Curtiss-Wright Plant 2/Westinghouse Electric Plant (Site)

 Second World War 1939-1945, factory, place with historical importance, aircraft, historical layer / disappeared object

Originally two small hangars located along Genesee Street on the large grassy field known as Buffalo Airport, the Curtiss Aerodrome began operations shortly after Glenn Curtiss' 1915 arrival in Buffalo as a final flight testing and evaluation facility for aircraft produced at the Curtiss Churchill Street Plant. The Aerodrome continued to perform this role well into the late 1930's and despite the rapidly expanding and advancing Curtiss and Curtiss-Wright factories being built in numerous locations across Buffalo during World War I years and 1920's, the Aerodrome and its facilities remained relatively spartan and isolated from the hub of production sites.

The design and introduction of the Curtiss-Wright P-40 Warhawk in 1938 brought significant changes to the Aerodrome and its facilities, as gathering war clouds in Europe caused the US Army Air Corps to place the largest single fighter order it had ever made for fighters: 524 P-40s. Suddenly overwhelmed by the both production requirements and flight testing backlogs, the Curtiss-Wright company and the National Defense Expansion Corporation bought 124 acres of land surrounding the small Aerodrome facilities in mid-1940 for the construction of a 1,500,000 square foot factory building for the full-scale production of the P-40 fighter. Employing several hundred construction laborers from the local workforce, ground was broken on the Curtiss-Wright Buffalo Plant #2 on November 9th, 1940 and completed with its formal dedication on August 14th, 1941.

Built on the site of the former Aerodrome Facilities, the factory began aircraft production in on May 19th, 1941, a full three months before its formal completion date, but also continued to operate as a final flight testing and evaluation facility for aircraft produced at the plant and also at the nearby Curtiss-Wright Plant #1 in Tonawanda. Operating on a 24/7/365 basis for the next four years, Plant #2 would go on to employ a lionshare of Curtiss-Wright’s 43,000-strong Buffalo workforce who would build a total of 17, 575 planes at the factory, 9,902 of which were various models of the P-40 Warhawk. The enormous success of the P-40 design and its stout construction would see aircraft produced in Buffalo serve with the air forces of 28 Allied nations during the Second World War before production of the airframe ended in 1944 as it became increasingly outdated. The end of P-40 production brought no respite from the pace of operations for the workers at Plant #2 however, as Curtiss-Wright rapidly retooled the plant for full-scale production of the C-46 Commando cargo transport, 2,674 of which were built at the plant by the end of hostilities in September 1945.

The end of the Second World War brought drastic changes to the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which had grown enormously thanks to heavy wartime aircraft demand and government investment. The end of hostilities and subsequent freefall in demand for Curtiss-Wright aircraft caused the workforce at the companies’ Buffalo plants to drop from 43,000 to just over 5,500 by the end of 1945, and by late 1946 the workforce dropped to zero after the company announced its intention to relocate all its production facilities to Columbus, Ohio. Despite being only five years old, the enormous and technologically up-to-date Plant #2 found itself idle and without an owner, however this period of disuse lasted less than a year before Curtiss-Wright sold the entire facility to Westinghouse Electric.

Becoming the home to the Motor and Industrial Controls Divisions of Westinghouse, the former aircraft plant produced electronic parts and motors for the next 42 years before the ageing facility was shut down by Westinghouse in 1985. Remaining largely vacant for the next decade, the large plant was the subject of several reuse attempts as mixed commercial/light industrial space but none came to fruition before lack of occupancy and the harsh Buffalo winters began to take their toll on the building. Empty once again in by 1991, the plant and its 124 acre property were purchased by the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority who promptly announced plans to demolish the plant and reuse its land as part of an expansion to the Buffalo-Niagara Airport. When demolition of the factory completed in mid-1999 the factory grounds were razed to expand the crosswind 14-32 runway and the Buffalo-Niagara Airport terminal and tarmac.
Today, no evidence of the Curtiss-Wright #2 plant exists aside from some of the original employee parking lot on the Northeast portion of the former property. Through a memorial plaque for workers lost in a September 11th, 1942 crash was unveiled in September of 2000, a larger planned monument to the factory and its workers on airport grounds fell to the wayside in the face of post-9/11 security concerns, leaving the majority of tangible evidence of the plant’s existence and contribution to the Second World War and subsequent generations available at the Cheektowaga Historical Association and Museum.

www.buffaloah.com/h/aero/curt/index.html
www.cheektowagahistory.com/page9.php