Torn-Down Tuesday: When the Erie Canal wandered through the West Side

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Many Buffalonians know that the Erie Canal started in Buffalo — at the old Aud site at Canalside. Where it went from there is a little less well-known, but even easier to picture — the canal bed as it ran through the Lower West Side is essentially paved over for a very familiar roadway. Between Erie Street (next to the old Aud site) and Porter Street (next to the Peace Bridge), the Erie Canal ran on the path of what is now I-190.

The Canal was part of life on the Lower West Side, but not in the “low bridge” and “mule named Sal” sense. It was, for intents, a garbage dump. An illegal dump, but a dump nonetheless.

The garbage-filled waterway is the long-defunct Erie Canal in this 1938 photo. City Hall is seen to the south, and the bridge crossing the canal is at about the same place where the pedestrian bridge now crosses the 190 from Hudson Street to LaSalle Park. (Buffalo News archives)

In the 25 years following the snapping of the photo above, the Lower West Side would go through a series of scorched earth “Urban Renewal” type projects that left the area entirely unrecognizable to someone who would have been familiar with the canal.

When the Lakeview Housing Project was announced, residents were told the canal bed would be transformed into a playground for children. If this ever happened, it only lasted for about a decade with the 1950s building of the “Ontario Thruway.”

Gone would be tightly packed “slum areas” like the one below.

Buffalo News archives

This image, probably taken in front of 370 Trenton Ave. near Hudson Street, was provided to newspapers in 1938 as the typical sort of “slums” which would be condemned to build the new Lakeview project. By 1939, Trenton Avenue looked like the photo below, with 696 units of housing planned, costing renters on average about $4 per month.

Buffalo News archives

Today, the corner of Trenton and Hudson has gone through another transformation, with a new generation of subsidized housing built there over the last several decades.

 

What it looked like Wednesday: Getting beers at Pilot Field, late ’80s

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Regardless of what the temperature is or how much snow is in the forecast, the Bisons’ first home game is as sure a starting point for Buffalo’s spring as any other measure.

Buffalo News archives

Part of what makes a trip to the ballpark so enjoyable is the communal nature of thousands of baseball fans getting beers from the same vendors for decades.

Buffalo News archives

Conehead:

One of Buffalo’s all-time most popular sports personalities, Conehead — known as Tom Girot when deconed — has been wandering the stands of Buffalo sporting events with ice cold beer since the early ’70s. His all-time record sales day came at a Bisons exhibition game at the Rockpile. Fans tossed back 59 cases, all served up with the Conehead guarantee, as the Bisons played the World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979.

 

Buffalo News archives

The Earl of Bud:

Though he’s been gone from the stands for almost two decades, Earl “The Earl of Bud” Howze is still a household name and a testament to how much Buffalo loves its beer and beer vendors.

He started hawking beer to Bisons fans in 1979, the same year the team returned to the field after a decadelong hiatus. For almost two decades, it was his style as much as his product which endeared him to a generation of thirsty sports fans. His white tuxedo tails with his nickname emblazoned in red were sponsored by Heidie’s Tuxedo.

Even my unflappable, no-nonsense grandfather — a longtime season ticket holder for the Bills and the Sabres, a man who was rarely impressed with any notion of pageantry or exhibition beyond what the game on the field or the ice, was really impressed with The Earl of Bud.

“They should get rid of that Pee-Wee Herman,” grumbled Gramps, “This guy is 10 times the dancer.”

Of course, as little as Grandpa Coyle liked nonsense, he loved ice-cold beer — which likely explains it all.

 

Buffalo News archives

There have always been beers on the concourse, too. In fact, that’s where most of Buffalo knows they can find Conehead at the arena these days. In 1989, choices on the concourse were limited to only a few bottled varieties not carried around the park by roving vendors.

Today, the selections include a dozen or more local craft brews if that Blue or Blue Light — even served by the Conehead — doesn’t get the job done for you.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Pro-booze women march on Niagara Square, 1932

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The photo shows only a small portion of the parade of 20,000 women who marched in front of an estimated 100,000 people lining the streets of Buffalo, nearly all boisterously in favor of the repeal of the 18th Amendment and the end of Prohibition.

Buffalo News archives

Most seemed to agree, it was written in the Courier-Express, that some government control over liquor by taxation was a better idea than “the unending stream of bootleg liquor and beer that flows tax-free through this city.”

In characterizing the crowd, Courier reporter C.V. Curry noted there were no machine guns, bootleggers, gangsters, racketeers or “red-faced saloonkeepers of the days long ago.” Instead, he wrote, those marching to return to the legal stream of booze included socially prominent matrons, “veterans of the battlefields of France,” and “at least six elderly, dignified veterans of the Civil War.”

As far as this photo, it might seem familiar but difficult to place. Several landmarks shown still stand, while several others are gone.

The Rand Building looms in the background in full view — the neighboring Tishman building, which now partially blocks the view from this vantage point, was not built until 1959.

The building in the left foreground is the familiar Statler Hotel. To the right is the Walter Mahoney State Office Building. Both look pretty similar today.

The torn-down part of this Torn-down Tuesday entry are the buildings along Franklin Street that have since given way to the Convention Center. The sign that can barely be made out on the building is for the Mohican Grocery store at 157 Franklin.

Buffalo in the ’70s: Dancing at Club 747

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

“It’s Saturday night in Buffalo, and that ‘fever’ sends the disco crowd scurrying toward what looks like an airplane. Not just any plane, but a Boeing 747 jetliner placed strategically across the street from the Greater Buffalo International Airport.”

Buffalo News archives

By the time that was written in “Billboard” magazine in 1978, Buffalo’s Club 747 — opened in March 1975 — had already become the inspiration for a string of other discotheques.

As many as 5,000 people a week were hustling their way through the airplane-themed club on Genesee Street. Three years in, and the place had already seen a $100,000 renovation, carried out by the same lighting crew that was responsible for “Saturday Night Fever.”

Buffalo News archives

During the late ’70s heyday, a “boarding pass” to get into the club was $1, $2 on Saturday nights. Dancers were expected to be dressed appropriately — no sneakers, sweatshirts and “non-dress jeans” (remember, this was the ’70s) were allowed.

You can see the back of an airline seat in the foreground here. (Buffalo News archives)

Aside from those who enjoyed the live dancing and music played by disc jockeys like Shane Brother Shane, Super Shannon and Dr. John Bisci, the cache and place in the memories of Western New York jumped a few notches when “Disco Step-by-Step,” recorded at 747, became one of Buffalo’s favorite television shows.

Buffalo News archives

Marty Angelo hosted the dance show on cable, and Kevin O’Connell joined him when the show moved to Channel 4.

Club 747 was a part of the Executive Inn complex, which also included the Playboy Club. The place was Kixx Nightclub through the 1990s and was torn down to make way for Courtyard by Mariott hotel in the mid-2000s.

For more about Buffalo’s other early discos — such as Mulligan’s, He & She’s, Big Bertha’s and more — check out 1975: The beginnings of disco in Buffalo.

What it looked like Wednesday: The changing look in front of Channel 4, 1960 -2016

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

When Don Paul retired as Buffalo’s pre-eminent weather authority last month, the folks at Channel 4 wished him luck on the message board in front of the station’s Elmwood Avenue studios. The high-definition display replaces a scrolling light sign which had been in place for at least 40 years.

Steve Cichon/Buffalo Stories photo

The station now known as WIVB-TV has called 2077 Elmwood Ave. home since 1960, and until 2000, the building also was home to WBEN Radio. The yellow buildings across Elmwood Avenue in this 1983 photo have long since been torn down, and replaced by Popeye’s and Napa Auto.

Buffalo Stories archives

In 1977, it wasn’t Don Paul, but another fabled Buffalo weatherman — Channel 2’s Kevin O’Connell — who was then Channel 4’s main weatherman, broadcasting live from underneath the sign as a blizzard descended upon the region.

Buffalo Stories archives

It was a simpler sign — almost bizarrely similar to next-door neighbor and competitor WGR’s sign in 1961. The tiny building that housed WGR’s radio studios for several years has been owned by Channel 4 for decades. It still stands directly across Elmwood from McDonald’s.

Buffalo News archives

Looking further down Elmwood, none of the buildings in view past the former WGR building are still standing. A paint store stood where the former Don Pablo’s/Advance Auto now stands. Off in the distance closer to Hertel, the water tower of the Kittinger Furniture factory is visible.

 

Torn-Down Tuesday: The Palace Burlesk

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Buffalo men of a certain age react one of two ways at any mention of the Palace Burlesk: Whimsical and easy smiles or tense and dyspeptic discomfort. The reaction is usually based on whether the man’s ribs happen to be close enough to catch an elbow from a wife who knows all too well what those smiles are about.

The last show at the Palace Burlesk’s original location in 1967.

Burlesque sounds bawdy enough when it ends with “–que,” but when it ends with a “–k,” as it did for most of the 50 years Dewey Michaels ran downtown Buffalo’s most famous and infamous live girlie show, you knew what you were going to get.

A far cry from the “Canadian Ballet” style of “gentlemen’s entertainment” in later eras, the Palace Burlesk women bared a lot — but certainly not all. There was dancing, Vaudeville comedy, the occasional animal act, short films and always live music.

Rest assured that when your father or grandfather went to the Palace, it wasn’t for the Borscht Belt Jewish comedians who had been at the top of their game 30 years earlier — but the mix of entertainment made it likely that there might also be more than just the odd woman there for the show.

The Palace and Shelton Square, late 1940s. (Buffalo News archives)

The Palace Burlesk was the crown jewel of Shelton Square, known for decades as Buffalo’s Time Square. Both the Palace and Shelton Square were wiped off the map in the late ’60s, when the tightly packed, century-old buildings were wiped out for the Main Place Tower, the M&T Building and the green space along the east side of Main at Church, where the Palace once stood.

With the M&T headquarters already built in the background, the block of buildings where the Palace stood was being torn down to make way for green space in 1967. (Buffalo News archives)

They tried to build a new Palace Burlesque at the corner of Main and Tupper, but it never caught on. Within a decade, the place was the home of Studio Arena Theatre—now known at 710 Main Theatre.

Main and Tupper, 1967 (Buffalo News archives)

In 1993, George Kunz wrote about the Palace for The News, and he does a wonderful job of describing the spirit of the place — and offering a whole host of reasons that men of a certain age might tell their wives and daughters and granddaughters why they visited the Palace.

The End of Royalty

By George Kunz
August 1, 1993

Rarely can one fix an exact date for the end of an era, but in the case of vaudeville-burlesque in Buffalo, there is an absolute date for an absolute end: April 6, 1967. On that spring evening, people gathered at the Palace Theater to see the curtain rise and fall for the final time.

It was a gala performance: all 720 seats had been sold long in advance, with big blocks of tickets bought by the Saturn and Buffalo clubs. A tall doorman in blue uniform with gold braid and buttons presided at curbside, helping guests alight onto a red carpet which stretched on into the Palace.

Long, shiny cars started arriving before 8; men in black tie, women wearing floor-length gowns. From outside the area, visitors traveled by chartered bus. Almost a thousand people squeezed into the high, narrow building.

Although the Palace had been known as a burlesque house, its programs were largely vaudeville. This entertainment, American cousin of the British music hall, once thrived in a dozen local theaters, but movies gradually stifled live performances.

One by one, showplaces shut down or converted to films until only the Palace remained as a source of employment to a generation of performers who had trained on the vaudeville stage. With a blend of burlesque and vaudeville acts, the Palace held a unique place in the heart of downtown Buffalo. Audiences were large and spirited.

Such was the theater’s fame that for years the Palace was used as a focus for any downtown geographical instructions. “You know where the Palace is … well, you turn right there.” Everybody remembered the lively marquee with the dancing girl figures kicking endlessly to the rhythm of blinking lights.

Located across Main Street from Shelton Square, the Palace exuded life. Pedestrians passing during showtime heard raucous, robust sounds of extravagant fun. The orchestra blared, drums rumbled and laughter, a rollicking outrageous laughter, tumbled out the doors onto Main Street.

When I was a kid, my mother and I would sometimes pass on the way to catch a South Park trolley. Mother had just made the weekly novena at St. Joseph’s Cathedral, and she would hustle me by the Palace, hoping that I would not notice the hilarity.

Old by American standards, the Palace was built shortly after the Civil War. The three-story edifice was faced with white marble and sparkled with lights, with joie de vivre. Inverted V signs pictured the week’s headliners: girls posing naughtily with their fans, veils, feathers. Smaller posters advertised an accompanying movie, but this was incidental. The Palace specialized in live entertainment.

An old Buffalo joke had it that to receive a high school diploma, young men, at least once, had to skip the day’s classes and attend the Palace Burlesque. Only then could an education be considered complete.

The Palace was ready to satisfy such graduation requirements: On weekdays, the first show began at noon; four other performances followed. A final midnight special was added on Saturday.

To describe a Palace midnight show is to resurrect a bygone era. Waiting for a performance, hucksters circulated among the audience, peddling popcorn, ice cream suckers, candy, programs. The atmosphere resembled that surrounding a hockey game.

Generally, all seats were filled, and with a lively drum roll, the orchestra started its overture, the curtain rose and the chorus danced out to enthusiastic applause. In front were always the better dancers, the more lissome girls; behind them, the veterans whose prime had been kicked over the footlights of many stages.

After this boisterous introduction, a master of ceremonies took command, introducing individual acts: singers, jugglers, magicians. The featured solo dancers were, of course, alluring and deeply appreciated by students. They always performed under soft blue lights.

The best part of any Palace show was the comics. Rag-tag survivors of a dying vaudeville, the baggy-panted comedians worked their old routines. Wonderful, funny, talented performers they were — the last of a breed that knew it was vanishing.

Sometimes they wove the lead dancers into their skits, and the contrast between beauty and the fools was uproarious. Such acts were usually without vulgarity, reminiscent of the French farces of Georg Feydeau. Compared with modern television, they were touchingly innocent.

A staple of any Palace burlesque show was the closing promenade. The music of Irving Berlin’s classic “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” was unvarying background. While the emcee droned the lyrics, the girls, quite tired by now, crossed the stage one final time.

Great burlesque queens played the Palace: Evelyn Nesbit Thau and Rose la Rose. But the comics are the stars who deserve to be immortalized: Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers, W.C. Fields, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr. and a host of gentle, forgotten vaudevillians.

For that last, era-closing performance in April 1967, some famous personalities came out of retirement: Hal Haig, one of the original Keystone Kops; Bert Karr with a legendary vaudeville ice cream routine; Lenny Paige, a longtime local stage celebrity, was master of ceremonies.

Awards were presented to the Palace’s respected owner-showman, Dewey Michaels, who also operated the Mercury, an art theater out Main Street. Michaels had bowed to the rights of eminent domain and sold his theater to New York State so that the Church Street Arterial could be built.

Michaels invested that payment in a new burlesque theater at Main and Tupper streets. Unhappily, the medium did not survive the transplant; the patrons were indifferent and few.

In September 1977, this new, ill-fated theater was sold; the operation went highbrow and became the Studio Arena Theatre. As such, it still offers live entertainment in Buffalo’s Theater District, although not quite in the old Palace tradition.

Buffalo in the ’80s: Electronic games from Hengerer’s, Brand Names

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Long before the days of smartphones and tablets, kids from toddlers to teens got their fill of electronic gaming not on iPhones and Kindles, but from Merlin and Simon.

Buffalo News archives

Just before Christmas 1981, Hengerer’s downtown store devoted a special section to electronic games, and it was enough to get News photographers in the door to check out the latest in what every kid wanted under the tree.

Buffalo News archives

If you got one of these games, even if you did scope it out live in the store — you likely circled it in your Brand Names catalog, too, just to make sure Santa knew whether you wanted the Coleco or Mattel hockey game.

Buffalo Stories archive

Buffalo Stories archive

According to these pages from the 1980 Brand Names catalog, most of these games cost between $35 and $50, which according to US Labor Department statistics, would cost between $101 and $144 in 2016 dollars.

Adventures in Grandma Cichon’s kitchen

By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo

BUFFALO, NY — A few years after it was published, when I was in grammar school, my grandmother gave me a copy of this amazing issue of The Buffalo News magazine. This cleaner copy is newer to the archives– I still have the well-worn one Grandma Cichon gave me more than three decades ago.

buffalo mag

This great 64 page work is filled with hundreds of historic photos and stories—so many of the great places, events, and people that were a part of Buffalo during The News’ first 100 years of publication.

Seeing the photos and getting my first glimpse at how Buffalo once was immediately triggered a love for and a desire to better understand, collect and share our area’s past when I first introduced to it by means of an old newspaper tucked into in grandma’s buffet drawer when I was in first or second grade.

Grandma’s buffet was piled high with every kind of crap imaginable, including, thankfully, old newspapers. The dining room buffet was only used for supper on holidays like Easter or Thanksgiving—even though she still called the evening meal “supper” when it was pizza from Pizza Shanty or fish frys from Trautweins on Seneca Street. That we’d eat in the kitchen off the Corelle “Butterfly Gold” brown-flowered plates which everyone’s grandma seemed to have in the 70s and 80s.

butterfly gold

She’d entreat us to “sit in the parlor” when it got too crowded out in the kitchen, but mostly, Grandma liked people in that room where she seemed to live.  She sat at the far head of the table smoking Kools, drinking instant coffee, and watching Channel 17 on the little black-and-white TV in the corner of the kitchen counter.

The problem was she had ten kids, and all kinds of grandkids and all their friends and they’d all be in the kitchen when she was trying to cook.

“Everyone into the parlor!” she’d say in her high, breathy, asthmatic voice… There were often so many people for dinner, she’d say “small bums on the board!” She had a piece of wood that she’d put across two chairs, and three or four of our tiny bums would fit on there.

We’d all sit there waiting for Gramps to get home from work– The front door was a straight shot to his seat at the head of the table. He’d walk in, put his coat on the banister, sit down and say the fastest grace ever– “BlessOLordgiftsboutreceiveChristLordAmen.”

It came out as one word, but it was prayer, and that’s how our meals were blessed at Grandma Cheehoyn’s house.

Paging through this old Sunday insert still leaves me with a great yearning to understand how things used to be, and why these old ways are important to us now and in the future. The News Magazine and its progeny have enlightened and inspired me for as long as I’ve been able to read, as have Grandma Cichon and all the other great storytellers who have been a part of my life…

And since thinking and writing about this, I’ve had the insatiable urge for instant coffee. Like I did for grandma so many times, I think I’ll turn on the kettle– but unlike at Grandma’s, I don’t think there’s anyone here who’s going to light a smoke off the gas flame of the stove as the water boils.

 

Buffalo in the ’60s: Luke Easter’s 500-foot home run

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

It’s spring in Western New York. For most of the last 137 years, that has meant getting ready for Bisons baseball.

Buffalo News archives

This 1957 photo shows Offermann Stadium, home of the Bisons from 1924 to 1960, and the path of Luke Easter’s record 500-plus-foot home run over the scoreboard that year. It was the first time that it have ever been done during a game in the park’s 33-year history — although legend had it that Babe Ruth once hit a ball over the scoreboard during an exhibition.

The outfield billboards are an interesting snapshot of life in Buffalo in 1957 as well.

WKBW’s clock advertises the station that wouldn’t become Buffalo’s top 40 rock ‘n’ roll leader for another year yet. Weber’s Mustard remains a Buffalo favorite, but Madison Cab, Don Allen Chevy and the rest all only exist in Buffalo memories.

What It Looked Like Wednesday: A&P, Delaware at Great Arrow, 1948

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Buffalo News archives

Now known as Marshalls Plaza, the strip mall has also been known as Great Arrow Plaza and, when it first opened in 1948, the Delaware Park Shopping Center. The apartment buildings in the background are still recognizable.

The big tenants when this photo was snapped were the A&P market and the Western Savings Bank branch — which was opened after state law changed allowing savings banks to open two branch locations. Episcopal Bishop Lauriston Scaife was joined by about 6,000 onlookers when the bank location opened.

Buffalo Stories archives

The plaza was built on the northeast corner of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition — on the site of the 12,000-seat stadium.