Creating an immersive DL&W experience.
History comes to life with multi-sensory storytelling.
To help envision what the DL&W project can become, we partnered with Local Projects, a design studio known for developing resonant experiences in public and cultural spaces worldwide. For over 20 years, its multidisciplinary team of creative technologists, content strategists, producers, designers, and animators has helped institutions connect people to stories through innovative, interactive design.
Local Projects in Buffalo
The Manhattan-based firm’s work in Buffalo began a few years ago on a different project. At Canalside, an exhibit for the Longshed building was created in collaboration with the Buffalo History Museum to commemorate the Erie Canal’s bicentennial. Waterway of Change: The Complex Legacies of the Erie Canal is an interactive installation now open to the public.
Waterway of Change traces the surrounding area’s history from its significance as ancestral Haudenosaunee land through Buffalo’s rise as a bustling hub of shipping and railway commerce. Through touchscreens, projection, custom animations, audio storytelling, and objects of material culture, the exhibit invites visitors to engage with the layered and sometimes complicated stories that shaped Buffalo’s waterfront.
Local Projects’ Project Director, Brook Anderson, has worked in museum design for over two decades as an exhibit designer, educator, and advocate for narrative-driven space.
“Local Projects’ work on the DL&W terminal builds on the immersive storytelling we developed for Waterway of Change…” Anderson explains. “That installation helped reintroduce and reframe Buffalo’s early waterfront history; the DL&W terminal extends that narrative by transforming a historic transit hub into a new civic anchor. Together, these efforts reconnect the city to its industrial roots while shaping a vibrant, forward-looking waterfront experience.”
A sample of immersive concepts for the DL&W
Anderson and his team began their work for the DL&W project in the fall of 2024 by exploring the building’s architecture, the site’s legacy, and the surrounding neighborhood to propose a set of experience principles and ideas grounded in Buffalo’s culture and history.
The recommendations span imaginative and educational interactive elements designed to draw people in, invite participation, and create moments of everyday connection.
Among early concepts are multisensory installations using projected light and sound to share the stories of workers, passengers, and builders who shaped the terminal’s past.
Another reimagines meals inside historic train cars with menus inspired by old-school railway dining.
Yet another suggests that traditional coin-operated tower scopes, often found near natural vistas that attract tourists, be converted to show viewers images of Buffalo’s busy harbor 200 years ago.
Additional ideas — including a “living gallery” or immersive timelines that leverage augmented reality — are rooted in Buffalo’s distinctive character while remaining adaptable to future uses and seasonal programming.
While all the ideas outlined here are just ideas and the DL&W project is still defining what kinds of experiences guests will have when visiting, if you’d like to see what happens when one of Local Projects’ ideas becomes a reality, visit Waterway of Change: The Complex Legacies of the Erie Canal at the Longshed at Canalside this summer. The exhibit is a powerful example of how history and design can create meaningful connections and allow us to see Buffalo’s waterfront in a new light.
