Buffalo in the ’80s: Lost bits of the First Ward

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

By the time this photo was taken in 1978, vast tracts of one of Buffalo’s oldest working-class neighborhoods were long gone.

Buffalo Stories archive

The decades’ old shanties of the First Ward and surrounding neighborhoods had long been a target of urban renewal. The Niagara Extension of the Thruway took over railroad right-of-ways, but it cut some streets and neighborhoods in half in the process. The Commodore Perry public housing project replaced block after block of rich, old-time neighborhoods with soulless government-owned tenements.

The Irish families that lived and worked there for generations left as the harbor and grain jobs did.

Thirty-seven years after this photo was snapped, parts of the First Ward are seeing new life. Within blocks on Fulton and Marvin, there are the Elk Terminal Lofts and the mixed use Fairmont Creamery Building. There’s all the development of the Buffalo River Works, Canalside and HarborCenter areas a short walk away.

And while the lot where this storefront/tavern/home once stood is now empty, it stands directly across the street from the Seneca Creek Casino.

Buffalo in the ’50s: A quarter-million dollar Broadway/Fillmore bank heist

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The world was a different place in 1951.

Buffalo News archives

In July 1951, a gunman walked into the Buffalo Industrial Bank on Fillmore Avenue just south of Broadway with a blue steel pistol and walked out with $40,000 in cash ($366,000 in 2015 dollars).

The Buffalo Evening News was invited in to photograph the scene of the crime, complete with tellers and managers accounting for the stolen cash.

Buffalo in the ’30s: The old booze-hidden-in-the-apron trick

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Buffalo News archives

From Jan. 16, 1920, to Dec. 5, 1933, Prohibition was the law of the land … and Buffalo was a center for the import of illegal booze.

In Buffalo and around the country, organized crime grew from Americans’ insatiable thirst for liquor. Spirits were smuggled by the boatload into Western New York from Canada.

While some folks turned to making moonshine or bathtub gin at home, others did their best to figure out a way to bring a nip home from Fort Erie undetected.

Often that worked – but it didn’t work for the man who was arrested wearing this apron of booze under his clothing when he crossed into the U.S. over the Peace Bridge in 1930.

Buffalo in the ’80s: MetroRail ‘unpaves the way’ to downtown revitalization

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In 1981, the Ansonia Building at Main and Tupper was being considered for a $500,000 facelift with the thought that locations along the coming MetroRail route would be increasing in value.

Buffalo News archives

When this photo was snapped, the officer parking his Dodge Coronet police car would have to hike a block or so south on Main Street to get to the Third Precinct house in the old Greyhound bus terminal. An officer parking there today would only have to walk to the opposite corner of Main and Tupper to the new B District headquarters building.

Traffic returned to the block several years ago, after decades of being an auto-free zone.

 

Torn-down Tuesday: Before it was Buffalo’s most confusing intersection …

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

If you’ve ever tried to get to the 33 from Main Street, you’ve probably wondered who designed it. The Main Street/Humboldt Parkway/Kensington Avenue intersection, meant to act as an access point for both the Kensington and Scajaquada expressways, is a nightmare.

Buffalo News archives

It’s a tightly nestled compound intersection with one traffic light and several stop signs with at least 14 head-spinning different ways to legally move through it.

City and state traffic engineers have acknowledged that this area of Main Street between Sisters’ Hospital and Canisius College is poorly designed and doesn’t work well, but citing cost, the same folks failed to make fixing it part of the 2003-09 reconstruction of Main Street from Humboldt to Bailey, as well as the coming redesign and downgrade of the Scajaquada Expressway.

 It wasn’t always that way, though. In the days when Kensington Avenue was known as Steele Street, there was a toll booth near that intersection, collecting money to help defray the cost of paving Main Street from downtown Buffalo to the Village of Williamsville.

The intersection became somewhat more complicated with the addition of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway, but not too much for most folks to handle.

This 1930s photo shows the intersection from Kensington Avenue. The spaces occupied by the gas station and the home owned by generations of the Culliton family are now occupied by MetroRail stations.  The large building was the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph for more than a century. It’s now filled with Canisius College offices and classrooms.

Buffalo Stories archives

By 1951, the gas station had come down to make way for a Robert Hall clothing store.

Buffalo News archives

While the Robert Hall building and small house next to it are gone, the larger brick building still stands with the same billboard structure in place—although Laube’s Old Spain is no longer being advertised there.

It was the 1960s construction of the Scajaquada and Kensington expressways, with Route 198 running under Main Street and leaving a series of bridges and overpasses in its wake, that left the intersection unwieldy to motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and anyone with common sense.

Torn-down Tuesday: A ’30s look at Larkin Square

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

For most of recent memory, the Seneca and Swan intersection in the Hydraulics neighborhood has had an undeniably industrial feel.

Even with the small businesses and taverns which dotted Seneca Street well into the ’90s, the area’s presence was dominated by the buildings that were built as the Larkin factory and warehouse.

Buffalo News archives

Those buildings were just as large in 1930, but the surrounding buildings offered much more of a neighborhood feel.

20

By 1955, the buildings on the Y between Swan and Seneca had been torn down to make way for Buffalo Fire’s new Engine 32/Ladder 5 house, which replaced an older fire house just out of the photo.

Over the last decade, this area has seen a renaissance precipitated by Howard Zemsky’s development of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse property into offices and a veritable city within a city, hosting music, entertainment, and food truck Tuesday events.

Buffalo in the ’50s: Tradesmen toil in anonymity

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Bill Dyviniak was a colorful, gruff photographer who spent almost 50 years taking often colorful, gruff photos of everyday life in Buffalo for The News and The Courier-Express.

His style and his subject matter were a reflection of our city through the 20th century: a place where blue-collar people worked hard to get the job done.

Buffalo News archives

“BY DYVINIAK” is scrawled across the back of this 1958 photo, like thousands of others he took through the years. The caption that appeared under the photo when it appeared in The News seems to tell the story of the blacksmith, all the hard working tradesmen and laborers who made Buffalo great, and maybe even Dyviniak himself.

Buffalo News Archives

“Buffalo master of a dying art, with more business than he can handle with ease, prefers to remain anonymous.”

Buffalo Stories Archives

In the 1955 Buffalo City Directory,  only five blacksmiths are listed– perhaps this man in the photo was among them.

Torn-down Tuesday: Gas station behind City Hall

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

It’s been the site of a parking lot for most of recent memory, but in 1951, as you left City Hall, walking up Niagara Street towards the West Side, an interesting little gas station was among the first buildings you’d encounter.

Buffalo News Archives

The gas station, which was on Niagara Street, is long gone, but the building next door on the very short piece of West Mohawk Street still stands.

Buffalo News Archives

Millard Fillmore Hospital: Buffalo excitedly tears down what it excitedly built 50 years ago

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

As Buffalo waits with great excitement for the implosion of the Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital on Oct. 3, 2015, and controversy swirls about what might be built in its place– 50 years ago, additions onto the old Millard Fillmore Hospital were ushering in “an era of great change in healthcare,” just as the abandoning of Gates Circle for the Medical Campus did several years ago.

Buffalo in the ’50s: Superman’s strange little cars on sale on the East Side

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

For a good part of the 1952-1958 run of “The Adventures of Superman” on ABC-TV, when you saw Clark Kent, Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen behind the wheel of a car, the car they were driving was a Nash.

Originally known for stylish sports cars, by 1955, after Nash became a division of American Motors Corporation, the Nash line was promoting itself as the perfect, sensible second car now that more and more women had to drive all around suburbia to tackle their domestic chores.

Sixty years ago this week, as one News ad touted that the distinctive-looking cars were starting at just $1,640, Buffalo’s newest Nash dealer was opening on Walden Avenue just west of Bailey Avenue on Buffalo’s East Side.