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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For many of us, imagining what Buffalo looked like before the urban renewal efforts of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s can be tough.
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Perhaps one of the most difficult ideas to grasp is that the area we now call “Canalside” and the area we think of as “downtown” were really a single continuous area without any sort of distinct border.
The massive Skyway/I-190 complex of elevated roadways and interchanges make far more of a statement than the previous few elevated railbeds in the same footprint did.
The several block imprint of the Marine Midland Tower also acts as a psychological “You Are Now Leaving Downtown” sign for anyone trying to walk from the business district to the inner harbor.
This 1890s photo was taken in the 100 block of Main Street. These buildings once stood in the massive area now filled with One Seneca Tower, which was known as Marine Midland Tower when it opened as Buffalo’s tallest building in 1970, and later known as HSBC Tower, when Marine Midland Bank was sold.
Some of the businesses visible in this photo include one still in operation.
Scheeler & Sons, at 145 Main St., became Buffalo Wire Works in 1903. The plant is now on Clinton Street in Buffalo.
Buffalo Stories archives
Two doors down at 139 Main is Russell & Watson. Founder William Russell came to Buffalo in 1830 at the age of 3 on a canal boat with his parents, settling on the outskirts of the city at what is now Huron and Franklin, a block south of Chippewa Street. One of his favorite memories of youth was hunting squirrels with his father around what is now Delaware and Huron. He started selling ship and hotel supplies at this location in 1859. He died at 92 in 1919.
The saloon at 131 Main St. was a pretty rough and tumble place in the 1890s.
Following a brawl inside the gin mill in 1896, 16 men were arrested. First Precinct police needed two wagon trips to haul in all the offenders. The men spent the night in lockup before being fined $5 apiece at sunrise court.
The answer to the question which still gets mumbled around Riverside without a satisfactory answer is May 1986. That’s when the elephants came down.
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Twin elephants stood atop the Wood & Brooks building at Kenmore Avenue and Ontario Street for much of the 20th century. The massive sheet metal and neon pachyderms towered over the neighborhood as a reminder of what was being manufactured and assembled there — the ivory keys and keyboards of some of America’s finest pianos.
The plant opened in 1901. Eventually, as the world’s largest keyboard manufacturer, Wood & Brooks was turning out more than 100,000 every year from the Riverside facility for use in instruments created by Steinway, Baldwin, Wurlitzer and many others.
By the early ’50s, business was still booming, but the elephants were a reminder of days gone by. Wood & Brooks was still among the world’s largest ivory importers — taking in 25,000 pounds every year, but 90 percent of all piano key coverings were plastic. By 1970, much of the assembly work for the keyboards had been sent to Mexico, and by the mid-’70s, Wood & Brooks had played its last song.
After more than a decade of neglect, the once colorful elephants were more rust than paint, and the once bright neon had stopped glowing. Many Riverside neighbors hated to see the elephants go, but the consensus was it was far more difficult to see the industry leave in the first place.
Sister Mary Sacred Heart is cutting a celebratory cake for some of Mercy Hospital’s youngest patients in this photo from October 1954.
The Sisters of Mercy were among Buffalo’s earliest Catholic teachers, and from their convent on Fulton Street near St. Brigid’s church and school, Sister Martha began dispensing her “famous black salve.”
That’s credited as the start of the sisters’ medical ministry, which grew to include a hospital inside a former home on Tifft Street near Holy Family church and school, and then later the current Mercy Hospital on Abbott Road in South Buffalo.
In 1954, when this photo was taken, Mercy Hospital was described as a “modern, fully-equipped, six story brick structure.” During the first 50 years of the hospital’s existence, Msgr. Francis Growney estimated that the hospital had cared for 148,000 patients.
The area that is now seeing a resurgence as Buffalo’s Medical Campus was once a very densely populated center for brewing in the city.
Buffalo News archives
Ralph Alley, which was known as Ralph Street by the time this photo was taken in 1958, was one of a half-dozen or so alleys in what is now the Medical Campus footprint.
Buffalo Stories archives
In the 1890s, hundreds of homes like these were filled with mostly German immigrants and the first generation Buffalonian children of German immigrants. Many of the men worked in the nearby Ziegele, Weyand, German-American, Empire, Star, and Buffalo Brewing breweries or associated businesses like Braner or Wiegand Malting.
As a part of urban renewal and the expansion of the Buffalo General Hospital and Roswell Park Cancer Institute in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the tightly packed alleyways in the area were simply wiped off the map.
What was once Neptune Alley (also known as Ketchum Street) now runs under RPCI. Swiveller (also known as Hammond) and Codlin Alleys were also abandoned in favor of the Roswell campus.
Weaver (also known as Morton) Alley, DeMond (also known as Boston) Alley, and Ralph Alley were all plowed under when a new streetscape was designed for the McCarley Gardens public housing project.
The address is still familiar 78 years later, but there’s not much from this December 1937 view of Lafayette Square that survives.
Buffalo News archives
The very top of the Soldiers and Sailors monument in the middle of the square is visible in the lower left corner. That, and the Hotel Lafayette — the Clinton Street wall of which is visible on the right side of the photo — are the only easily seen remaining structures in this photo.
When the Romanesque-Revival old Central Library was opened in 1887, it was said that “no library in all the land is more nobly housed.” By the 1950s, however, the old building was seen as leaky, cold and difficult to adapt for new technology. The current Central Library replaced the 1887 building in 1964.
Most, if not all, the buildings visible behind the library and Hotel Lafayette are gone. Most that survived into the ’60s and ’70s were torn down to make way for the never-built Elm-Oak corridor expressway. By the 1980s, modern bunker-like government buildings were built on the vacant blocks between Oak and Elm. The Lafayette Theatre building was torn down in 1972 to make way for a parking lot.
The triangle in the background of the wider view photo, where Broadway and William come to a point, is now occupied by a gas station.
By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo
It’s not unusual for dads to pass on their love of sports teams to their sons. It’s easy to see how it happens, when a boy gets caught up in his ol’man’s religious-like fanatic devotion to the games, but also talking about and thinking about and clearly loving a team every waking moment, on the field or not.
This is the way I became a Beatles fan. Our house was always filled with Beatles 8-tracks and albums with STEVE crawled in the sloppy ballpoint pen work of my ol’man. There were also solo albums from John, Paul, and George. Dad never owned a Ringo solo record, but he did name his last dog Ringo after Sir Richard Starkey, so I think it’s even.
The ol’man, listening to 8-tracks, somewhere in Asia as a Marine. I’d be willing to bet that’s a Beatles 8-track in there…
There’s one thing I have to say first, flatly. There was nothing “cute” about my ol’man. The guy was a tattooed Marine. But looking back, dad’s devotion to this band was really almost cute. Seeing him sing (terribly, of course) or talk or even think about The Beatles offered us all a glimpse at what it must have been like seeing him watching John, Paul, George, and Ringo on Ed Sullivan for the first time when he was 13.
The clichéd notion of the cranky Vietnam-era disabled vet might include an abhorrence of computers– but not for my ol’man. He quickly realized that the online world offered him two amazing things– an unending torrent of used cars for sale and an unquenchable supply of new Beatles facts, ideas, and photos.
This meant at any given moment, any conversation could quickly turn to “There’s a great little Caddy in Ohio– only three grand!” or “Did you know John’s dad played the banjo?” Of course, you were expected to know “John” just by the first name.
As sons often do, over the last 38 years, I’ve developed and nurtured my own love and appreciation for my ol’man’s devotion. For my ninth birthday in 1986, I got a Walkman. (For the record, it was a knockoff GE cassette player from Brand Names, but it was a Walkman, dammit.) Anyway, for another present, my uncle took me to Gold Circle to pick out a couple cassette tapes to listen to on my sleek new machine.
I picked my favorite music: Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, The White Album. I was able to get an extra one because the older Beatles cassettes were cheaper than Guns N Roses or Huey Lewis and The News.
For the roughly 15 years when CDs were my preferred in-car music delivery method, Paul McCartney’s “All the Best” greatest hits album is the only one I ever had to replace– I wore it out playing it so much.
Anyway, Dad never got to see any of the Beatles live. A few years before he died, my mom took the ol’man to see the Beatles tribute band Rain at Shea’s Buffalo. The way mom describes it, it might as well have been the actual guys up there the way dad was enjoying himself.
When I heard Paul McCartney was coming to Toronto, I was going. It was deeper than just “really wanting to go,” it was about being in the presence of someone who has brought me untold joy from the moment of my birth. It was being in the presence of someone who helped bring so much light into the often dark life of my ol’man. It was fulfilling the wish, hope and desire that filled the last 47 years of dad’s life– to see a Beatle live.
It was cemented when the Buffalo date was announced. My sweet wife signed up for the chance to buy presale tickets online as a birthday present. A half-hour’s worth of refreshing a clogged webpage finally hit pay dirt with a pair of seats available. I would have been happy with nosebleeds, but the robot living in Paul McCartney’s computer only offered us floor seats. I cashed in my 401k, and got ready to see Paul McCartney.
Steve and Monica outside First Niagara Center, October 22, 2015.
What a show. Three hours’ worth of mostly Beatles tunes, with some great Wings stuff, and pretty good brand new music as well. Every single song sounded like we would expect it to sound, as it did on the album. McCartney is not bored with the music that made him famous and brought us all such joy for the last half century.
The only time the soundtrack varied from the familiar arrangements was for a ukulele version of “Something” as a tribute to George Harrison, and extra audience sing along choruses of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Na, Na, Na, NaNaNiNa.”
There was also a heartfelt and stunning tribute to John Lennon, which he introduced by asking for an ovation for “John,” and then encouraging everyone to not hold back the things they want to tell people they love. (You can watch highlights of all of these in the video below.)
McCartney displayed tremendous energy keeping up with our 40 and 50 year old memories of how he sounded on our car stereos on the way to the concert. His voice was there, and he played an instrument– his trademark bass, one of three or four guitars, organ, or piano– on every song. He didn’t take a single song off and hit a surprising number of notes when any of us would have given him a pass.
As you might expect, Paul was charming, too. His talking between songs wasn’t just canned stuff from every concert. He played off the crowds. He played off the signs. He looked like he was having fun. After playing “Back in the USSR,” he told about his first time playing in Russia. Doing a pretty decent ’60s spy movie Russian accent, he told the story of the Russian defense minister who shook his hand and told him, “The first record I ever buy was Love Me Do.” He said another Russian official said he learned English from Beatles records, “so I say Hello. Goodbye.”
While singing “Lovely Rita,” introduced as “a song about a lady who used to write me a lot of tickets,” he gave the best commentary of the night with his face.
While schmaltzing though the lyric “sitting on the sofa with a sister or two…” he very briefly offered up the same comical pained face that your favorite uncle might give in telling a similar story of sitting on a couch between a couple of sisters before a date. It’s clear that Sir Paul had been on that couch.
There was also the extra-worldly. From the moment I heard McCartney was coming, I knew this show was going to be a convening with my dad’s soul. Seeing Paul McCartney, standing in front of me, singing the songs my dad taught me to love reduced me to tears too many times to count. A few times it was more the images being flashed than the music– during Band on The Run, the big screen flashed that album’s cover. Instantly I was flashed back to sitting legs crossed in front of my parents’ record shelf, trying to decide which record to play (and probably scratch the hell out of– sorry!) next.
One resoundingly smiley moment came as Paul lead 18,000 people in “All Together Now,” a silly song from the silly Yellow Submarine album. Dad was the biggest Beatles fan out there, but he didn’t discuss Yellow Submarine. When I made copies of all my Beatles CDs for him, he told me to skip Yellow Submarine. I think I actually heard dad say, “ooOOooh geeeez” when McCartney started the song during the concert last night. Dad would have been happy, though, that Paul resoundingly made fun of the song, saying something along the lines of “it was one of my more intellectual moments.” Paul actually agrees with Dad. Somewhere, dad’s saying, “I told you that song was stupid.”
An amazing concert musically. Tying up loose ends for my ol’man. And thankfully, it was loud enough where no one had to listen to my singing– because there was a lot of it and it was terrible. Just another way my Beatles devotion is like father, like son.
—
Here is a 12:30 video with some highlights I recorded at the concert.
Quick snippets from his 3 hour show in Buffalo, NY, at First Niagara Center on 10/22/15. Beatles and Wings classics, talks about John Lennon, George Harrison, playing in Russia, and more. Wobbily shot from floor seats on an iPhone6s.
Huge projectiles from stubby shotguns created formidable tear gas barrages in Centennial Park today as new equipment was demonstrated to police. Commissioner Glenn H. McClellan, Patrolman Walter Jabcuga and Lt. Alfred Sendker of the mounted squad examined equipment.
This former NFT bus, a 1967 GMC Model TDH-5304, was the wave of the future when it and 33 others started rolling around Western New York.
Buffalo News archives
This undated photo, likely from the late ’30s or early ’40s, shows those “Old Look” buses lined up for service along the Porter-Best route.
Buffalo News archives
By the time the Blizzard of 1985 struck, the NFTA was replacing “New Look” GMC buses with an even newer look — these 1983 GMCs were the first to arrive on Western New York roadways with the orange and brown color scheme that the NFTA used through the ’80s and ’90s.
Buffalo News archives
These three buses were fighting through the snow on Seneca Street at Stevenson as life began returning to normal after the 1985 blizzard.
It’s with a hybrid of longing and loathing that we look back at Bethlehem Steel.
By itself, a title like “Torn-down Tuesday” might inspire a sense of loss and memories of once-wonderful places that vanished after a misguided date with a steam shovel or a backhoe.
Sometimes, it’s a bit more complicated. Many of us fondly remember the days when 20,000 of our Western New York neighbors worked for Bethlehem Steel. It was dangerous, back-breaking, really terrible work — but the good pay and benefits from Bethlehem and other manufacturing giants provided the means for hundreds of thousands of men to offer the next generation a life better than their own.
The burning of coal to smelt iron, and the slag and smoke that process created, left our ground, water, and air heavily polluted. It contributed to irreversible environmental damage and very likely played some role in the sickness and disease of thousands of people who never stepped foot in the plant.
But still, smoke stacks meant jobs.
The smoke stacks were still there when this photo was taken in 1984, but most of the jobs left in 1982 when the main plant closed.
To most Americans, the thought of a man flying around with a rocket pack on his back seems like something from 1960s science fiction.
The people of Buffalo, however, are more likely to remember the Bell Rocket Belt as science fact.
Buffalo News archives
Throughout the mid-’60s, Wheatfield-based Bell Aerospace took dozens of opportunities to show off the hydrogen peroxide-powered device that the company was initially developing for the U.S. Army.
In October 1965, Bell engineers took the belt pack into downtown Buffalo, and News cameras were there to capture the flight in front of the Rand Building and around Lafayette Square.
Office workers looked out the windows in amazement, while folks outside on the sidewalk — including a police officer and women in headscarves — took in the flight with a combination of awe and distress over the noise the rocket pack made during flight.
The Bell Rocket Belt worked — but it was limited by two key drawbacks. One, flights couldn’t last longer than 21 seconds, and two, there was no way to land safely if the device failed mid-flight.
In the end, military brass tagged the Bell Rocket Belt as “spectacular toy” more than an efficient transportation device, and development was scuttled.
By Steve Cichon
Buffalo News archives
