Category: Buffalo Neighborhoods

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

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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Buffalo in the ’70s: Who remembers White Tower Burgers?

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In the 1930s, a federal court ruled that Milwaukee’s White Tower Hamburgers was a direct rip off of Wichita’s White Castle Hamburgers. For the next 40 years or so, White Tower and White Castle served up cheap fast burgers all around the country — but generally they steered clear of each other’s territory.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo was White Tower territory. In the 1940s, there were White Tower restaurants on Broadway, Chippewa, Fillmore and on the 200 and 1000 blocks of Main.

While White Castle still thrives in 2015, White Tower didn’t fare as well. By the late ’70s only a handful of restaurants were left nationwide, including two in Buffalo — one at Broadway and Sycamore, and one at Kenmore and Tremaine in Kenmore. Both buildings remain, but they are drastically changed, to the point where it’s difficult to say for certain which location — complete with Courier-Express paper box — is in the photo above.

Update: Readers point out the broadcast tower in the background, which cements the location as in Kenmore. The tower is on Channel 4’s property on Elmwood Avenue.

 

Torn-down Tuesday: Main and Chippewa, 1946

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The corner of Main and Chippewa has had different looks through the years, but perhaps none as urban and vibrant as this view in 1946.

Buffalo News archives

The now-gone building right on the corner, with its lunch counter and soda fountain, was one of 12 Harvey & Carey Drugs locations in the City of Buffalo in 1946.

Looking at the Main Street part of the corner, you can see Unger’s millinery and then the famous and well-remembered Mac Doel’s Drum Bar. Just out of the frame to the right is the marquee of the Paramount Theater.

Up Chippewa Street, we have a densely packed metropolitan scene, with the Great Lakes Theater, a Deco restaurant, no fewer than eight neon signs, double-parked delivery trucks and plenty of people.

The look is a bit more subdued these days.

Buffalo in the ’60s: Fighting for racial equality in Buffalo schools

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In 1964, many Buffalonians of all races were protesting a plan that was set to throw off the racial balance at the city’s junior high schools.

blacksinbuffalo001

Buffalo News archives

Woodlawn Junior High, freshly built on the site of Offermann Stadium, was ready to open — with some school leaders looking to make it the junior high school for the city’s black students by drawing its population from elementary schools in mostly black neighborhoods.

An alternate plan, backed by Dr. Lydia T. Wright — the only black member of the school board — called for students to be drawn from elementary schools in both black and white neighborhoods.

The Coordinating Council of Community and Civil Rights was formed in the shadow of the issue. The group’s stated objective was to “insure a stable racial balance at Woodlawn Junior High School with no more than one-third Negro pupils.”

A crowd of 150 protesters marched from Michigan Avenue and William Street to City Hall on March 25, 1964, to protest what was shaping up to be a “separate but equal” scenario in Buffalo’s public schools.

blacksinbuffalo002

Buffalo News archives

That evening, the school board voted 6-1 to draw Woodlawn’s population from mostly black neighborhoods. Lydia Wright was the lone vote against.

Local NAACP leader Raphael du Bard said the decision left Buffalo’s schools the most rigidly segregated in the state.

In 1972, a group of Buffalo parents filed a federal lawsuit to order the desegregation of Buffalo Public Schools. By the mid ’80s, Buffalo’s desegregation efforts were being nationally recognized— but today, changing demographics in the city leave Buffalo’s schools with the same racial imbalance as was protested more than 50 years ago.

Buffalo in the ’50s: Train of the future at the Central Terminal

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

It was General Motors’ new, experimental, lightweight “dream train” on display at the New York Central Terminal in January 1956.

Buffalo News archives

The 10 passenger cars on the train were modified motor coach buses.

Also known as “The Aerotrain,” it was set to go into regular service between Detroit and Chicago later that year.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Making way for the Manny’s Supper Club parking lot

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Norman Besso and his wife Rosemary opened Manny’s Supper Club on Delaware near Virginia in 1961.

Buffalo News archives

Following a fire in the former Shadow Restaurant in 1974, Besso had the structure on the corner — boarded up and covered with political signs — torn down in 1977 to make way for a parking lot.

Known for excellent cuts of steak, mussels ala Norman, and black bean soup for 32 years, Manny’s closed in 1993. It was three years later that artist Frank Cravotta painted the now landmark lion mural on the side of the building where Shadow once stood.

Buffalo in the ’20s: Lacrosse at Buffalo’s Baseball Park

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

From 1889 to 1960, the International League Buffalo Bisons played at East Ferry, Masten and Michigan.

For the first 35 years, Buffalo Baseball Park was barely more than glorified wooden bleachers. But under the direction of team owner and Erie County Sheriff Frank Offermann, Bison Stadium opened in 1924. The park was renamed in Offermann’s memory when he died unexpectedly at the age of 59.

The city owned Offermann Stadium, and in 1960, the land was reclaimed to build Woodlawn Junior High, which today is Buffalo Academy of Visual and Performing Arts.

As a city-owned facility, Offermann Stadium and its predecessors were open to far more than just baseball. This 1920s photo shows a lacrosse game, and outfield ads for, among other items, Buffalo-brewed Phoenix Beer.

Buffalo News archives

The extreme right side shows some players standing behind the play, an outfield ad for baseball tickets, and several homes — including one with a distinctive turret.

While sports fans no longer look at the house, it doesn’t look much different 90 years later for students staring out one of the Woodlawn Avenue windows at Performing Arts.

Buffalo in the ’40s: Before SolarCity, there was National Aniline and Republic Steel at RiverBend

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

SolarCity is promising 1,500 jobs at its currently under construction South Buffalo location, which marks a big turnaround.

Buffalo News archive

For nearly three decades there seemed to be little hope for the vacant, decayed brownfield. The area now known as the RiverBend, where the Buffalo River meets South Park Avenue, was home to a steel plant and chemical factories, making the area highly contaminated. There weren’t resounding calls for remediation and reuse.

But the area was once home to thousands of good-paying jobs. Buffalo Color, the last part of a much-larger operation that was once National Aniline and Allied Chemical, closed in 2000. Across the river, Republic Steel closed and tore down its steel plant in the early 1980s.

This photo shows the build out of both National Aniline and Republic Steel in 1949. The single drawbridge at the top of the photo went over South Park Avenue.  As you can see in the Google Maps image below, most, if not all of the buildings pictured are now gone, but new buildings with new jobs are coming up in their place.

 

Buffalo in the ’80s: Hengerer’s becomes Sibley’s

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

It was November 5, 1981, when the sign for the William Hengerer Company was replaced by Sibley’s.

Buffalo News archives

Hengerer’s had been in downtown Buffalo for 105 years when the name was changed. Buffalo’s Hengerer’s and Rochester’s Sibley’s had long been owned by the same parent company.

The downtown store in this photo was closed in 1987, and Sibley’s was eventually merged into Kaufmann’s in 1990. Most remaining Kaufmann’s locations became Macy’s in 2006.

Buffalo in the ’40s: The Zoo’s Marlin Perkins and Eddie the Chimp

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

As Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” was on the air from 1963 to 1985, Buffalonians were always quick to claim the host Marlin Perkins as one of our own.

Buffalo News archives

America’s best-known animal lover in the TV age, Perkins grew and expanded the Buffalo Zoo in the years he was curator and then director in the 1930s and 1940s.

Perkins is pictured in 1944 as he was leaving for a new post in Chicago, accepting a suitcase from Eddie the Chimp.

For as famous as Perkins was around the country, he could barely compete with the sensation he created at the Buffalo Zoo.

Eddie was the Buffalo Zoo’s first chimpanzee when he arrived from Africa in 1940. Eddie was friendly and willing to take direction, and Perkins and staff had soon taught Eddie to dance and to shave his keeper — with a straight razor. It was clear that Eddie loved the limelight, and would seemingly do anything for applause. Keepers dressed him in a Marine uniform and the chimp raised money for the USO during World War II.

But soon after Eddie became an adult — when he was 5 or 6 years old — Eddie stopped wanting to perform. One handler said it was pretty clear that Eddie thought of himself as more human than chimp. He never associated with the other chimps and never mated.

By the early 1950s, Eddie was clearly angry. The banana peels he’d fling at passersby were the least offensive organic matter one might get pelted with.

In the late 1950s, after Eddie spat at and threw dung at a group of passing VIPs, glass was placed between Eddie and zoo visitors and the barrier seemed to suit him just fine.

For more than 30 years, visitors to the zoo didn’t know what they might get from Eddie. Maybe a dance, reminiscent of the way he was in the 1940s … or maybe the show looked more like something from a bawdy boys high school locker room.

That was part of Eddie’s somewhat sad draw though — never knowing what you might see.

At the age of 47, Eddie the Chimp was the oldest resident at the Buffalo Zoo when he was euthanized after suffering a stroke in 1985. Perkins died the next year.