Stumbled Upon this Little Goldmine... (1 Viewer)

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First post- Awesome website, so I thought I'd join up for the duration.
VERY impressive and important series of photographs, just awesome really.
I toured this plant when it was Westinghouse in the late 1970's." Sprawling" is certainly an understatement in describing its seemingly endless size. It was located adjacent to Buffalo International airport on Genesee st. (Rt 33) in Cheektowaga N.Y.
At the time my uncle worked there and the plant was open one day for public tours. With my uncle as our private tour guide we got to go everywhere throughout the entire plant. It took several hours. The aisleways had street names and some of the larger intersections had traffic lights! One thing that sticks in my memory that Westinghuose was very proud of was its state of the art computer room full of row upon row of massive computers that were larger than today's largest upright refrigerators and featured large reel to reel tapes. These computers used heavy paper punch cards, there were no video monitors. Once data was computed and the machine produced a card with a series of vertically rectangular holes punched in it, it could be then fed into another machine and after a while and much whirring and humming a readout was printed on continuous paper about 18 inches wide. At the time, stunning.
My uncle told me that during the war a p-40 crashed into the roof of this building. Also during the early 80's there was another planecrash into the roof of this building while he was inside working. He had a souvenir of that, a section of aluminum fuel line with some red anodized hardware attached that he was able to pick up before being evacuated. My uncle sadly passed away just last fall. He was a proud U.S. Navy veteran who served at Saipan and Iwo Jima and several other places in the pacific aboard a heavy cruiser, U.S.S. Chester CA-27 during WWII.
Westinghouse ceased operations and closed the plant in the early 1980's laying off the workforce. My uncle however, being employed in the maintenence dept. was kept on as part of the small crew dismantling all the machinery in the plant. This gave him another eight years of employment there which further shows the massive size of this facility.
Today no trace of this building remains.
 
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