The elevator doesn't go to the top. It stops at 25, and you walk the last three flights — which tells you most of what you need to know about this place. Buffalo City Hall is a working government building that happens to have one of the great American views on its roof. Nobody takes your ticket, because there isn't one.
It's free, on weekdays, with a metal detector in the lobby and planning applications riding up in the lift beside you. Go.
Get your bearings before you shoot
Everyone writes "360-degree views" and leaves it there. Here's what you're actually looking at.
North is the reason to come: sixteen miles off, the Niagara Falls skyline, and above it the standing column of mist thrown up by the falls themselves. On a properly clear day the Toronto skyline surfaces across the lake.
East is old Buffalo — the vast silhouette of Central Terminal, the Art Deco railway cathedral that outlived its railway, with the Polonia church steeples scattered around it. South, behind the modern skyline, look for the grain elevators of Silo City: the structures that made this a milling capital and paid for the building you're standing in. West is Lake Erie.
The walkway is glassed in — sensible in a city that gave the world the phrase lake-effect, and annoying if you brought a camera. Shoot through the cleanest panel you can find and accept it.
Don't skip the lobby
Ride straight to 25 and you've missed half the visit. Dietel and Wade finished this in 1932 at 398ft, one of the largest municipal buildings in the country, built as the money to build it was running out.
Look at the entrance columns on your way in: the shafts are carved as giant octagonal nuts, rivet heads and all, under a lintel moulded to read as a saw blade. That's a building telling you who paid for it, in the language of the people who paid. Albert Stewart cut the friezes; René Paul Chambellan executed the sculpture. The sandstone panels over the door show a woman harvesting, a man hunting deer, a woman weaving, a man raising a cabin — the pioneer story, told without sentiment.
The lobby murals deserve ten minutes. If the 13th floor is open, put your head into the Common Council Chambers for the skylight.
Practicalities
You don't need the tour. The deck is walk-up on weekdays and plenty of people go straight there. Explore Buffalo does run a free 60-minute City Hall tour at noon on weekdays — genuinely free, a non-profit running it as a community service — and it's the better way to understand the building, but it's optional.
Those last three flights have no lift alternative, so the deck is out of reach if you can't manage stairs; Explore Buffalo says the same about its own tour. High wind closes the outdoor ring without warning, which in January is not rare.