GLF) elevator and turned it into a fabulously unique entertainment spot.

"It was a pretty ugly place when we acquired it," said Earl Ketry, a long-time Buffalo restaurant owner and hotelier and one of RiverWorks' owners. "We saw in that property what everybody else didn't see. We could see the potential."

Today, the facility is home to two ice rinks, a roller derby rink, a restaurant and the world's first brewery built inside a grain silo (you can't miss it; it's painted like a giant six pack of Labatt's).

A riverfront beer garden set amid the silo ruins, dubbed Buffalo's Stonehenge, is not to be missed.

A rock-climbing course opened this summer, built up the walls of the silos; and a zipline course, with lines extending from atop the grain container, is expected to open within a month.

Ketry says the business plan calls for debuting new attractions at the site every year in a quest to make the property "an industrial Disney World."

He added, "We think we can create some of the most unique experiences you're going to find anywhere."

And the beer is pretty good, too.

Silo City

Competing with RiverWorks in the nowhere-but-Buffalo category: Silo City, a collection of grain elevators densely sited along a bend in the Buffalo River, about a mile downriver from RiverWorks.

Rick Smith, the owner of nearby Rigidized Metals, bought four of the elevators in 2006 (and has since sold one), with plans to build an ethanol plant. When that idea fizzled, he settled on a more public purpose: Use the space for art installations, concerts, special events and group tours.

Explore Buffalo, a local nonprofit, offers regular tours of the space, including one that takes visitors to the very top of these industrial relics (closed-toe shoes and a sense of adventure required).

I joined volunteer guide Margaret Logan on a recent Silo City Vertical tour, which offered a crash course in Buffalo's industrial past, plus some stunning views.

Invented in Buffalo in the 1840s, these storage facilities were first made out of wood, which proved a fire risk, and then concrete. The development of bucket elevators and conveyors made moving the grain easier, but also put "scoopers," primarily poorly paid Irish immigrants, out of work.

The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the late 1950s, which allowed ships to bypass Buffalo on their way to or from the Atlantic Ocean, was the death knell for many of these facilities and in some cases, the businesses that owned them.

The old American Malting Co. elevator, one of three we toured, didn't even make it to the '50s, a victim of Prohibition in 1921. After it was sold, it was converted to a flour-making facility, an operation that continued until 2001.

Much of the old equipment remains inside, alongside some complementary artwork by students at the University of Buffalo.

The adjacent Perot elevator, built in 1907, was operational until 1993, under several owners. The workers seem to have left in a hurry: worksheets and calendars from 1993 are strewn about the facility's upper floors. Piles of spent, decades-old grain (barley?) continues to release a stale, yeasty smell nearly 25 years after it was last processed here.

This is Buffalo history up close.

The view outside a window atop the 160-foot-high elevator provides another perspective. To the north, RiverWorks and Canalside; to the west, the Lake Erie shore.

In one scene, it's all there: Buffalo's past and, even better, its future.

More information

Canalside is just south of downtown Buffalo at the intersection of Pearl Street and Marine Drive, with easy access off I-190. For a concert schedule, special events and activities: canalsidebuffalo.com

RiverWorks, 359 Ganson St., Buffalo: buffaloriverworks.com

Explore Buffalo offers frequent tours of Silo City, priced from $15-$40. Information: explorebuffalo.org. For more information on Silo City: silo.city

For information about visiting Buffalo: visitbuffaloniagara.com

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