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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Now known as One Canalside, the former General William J. Donovan State Office Building is now an anchor of what’s fun, new and exciting in Buffalo’s inner harbor — from the new Pizza Plant to the spectacular top floor headquarters of Phillips Lytle.
Buffalo News archives
Just as the refurbished building represents what Western New Yorkers hope is a “New Buffalo” on the horizon, when it first opened in 1962, it also represented what was new and exciting.
Century-old buildings, seen as tired and worn out, were bulldozed to make way for the building — the construction of which was followed closely by both The Evening News and Courier-Express in much the same way we all anxiously followed the construction of HarborCenter.
This was the view from the roof of the Donovan Building, looking north up the 190, shortly after the building opened in 1963. That’s the corner of Memorial Auditorium in the foreground, the Col. Ward Pumping Station in the distance to the left, and to the right is the familiar top of Buffalo’s City Hall.
Otherwise, most of the 19th century buildings in view are long gone, replaced by the Marine Midland/One Seneca Building and the WNED/WBFO studios, the Adam’s Mark Hotel and others.
To the left of the Ashland Oil sign, you can still make out the front of the Buffalo Gas Works building — the front of which still stands as part of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters.
In the year of the big blizzard, the iconic Buffalo News tavern and music critic Dale Anderson counted 17 bars on Seneca Street between Elk Street and the city line.
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon collection
He visited or at least talked about 10 different gin mills along Seneca Street and Abbott Road, including four within a block of where this photo was snapped at Seneca and Cazenovia streets. Here are a few of the places talked about, with a more current status:
Terry & Wilbur’s — 1944 Seneca St. at Mineral Springs. Across Seneca Street from Rite-Aid in the large building on the corner.
JP McMurphy’s — 2126 Seneca St. Formerly Maloney’s — an old railroad man bar. Recently D-Bird’s and Brandy’s Pub.
Early Times — 2134 Seneca St. Now the Blackthorn Pub.
Falcon Eddie’s — formerly Jack & Ester’s Schuper House—2143 Seneca St. Now the site of Dollar General. (I also have to mention that my great-grandparents lived upstairs.)
The Sky Room — on the top floor of the old Shea’s Seneca building. You’d drive into it if you drove straight through the Cazenovia Street intersection.
Fibber Magee’s — 2340 Seneca St. Recently Mr. Sports Bar, near Duerstein.
Klavoon’s — 81 Abbott Road, currently Griffin’s Irish Bar
Stankey’s Café — 107 Abbott Road, now Jordan’s Ale House
Smitty’s — 474 Abbott Road, now Doc Sullivan’s. Smitty’s was famous for the unique tangy wing recipe created by Carol O’Neill at the bar. You can still order Smitty-style wings at Doc’s and many other South Buffalo taverns.
Now armed with a better sense of where these places were, here’s Dale’s original tale of three nights of drinking in South Buffalo 39 years ago.
The summer of 1965 brought much excitement for the area we’ve come to know as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. While at least a half-dozen current projects are combining to make the area a bastion of hope for what is to come for our city and our region, then it was only one big project — the expansion of Buffalo General Hospital — that was making people excited.
Buffalo News archives
The new high-rise structure was offering new vistas like this one, looking north from near the corner of Main and High.
Two churches jump out of the photo.
In the foreground at Main and Best, the former Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church is currently owned by Ellicott Development, and along with recently purchased surrounding property, was slated for some manner of mixed business and residential space.
The larger church in the distance is St. Joseph’s New Cathedral at Delaware and West Utica. From 1912 until 1976, the church was the Cathedral of the Diocese of Buffalo. The poorly designed church deteriorated before the eyes of the diocesan faithful, and Bishop Edward Head ordered it razed in 1976. The Timon Towers apartment complex now fills the site.
Buffalo’s love of Swiss Chalet can be seen with a stroll through the parking lot of the Canadian rotisserie chicken chain’s restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ont. At any given moment, half of the license plates in the parking lot read “NEW YORK” across the top.
Buffalo News archives
After great success with three restaurants in Montreal and Toronto, a storefront next door to the Town Casino and across the street from Shea’s Buffalo became the home of the fourth Swiss Chalet Restaurant in 1957.
With all the hustle and bustle of Buffalo’s glitzy theater district and late-night hours for folks leaving shows and clubs hungry, Swiss Chalet, with its charcoal-roasted chicken, became an instant Western New York classic.
By 1965, Western New York’s second Swiss Chalet restaurant had opened on Niagara Falls Boulevard, followed through the years by a handful of other locations serving quarter- and half-chicken dinners with what former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin called the city’s best French fries in a radio ad in 1996.
One of the new locations was right across the street from the one in the photo. After a 1984 fire at the 643 Main St. building — which for decades has now been the home of the Bijou Grille — Swiss Chalet opened across Main Street into the former Laube’s Old Spain building.
Swiss Chalet left downtown Buffalo after 39 years in 1996; the space eventually became Shea’s Smith Theatre.
The chain’s remaining Western New York stores — including the Niagara Falls Boulevard location — closed to packed seats in 2010, but the lingering taste of 53 years of chalet sauce has made international dinner travelers out of the hundreds of Buffalonians who are seen every week at the Swiss Chalet restaurants closest to the U.S. border.
The Swiss Chalet closest to the Peace Bridge is at 6666 Lundy’s Lane, Niagara Falls, Ont.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, Hertel Avenue has cemented a reputation as the slightly less-crazy-but-still-just-as-fun older brother of the Elmwood strip.
Spending an afternoon or evening on Hertel drops you in the center of the cosmopolitan “New Buffalo,” showcasing a perfect example of a diverse neighborhood that has retained the flavor and feel of its heritage, keeping bits of the old while the vibrant and new evolves.
The result is a strong, proud, urban neighborhood filled with residents and entrepreneurs of every age and experience — all combining to reflect the best of our uniquely Buffalo character.
While history is certainly a part of the mosaic that is the Hertel Strip, the street’s great vibe doesn’t rely on cheap nostalgia. Longtime venerable institutions have been rebuilt and reconfigured to fit our modern needs and make the past a living, breathing part of what’s next.
Here, in the first of a biweekly series about the history of our city that the citizens of Western New York should know, Chronicles takes a look at what makes Hertel Avenue special.
The North Park Theatre
The most obvious and stunning example of Hertel Avenue’s renaissance is the North Park Theatre, built by Buffalo movie house magnate Michael Shea as Shea’s North Park when the neighborhood was new. As the cinema opened in 1920, you could still pick a plot of land and have a house built to your specifications on many of Hertel’s side streets.
Houses were still being built around Hertel when the North Park Theatre was built. These ads are from 1917. (Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon)
Buffalo Stories archives, 1964
The bright lights of the North Park have shined through plenty of history — bright during Buffalo’s Golden Age, they were still lit as “the last person to leave Buffalo” was asked to turn out the lights by the famous downtown billboard in the late ’70s. The theater was there for neighborhood kids to spend their spare nickels and their entire Saturdays watching Tarzan and Popeye. Later, after those kids started spending Saturdays at home in front of their own screens, the theater was there showing dirty movies.
As an institution, the single-screen “neighborhood show” was decimated by the 1980s, but the North Park hung on. In the ’90s, the North Park was the last man standing, showing mostly foreign and art films, until the digital age caught up with the dinosaur. The North Park was open for business before talkies in an era when films didn’t even have sound. It seemed financially implausible to update the old house with the cinematic workings of the 21st century, but somehow, unlike dozens of other community movie theaters, the North Park lived on to become the focal point of the renaissance of a neighborhood and a city.
The millions of dollars pumped into the landmark excited an already-burgeoning scene on Hertel, doing what Buffalo seems to do best — using our history as a foundation for our future.
Hertel’s Jewish background
The North Park hung on long enough to become an anachronism worth saving, but that wasn’t the case at the home of Hertel’s other famous neon sign. When Jack Shapiro served his last pastrami on rye with a side of gruff and slightly agitated at his beloved Mastman’s in 2005, an era ended as the city’s last kosher deli closed. It followed a handful of other institutions that had been a part of the vibrant Jewish community on Hertel.
Buffalo Stories archive/Steve Cichon
When Shapiro bought Mastman’s in the late 1970s, the matzo ball competition with other delis — like the vaunted Ralph’s — was fierce. Go back to when Max Mastman opened his door at Hertel and Colvin in 1945, and there was even more competition — even from the family of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, which owned Blitzer’s Delicatessen in the storefront that later became Ralph’s.
Of course, it wasn’t just the delis or the synagogues that eventually left — it was the people who populated them.
The epicenter of Buffalo’s Jewish culture, which had moved from William Street on Buffalo’s East Side in the ’20s and ’30s to Hertel, moved on to Amherst in the ’50s and ’60s. Meanwhile, larger and larger segments of Buffalo’s Italian population began drifting north from West Side Catholic parishes to North Buffalo’s Holy Spirit, St. Margaret’s and St. Rose of Lima.
It was back on the West Side on Connecticut Street where a group of proud Italians tried to revive the old traditions of the St. Anthony’s festival in the mid-1970s. They succeeded, reviving it to the point where “The Italian Festival” outgrew Connecticut Street. It expanded even further once it hit Hertel in 1989, and it was in North Buffalo where the festival became a regional event.
Where you went to have a good time
Part of Hertel’s modern-day appeal is the nightlife, and the handful of taverns, gin mills and night spots where patrons have the feeling like they could run into just about anyone who is in Buffalo and looking for a good time.
Along Hertel in the 1970s, one place in particular had that feel, and that place was was where the powerful and elite went to have a good time: Mulligan’s. Mulligan’s was the regular night-out home of Buffalo’s great stars, such as OJ Simpson, and Buffalo’s great visitors, such as Cher.
Mulligan’s was even the scene of an underworld execution: Career burglar Frank D’Angelo was ambushed and shot dead leaving Mulligan’s on Oct. 5, 1974. It’s long been assumed he was killed after not offering mob bosses their expected portion of the profits after a big jewelry heist.
The 1970s also gave rise to what is likely Hertel’s greatest contribution to Buffalo’s pop culture DNA. Accounts differ of the exact details, but most stories involve a bottle of tequila, a few Vietnam vets and a hankering for the tacos they’d grown up with in Chicago. Four guys scraped together $6,000, and “The Mighty Taco” was born at 1247 Hertel Ave. in 1973.
At first, Buffalo didn’t know what a taco was.
“We’d have old North Buffalo Italian ladies come in and ask what they were,” co-founder Andy Gerovac told The News in 1997. “We’d tell them they were Mexican sandwiches and they’d say ‘Thank you,’ and leave.”
photo from Mighty Taco Facebook page
It was with the late-night college student crowd that those “Mexican sandwiches” first caught on, and by the end of the ’70s, Mighty Taco had four locations.
The original Mighty Taco location moved off Hertel to nearby Delaware in 1994. But, just as we remember the Anchor Bar’s Main and North location as the first place chicken wings, hot sauce and butter were mixed, we should remember the original Mighty Taco storefront on Hertel near Commonwealth.
Some things change; others remain the same
Perhaps the most wonderful part of the evolution of Hertel Avenue is the fact that it has been a true evolution. Many of Buffalo’s most exciting places have undergone more harsh makeovers to become the places we enjoy today.
Hertel & Norwalk, 1930s
A walk through Larkin Square or along Chippewa, for example, would be an entirely foreign journey for someone familiar with the place half a century ago. Maybe just the buildings would be familiar. Not even the buildings give any clues to the past at the Medical Campus or Canalside, which have been rendered completed unidentifiable from past incarnations of those neighborhoods.
Not so on Hertel. For all that’s new and exciting there, it’s pretty much the same place, though some changes do jump out.
For example, the Sample Shop, which for decades brought more people to Hertel than perhaps everything else on the strip combined.
The Sample’s first dresses were sold in the living room of a still-standing house just east of the Sample department store we all remember. That was in 1928. For decades afterward, thousands of women from all over Buffalo, attracted by the high fashion and unusual late evening hours, were seen stepping off the streetcar or bus at the corner of Parkside and Hertel in front of Sunshine’s Market (another victim of “progress”) to walk up the block to the Sample.
On the corner of Hertel and Parker, an entirely different business operates today, but the feeling is the same as it ever was. In the ’50s and ’60s, friends and neighbors gathered at the old Parker Pharmacy for a phosphate or an ice cream sundae. Today, people gather in the same building at what might be this decade’s version of the soda fountain: a coffee shop. It’s the same fellowship and conversation — we’ve just switched out the soda jerk for the barista and the 5-cent pop for a $5 latte.
Some things just haven’t changed at all. There are plenty of restaurants and small shops where the faces behind the counter have been familiar ones for decades. A handful of bars have been in the same spot for generations, remaining real neighborhood joints as trends like disco and chocolate martinis come and go.
For just one example, look to a place North Buffalonians have been doing their banking on the corner of Hertel and Norwalk for more than 80 years.
Hertel is a microcosm of the best version of “what’s next” for Buffalo — an eclectic, evolving, welcoming place characterized by the very best of what’s new woven into the fabric of what has always made our city great.
At first glance, the back of this photo offers no clues to the precise location where this photo was taken.
Buffalo News archives
The only information offered is the names of the men in the car and the date (plus a stern reminder to put the photo back in The News archives.)
Dr. Dewitt Sherman was the president of the Erie County Medical Society. Edward C. Bull was an executive with Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co. and the longtime president of the Buffalo Automobile Dealers Association — not much help there.
The date, however, proves useful. Nov. 16, 1929, was the opening day of the Pierce-Arrow showroom at Main and Jewett.
While useful in placing this image, the date is also somewhat irony-filled. After spending decades as the preferred motorcar of the elite from New York City to Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, Pierce-Arrow’s new Art Deco showcase palace opened within days of the 1929 stock market crash. The crash helped precipitate the Great Depression and ended the good times and free flow of cash that helped usher the Pierce-Arrow brand to the top.
By the time the last of the Pierce-Arrows rolled off of Buffalo assembly lines in the mid-’30s, the building was a Cadilliac showroom. In fact, for parts of eight decades, the building was home to a Cadillac dealership— first Maxson Cadillac-LaSalle, then Tinney Cadillac and finally Braun Cadillac, before finding new life as a bank branch for Buffalo Savings Bank and now First Niagara.
Kitty-corner from the old Pierce-Arrow showroom, both then and now, is the English Gothic Central Presbyterian Church, which today is the home of the Aloma D. Johnson Charter School. The Main Street windows — which took the place of the building’s original front door — are seen in the photo as well as on the linked image below.
Back when living along the Tonawanda/Amherst border was like living in a real-life version of “American Graffiti,” Henry’s Hamburgers at Sheridan and Niagara Falls Boulevard was one of the many places a cruise down the strip could have landed.
Buffalo News archives
By the time the photo was snapped about a year into the operation of Henry’s in 1960, the Western New York version of guys like Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss and gals like Mackenzie Phillips and Cindy Williams had already eaten 720,000 hamburgers and 33 tons of French fries. The numbers were easy to hit when hamburgers were 15 cents each — or a bag of ten for a buck.
Within a year, there were three Henry’s locations — this one, another on McKinley Parkway in South Buffalo across the street from Park Edge (later Bells) Supermarket, and another across Union Road from Airport Plaza — right about where the Kensington Expressway eventually cut through.
Through the ’60s and ’70s, at least a dozen different Henry’s locations came and went around Western New York — most notably, the two (one at Main and Dewey and one on Jefferson) owned by Bills great and Channel 2 sportscaster Ernie Warlick.
The Main and Dewey location is the only one that survives as a restaurant. It’s now Tony’s Ranch House.
As far as the Sheridan Drive location, the area has obviously lost the rural feel of this photo. The gas station selling 26¢ gas at its two pumps was soon replaced by a Firestone shop. The Henry’s lot has been filled in with a small strip plaza and a former Denny’s restaurant.
If you were a kid riding in the back seat on Transit Road in the 1980s, you quietly waited, hoping that your sibling forgot about the “sure thing” that was coming up.
Buffalo Stories archives/Buffalo News
Just past Cambria’s and Ralph’s Food Valu heading from the north — or just past Zorba’s and Lucki-Urban Furniture from the south — was a free, no-doubt-about-it punch for the kid who was paying attention.
Of course, nearly every set of siblings from the ’60s through the ’80s played the “punch bug” game with the original Volkswagen Beetles, produced for American drivers from the 1950s through 1977. Millions of Bugs meant millions of punches — as the game went, the first to see a “punch bug” was able to lawfully, under kids’ law, punch the person next to them as they exclaim “punch bug!”
It was about 1980 when Jim Abdallah, the Jim of “Jim’s VW Service” on Transit Road, took the engine out of a 1968 Volkswagen Bug and hoisted it up onto the roof of his repair shop.
From the small blurb in a 1985 Buffalo Sunday magazine, it’s unclear whether or not Abdallah was aware of the thousands of instances of physical violence he’d be precipitating in the back seats of family cars in the greater Depew/Lancaster/Cheektowaga area. There, however, the punch bug remained until some point in the ’90s — when the roof-borne bug was replaced with one painted on the side of the building. That still might be enough for some brothers to punch one another.
A new shopping plaza on Elmwood Avenue brought the ease of modern supermarket shopping to the families of that part of 1960s Buffalo — and shoppers have been on a ride ever since.
Buffalo News archives
Now a Price Rite Market, the store first opened as Loblaws in 1961. It became Bells in the 1970s, then Quality Markets when the Bells chain was sold in 1993. Quality closed 10 years later, and Latina’s opened and closed within a decade. Price Rite opened there in 2008.
Shot in 1962, probably out a window in the Statler Hotel, this view of Delaware Avenue has evolved slowly but changed drastically through the last 54 years, essentially creating a new gateway to Buffalo’s City Hall and Niagara Square.
Buffalo News archives
The building we see the front and center still stands with some changes. It was built as the Federal Reserve Bank in 1955, and it remained so until it became the headquarters for New Era Cap in 2006. The most substantial change came in the years immediately after the photo was taken, when the block of 19th-century mansions was cleared for the building of what would become the Thaddeus Dulski Federal Building, now known as the Avant.
The most remembered and revered building on that block was, in 1962, the Normandy Restaurant — one of Buffalo’s more swank dining spots.
It was built by Dr. Walter Cary in 1851. Cary was one of Buffalo’s cultural elite, and for more than a century, his home was considered one of Buffalo’s finest. It was also the boyhood home of Dr. Cary’s son George, one of Buffalo’s leading architects at the turn of the century. He designed what is now the Buffalo History Museum for the Pan-Am Exposition, the Pierce-Arrow building on Elmwood and the gates and offices of Forest Lawn Cemetery, among others.
These few blocks saw many of Buffalo’s elite diners during this era.
The Normandy is front and center, but across the street and out of view was Foster’s Supper Club. At the very bottom of the photo is the Chateau Restaurant, which lives on in the ghost sign still visible on the side of the only 19th-century home that still stands on that part of Delaware Avenue.
The Chateau offered a “Choice of 25 entrees,” and it painted the offer on the building’s brick façade. The words “Choice of 25” are clearly legible today. Later, as the Roundtable Restaurant, the building at 153 Delaware Ave. served as the venue from which shipping magnate and restaurant co-owner George Steinbrenner announced that he was purchasing the New York Yankees.
Toward the top of the photo, we see a corner that has undergone massive changes in the last 15 years.
The Hotel Richford, previously known as the Hotel Ford, was torn down in 2000 to make way for the Hampton Inn & Suites on the corner of Delaware and Chippewa. Just past Chippewa is the Delaware Court Building, which was torn down in 2014 to make way for the 12-story headquarters of Delaware North.
The northwest corner of Delaware and Chippewa was once the southeast corner of Dr. Ebenezer Johnson’s large estate. He was Buffalo’s first mayor in 1832, and his home, at the time, was on the rural outskirts of the city. A home built by Philander Hodge on that corner in 1835, which later served as the home of the Buffalo Club, was torn down to make way for the Delaware Court Building in 1913.
By Steve Cichon
