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.
Scroll to read more about Buffalo’s Neighborhoods or search for something specific…
In 1981, an era ended in Buffalo when the last Deco Restaurant turned off the short-order griddle for the last time.
Buffalo News archives
Deco served its first hot dog and what would become known as “Buffalo’s best cup of coffee” in 1918. Success at that first small stand at the corner of Main and Lisbon saw another small stand open near Seneca and Bailey. By the 1940s, Gregory Deck grew the business into an empire of more than 50 Deco lunch counters around the city. These places were small, cheap, and slam-bang. From your stool bolted in front of a small counter, you could order coffee, burgers, hot dogs, and a limited menu of one or two regularly changing specials. Cherry Cokes and lemonades were the favorites of the younger crowd.
The smell of grease, cigarettes, and coffee hung in the air. Reflective of Buffalo’s then overwhelmingly blue collar factory workforce, Deco was more a place for shift workers to consume sustenance than a place to sit down and enjoy a meal. Depression-era and then war-production-era Buffalo lapped up the no-frills little joints.
In the ’50s, the appeal of Deco’s haggard simplicity was waning. Teenagers still liked the cheap prices and the pinball machines that were squeezed into most locations, but more welcoming places like Your Host and Colonial House were gaining a foothold with bigger menus and a nicer atmosphere. On the cheaper end, places like Henry’s Hamburgers were offering a sack of burgers for a buck. McDonald’s was there, too — faster and cheaper.
Deco Restaurants listing in the 1950 and 1977 City Directories. (Buffalo Stories archives)
When Gregory Deck retired in 1961, he sold out to SportsService and the Jacobs family. Eight units remained in 1977, and the last one — now the parking lot for the Hotel Lafayette — closed in 1981.
Since 1900, the boat now known as the Edward M. Cotter (below, middle) has served the Port of Buffalo as an ice breaker and firefighting vessel.
Buffalo News archives
After a rebuild and refit in 1953, the former WS Grattan was renamed in memory of favorite firefighter and union leader Cotter.
While occasionally breaking ice or fighting fires, these days the Cotter serves more as a floating museum, as testimony to the way things once were — when as the WS Grattan, the then-coal-powered boat played in active role in one of the world’s great fresh water ports — Buffalo.
This undated shot shows the WS Grattan offering assistance to another vessel in Buffalo Harbor, while the W.W. Holloway is moored nearby. The Holloway spent 50 years on the Great Lakes, mostly carrying raw materials of the steel trade: coal and ore.
While the Cotter is certainly one of Buffalo’s more famous boats, the W.W. Holloway is Hollywood-famous.
In the 1980 cult classic film “The Blues Brothers,” it was the Holloway that was waiting to pass through Chicago’s 95th Street drawbridge when Jake and Elwood Blues veered around waiting cars to fly over the bridge and continue on their way.
Last week, the state Department of Transportation announced the fast-track downgrade of the Scajaquada Expressway to “Scajaquada Boulevard.” When this undated photo was taken – probably in the 1950s – there was barely a “Scajaquada Path.”
Buffalo News archives
Still familiar landmarks include what was then Mount St. Joseph Teachers College, now the main building of Medaille College, at the bottom left. To the right, Agassiz Circle remains in name only—this is now the 198/Parkside intersection. The park parking lot is also very similar today.
At the top of the larger photo, shown in detail below, you will notice the still familiar ball diamonds – but none of the on- and off-ramps for the Scajaquada Expressway. You’ll notice that some of the lots at Middlesex and Delaware remain undeveloped in the photo.
The biggest change, of course, is the four-lane highway which would now be running through the middle of the page.
Out driving the day after the infamous Crystal Beach Boat Riot, this group of accused juvenile delinquents may have just picked the wrong day to cruise Buffalo’s West Side with a switchblade in their car.
Buffalo News archives
The summer of 1956 was one of conflict in Buffalo and with Buffalo youth across the lake in Fort Erie. When the Crystal Beach Amusement Park opened on Memorial Day, the day ended with nine youths under arrest, and another six in the hospital with minor injuries. Those arrested and those injured were both black and white.
Two days later, the final ride of the day back to Buffalo aboard the Canadiana—“The Crystal Beach Boat”—was marred by what many who were there remember as rowdy teens getting “extra-rowdy.” In common memory, it was “The Crystal Beach Boat Riot,” or “The Crystal Beach Boat Race Riot.”
Stormy weather meant cramped conditions for passengers crowded into the covered areas of the boat during the 9:15 p.m. run. Tensions already high from the fight in the park a few days earlier boiled over.
Many of those involved said it had more to do with neighborhood or school pride than race, but the resulting breakdown was the same: White youths fighting black youths and black youths fighting white youths. Kids of both races with no previous records of misbehavior at school or with the police got caught up in the melee. Investigations by the FBI and a panel established by Mayor Steven Pankow showed that early newspaper reports of “a nightmare of flashing knives and sobbing passengers” didn’t paint the full picture.
What in retrospect was Buffalo’s earliest manifestation of the civil unrest and racial tensions that were to come during the civil rights movement of the 1960s was at the time downplayed as less about race and more about juvenile delinquency. Three black youths were arrested, but city fathers and the black community called it an unfortunate isolated incident, attributable to hooliganism among the young rather than racial tension.
Police vowed to stop the violence and quell the rowdy behavior of Buffalo’s young thugs and troublemakers.
Within 24 hours of the Canadiana riot, the boys pictured above were taken to the Niagara Street Police Station after a switchblade was found in the car they were riding in—they were all charged with possession of the single knife.
While civic leaders downplayed the role of race in the problems of that summer, race relations in Buffalo were permanently harmed. The riot aboard the Canadiana was also the final straw for steamer service which was already struggling with increased competition from cars and buses. The summer of 1956 was the last season for the boat which, since 1910, had carried 18 million passengers between Buffalo and Crystal Beach.
Many Buffalonians know that Grover Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo before moving on to become governor of New York and president of the United States. Other than that, we don’t have much to say about the man who lived here for 27 years practicing law and serving as sheriff and mayor.
There are a few statues at City Hall, a high school named in his honor on the West Side, and then there’s the tail end of Route 263—commonly known as the Millersport Expressway—which actually turns into “The Grover Cleveland Highway” between Eggert and Main.
But as far as actual, tangible, still-in-existence places that Grover Cleveland would have known, there are very few. Like most of Buffalo’s 1860s and 1870s landmarks, just about every known place Grover Cleveland lived or frequented is gone.
Notable exceptions include Old County Hall. Mayor Cleveland would have conducted business there during his eight months as Buffalo’s chief executive in 1882. An institution which survives is Phillips Lytle. The law firm, founded in Buffalo in 1834, was known as Cleveland and Bissell during the 1870s and up until the time Cleveland became governor in 1883.
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon Collection
Many of the other “Grover Cleveland slept/ate/drank here” stories about modern-day places simply aren’t true. Several of the more recent popular myths were debunked by Cynthia Van Ness, the Buffalo History Museum’s librarian and Director of Archives, in a recent talk called The Top Five Urban Legends About Grover Cleveland.
While some stories appear to be made of nothing but imagination or hope for profit, others might be based in truth with misplaced details.
One oft-told story involves Ulrich’s Tavern, potato pancakes and Grover Cleveland. In retelling the story, it often becomes “Grover Cleveland ate potato pancakes at Ulrich’s.”
Taking a step back, the story which has been told often by former Ulrich’s owner Jim Daly, is this: When Ulrich’s namesake, Michael Ulrich, was a young German immigrant working as a busboy in a Buffalo hotel in the 1890s, Grover Cleveland smelled the potato pancakes that Ulrich was cooking for his friends, and asked that some be sent over to his table.
The story sounds plausible because Grover Cleveland was known for spending time in taverns and for his fondness for the fare of the German immigrants in Buffalo. The story is easy to remember, because potato pancakes have been a specialty at Ulrich’s for more than a century.
Daly’s story jibes with the one that Michael Ulrich told Buffalo newspapers in 1946 and 1952, so this story goes back at least 70 years. The only problem is, Ulrich gave conflicting details and mentioned two different hotels in the separate newspaper accounts.
In 1946, Ulrich said Cleveland visited the Niagara Hotel on his way to Niagara Falls in 1895. In the later version of the story, it was the Iroquois Hotel, but there was no mention of the Falls. Both stories mention on his next trip to Buffalo, Cleveland wanted the same potato pancakes he had the time before. The 1952 version says when Cleveland returned, Ulrich was working as a beer wagon driver, but went back to the hotel to make his specialty for the president.
The biggest problem with the story is that Cleveland only visited Buffalo twice after Ulrich immigrated to Buffalo from Germany in 1890. And Cleveland’s last visit to Buffalo is a well-documented, half-day visit for a funeral, with no mention of potato pancakes. The story is not true of Grover Cleveland, but it is plausible that Ulrich may have remembered the wrong president.
President William McKinley came to Buffalo in 1897, making several speeches before moving on to Niagara Falls. At the time when McKinley made his fateful last trip to Buffalo in 1901, there is an “M. Ulrich” listed in the Buffalo Directory as a driver. Ulrich’s details fit the “McKinley in Buffalo” timeline, but not “Cleveland in Buffalo.” By the time Cleveland returned to Buffalo for the last time in 1903, Ulrich was in the tavern business and was no longer driving a beer wagon.
And it is with documentation like this that most of the Grover Cleveland stories we know can be explained away.
The question still remains, however, where did our nation’s 22nd and 24th president live, work, eat and spend his leisure hours when he lived in Buffalo? And where do those places fall on a modern map?
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon Collection
Grover Cleveland had lived in Buffalo for about nine years when this photo was taken around 1864 when he was 27 years old.
Even toward the end of his time here, Buffalo was still a place with horse-drawn trolley cars and gas-powered street lights. The tallest building in town was old County Hall. Again, since Cleveland lived in Buffalo so long ago, from 1855 to 1881, nearly every building in which he lived, worked, or dined has been torn down and replaced at least two or three times. From contemporary accounts and city directories, we know the names and approximate location of many of the places he frequented, but finding the exact spot can be a challenge.
For example, Louis Goetz’s Restaurant was one of Cleveland’s favorites. From his earliest days here until he left Buffalo, Cleveland had a special secluded table where he and his friends would play “pea-knuckle” and wash down pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut with beer most evenings.
From the 1870s through the 1910s, Goetz’s was at Pearl and Eagle—which was then right in the middle of all that was happening downtown. Today, standing at Pearl and Eagle you see the back of the Main Place Mall, the back and side of the Rath Building and a parking ramp.
A 1940s history written by Roy Nagle says that the spot where Goetz’s stood is “now the site of a Laube’s Cafeteria.” Others who remember say it was a bit north of Laube’s, but for years, that seemed to be the identifying marker.
Buffalo News archives
Looking at a 1960s photo of Laube’s (left in photo) might help the modern Buffalonian visualize the spot—the gaping hole between Pearl and Main Streets was about to be filled with the Main Place Mall. Stepping back in time, Goetz’s at 194 & 200 Pearl was next door to the often-photographed Miller’s Stables. You can see the front door of President Cleveland’s old haunt to the left in the old photograph.
210 Pearl then. Goetz’s was next door.
To visit the site today, you’ll be looking at the Fernbach Parking Ramp.
The Fernbach Parking Ramp on Pearl Street, Monday, March 23, 2015. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News)
The list of bars and restaurants which claimed Cleveland as a regular is a long one, but his visits to taverns weren’t merely about drinking and carousing.
A 1937 article in the Courier-Express, commemorating the centennial of Cleveland’s birth, says as the Civil War dawned, Cleveland also spent time in many Buffalo taverns advocating the abolition of slavery. Gin mills made great spots for stump speeches as well, and there’s at least one account of Cleveland standing on a table in a First Ward establishment with glasses of beer at his feet—the idea being that you could help yourself if you stopped and listened to the oratory and pledged a vote for Cleveland.
In fact, in 1870, when Cleveland was elected sheriff of Erie County, Buffalo was still a place with a frontier feel. There were about 150,000 residents and 673 “groggeries and disorderly houses”—a bar for every 200 people. Crime was rampant; so was graft. Buying one’s way out of prison was a simple fix, until Cleveland cleaned up both the bars and the jails.
Long before he was president or mayor, Cleveland’s first brush with wide notice came in 1872 and 1873 when Sheriff Cleveland assumed the role of executioner when his undersheriffs blanched at the notion.
Recent parolee Patrick Morrissey had killed his mother, calling her a “damned bitch” as he plunged a bread knife into her chest. John Gaffney had slain a man with a revolver in a whiskey-fueled rage at a Canal Street saloon. Each was executed within six months of the other on a gallows constructed in the yard outside the Erie County Jail. In both cases, Sheriff Grover Cleveland, it was reported in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, “press(ed) the iron lever which drew out an iron pin upon which one side of the trap rested, causing the latter to drop.”
The nature of the crimes and the fact that it was the sheriff himself who acted as hangman caught the attention of newspapers across New York State and as far away as Chicago and Boston.
The Commercial-Advertiser account of the Morrissey execution describes the gallows as having been built up against Batavia Street on the north side of the prison yard. In the years since Sheriff Cleveland ended two lives there, Batavia Street has been renamed Broadway. The Erie County Jail was located where the downtown branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library is now located.
When walking on the sidewalk north of the library, you’re walking along the spot where Grover Cleveland executed two men about 144 years ago.
Cleveland came to Buffalo as a teenager following the death of his father. He was looking for a place to study the practice of law, while making enough money to support his mother and younger siblings. His plan was to stop in Buffalo to visit with his uncle, Lewis Allen, as he moved out west. He never got further than Buffalo.
Allen was one of the area’s leading land speculators and cattlemen. Allen Street was named in his honor in 1888, 50 years after his cattle trod the road into existence as a route to their pasture. When Cleveland first arrived in Buffalo, he lived with Allen in a sprawling estate once owned by General Peter Porter on Niagara Street.
That home, near Ferry Street, had other presidential history besides being Cleveland’s first Buffalo home. John Quincy Adams had visited the home and Millard Fillmore was a frequent guest. When the mansion was built, the lawn extended to the banks of the Niagara River.
By the time it was torn down in 1911 to make way for the plant of the Thomas Motor Car Company, railroad tracks cut the house off from the water, and the once rural Niagara Street was definitively more industrial. To visit the site of Cleveland’s first home in Buffalo, you’d stand on the sidewalk in front of Rich Products on Niagara between Ferry and Breckenridge. The brick building erected as a car factory more than 100 years ago is now part of the sprawling Rich’s complex.
Over nearly three decades in Buffalo, Cleveland never owned a home. He lived in a succession of six or seven boarding houses and hotel rooms—each nicer than the last. Only having to maintain a few rooms played into Cleveland’s bachelor lifestyle, and also allowed him to continue to support his family. In fact, he supported his mother the entire time he lived in Buffalo. She died in 1882—Cleveland’s year as Buffalo mayor and his last year in Buffalo before moving on to Albany as New York’s governor.
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon Collection
In 1873, Cleveland lived in the Weed Block building at the corner of Main and Swan. The following year, his law office also moved into the Weed Block. For most of the 1870s, the future president lived and worked in the building that would be torn down in 1901.
Cleveland’s office in the Weed Block.
Cleveland was known as a gentleman with a quiet dignity and integrity about him. That’s perhaps proven in the fact that the only two out-of-character stories about him during his time in Buffalo became campaign issues through the years.
For one, there was the time he slugged a guy.
History has forgotten the political argument which lead up to the fisticuffs, but when Mike Falvey—a politically active furniture maker—called Cleveland a liar as they walked along Washington Street, the future president struck the tradesman with such force that Falvey wound up in the gutter on Seneca Street. The ensuing melee took the two up Washington Street from Seneca to Swan before it was broken up.
The story first written more than a century ago says the two men brushed off and made amends at nearby Gillick’s Tavern. In 1873, there was no tavern with a name anywhere close to Gillick’s anywhere close to Seneca and Washington. Only a few steps from that intersection, however, stood the building of Gillig & Sons Wine & Spirit merchants.
Cleveland’s fist and the make-up cocktails were both served on the block of Washington Street now occupied by Coca-Cola Field, very close to where the statue of Mayor James D. Griffin now stands.
The fight story made minor waves, but the story of a child out of wedlock and an institutionalized mistress almost cost Cleveland the presidency.
Maria Halpin was a young, beautiful widow in Buffalo in the 1870s. While each side had a different version of events on what exactly led up to it, the fact is that Halpin gave birth to a baby boy with the last name Cleveland. She was then placed in the care of the Providence Lunatic Asylum at Flint Hill in the northern countryside of the City of Buffalo.
Providence Lunatic Asylum
Halpin claimed she was vigorously pursued by Cleveland and after her baby was taken from her, she was forcibly institutionalized to keep her quiet.
Others claimed that the baby’s first name might offer a clue to his actual father. Oscar Folsom Cleveland was named after one of Cleveland’s law partners (and was the father of the woman Cleveland would marry in a White House ceremony). It was said that as a bachelor, Cleveland took responsibility for the child to help the married Folsom avoid scandal. That camp also claimed that Halpin did in fact need mental health treatment.
Her testimony was refuted by a contract which showed that in exchange for $500, she would put the baby up for adoption and never bother Cleveland again.
Whatever the truth, the chant among those opposing Cleveland’s first presidential bid was “Ma Ma, where’s my Pa?” The thought of a philandering president—especially one who sends his mistress to a place called “The Providence Lunatic Asylum” was too much for many to bear.
The Providence Lunatic Asylum—at least the bones of it, still stand in Buffalo to this day, although it has been enveloped by a hospital with a slightly less provocative name. The Sisters of Charity opened the place in 1848 near the corner of Main and Steele Streets. Eventually, the sisters merged the work they were doing at other hospitals into the single campus at what was by then Main Street and Humboldt Parkway. The guts of the Providence Lunatic Asylum still lie within what has been Sisters of Charity Hospital for more than a century.
The Providence Lunatic Asylum is now Sisters Hospital.
Despite the scandal, Cleveland won the White House—but the fact that so many Buffalonians were ready to offer assistance in telling the story was said to have left President Cleveland with a slightly sour taste for many in Buffalo.
He only visited Buffalo once after leaving the presidency. In 1903, Cleveland spent not-quite-a-full-day in Buffalo for the funeral of his former law partner and his second-term postmaster general, Wilson Bissell.
Cleveland stayed holed up in the home of John Milburn, which was infamous as the place where two years earlier, William McKinley died. Milburn’s home was near the corner of Delaware Avenue and West Ferry. It was razed in the mid-1950s for a parking lot for Canisius High School.
The much beloved former president didn’t have much to say to reporters in Buffalo that day, only briefly reflecting on the life of his friend and partner Bissell. However, a photo of Cleveland (left) was snapped on the front lawn of his late friend’s home as he waited to call on Mrs. Bissell.
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon Collection
The Bissell home was on Delaware Avenue, and the site is now the home of the Catholic Academy of West Buffalo.
The shadows of Grover Cleveland’s Buffalo are still among us, but it’s not quite as easy as making up a story about whether one of Buffalo’s favorite adopted sons ate, drank, slept or hunted in a particular spot.
Over the last several years, cars crashing into buildings — particularly restaurants like Schwabl’s in 2014 and Kosta’s in 2015 — have led some to begin to think of Buffalo as the “cars crashing into buildings” capital of the world. Recent accidents have even been plotted into maps.
Western New York’s attention became focused on vehicles crashing into buildings in 2011, when a car driven through the window at Cheeburger Cheeburger on Niagara Falls Boulevard in Amherst resulted in two deaths of patrons inside the restaurant.
At the scene of a car crashing into a bank several years ago, one police captain told me he doesn’t think these crashes happen more than they used to — it’s just that several high-profile cases have called our attention to these types of incidents and the fact that everyone is now carrying a phone in their pocket makes it easier to report on every case.
Buffalo News archives
A woman was seriously injured when a conversion van slammed into the side of the McDonald’s on the corner of Union and Main in Williamsville in 1989.
In fact, as long as there have been cars, they have been hitting buildings. Here’s another example from 1959.
For more on the trend, and whether Buffalo is actually unique in our number of vehicle/structure crashes, read Ben Tsujimoto’s analysis from last May.
A glistening nighttime shot of Buffalo’s “Great White Way,” better known now as the Main Street Theater District.
Buffalo News archives
The most famous lights of the strip would have been captured had the photographer turned around. Behind him are the neon and incandescent glows of Shea’s Buffalo, Laube’s Old Spain, the Hippodrome, the Town Casino and more.
All of the signs and most of the buildings visible near the corner of Main and Chippewa in this photo from 66 years ago were replaced by banking high rises in the ’80s and ’90s.
Before there was Billy Fuccillo, Kaufman’s “jolly little baker” was Buffalo’s ubiquitous pitchman on radio and TV.
Buffalo News archives
As much as the unique, dense rye bread that still sparks life in the palates of Western New Yorkers, our yearning for Kaufman’s rye bread is tied to the fact that the taste is forever linked to that 18-second jingle, permanently implanted in the subconscious of generations of Buffalonians, which many of us could still sing on demand.
Sam Freedman bought the small neighborhood Kaufman’s Bakery in 1937. After several expansions, in 1968 Kaufman’s moved from a cramped East Ferry Street location to the mammoth building — the former Hall’s Bakery — on Fillmore near Main.
Buffalo News archives
Kaufman’s bakers Gottleib Zeintl and Sam Freedman in 1990.
The giant loaf of Kaufman’s was on the roof until 2004, when Stroehman Bakeries — which bought out the Freedman family in 2000 — closed the Buffalo plant. Buffalo not only lost an iconic brand, but the neighborhoods surrounding the bakery — including Parkside and Central Park — no longer woke up to the smell of fresh bread being baked for the first time since at least 1915, when Hall’s bread wagons were hitched on the front corner of what was then the Buffalo Cement Company property of Lewis Bennett.
Aside from the well-remembered rye bread, Kaufman’s rolls were a part of the purely Buffalo experience at Ted’s Hot Dogs and many other restaurants.
In July of 1981, this Elmwood Avenue Twin Fair store — located next to the Channel 4 studios where Tops now stands — was one of 16 Twin Fair locations up for sale around Western New York as West Seneca-based Twin Fair Inc. looked to pay off debts. Eight Hens & Kelly locations, owned by the Twin Fair parent company, also were put up for sale.
Buffalo News archive
Hens & Kelly locations closed the following year, while Twin Fair was bought by Federated Department Stores. Many of the Twin Fair locations then became Gold Circle stores, before they were sold off in 1988.
In 1991, this particular Twin Fair/Gold Circle building gave way for what was billed as a “Tops Super Center,” replacing a smaller Tops Market on Kenmore Avenue at Grove. That location became a Vix Pharmacy, and is now a Price Rite market.
One of the less-celebrated and remembered industries of Buffalo’s past is livestock trading. In the 1880s, the East Buffalo Stockyards made Buffalo the world’s second largest livestock market.
Buffalo News archives
About 100 acres of Buffalo’s East Side was dedicated to the livestock trade. For decades, every day thousands of animals made their way to and from Buffalo between their time on the farm and the table.
Buffalo’s place next to Chicago as a hub for the trade of livestock was sealed when the New York Central and Erie railroads created a more efficient animal delivery framework in 1864.
The pens and pockets between the New York Central tracks and William Street had capacity for 35,000 hogs, 40,000 sheep and 25,000 cattle. The each year of the 1890s saw about one million cattle, 5 million hogs, 2.5 million sheep and 75,000 horses pass though.
Much of Buffalo’s early wealth was derived somehow in the trading of animals. Virgil Bailey, after whom Bailey Avenue was named, was a horse trader. The Larkin Empire started when John D. Larkin came to Buffalo in 1875 to make use of the fat rendered from animal slaughter in the making of soap. The iconic Sahlen’s hot dog, still made on Buffalo’s East Side, can trace its lineage back to the Sahlen and Roland Meat Packing Company founded in 1869.
The Stockyards gave way to the William Street Post Office in the late 1950s, and in 1964 — 100 years after centrally organizing the stockyards on William Street — the New York Central closed its East Buffalo Stockyards station and got out of the livestock business in Buffalo.
Some spinoff industries, like leather tanning, left when the railcars mostly stopped. Other spinoff industries, like Sahlen’s Meat Packing and others, continue on Buffalo’s East Side to this day.
By Steve Cichon
1959 (Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon collection)
