North and South Buffalo. The East and West Sides. But how many neighborhoods can you name that don’t fit any of those descriptions?
From the biggest geographical sections, to the dozens of micro-neighborhoods and hundreds of great intersections, each little bit of Buffalo has it’s own unique story, and many of those stories are right here.
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Love him or not, there is no disputing the fact that James D. Griffin relished his time as Buffalo’s mayor, and there were few events where Mayor Griffin was more joyful than he was each year at Buffalo’s St. Patrick’s Day parades.
Buffalo News archives
“This is my 16th parade as mayor, but my 32nd all-around,” recalled Griffin at his last parade as mayor in 1993, as he had a beer outside DuBois Restaurant on Niagara Street. Unperturbed by the 14-degree windchill, he told News reporter Lauri Githens, “This is a great day. Every day is a blessed one for the Irish.”
The parade has been on Delaware Avenue now for decades, but before the building of the MetroRail in the early ’80s, Buffalo’s Irish and Irish-at-heart would parade up Main Street from Memorial Auditorium to North Street.
Bagpipers pipe past AM&A’s at Main and Court in 1972. (Buffalo News archives)
Since 1994, Buffalo’s second St. Patrick’s Day parade, the “Old First Ward Parade,” has brought grassroots marching and wearing of the green back to where it all started.
This 1937 photo shows the start of that year’s parade at Elk (now South Park Avenue) and Louisiana Street.
Buffalo News archives
News reporter Anne Neville wrote a comprehensive history of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2014. You can read that story here.
This oft-quoted billboard was posted near Buffalo City Hall in September 1977, and is looked upon as Buffalo’s darkest moment, reading, “Will the last worker out of Western New York please turn out the light?”
The 1977 billboard behind Buffalo City Hall read, “Will the last worker out of Western New York please turn out the light?” (Buffalo Stories archives)
The bitter and deadly Blizzard of ’77 cemented Buffalo’s place in the punchlines of Johnny Carson and funny people everywhere. By 1977, recession, inflation, and an oil crisis crippled Western New York’s steel and auto industries and Buffalo had begun what would turn out to be a decades-long hemorrhaging of good-paying industrial jobs.
At the time, people were wondering how it could get any worse for Western New York. Some of the thousands of steelworkers still employed at Bethlehem Steel paid to have this billboard erected in the shadow of Buffalo’s City Hall.
While posted in despair and desperation, the message “Will the last worker out of Western New York please turn out the light” did little more than land another strong body blow to the already delicate Western New York psyche.
The idea for such a billboard was not original — the first of its kind was built in Seattle when the aerospace industry was disintegrating there. But for Buffalo, the sign — what it represented and what it amplified — helped create a point for a few to rally around.
State Senator James D. Griffin was elected mayor within weeks of the billboard’s appearance. He pointed to it often as a basement from which to build up. The sign also underscored the necessity for Buffalonians to start feeling better about themselves, and from that feeling came that great anthem of Western New York self-love — the Buffalove prequel — “Talking Proud.”
For those who didn’t know any better, the sign that hung outside the Continental might have made it look like the kind of place where your great-aunt would go for a fish fry and a Genny draft.
Buffalo News archives
For those who remember and love the place, the arrow on that sign pointed to the doorway opening into an epoch of live music and a scene which will never be replicated.
The Continental was punk and new wave in Buffalo. It was dark and grungy — both literally and in the popular metaphoric use of the words — and the people who made the place home in the ’80s and ’90s liked it that way.
Antigone Rising plays at the Continental in a 2003 file photo by The News’ Derek Gee.
Buffalo Stories archives
So where did the name and the sign come from? The spot was home to “O’Day’s Grill” for decades. Then, in 1954, Al Amigone opened “Amigone’s Continental Café” in the building. One ad bragged, “If you want to impress the little woman on your anniversary or you want to make the occasion very ‘special,’ take her to Amigone’s new ” ‘Café Continental.’ She’ll enjoy the superb food, the relaxing atmosphere and the superior service.”
Al Amigone was long gone from the picture by the time of the strobing lights and electronic beats of what Buffalo’s underground community remembers as the Continental. In fact, between the earlier haughty fare for the “little woman” and later naughty fare for people looking to party, the place was an experimental dinner theater.
The letters have been removed from the awning above the door, but the name “Downtown Manor” was faded in place when this photo was taken in 1983.
The Continental closed in 2005. The building was torn down in 2009.
As Buffalo gathered to mourn the death of Martin Luther King Jr., two men who remained community leaders for parts of five decades conferred as they marched in memory.
Buffalo News archives
George K. Arthur (far right) and Arthur O. Eve (second from right) were among those in Western New York working to ensure that the April 1968 assassination of the civil rights leader wouldn’t reopen the wounds of Queen City race relations, which had barely begun to heal.
King visited Buffalo five months before he was slain in part to help promote healing following racially charged protests and rioting in Buffalo during the summer of 1967. He told an audience at UB that “we are moving toward the day when we will judge a man by his character and ability instead of by the color of his skin.”
Buffalonians of all races gathered on the plaza in front of the downtown library at Lafayette Square to remember Dr. King. Among the speakers was freshman Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve, who implored, “If you know of anyone planning violence, stop them.
“We can overcome by using our brains, talents, and abilities, and by uniting together, black and white, to achieve equal justice for all.”
“He knew his method was the right method,” Eve said of King’s strict adherence to nonviolence, “but if we do not continue his fight and struggle, his death will have been in vain.”
Barely a year on the job in Albany when this photo was taken, Eve served another 34 years in the Assembly. He was deputy speaker from 1977 to 2002.
George K. Arthur was on Erie County’s board of supervisors, was Ellicott District councilman, and was president of the Common Council from 1984 to 1996. He later served as secretary of Buffalo’s financial control board.
Today, it’s the latest, greatest Buffalo hangout: Canalside. Selfies with SharkGirl and Tim Horton, curling, riding ice bikes, and soaking up sun in colorful Adirondack chairs are all exciting new parts of what it means to be a Buffalonian in 2016.
While many say the rebirth of the inner harbor area is a long time in coming, it’s at least the fourth or fifth time the area has been “reborn” since Buffalo’s first non-native residents built huts along the northern shore of Little Buffalo Creek. That creek was excavated to form the Commercial Slip and Erie Canal terminus, which was filled in so the Aud could be built on it. Then the Aud was torn down and replaced with the Canalside skating rink.
From the canal, to railroads, to grain storage, to manufacturing and industry, most of what made Buffalo an important place during the city’s first hundred years happened within sight of modern day Canalside.
Buffalo’s birthplace
It was from the area we now know as Canalside that Buffalo grew into a village, then a city. Through the second half of the 1700s, the place was wilderness, with a scattering of huts from French and, later, British explorers and traders. The Senecas also built a longhouse in the area near what we now call Buffalo’s inner harbor.
Cornelius Winne, one of the first European settlers to come to this area, built the first permanent house by Western standards in 1789 near where the I-190 goes over Washington Street.
Three decades later, Buffalo’s future was secured when it was decided that the Erie Canal would terminate at Buffalo Harbor. The canal was a modern marvel in transportation and communication that tied the eastern United States to the frontier lands of the west, and its end point was where Buffalonians now spend the winters curling.
The canal brought ships, and ships brought business — and sailors. As one of the country’s busiest ports, the area near the canal was also one of the county’s most rough-and-tumble neighborhoods, as demonstrated by one of the maps recently restored by the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library.
Known as “the Infected District,” “the Hooks”or just Canal Street, the area was a hotbed for licentious behavior, especially among visiting sailors. The red dots on the map show the location of “houses of ill-fame.” The Christian ministry that created the map, in hopes of drawing attention to the problems of the area, counted 75 houses of prostitution and 108 “thriving” saloons in the relatively small area now covered by the Marine Drive Apartments, the Buffalo & Erie County Naval & Military Park, and the Liberty Hound Restaurant.
A 1903 piece in The Buffalo Evening News described the district and the map in detail.
“The extent to which vice flourishes at the Canal street region, or the infected district, as it is called, is pointedly shown in a large wall chart just issued by the Christian Homestead Association, which is doing mission work in that district.
“Staff Captain Cox of the Salvation Army, who has been in the slums in all the large cities in the world, says the district is the worst he ever saw, with the single exception of a street in Bombay. The chart shows the location of 108 saloons, 19 free theater saloons, 75 houses of ill-fame and 75 second-hand clothing stores, barber shops, restaurants and other legitimate places. It is issued for the purpose of bringing forcibly to the attention of the people of Buffalo the iniquity of that district, and to get them interested in the work of the Rescue Mission, which is maintained entirely by subscriptions.”
Part of what was so shocking about the drunkenness and debauchery of Canal Street is that it was freely participated in by both men and women. The steely females of Buffalo’s waterfront weren’t just arrested for prostitution — they were often found in the drunk tank and were accused of knifings, assaults and even the occasional murder.
The Canal Street area was also a place of extreme poverty. Interspersed among the gin mills and cathouses were the crumbling tenement homes teeming with first-generation Italian immigrants. The 19th Ward, of which this area was a part, had Buffalo’s highest concentration of tenement housing at the turn of the 20th century. Italians, more that any other nationality, lived in tenement structures in 1893, when Buffalo had about 9,000 people living in such conditions, where poor sanitation helped breed illnesses like cholera.
That 1893 study of tenement houses citywide made note of the poor sanitation on Canal Street, where the water closets and toilets for an entire block of homes “were too filthy for use.” Families were routinely living and sleeping in single rooms smaller than 10 feet by 10 feet.
A tenement on Canal Street. (Buffalo Stories archives)
The language in talking about these places was strong, particularly where the welfare of children were concerned. Buffalo’s more landed and wealthy class looked upon the living conditions of Buffalo’s poorest with much hand-wringing.
“Hundreds of children living in tenements in the infected district play around the cess-pool of iniquity and degrading vice, and where all that is vile and loathsome accumulates to contaminate or destroy decency and innocence we can hardly expect youth to walk in the path of purity, sobriety, and virtue.”
While “The Charity Organization Society” clearly means to describe the living conditions in the slums, another article in The News in 1896 shows antipathy for the people as well their living conditions. The author is explaining “nicknames for different nationalities found in Buffalo.” Today, we’d call them slurs, but 110 years ago, they just wanted to be sure that readers were using the words properly.
“The Italians, besides the generic name of Dagos, have no general name of their own. All are Dagos to the outsiders. However, the Sicilians, here as elsewhere, are called ‘Ginneys.’ Just why, no one seems to know. The ‘Ginneys’ are the people who are generally blotting out ‘The Hooks,’ and the tenements about Peacock and Canal Streets are inhabited almost entirely by ‘The Ginneys.’
“The ‘Dagos’ proper are the better class of Italians, and they are chiefly found in the neighborhood of lower Court Street and the adjacent territory.”
Canal Street as a civic center
While today’s Canalside was once home to aristocratic Buffalo’s least favorite immigrant neighborhood, it was also home to one of the city’s great sources of civic pride for more than a century.
Buffalo News archives
Buffalo’s Liberty Pole was erected in the wake of a nationalistic fervor following Buffalo’s role in Canadian attempts to throw off the yoke of the British monarchy in 1837’s Upper Canada Rebellion. Canadian freedom fighter William Lyon Mackenzie convinced many Buffalonians to help, including the owner of the steamer Caroline, which was ferrying supplies to Mackenzie’s holed-up spot on an island in the Niagara River. British forces captured the ship and set it on fire, letting it crash over Niagara Falls. An American crew member was killed.
The next year, men of Buffalo and Black Rock gathered to celebrate their liberty — and built a Liberty Pole to celebrate freedom from the British. The pole was topped with a menacing gold eagle facing Toronto and the British Canadians with whom they’d been embroiled.
For the next 100 years, the Liberty Pole at Main and Terrace was perhaps Buffalo’s best-known meeting place, on an open square near what was, for most of that time, Buffalo’s rail hub as well as the busy lake port.
You don’t have to reach far back to find memories of Canalside as a port, either. Generations of Buffalonians caught the Crystal Beach Boat at the foot of Main Street, though their view of the Canalside area was dramatically different from the one we have today. For years, as they left the Americana or the Canadiana, they could look up Main Street and watch what was truly Buffalo’s main business thoroughfare disappear into the horizon.
Today, the Skyway, the I-190, and the gargantuan Marine Midland Tower complex divides the “waterfront” from the rest of the city. But that’s a relatively new delineation. (Buffalo Stories archives)
The Infected District disappears
In 1939, construction began on the mammoth Memorial Auditorium at one end of Dante Place, wiping out a series of what were considered tired old buildings with a fresh new structure that was intended to reflect Buffalo’s future. It was the beginning of the end for the the colorful neighborhood that had been known as Dante Place, Canal Street, the Hooks, and the Infected District.
This photo shows the area just before the Memorial Auditorium was built. The Liberty Pole is there, along with the columned Lehigh Valley Terminal, which was torn down in 1960 to make way for the Donovan Office Building. That building is now the remodeled headquarters of Phillips Lytle and a Courtyard by Marriott hotel. Toward the upper right of the photo, you can see the rounded roofs of the train sheds visible in far off in the background of the Liberty Pole photo above.
Buffalo News archives
While the Depression-era public works building of the Aud helped spell the end of one of Buffalo’s great neighborhoods, it also helped bring a feeling of new life to the city. In fact, in much the same way the slow demolition of the Aud in 2009 seemed to spark excitement and hope for something new at the waters’ edge, the slow building of Buffalo’s new “convention center” had the same effect 70 years earlier.
A 1950 view of the Hooks from the roof of Memorial Auditorium, just before the neighborhood was wiped away to make room for the Marine Drive Apartments. (Buffalo News archives)
“As if overnight the terrace is coming back to life,” News reporter Nat Gorham wrote in 1939. At the beginning and end of its usefulness as a building, the waterfront’s Memorial Auditorium helped coalesce Buffalo’s dreams and hopes for the city. Just as we watched with anticipation as the Aud came down, the people of Depression-era Buffalo watched with anticipation as the building went up.
A relatively new Memorial Auditorium (marked 4), before the bulldozing of the Dante Place neighborhood (just above the Aud in the photo), and before the building of the Skyway and the New York State Thruway’s Niagara Extension. (Buffalo News archives)
In 1970, the Aud again played a part in what was new and exciting in Buffalo, bringing thousands of fans to Canalside as the home of the NHL’s Sabres and the NBA’s Braves. A facelift for the building and surrounding area brought modern lighting to the streets, and the orange level of seating had been added to the building by 1973.
Nearly 30 years later, the Aud closed, and in 2009 it was demolished. That cleared the way for what we know today as Canalside.
For 50 years, people all over the city bemoaned the fact that there was “nothing going on” at Buffalo’s waterfront. The somethings-new every few years did little to jump-start the imaginations of Western New Yorkers or make any real progress at the water’s edge.
The waterfront as it looked for many years in recent history. (Buffalo News archives)
But ever since settlers came to Buffalo’s waterfront in the 1700s, there has been flux and shifting for the land closest to the Buffalo Harbor. It all coalesces in more excitement for Buffalo and its waterfront than has been seen in generations.
A scene from today’s Canalside. (Harry Scull Jr/News file photo)
Back in a time when every hospital had its own ambulance corps, Emergency Hospital’s Women’s Guild raised money to buy a new, shorter ambulance for the hospital. It was touted as “similar to the ones used in Vietnam.”
Buffalo news archives
This 1968 shot shows driver Russell Sparcino, Guild President Mrs. James Kerrigan and hospital administrator Thomas McHugh.
First opened in 1884 at Pine and Eagle streets, Emergency Hospital was operated by the Catholic Daughters of Charity — the same religious order that for decades operated Sisters Hospital on Main Street.
The Diocese of Buffalo began operating the hospital in 1954, and it became known as Sheehan Memorial Emergency Hospital in 1977 after a donation from Paul V. Sheehan, a Buffalo attorney for more than 60 years who once ran for Congress in the ’30s.
After several bankruptcy filings, Sheehan Memorial was closed by New York State in 2012.
This week, The Broadway Market kicks off its busiest time of the year — the days leading up to Easter.
For generations, the market was the epicenter of Buffalo’s Polish community.
A fixture in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood for more than 125 years, the market’s heyday was likely in the 1950s – when every Friday and Saturday people from the neighborhood stuffed into the newly renovated structure in the same way we see now only during Holy Week.
William Roesch, The Albrechts, Broadway Market
The glory years were certainly waning by 1983, but the market had much of the same character and charm as it did in the earlier years. Dozens of second- and third-generation family businesses filled the stalls once run by their fathers and grandfathers.
This piece takes a look back at some of those families and how the market had changed through the years up until that point. Many who still remember the old daily hustle and bustle of the market miss it terribly – the next two weeks is an opportunity to relive a part of what it was like, and perhaps conjure some idea of what the future of the beleaguered landmark might be.
The photos and text here were featured in “The Magazine,” The News’ Sunday insert in 1983. The paper is from the Buffalo Stories collection.
The Redlinskis Broadway Market
The Wojciechowiczez, The Bordeaus, Broadway Market
From the roof of AM&A’s in 1960, very few of the buildings seen here would still be standing a decade later.
Buffalo News archives
While the venerable Buffalo retailing names like Tanke and Ulbrich, which dated back to the 1850s and 1870s, would hold on until the 1980s, the buildings they’d called home for generations would not. Most of the block was torn down to make way for the Main Place Mall.
The buildings on the other side of Pearl Street the next block over would eventually be replaced by the Rath Building, the Family Court Building, and the Fernbach parking ramp.
Among the buildings in the footprint where the Rath Building now stands was the Hotel Niagara. Through the ’40s and ’50s, the piano bar at Ryan’s Hotel Niagara was one of the Queen City’s most frequented and well-remembered gay night spots.
One building still standing: Old County Hall, which was just County Hall then, but it was still almost 90 years old.
“When the fog horn at the entrance of Buffalo harbor begins its mournful ‘moo,’ ending in an abrupt roar, it does more than prompt some of the populace within its range to answer in lurid expletives, or send others to demand of officials that it be stilled.”
Buffalo News archives
Buffalo’s main lighthouse — and attached diaphone foghorn — was known as “The Breakwater Light” at the time of this 1930 photo.
Eighty-five years ago, Buffalo was still a great port city. And as a great port city, harbormasters had to guide ships into Buffalo under all conditions.
To beat the frequent Lake Erie fog, the lighthouse’s great fog horn — which could be heard from 25 miles away — was sounded to bring those lake freighters in safely.
This horn is similar to the one that graced Buffalo Harbor in the 1930s.
While the blaring horn helped ships’ captains pilot their craft, “the mournful moo” was not, as you might imagine, conducive to sleeping in the vicinity of the harbor.
It’s not clear whether the photo was printed incorrectly in the paper or on the photo print that was found in The News’ archives.
This corner store was at the corner of Dewitt and Helen, behind PS 19 (now the Native American Magnet School) on Buffalo’s West Side in 1955 — but it could have been on any corner, anywhere in Buffalo.
Buffalo News archives
The photo was taken as Mrs. Frank Ott was forced to close the store, because young hoodlums were driving away women customers with “foul language and insults,” while also stealing about $1,000 in merchandise over the course of a year.
From Iroquois, Carling and Genesee beer to Squirt and Vernor’s pop — and Rich’s Ice Cream — the place was crowded with groceries and merchandise that were unique to Western New York.
By Steve Cichon
