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…
Are we alone out there? While many of us still ponder that question, it’s no longer a question that receives the sort of mainstream media attention that it once did. At some point, we stopped thinking of UFO sightings as news. Maybe it was around the time society started thinking of people who see UFOs as fringe kooks. But through the 1950s and 60s, everyday people made reports– and those reports were in turn, put in print.
A joking paragraph in 1951 Courier-Express article
Here are a few of those reports from Buffalo area newspapers. They show the cross-section of opinion with a mix of straightforward reporting, sensationalism, and skepticism.
Since conspiracy theories abound, rest assured the only edits made to these images were, in some cases, taking the date and name of the newspaper from the page on which the story occurred, and resizing it and pasting it to the top of the story. Nothing else was changed from the microfilmed copies of the newspapers.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
Even before it was called Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving has long been the day where people decide they need to get their behinds in gear for Christmas present shopping.
This year’s big Thanksgiving retail controversy surrounds the many stores which have decided to open on Thanksgiving day, taking employees away from their families and friends on one of the last vestiges of humanity left in our God-forsaken country. I think that’s how I heard the whole thing described. Anyway, it seems the whole world is against this move, calling it unprecedented. Most would point to the notion brought forth in this Sattler’s ad from 1968, wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and asking them to stop by after the holiday.
For decades, I worked in the radio and TV industry, which can’t shut down for holidays. Even when you hate holidays, hate your family, and have no friends, it’s still awful working on a holiday when the rest of the world isn’t.
There’s always a very small number of people who’ll say, “I’d rather work!” Those people need to find better ways to deal with their problems. Just like the people who are excited about being able to leave their families on Thanksgiving to go buy worthless, consumery presents for those same people they are leaving.
Even if you hate your family, you should still spend time with them. Sitting in an intoxicated stupor on the couch in the same house counts as spending time with your family. At least I hope so.
Anyway, Thanksgiving 2013 is NOT the first Thanksgiving where Buffalonians could leave their homes and shop on the big day itself. In 1968, IDS Department stores advertised their 4 area locations were open on Thanksgiving Day. Could that be part of the reason no one has ever heard of IDS 45 years later? Hmmmmm.
I think shopping on Thanksgiving is a terrible idea, and, like every good American should be, I will drunk on a couch–not shopping on Thursday.
So here is that IDS ad, and the first of about 60 others to come over the next few days… A quick visit back to some of the cool things you could buy… and some of the cool places you could buy them in. Black Friday 1968 in Buffalo. As you’re reading, keep in mind that government data says that a 1968 dollar is equal to $6.71 in 2013 money. Enjoy!
The IDS stores in Buffalo’s Central Park Plaza, Union Rd-Cheektowaga, Union Rd-Orchard Park, and Niagara Falls Blvd were open 10-5 Thanksgiving Day 1968.
Admiral radio’s AM/FM radio is $106.55 in today’s dollars
Classic Corningware from AM&As
AM&As
Gifts for the lady from AM&As
More AM&As toys
come see the AM&As windows downtown…
Bells helping men buy presents for their wives…
LL Berger’s, six floors of holiday savings downtown
LL Berger’s and the Courier Express
Junk from the Cape Cod store
Century: one of Buffalo’s great catalogs used to pick your own gifts!
Some of the junk available from Century
From Hengerer’s
Hengerer’s offered this great Iroquois Beer can lighter for only $2. Smoke ’em if you got em!
Half of a GEX ad… GEX was located where the Walden flea market now stands.
Hey girls! Open your Marine Change at Gutman’s!
Hengerer’s had about 10 pages of ads in the paper.
Hengerers hotties
in 1960s mens ads, there was always a guy smoking a pipe, just like this Hens & Kelly ad. Always.
Not an ad, but photo of Rochester Amerks Defenseman Don Cherry (4) getting owned by the AHL Buffalo Bisons. There’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Three Kleinhans locations
K-Mart stuff
Toys from K-Mart
a subtle reminder from K-Mart that women like blenders
This TV and cart was at my grandma’s house. Its great to go through these ad to find the things that you remember…
Kresges was owned by K-Mart, kinda like K-Mart, but not quite K-Mart. More like Woolworths. Nice phonograph!!
Kobachers
Great stuff from Leader Drug
This was from Leaders. Don’t we all know women who, as girls, played with this doll a bit too much?
There used to be a mall downtown. Wait- BREAKING NEWS- there is still a mall downtown. Who knew? But when it opened, you could actually shop at Main Place Mall.
Was this toy at Neisner’s a result of early LSD experimentation?
Great stuff from Noah’s Ark
Park Edge Grocery
Purchase Radio Label makers!!
“For the modern pad.” Hahahaha.
Ron Burgundy was apparently a model for The Sample
visit Santa at The Sample. Balloons are cheaper than candy canes, right?
Sattlers has more guys with pipes
From Sattlers: This stupid valet chair has been a popular item at WNY thrift stores for 30 years.
Sattlers had freaking everything… Including dogs. ON SALE!!
Toys from Sears…
The ad is black and whte, but the big console TV is COLOR from Sears.
More 1960s retail misogyny: Look how happy the females of the house are with the automatic dishwasher! Unloading in a dress even!
A South Buffalo institution: Spoonley the Train Man
Tanke’s rhymes with Swanky’s. Very posh.
Town Squire in Allentown. This ad was on the theatre page.
Ulbrich’s (junk)
My mom might still have some of this Woolworth’s wrapping paper
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo
BUFFALO, NY – John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 50 years ago today.
As the nation mourned, Buffalo mourned, and maybe more so. The largely Catholic Buffalo had a special interest in the nation’s first Catholic president. Hundreds of thousands of Western New Yorkers also had a special connection with Kennedy, having seen him in person during his two visits to the area, one in the weeks leading up to his election in 1960, and another, a year and a half before he was assassinated in 1962. (I wrote a column with more on JFK’s 1960 visit to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Wheatfield, North Tonawanda, and Lockport earlier this week. )
Here are photos from Buffalo’s two newspapers, the Evening News and the Courier-Express, as a city mourned a President. They are, as published, in mourning and in memory, in the days following the assassination in Dallas.
The somewhat rare first bulletin newspaper
A Buffalonian so distraught he smashed his radio on the floor of his Main Street store upon hearing the news…
People watching the television coverage of the assassination in horror at Buffalo State College’s student union.
Kennedy speaks to 100,000 in Niagara Square in 1962.
By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo
BUFFALO, NY – JFK was important to the people of Buffalo, maybe even more so than the rest of the country. In 1962, 400,000 people came to see him here. Four-hundred thousand. Even if that is exaggerated by double, when is the last time 200,000 Buffalonians were measured doing anything together at the same time– aside from sitting on our collective well-padded ass watching sports on TV?
The truth is, I’m on Kennedy overload right now, but I know I have no right to complain about it. For the people who remember, 50 years later, it remains one of the saddest days of their lives, a sadness shared with an entire grieving nation. For most, it felt as if a member of the family had been shot and killed. Not anger, just sadness and grief.
As a little kid in the late 70s/early 80s, the Kennedy assassination seemed to me like the biggest thing that had ever happened in American History.
Everyone knew where they were when it happened. Msgr. Toomey came into my mom’s classroom at St. Teresa’s on Seneca Street.
But it wasn’t just the assassination, it’s who Kennedy was, and what he represented to the people in my family. My dad’s whole school– St. Stephen’s on Elk Street– got to leave class when President Kennedy’s limo came the wrong way down the 190 and got off at Smith Street… Then got right back on again. Kennedy got off the Thruway… so people could see his car and wave. There may have been some other technical reason, but technicality be damned for my 10 year old dad.
But somewhat forgotten, was his swing through Western New York as Senator Kennedy, running for President in 1960, only a week after the famous televised debate against Richard Nixon.
These are some photos from when the dynamic young Massachusetts Senator spent the day our backyard, from the archives of Buffalo Stories LLC and staffannouncer.com, as seen in the pages of the Courier-Express in 1960.
All images from the Buffalo Courier-Express and the BuffaloStories.com/Staffannouncer.com archives. This story originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
We just got a notification that they were moving around our cable channels, and I kinda laughed, since I have literally (and figuratively) no idea where any of my 900 cable channels are located anyway.
Every time I pull up the courage watch some TV, I spend 7 minutes trying to turn it on before I can start flipping. After 5 minutes of not finding anything good– but finding a lot of offensive– I go find something else to do.
Do you remember the days when you not only knew every cable channel you had, you also knew the number off the top of your head?
I remember first getting cable, and being amazed at the world that was opened up to me. Dozens of extra cartoons. You Can’t Do That On Television. Sabres Games. Guys speaking Spanish. Getting to watch Congressman Henry Nowak “Live from Washington, DC” on C-SPAN. OK, maybe that last one was just me, but for all of us, it was in 36 or fewer channels. It was fewer in my house, because we never got Disney or HBO. We, for some reason, always had Cinemax and Showtime. (I think they were cheaper than HBO and The Movie Channel at one point.)
Depending on where you lived, Western New York had a handful of different cable companies like Courier Cable, Cablevision, Jones Intercable, Adelphia, and TCI among others, until Verizon wound up gobbling them all up. I can remember looking in the TV Guide with pre-teen anger at the all great stations people in other towns were getting that we weren’t. Jones Intercable always seemed unfair and a few years behind the times.
TCI served the City of Buffalo for most of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Here is the TCI cable lineup from 1989.
(For all the kids out there, you had to keep this next to the television, because the names of the stations didn’t appear on the screen when you flipped through the channels when your mommy and daddy were little.)
That’s it! No page 2! No digital tier!
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
As a guy who people think of as a “historian,” it means that I get to do a lot of “research.”
Right now, I’m in various stages of writing and research at least 6 or 7 books, most of them having to do with some element of life and pop culture in Western New York. The most fun part of writing a book for me, far and away, is the research.
It’s sort of like CBS Newsman Charles Kuralt talking about his old series “On The Road,” where he’d drive around the country in a Winnebago doing stories about oddities in every day life in America.
“We generally have a story in mind when we hit the road,” he said to WBEN reporter Mike McKay when Kuralt visited Buffalo in the early 90’s, “but we kinda hope we don’t get there.”
I love getting lost in research. It can be painstaking and hit or miss. Even if I know the date of some event that happened in 1963, you have to look through both the Courier-Express and the Buffalo Evening News a few days before hoping for a preview, and a few days after hoping for a recap. It’s often a low-odds gamble to look for something specific like that, and if you did nothing but look for what you were looking for, you could walk away with nothing after 8 hours.
So I end up reading the paper. From like 50 or 100 years ago. So even if I don’t find what I’m looking for, I find out things like Buffalo Police used to carry their suspects to the police station. Like over-the-shoulder WWF style.
I know, right? Read on.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
We’re going back 63 years here, but these photos show that on many levels, life was simpler not all that long ago.
Two generations ago, you could walk to the car dealership in your neighborhood to purchase your next ride. If you wanted to haggle over the 9 or 10 cars they had, you went in and talked with the guy whose name is on the sign. The buildings are just regular city buildings, many of which still stand today, and you’d never guess were once car dealerships.
It’s just so much different than what we think of in 2013.
Although most of these photos are likely from the mid ’40s or earlier, each of these photos was taken from a collection of ads dated 1950.
The best thing about every single one of these places? None of them are HUUUUGE.
DiBello Pontiac 1275 Main Street. Its facade is bricked over, but it’s still standing.
Don Allen Chevy, 2585 Main at Fillmore. Now the site of an Eckerd. I mean Rite Aid.
Gillen Pontiac, the only dealer shown outside of the city, at 3445 Delaware Avenue in Tonawanda. Until recently the home of Premier Liquor, it’s now Len-Co Lumber.
LB Smith Ford, 1212 Abbott Rd at City Line. Recently abandoned after years as a Ford dealership, the buildings still stand next to LB Smith Plaza, home of Hens & Kelly.
Maxson Cadillac-Pontiac, 2421 Main St at Jewett. Built as a Pierce-Arrow dealership, Caddys were sold here for about 65 years. Has been a bank for the last decade.
Rooney Nash, 2705 Bailey St. Neither the car make nor the building have made it. This was where the gas station near the police station is.
Taggart Schutz Pontiac 1294 Seneca St. building is boarded up and painted white, but still stands.
Taylor-O’Brien Ford, 2837 Bailey Ave, Buffalo. Building still stands with large cement awning next to the 33
Not a car dealer, but interesting old car photos, and AAA– which still does all these things (except the crisp white jumpsuit wearing.)
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
These are the kinds of thing that litter my hard drive and my attic.
This is what it means to be a “Buffalo pop culture historian,” having this sort of junk at my fingertips. And if I don’t regularly share images like these, people stop calling me a “historian” and start calling me a “hoarder.”
So these are from the Buffalo Stories/staffannouncer.com Archives.
If you survived the decade of the 1980’s in Buffalo, New York, you very well may remember:
In most locations, Gold Circle took over Buffalo area Twin Fair stores in 1982. Gold Circle stores closed in 1988, with many becoming Hills, unless there was already a Hills location nearby (such as on Lake Avenue in Blasdell.)
Remember when the Trico ad in the boards lit up when the Sabres scored a goal at the Aud? Windshield wipers were invented in Buffalo, and produced in 3 various plants around the city, until Trico closed up shop and moved to Mexico. Also, remember when the Sabres scored goals?
A field full of plants growing cans of delicious Genny Cream Ale? Don’t tell me you haven’t dreamed this dream. People will come, Ray… People will most definitely come.
This is the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce in 1982. The best part is, the “Talking Proud” hook rug hanging on the wall might not even be in the top 5 most 80’s things about this photo.
Get your discount Crystal Beach tickets at Super Duper. That’s exciting, but the real excitement, in retrospect, was the fact that you could very likely cross the Peace Bridge by answering one question with “US,” and then getting a “go ahead,” from a customs guy.
This 1981 Irv Weinstein photo has a strong 1970’s look about it, but the early 80’s had a strong 70’s look about them. For some people in WNY, the 70’s ended and the 80’s began some time in 1992.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
One of the allures of wrestling is that while the characters are huge over-the-top exaggerations, there is (almost) always a solid kernel of truth in their grossly surreal mannerisms and affectations.
If Vince McMahon called you and asked you to invent a wrestling persona based on a Buffalo guy, and he was going to be a bad guy wrestler, you’d probably come up with something close to Joe Hollywood.
A drunken Bills fan with stupid nickname and a haircut that was really cool 30 years ago.
The perfect wrestler, right? But if you are a Buffalonian and you are reading this, there is an embarrassingly high chance that sentence can also describe you. (Yes, you too, ladies.)
While I don’t think most people would think that sentence applies to them, the chance is almost 100% that a Buffalonian reading this is closely related to, or counts among his circle of friends “a drunken Bills fan with a stupid nickname and a haircut that was really cool 30 years ago.”
Most guys who fit this description are great guys. Really. Our neighbors, our friends, our uncles, our cousins, and look a little closer in the mirror—Us.
Just like a WWF (or whatever it’s called now) heel, Joe Hollywood took our idiosyncrasies to the extreme.
Not satisfied with drinking canned beer on the couch, or even getting kicked out of the Ralph the old fashioned way, this guy was arrested running around at field level in a Santa suit.
Most of us have nicknames that make us cringe when they are used in front of our wives. He went before a judge to change his perfectly Buffalo polysyllabic Polish last name to that stupid nickname that someone probably gave him drunk in a bar one night.
And, well, the hair.
Many of us had some fun booting this guy around the other day, and I get it. Add a couple of dozen run-ins with police to his persona, and you have the mass-media personification of that guy in your neighborhood or family that always seems to shatter the peace.
God rest his soul, he was the worst-case-scenario Buffalonian, the least desirable outcome of someone raised in our Western New York environment. But that reflects on us.
Despite the occasional numb-the-pain-over-indulgence during football games, most of us are far closer to the “good guy Buffalo wrestler persona” than Joe Hollywood ever was… but think of how many wrestlers have quickly turned from good guy to bad guy to stretch out a career.
Any of us are two or three… or two or three dozen… bad breaks away from Joe Hollywood. If anything good comes of this, let it be a reminder that all of us here in Buffalo probably need a good haircut.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com
BUFFALO, NY – This weekend, walking the dog, I found the best piece of “trash” I’d seen in a while.
This landfill bound wooden box, filled with woodworking scraps, was once used by Rudolph Frey Meats to deliver sausages and other meat products to small grocery corner stores, butchers, and places like the Broadway and Washington/Chippewa Markets all over the city.
At one point in my life, for fear that someone else find my treasure, I probably would have grabbed this 50 pound box, and tried to carry it while managing my erratic and mentally unstable dog for the rest of the way around the block.
Instead, at peace with the fact that someone else might snatch up and enjoy this vestige of long ago East Buffalo, I took the dog home and got the car. It was still there, and I loaded up the box (which I wanted) along with the wood scraps inside (which I didn’t want but will explain in a moment.)
It had been quite some time since I grabbed something out of someone’s pile of trash at the curb. These days, people bring me their junk. I don’t even have to ask, let alone pick. Occasionally, I’ll see something destined for a landfill and I’ll ask to give it a home, but straight up garbage picking I haven’t done for a while.
It’s not because I’m above it, it’s just that my tastes have refined. I have eleventy-twenty-two tables that just need a little… or chairs which will be great with a new… I don’t need more of those sorts of things, and that’s generally what’s in the garbage. Broken stuff.
When we first bought our house 13 years ago, the first big trash day doubled the volume of furniture in our big city house. It was the only way we could do it. Some of those items, carefully spruced up, remain a part of our home today. Most, however, were eventually put back to the curb. A few times, I even helped someone load the thing I was throwing out into their car as they plucked it from the spot next to my big blue tote. The circle of life.
As a garbage picker who lives on a busy street, I am careful to properly display (and even put a “TAKE ME” sign on) stuff I consider to be “good garbage.” Not in good enough shape to head to AmVets or St. Vincent dePaul, but still good enough for someone to get some use out of it. As I said, if I see the actual picking, I’ll even help load it in the car, and give the provenance of the piece to the new owner.
One time a guy was so happy to find this bike that he could fix up for his daughter, I went to the garage and got all the bike parts I could find to help him make his daughter’s day. Garbage picking builds communities.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to garbage pick.
My Frey’s box was being chucked, in some part, because it was the vessel holding those wood scraps at the curb, part of this man’s effort to neatly pile a bunch of junk from the basement on the curb. To just dump the wood in a pile on this guy’s lawn would have obviously (I hope) been rude, and there was no other clean way to leave ’em, so the whole thing went in my trunk. Since it was big garbage day anyway, I bundled up the wood and put it neatly at my own curb.
For as happy as I am when a guy who needs a grill thinks he can get a year or two out of the one I’m throwing out, I’m just as angry at the junk dealers and metal scrappers, who’ll turn a neat pile of refuse into an ugly mountain of detritus and debris, hop in their Fred Sanford-looking pick up and leave without conscience.
After about 8 years of renovations on my home, my basement was filled with scraps and bits of all sorts of home improvement ephemera, small pieces of wood molding, PVC drain, electrical wiring, copper pipe, window glass, fiberglass insulation, etc, etc. I put 8 years of this stuff into about 2 dozen contractor bags, very lightly filled for ease of carrying. By the time I saw him, some low-life had taken an razor blade and slit about 15 of the bags, pulling out no more than 8 cents worth of metal, but leaving saw dust and little bits of broken glass all over my lawn and side walk.
While Mr. Cunningham’s 80’s commercial advice echoed in my mind, it was rather difficult to “not get mad,” because I had, indeed, “gotten Glad.” It was like some sort of epic battle between Tom Bosley and the Ginsu guy in my front yard, and Howard’s fez wound up looking like that beer can.
I hate the shame attached to garbage picking, but jackwagons like this razorblade loser give people pause when they see someone trolling their trash. So by all means, reduce, reuse, recycle. But be respectful. Pick politely. Don’t make a mess.
This page originally appeared at TrendingBuffalo.com