Buffalo in the ’30s: Babe Ruth visits the Hotel Lafayette

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Babe Ruth’s infamous girth was 21 pounds lighter as he met with fans and reporters at the Hotel Lafayette downtown before heading to Offermann Stadium for an exhibition game against the Bisons in September 1938.

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Buffalo News archives

The King of Swat joined the Brooklyn Dodgers as a coach earlier that year, and told assembled reporters that any hopes of a comeback seemed unlikely — despite his request to be placed on the active roster as a pinch batter when rosters expand to 40 for the month of September.

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Babe Ruth, Brooklyn Dodgers coach, poses with Bisons great Ollie Carnegie. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Ruth wasn’t in the lineup for big league games, but when the Dodgers played in exhibition, he was the star. He played the first five innings, and wound up 0 for 3 at the plate — although he cranked seven homerun bombs during a batting practice show.

A game story in the Courier-Express mentions that “Young Salvatore Maglie, rookie hurler of Niagara Falls,” closed out the game in excellent form for the Bisons. History was just missed —Bisons Hall of Famer Maglie didn’t face Ruth. “Sal the Barber” picked up the ball for the Herd after Babe Ruth left the game.

Back to the photo of Ruth in the Hotel Lafayette: The Soldiers and Sailors monument is still familiar and fully visible in the background. The other building behind Ruth is the German Insurance Building.

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The photo of Ruth was taken from the Hotel Layette, a block to the right of where this photo was taken.

The six-story cast iron building was one of Buffalo’s unique and eye-catching architectural landmarks until it was torn down in 1957, to make way for the Tishman Building. The longtime headquarters of National Fuel, the building is now the home of the Hilton Garden Inn.

What it looked like Wednesday: The Village of Williamsville, 1933

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

This airborne shot of Main Street in the Village of Williamsville looks down Main from what is now the Creekview Restaurant, past what is now Amherst Town Hall, down to what is now the Beach-Tuyn Funeral Home and beyond.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo News archives

Williamsville Island is now Island Park, and the home to Old Home Days.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Super Flea, aka the Walden Flea Market

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

For decades, it was a weekend home-away-from-home for people who have stuff to sell and those on the endless quest for the perfect (if not slightly used) stuff.

Buffalo News archives, 1984

Buffalo News archives, 1984

While much of Super Flea’s buying and selling went on in the parking lot when weather allowed, the Super Flea building was a year-round weekend junk adventure.

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Super Flea moved into the structure originally built at a cost of $1.1 million by GEX, and opened in 1962. GEX was a membership department store for government employees, military personnel, and employees of companies which dealt with the government.

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When it opened, GEX carried more than 80,000 items, in a single story store “the size of three football fields.”

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The building that was home to GEX then Super Flea for more than 50 years was torn down starting in 2014. A new Walmart Supercenter opened on the site in 2015.

 

Buffalo in the ’80s: Russ the Baker and his ringing cowbell

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

His business was a holdover from an earlier era when the streets of Buffalo where filled with hucksters, salespeople and tradesmen offering their wares and services.

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“Ladies come and buy my bread… doo dah, doo dah,” Russ the Baker would sing, his head out the driver’s side window of his van, ringing a cowbell. “Buy my bread I knead (or was that need?) the dough… oh, doo dah day.”

If he wasn’t the very last, he was certainly the best known of a tiny number of old time roving street peddlers in 1997. He was a beloved Buffalo institution, still donning a baker’s hat on his head and a song in his heart, taking to the streets a few times a week when he died at the age of 70.

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Before Russell Russo was Russ the Baker, he was Russ the Milkman. In the mid-’50’s, Russ’s cousin, who owned a bakery on Connecticut Street, asked the milkman to unload an extra 40 loaves of bread along his route that morning. Twenty went quick at the gas station on Elmwood and Bryant.

As he was leaving bottles of milk at the side doors of what we now call the Elmwood Village, he began to half-sing and half-shout, “Who needs a loaf of bread?”

A couple dozen still-oven-warm loaves were gone in a matter of minutes and a new business was born. For the next 40 years, Russ was delivering his own home-baked treats as well as featuring bread from Balistreri’s and Famous Doughnuts.

A Vaudeville singer as a teen and an opera lover, Russ often combined the two in his booming voice to sing silly songs about his banana bread or the occasional pie.

Seven days a week, often with his wife Rosalie or a few of their nine children, Russ hit the streets of Western New York with a baked goods filled van. There weren’t many streets in Buffalo and the nearby suburbs he didn’t drive down to sell. He was best known in North Buffalo, South Buffalo and Black Rock.

I clearly remember his bellowing voice and bell on Allegany Street in South Buffalo, and somehow in song, telling us boys to tell our moms that he had cakes and bread. I don’t remember what happened after that, but I assume Mom gave us the same look she gave us when Goldie would interrupt Sesame Street to ask for our mothers to come to the TV.

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Thankfully, there were thousands of others through the years who heeded the melodic call to bread and doughnuts.

 

What it looked like Wednesday: The Zamboni drives up Main Street, 1975

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The City of Buffalo owned Memorial Auditorium and ran the day-to-day operation of the venue in a way that doesn’t happen with Erie County and First Niagara Center. This included apparently, changing the oil on the Zamboni.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo News archives

So, as Sabres fever in Buffalo was hitting a high point in February of 1975 — as the Sabres where destined for the Stanley Cup Finals that year — Jim Lombardo took the Zamboni in for “routine maintenance.”

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo News archives

Whatever exactly that meant, it involved driving the Zamboni from Memorial Auditorium up Main Street to a city garage for repairs. The maximum speed for this vehicle — which is cruising the 600 block of Main in these photos — was 8 mph.

Likely the heads of a few lunch patrons at the Swiss Chalet’s original location (across Main from Shea’s) were turned, as The Aud’s ice resurfacer incongruously schlepped its way past the window.

The repairs must have worked. The ice was so great at The Aud the following night that the Sabres and Flyers combined for 12 goals in a 6-6 tie.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Basil’s Colvin Theater

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

When it met with the wrecking ball in 1984, the Colvin Theater at Kenmore and Colvin was celebrated as “the last Art Deco picture show.”

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Opened in 1944 by the Basil brothers, the Colvin was one of about two dozen Basil theaters across Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Lackawanna. Nick, Gus, Bill and Tom Basil also owed the Lafayette on Lafayette Square, the Apollo on Jefferson Avenue, the Roxy on William Street, the Clinton-Strand on Clinton Street, the Varsity on Bailey Avenue, and the Victoria on West Ferry Street, among others.

Nicholas, Constantine, and Theophilos Basil (Buffalo News archives)

Nicholas, Constantine, and Theophilos Basil. (Buffalo News archives)

The construction of the theater began in 1941, and included a penthouse apartment above the theater. It was meant to be Nick Basil’s home, but he died in 1943, before the wartime construction lag allowed the building to be finished. Instead, Constantine “Gus” Basil and his family lived in the apartment—which afforded a view of the movie screen from their living room.

It might not seem like much now, but was something spectacular in the days before television. Apartment lights dimmed automatically when the living room curtain opened to the movie screen. m

It might not seem like much now, but was something spectacular in the days before television. Apartment lights dimmed automatically when the living room curtain opened to the movie screen.

The theater sat more than 900 people, and had parking for 300 cars. When it opened it was feted as one of America’s most modern movie houses in trade magazines like “The Motion Picture Herald.”

It opened as a second-run movie house, with the first-run films saved for the big theaters downtown, like Basil’s Lafayette. The actual film that played at the Lafayette would work its way through the Basil show houses, until it got to Colvin. But by the end of the ’50s, the Colvin was Basil’s most profitable building, and was soon showing first-run movies. The 1962 James Bond film “Dr. No” was shown at the Colvin the same time as the big theaters downtown. It was the first time a major film premiered locally in a theater anywhere else but in downtown Buffalo.

The theater’s lobby boasted leather-quilted walls and marble columns, with soft pink lighting.

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“Downstairs in the theater,” wrote News critic Anthony Bannon, “the late Art Deco style called Art Moderne shows itself more clearly, with soft rounded corners of an inner and outer lobby and smooth walls without ornamentation.” The look, wrote Bannon, echoed the streamed lines of railroad engines and automobiles built in the same era.

The Colvin was torn down in spring 1984, and an 11-story apartment tower was built by the Kenmore Housing Authority with 100 units for senior citizens.

Buffalo in the ’80s: Buffalo Nazis severely outnumbered by counter-rally

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The July, 2016, story of hundreds of counter-protesters showing up to in Cazenovia Park to drown out the voice of what wound up being only a single white supremacist might have sounded familiar to anyone who was paying attention to Buffalo headlines 35 years ago.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo News archives

Late 1980 was already a tension-filled time in race relations in Buffalo. Six black men were killed by what was assumed to be a single white man, who became known as “The .22-Caliber killer.”

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Joseph G. Christopher was eventually identified and convicted as Buffalo’s .22 Caliber Killer and Manhattan’s Midtown Slasher.  Implicated in four fatal shootings and six deadly stabbings in Western New York and New York City in late 1980, Christopher was sentenced to at least 58½ years in prison before dying of cancer there in 1993. He was 37. (Buffalo News archives)

In December 1980, a man who identified himself as a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of America applied for and received a permit for a rally in Niagara Square on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday: Jan. 15, 1981.

The organizer was Karl Hand Jr. — the same man who was the only white supremacist to show up to the Caz Park rally. On the permit application, he said he expected more than 100 neo-Nazi sympathizers to join him on Martin Luther King Day.

Karl Hand, Jr. was arrested by federal agents after a 1981 rally on an unrelated weapons charge. (Buffalo News archives)

Karl Hand, Jr. was arrested by federal agents after a 1981 rally on an unrelated weapons charge. (Buffalo News archives)

He sent around pamphlets asking for “100 White Men with Guts.” A pamphlet was created in reaction asking for “1,000 Black Men with Guns.”

Buffalo’s Common Council voted unanimously to search for a legal way to stop the rally. Meanwhile, Buffalo Police Commissioner James Cunningham begged for a “low-key approach” from the media covering the event. He promised that extra police manpower would be on display all around the city with the hope that “nothing will come of it.”

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Buses from Baltimore, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee and Cleveland were slated to bring anti-Nazi protesters to Buffalo, as another group organized a rally in remembrance of King nearby as well.

U.S. District Court Judge John Elvin allowed the protest to go on but urged that city officials keep tight controls over the crowds at the three different rallies.

Organizer Hand received a death threat that was investigated by the FBI. Governor Hugh Carey called the affair “repulsive.” He urged New Yorkers to treat the Nazi rally with “the indifference it deserves,” but he was also worried about the possibility of violence.

When the day came, 500 counter-protesters filled Niagara Square, while Hand was joined by only two other people. Following the rally, Hand was arrested on weapons charges after being caught with a shotgun while under felony indictment. Federal officials found the gun after Hand told a reporter that he had one for protection.

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Buffalo Police brass credited cool heads and 350 officers on the scene with no arrests, no injuries and no violence. Others called the whole imbroglio a media-created event.  Mayor James D. Griffin dismissed Hand as “a flake.” He said had the media done so, too, there wouldn’t have been such a spectacle.

Only days after the rally, Hand was in a New Jersey courtroom, charged with firing rifle shots at a black family.

Buffalo in the ’50s: South Buffalo’s beloved ‘Spoonley the Train Man’

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Model train collectors in South Buffalo, all of Western New York, and all around the country knew of “Spoonley the Train Man” from ads in The News, the Courier-Express, and dozens of national magazines that catered to the dreams of little boys and train enthusiasts of all ages.

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Chet Spoonley’s South Buffalo home on Choate Street, off South Park Avenue, doubled as his model train store – the basement shop was a place where young boys could see their H-O gauge dreams come true.

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He started the train business in 1937, while still working as a pressman for three different newspapers: the Buffalo Times, the Buffalo Courier-Express and the Buffalo Evening News.

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The Train Man’s attic was really Spoonley’s personal train museum — which also happened to sell and repair Lionel trains. Among the items on display — but not for sale — at Spoonley’s was a lantern that lit the parlor car of President Lincoln’s Baltimore & Ohio funeral train as it rolled through Buffalo in 1865.

Advertisements for Spoonley, which appeared in magazines around the country from the 1940s- 1970s. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Advertisements for Spoonley, which appeared in magazines around the country from the 1940s through the 1970s. (Buffalo Stories archives)

In 1974, Spoonley handed the model train business — by then moved to West Seneca – over to his son, Chester Jr.

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Spoonley Sr. died in 1980. The 74-year-old suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow.

Business lagged, and Spoonley the Train Man shop closed in October 1981, and Spoonley Jr. went missing three months later. His body was found in the Niagara River the following spring.

The story of Spoonley, his trains and the eventual dying off of a model train empire, was written in book form by radio newsman John Zach in 1988 and examined by News Reporter Anthony Violanti as the book was published.

What it looked like Wednesday: National Gypsum Headquarters, 1942

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Pointed to as one of Buffalo’s finest examples of Art Moderne architecture, the National Gypsum Headquarters building was built on Delaware Avenue between Chippewa and Tupper starting in 1941.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo News archives

National Gypsum moved its corporate headquarters from Buffalo to Dallas in 1976, and the building was sold in 1978. The original metal windows were removed during the years the building served as Conrail’s Buffalo office, 1978-88.

Torn-Down Tuesday: The Mansion House, Main & Exchange, 1932

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The Mansion House was built on the ground one of Buffalo’s early taverns and hotels. Originally known as Crow’s Tavern, the place was bought by Phillip Landon, an early surveyor of Buffalo, in 1806.

Buffalo News archives

(Buffalo News archives)

Landon’s public house served as Buffalo’s first public school as well as Buffalo’s first county courtroom.

The original tavern was destroyed when the British burned Buffalo in 1813.  Phillip Dorsheimer bought the entire block, and built a five-story building. Another floor was added, and that rebuilt gin mill was styled into a modern hotel by new owner Rebecca Wheeler in 1829.

For the next 100 years, the hotel served Buffalo’s elite arriving first by stage coach, then by canal and then by rail.

“The Mansion House, the career of which abounds in color and historic lore, was host to aristocracy of its day,” wrote The News as the building was slated for demolition in 1932.

The structure was called “one of the most outstanding landmarks in Buffalo’s history” weeks before it was taken down, to make way for buildings to be utilized by the New York Central Railroad.

The New York Central right-of-ways were then sold to New York State for the building of the I-190.

Piers holding up the I-190 now occupy the space once home to Mansion House.