Buffalo City Hall is a 32-storey Art Deco tower from 1931, its limestone facade covered in carved ornament: bison heads, Iroquois figures, and Great Lakes imagery. It is one of the most extravagant civic buildings of its era in America, built at the peak of Buffalo's prosperity just as the Depression was beginning.
The observation deck on the 28th floor is free during business hours and chronically undervisited — an excellent vantage point over the city, the waterfront, and Lake Erie. The lobby is genuinely spectacular: gold mosaics, marble floors, and bronze fixtures. Both are open to the public. The building faces Niagara Square, designed by Joseph Ellicott in 1804 as a radial street plan inspired by Pierre Charles L'Enfant's Washington D.C.