Torn-down Tuesday: Seneca Mall and Park Drive-In, 1968

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Here’s a look at the building boom in West Seneca just off Thruway exit 55 in 1968.

Buffalo News archives

This is the 51-acre Seneca Mall site about three months before the first stores opened in the spring of 1969. The 53-store project was one of the largest development projects started in Western New York in 1968.

Among the main tenants of the mall were the William Hengerer Company and JC Penney.

Buffalo Stories archives

Hengerer’s was in the spot to the right in the overhead photo closer to Ridge Road, and Penney’s was on the other end closer to Orchard Park Road.

Across Orchard Park Road and over the bridge was the Blatt Brothers’ Park Drive-In.

Buffalo Stories archive

The Park Drive-In was taken down in 1988 and work began on a $6 million medical park currently on the site. It took several years to tear down the abandoned Seneca Mall, with most of the work done in 1994. Tops Markets and Kmart now fill part of the mall’s footprint. The grass field at the top left of the overhead photo is now the site of Wegmans.

Buffalo in the ’40s: Celebrating Buffalo-made steel, beer, grain

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In 1949, The William Simon Brewing Company — makers of Simon Pure Beer — created a series of ads celebrating Buffalo, Buffalo’s industries, the men who work in those industries, and the products they make.

Buffalo Stories archives

“What Buffalo makes… Makes Buffalo” was the slogan which surrounded the campaign.

Buffalo Stories archives

“Be it steel or beer,” the ad reads, “the quality of the finished product depends on the materials, plant, and skill employed.” The photo in the “we salute our steelworkers” ad shows an unidentified local strip mill.

Buffalo Stories archives

As Simon Pure saluted millers, they reminded readers that Buffalo was the first city in the world for flour and feed milling, showing a series of elevators along the Buffalo River.

“Buffalo-made brands of flour, cereal, and feed set the standards of quality for the milling industry the world over. As with our milling industry, so with our brewing industry… for NONE can excel the high standard of quality maintained by Simon Pure.”

Buffalo Stories archives

Food industry workers also were saluted with a photo of the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal on Bailey Avenue.

Of course, Buffalo also was a brewing center, with nine brewers listed in the 1950 City Directory, but the only Buffalo-made beer ever mentioned was Simon Pure.

“Costlier malt, hops, and cereals, expertly blended and leisurely brewed (to) produce that superior taste and flavor that makes Simon Pure a neighborhood favorite everywhere!”

The Buffalo You Should Know: The slow death of Humboldt Parkway in building the 33 & 198

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In the coming years, the State of New York will spend $30 million to downgrade the Scajaquada Expressway and another $6 million to study the idea of covering the Kensington Expressway from Best Street to Ferry Street.

When visiting Buffalo to discuss highlights of the 2016-17 budget, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was met with cheers, oohs and aahs as he announced the work on the 33 and the 198, calling the ruining of Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs “a mistake.”

“It was originally the Humboldt Parkway,” said Cuomo of the Kensington Expressway, “it was beautiful, and it was part of the Olmsted design. In the mid-’50s, we had a better idea, and it turned out not to be a better idea, which was to move vehicles in and out of Buffalo faster by building a highway.”

While it makes for great speeches, it’s difficult to boil the agonizing, slow, 25-year Humboldt Parkway destruction process and community debate into a single sentence, let alone just the word “mistake.”

The 1962 headline that ran with this photo reads, “The Kensington expressway cuts through the heart of the city.” (Buffalo News archives)

In much the same way that the debate over what should happen next with the Scajaquada and Kensington Expressways will likely rage for years, it was nearly a quarter-century of study, redesign, promises, running out of money, redesign and finding more money before Buffalo’s Kensington and Scajaquada expressways left the Humboldt Parkway a memory.

A political hot potato

From the time the expressways were proposed in 1946 to when the Kensington was finally completed in 1971, they were more than roads. The Kensington Expressway, especially, was one of those public works projects that seemed to take on a life of its own. Through 25 years, “the 33” was a political hot potato, a metaphor for Buffalo’s forward thinking and a metaphor for Buffalo’s inability to ever get anything done, something some people wanted and something some people hated all at the same time.

The building of the highway, especially in light of what was lost to build it, is almost universally considered a mistake. But how did we get here? What was that better idea Cuomo talked about? How were these scorched-earth highways allowed to happen?

It wasn’t, as is often portrayed, just a matter of wanting to transport people from downtown to suburbia “as quickly as possible.”

Map of the arterial highway system planned for Buffalo by the State Department of Transportation in 1946.

The state created the first plan for a series of arterial highways crisscrossing Buffalo in 1946. The idea was to connect all parts of the city with the Niagara and Ontario Thruways, which were already in the pipeline.

Most of these ideas died on the drawing board, but that 1946 plan set the wheels in motion for the Scajaquada and Kensington projects. None of these ideas was taken lightly — they were introduced as marvels of modern engineering that would be needed for the 300,000 cars that were expected to be filling Erie County’s roads by 1960.

That number was passed in 1953. In the same breath that engineers were still calling the proposed highway system “futuristic,” they were also saying that if these roads weren’t finished quickly, they’d very likely be outdated before they were completed.

Planners thought that, if the number of cars in Erie County grew from 218,000 in 1946 to 368,000 in 1957, then the number could approach 625,000 in 1967. (The 2015 number, by the way, is 695,000.)

Traffic was increasing at an exponential rate. More and more cars were moving without guidance or planning through streets that were, in the words of one disgusted motorist, designed and “built for the horse and buggy.”

“The future of Buffalo’s residential areas is at stake today,” said Buffalo Planning Commission Director H. Dale Bossert, in outlining why Buffalo needed these new highways. “Heavy volumes of traffic are spilling over into formerly quiet neighborhood streets. A child on his way to school no longer travels along a quiet street but a trafficway rushing with cars and trucks.”

In the late 1940s, the Main Street and Humboldt Parkway intersection, shortly before the destruction of the parkway connecting Delaware and Humboldt (now Martin Luther King) parks began, as the Humboldt portion of the intersection was sunken below grade to speed traffic through. (Buffalo News archives)

The roots of the Kensington Expressway were included in the 1946 plan as five separate highways, all meant to alleviate the traffic flowing through nearly every city neighborhood, combining into a single super highway providing a straight shot from downtown to the airport.

In 1951, the new Main/Humboldt underpass was already being created to help ease the congestion and traffic flow on city streets. The Scajaquada Parkway Expressway was meant to start at Delaware Avenue and run to the new Ontario Thruway (I-190.) Humboldt Parkway was being extended from Agassiz Circle to Delaware Avenue through the park, connecting the new expressway with the expedited traffic coming through the Main/Humboldt interchange.

When it appeared in The News in 1951, the title of this photo was, simply, “Progress!” This marked the beginning of the piece-by-piece loss of Humboldt Parkway. Months earlier, the construction area was filled with two lines of trees and a bridal path. (Buffalo News archives)

A 1953 brochure outlining state plans for the highway were derided as “an over-enthusiastic engineer’s dream,” especially with the additional intersection in the middle with the Scajaquada Parkway expressway. The Kensington, the Scajaquada and the widening of Delaware Avenue from the park to Kenmore were thought to be enough to create better moving traffic around the north, east and west parts of the city.

It was clear that most Buffalonians and Western New Yorkers wanted to see the expressway built — though many had reservations. Some didn’t think it was physically possible; others just thought it was too big and too expense and that it seemed implausible that all the state, county and city forces that needed to come together would actually do so.

While there was protest of the building of the expressways — particularly from those who stood to lose their homes, businesses and neighborhoods — far more complaints came from those upset over perceived dragging of feet on a project that was seen by editorial staffs at both The News and the Courier-Express as important to the future of the city and the region.

“Modern highway access to Buffalo’s modernized airport will be assured,” said planner Bossert. “In addition to these advantages for normal traffic, the Kensington Expressway offers an unparalleled opportunity for Civil Defense evacuation and assistance. Planning for dispersal from the northern part of Buffalo reveals the extreme urgency of this project.”

Yes, Cold War-era Civil Defense preparedness was one of the reasons in favor of the Kensington. The need was there, said Major General Edwin Zeigler, Erie County’s Director of Civil Defense, to move people out of the city quickly in the event of an enemy attack.

At one public hearing, he testified that a June 1954 mock test showed that under then-established escape routes, about 230,000 Buffalonians would have died in an attack. With a good dispersal plan along high-speed highways, the number of dead in a potential attack could be dropped as low as 49,000.

In the 1950s, Buffalo was lagging behind other metropolitan areas in New York State and big cities across the country in terms of having a system of arterial highways with good traffic patterns to encourage the better flow of people in and out of the city.

Nearly eight years after it was proposed, the city and state weren’t even close to agreeing to how to start the Kensington project, although most seemed to agree something needed to be done. “You can only put so many fish in a bowl,” Buffalo Mayor Steven Pankow said in 1954, in urging agreement on the Kensington.

As more cars clogged the streets and Buffalo faced losing state and federal funding for road and highway building, years of inaction, more than possible destruction, were on the minds of civic leaders.

Newspaper editorial department writers opined “prompt action on Kensington Expressway plan is necessary.” The Chamber of Commerce hoped that “any objections to letting the State start right away with construction can be resolved quickly in the best interests of Buffalo as a whole.”

It was envisioned that the Kensington Expressway would carry more traffic than all of the city’s radial streets combined, and would fix the traffic problems that had been plaguing the city for decades.

“This important project would be a major step forward in alleviating the traffic blight that has diseased our neighborhood communities,” said City Plannning Director Russell Tryon in 1954.

He further went on to say that he thought the construction of the expressway might help keep people in the city, rather than literally drive them to suburbia. “If we make Buffalo a better place in which to live, the people will stay and not move out.”

Tryon added, “Unless something is done to alleviate the traffic blight in the neighborhood communities, the situation will grow so much worse that it won’t worth living in Buffalo anymore.”

‘Let’s not study anymore. Let’s move.’

The Chamber of Commerce’s executive director, Charles Fichtner, called the Kensington a “golden opportunity” and said letting the opportunity to build it with outside money slide would be “a little short of civic treason,”  adding that Buffalo is at “threshold of great and unlimited future progress. This is no time to make little plans. This is no time to think in small terms. We should want to do big things and think big things.”

Sisters Hospital, top left, Delaware Park and the Scajaquada Expressway, Thursday, July 10, 2014. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News)

“Let’s not study anymore,” he pleaded. “Let’s move.”

By 1954, when it became clear that neighborhoods in the Fruit Belt and along Humboldt Parkway would be the first targeted by the wrecker’s ball, many people who had lived there for generations spoke out — but their voices were marginalized by planners and the press.

A brief article about a community meeting on the project said that of about 200 people there, most of whom were slated to lose their homes, there was “an angry minority of homeowners in the Kensington section” who were looking to stand in the way of progress.

One homeowner argued that it wasn’t fair for the city and state to remove them from homes which they’ve occupied for years, contending it would impose a tremendous hardship on elderly people who didn’t follow the younger generation into the suburbs. Still others expressed the fear that the expressway, when completed, would encourage more Buffalonians to move out of the city because it would provide them with a high-speed route to their work in the city. A few contended the expressway would form another “barrier” dividing the Kensington section into two distinct parts.

State Public Works Engineer William Gallancy compared the building of the Expressway to a major surgical procedure: “Painful, but necessary for survival.”

Some questioned that notion. In a letter to the editor signed WHY, a Kensington area resident opines, “Our traffic situation is serious, but surely, with all the top engineers of the country to consult, a better plan could be devised. Why put a speedway through the middle of a heavy populated area? Will there be a ‘pedestrian under-pass at each street, or will people have to walk blocks to get across the highway? What’s wrong with a subway or an elevated, along one of our wider streets? Let’s fix the streets we already have.”

“Kensington area residents are definitely opposed to the Expressway as presently planned,” said Councilman at Large Peter Frey — one of the few city leaders to take up the plight of those who’d lose their homes to the Kensington. “They are willing and ready for any traffic relief, providing it does not blight the area and cause them to lose their homes, which represent their life savings. They do not feel that they ‘should have to suffer the consequences’ to bring suburbanites into downtown Buffalo. I agree with them in this respect.”

Years of feet-dragging end

By early 1957, the state was getting ready to displace 600 families from their homes to begin construction. Any family displaced by the expressway was given priority in in the newly built Kensington Heights public housing project on Fillmore Avenue, but it wasn’t always as orderly as moving from the path of the expressway to a nice new apartment.

Progress of the building of the first leg of the Kensington Expressway in 1959. The Museum of Science is to the right. (Buffalo News archives)

One “battling grandma” made the front page of the paper, after sending Gov. Averill Harriman a letter denouncing the state’s “dillydallying” on the Kensington project. Mrs. Edmund Jakubiak owned a building in the path of the expressway that the state promised to buy, so all her tenants left, and she herself bought a new place on the promise of a forthcoming state check. When no check appeared, the state’s “shenanigans” left her owing money and having to apply for a loan for her new home.

Jakubiak became a minor folk hero around her soon-to-be-demolished Best Street neighborhood, as she made sure every penny owed her was paid in full.

She wasn’t the only one to leave before the state was ready to begin construction, and those who left their not-long-for-this world homes and businesses left them vacant — and open to criminals. “Lawless elements,” it was claimed, “are congregating and endangering lives and property in and around houses taken over by the state” for the Kensington Expressway.

Homes are dismantled

On Dec. 16, 1957, the dismantling of homes and businesses along Cherry and Peach streets began, with demolition starting in January 1958 — 12 years after the project was announced. Many applauded this development, as the first section of land for the highway, from Michigan and Cherry to Humboldt and Landon, was cleared by August 1958.

Many of those who weren’t slated to lose their homes ended up losing the aesthetic of their communities, especially those living along Humboldt Parkway.

Buffalo School teacher Cornelia Metz lived at 936 Humboldt and wrote about her worst fears in a letter to the editor.

“It is not generally known that the beautiful trees on Humboldt Parkway will fall victim to ‘progress’ when the Kensington Expressway is constructed. Only a complete materialist could ride the mile-and-a-half of this street without being thrilled by its beauty.

“Must those who are in a hurry to go to their suburban homes be given more consideration than those who live in and pay taxes in the city? Granted that something must be done to expedite traffic, but must that be at the expense of our trees?”

Entreaties like Metz’s were met with a tone bordering on mocking by city developer Russell Tryon, who wrote about problems in building the expressway in the Courier-Express. “One opponent devoted considerable time to the harm which would be done to Humboldt Parkway by the proposed improvement, such as increased traffic and the loss of lovely trees on one of the city’s most attractive parkways. Answer — unfortunately, except for the trees in the Center Mall, the esthetic qualities of the parkway already have been largely destroyed by heavy traffic.”

Shortly thereafter, the tree-lined median in front of Metz’s home was replaced with a high-speed expressway.

That was 1958. The stretch of the Kensington between the Scajaquada Expressway and the Buffalo Airport was built over the next decade.

Above: a 1938 airborne view with UB’s South Campus in the foreground and Bailey Avenue to the left and Kensington High School to the upper left.  Below: A 1966 airborne image shows Kensington High School and Bailey Avenue as the expressway is being built.

In 1968, when the original plans were completed and downtown Buffalo was connected to the Buffalo airport, a problem remained: As engineers had predicted as early as the 1940s, the expressways could still be obsolete by the time they were finished.

This caused one last flurry of road building and the final trees of Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway to be felled.

Expressway sinks into place

The “Hourglass” portion of the Kensington moved traffic off the subterranean blown-out expressway onto Humboldt Parkway. Traffic clogged going toward downtown in the afternoon and toward Cheektowaga in the morning. Twenty years of planning and building, and the road still didn’t alleviate traffic. Worse yet, that small stretch saw the most accidents — and the most fatal accidents — than anywhere else along the highway.

The Courier-Express noticed the dwindling number of trees. “One of the most impressive archways of trees in Buffalo is rapidly disappearing to the tune of rasping power saws along the ‘bottleneck’ section of the Kensington Expressway. The biting teeth of the saws undo in minutes what it took 90 years for nature to accomplish. Many of the 300 trees that are to be felled are stately elms that were planted by the city around 1880,” was written in July 1968, “but then motorists snagged in rush-hour traffic jams in the section, less than one mile between East Delavan Avenue and Northampton Street, might be soothed by trees in summer green.”

By the end of 1968, the trees were gone. Thousands of tons of rock and earth were moved to sink the final grade-level portion of the expressway.

The hourglass portion of the Kensington Expressway, nearing completion, in 1970. (Buffalo News archives)

So, mistake? Sure. But a bit more complicated than that.

Buffalo in the ’40s: A decade’s worth of Buffalo Fire Dept.’s new apparatus

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

After the Great Depression and World War II, by the end of the 1940s, people were ready to spruce up and replace many of the worn out, faded, and busted things that they’d stretched long past their natural lives.

The Buffalo Fire Department was no exception. Not only was the equipment on hand worn out, advances in technique and equipment meant that an influx of new apparatus was needed to make Buffalo safer in a more efficient manner.

Buffalo News archives

This was one of seven light first-aid ambulances purchased by the Buffalo Fire Department in the 1940s. Commissioner Masterson and Deputy Commissioner Becker are looking on as Stanley Rebka sits behind the wheel of the rig destined for Squad 5 on Rhode Island Street.  “Equipped with inhalator, stretcher equipment, etc., these units respond to first-aid calls instead of the costly practice of sending larger equipment,” said the original caption.

Buffalo news archives

This brand new truck destined for Hook & Ladder 10 on Southside Parkway was built to order by Buffalo Fire Appliance Corporation on Central Avenue in Lovejoy.

Master Mechanic George Leo and Commissioner Turbridy check out the new style “quad” truck, with a 1,000-gallon-per-minute pumper, 300 feet of ladders, and a 100-gallon water tank.

 

Buffalo News archives

This $17,900 fire truck would soon be delivered to Engine 26 on Tonawanda Street. Fireman John Garvey is looking over the truck, which would cost just under $200,000 in 2016 dollars.

 

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo’s bravest just couldn’t wait to try out Hook & Ladder 2’s new rig at the drill tower at Court and Terrace behind City Hall. Shown on the $22,300 truck are the men who were assigned to operate it at the South Division Street hall. From the top down are Captain Louis Kron, firemen Francis McMahon, Stanley Panek, Emmett O’Leary, Michael Shea and Joseph Long. Captain James Forehead directs from the ground.

The background shows Buffalo Fire Headquarters to the right, along with several long-gone Lower West Side structures, victims of urban renewal.

Buffalo in the ’70s: TV reporter chased with a hatchet at ‘Deep Throat’ debut

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Nationwide controversy erupted when the pornographic film industry took a step toward legitimate films with the release of “Deep Throat” in 1973.

Unlike previous adult flicks, this one featured a plot along with actual attempts at acting and cinematic values.

According to an Associated Press account, the film was “sneaked into Buffalo” one weekend in the fall of 1973 and played at the Allendale Theatre on Allen Street. That Monday, State Supreme Justice Theodore Kaiser viewed the film, along with co-feature “When the West Was Fun,” and ordered the films seized and the theater manager, 73-year-old Benjamin Solomon, arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws.

That weekend, as word spread of the controversial film being shown in Buffalo, a Channel 2 news crew set up outside the Allentown theater to talk with people on their way into watch the movie. When Solomon saw this, he bolted from the ticket booth wildly swinging at reporter Susan King and cameraman Steven Cocklin with a hammer hatchet.

He tried to hit King and missed. King, who was Buffalo’s first female television news anchor after coming to WGR-TV in 1972, filed a report with police and Solomon was charged with menacing and harassment on top of the obscenity charges.

First as the local news anchor during the “Today” show, then as a featured reporter and weekend evening news anchor, King had quickly become one of Buffalo’s favorite television personalities in only about two years in Buffalo. She also spent several months as the primary weekday anchor at Channel 2 after Ron Hunter left the anchor chair. She received widespread critical acclaim, but was ultimately replaced by Rich Kellman.

Buffalo Stories archives

At the time, there were wasn’t a television station in the country that employed a permanent, solo female news anchor. Channel 2 and King weren’t bound to be the team to cross that historic threshold, but there was no disappointment in an interview with The News.

“I can’t say that they lead me on,” King told The News in 1974. “It was a wild summer and I learned a lot,” she said, making reference to Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation, all which came during her time in the anchor chair.

Buffalo News archives

Within a few months, King went from Buffalo to a station in Washington, D.C., before moving to ABC as a White House Correspondent.

Susan King is now the Dean of the UNC School of Media and Journalism in Chapel Hill, NC.

As for “Deep Throat,” in the end, the owners of the Allendale were fined $3,000 for showing the film. Theater manager Solomon admitted to swinging the axe at King, pleaded guilty, and was given a suspended sentence. The 103-year-old Allendale Theatre is now the home of the nonprofit Theatre of Youth Company.

Controversy erupted again in Buffalo the following summer when the Granada Theatre on Main Street in University Heights started showing “The One and Only Throat.” A judge put a ban on the showing of the film under that name as well — but not before ads made it into papers around Western New York.

Buffalo Stories archives

What it looked like Wednesday: The Apollo Theatre, 1941

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

With much fanfare, the Apollo — featuring cornice carved ceilings, an art nouveau lobby, a rich red rug, and soft, velvet-covered seats opened to the public in April, 1941.

Buffalo News archives

The Basil family operated it like all its theaters, as a neighborhood moviehouse, with special attention to what kids might want to spend their Saturday afternoons watching.

Through most of the theater’s heyday, its Jefferson Avenue address put it at the center of the commercial hub of Buffalo’s black community. Since the mid-’90s, the theater has served as a central location upon which to bring hope to the surrounding community.

The Apollo closed as a theater in the early ’70s and then operated as a church before being seized by the city in the ’80s. By 1995, it had been boarded up and mostly abandoned.

Masten District Councilmember Byron Brown helped lead discussions inside City Hall to make the theater’s renovation part of a plan to bring new life to Jefferson Avenue.

In 1998, plans were unveiled for $3 million worth of city funded renovations to turn the landmark into a telecommunications hub for the city. Aside from city television facilities, the building also became home to a small business resource center.

Torn-Down Tuesday: Broadway at Pratt, 1973

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Sadly, a drive down Broadway east from downtown is largely a lesson in urban decay. Many worn-out buildings left uncared for, many lots where buildings that formerly fit that description once stood.

Buffalo News archives

Shown here in a 1972 photo, these structures at 400 and 404-08 Broadway no longer stand.

The wholesaling business run by Noah Mandelkern, and then his son Albert, first opened on Broadway in 1916.

Buffalo Stories archives

Mandelkern’s was a well-known seller of bulk seasonal items like school supplies, small Christmas gifts, Easter novelties, etc.

At one time, they were also dealers of one of America’s most famous shoe polishes — proving they did know almost anything from Shinola.

Next door, August Meyer opened his manufacturing and distributing business in 1915. At first, A.F. Meyer & Sons dealt in store and bar fixtures, soda fountains and beer pumps.

By the time son Edward Meyer took over the business in 1933, they were also the area distributor for Green River pop, a lime flavored soda that was the second most popular soda in the Midwest and Chicago for much of the first half of the 20th century.

The business was sold to the owners of Tops Friendly Markets in 1967.

The homes now occupying the lot were built in 2002, according to city records.

Buffalo in the ’90s: Dead Heads outside Rich Stadium

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The Grateful Dead seemed to be on a single, constant, unending tour through the ’80s into the ’90s.

Buffalo News archives

They played at Rich Stadium in 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992 and 1993. There were also a number of solo concerts from each of the band’s members during those years, giving Grateful Dead fans — Dead Heads — ample opportunity to hear from Jerry Garcia and the boys.

Buffalo News archives

“Truckin’ Up to Buffalo” was a double CD/DVD released by the Dead in 2005, a recording of the 1989 concert at Rich.

The photos on this page were from what was the most memorable experience for many — the 1992 concert marred with box office problems that resulted in what police later called a near riot among many in the sellout crowd of 65,000.

Fans who were familiar with both Bills games and Dead shows said stadium officials dropped the ball at the concert.

“At the Dead show, there were no garbage cans in the parking lot, no toilets, and the wait in the ticket line was horrendous, as bad as I’ve ever experienced,” one fan told The News. “Everybody was pushing up against each other trying to get in. But we had to keep waiting and waiting. People were getting angry. You never see this kind of stuff at a football game. They’ve got to do something at Rich Stadium, or there’s going to be big trouble at one of these concerts.”

Following the show, two men were found dead in separate areas outside the stadium in suspected drug overdoses.

The following year, the Grateful Dead returned with Sting for what would be their last show at Rich Stadium.

Buffalo in the ’60s: Torso found in Black Rock Canal solves mystery of missing banker

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

In 1959, Buffalo industrialist, banker and former Assistant Navy Secretary Edward Germain seemed to vanish without a trace.

When he left a small group of friends at the Buffalo Club, the longtime president of Dunlop Rubber told friends he was going to drive to his summer home just over the Peace Bridge in Canada.

He never arrived. A 32-state search ensued, and the case made national headlines.

A $10,000 reward was offered, but the only information on the case came from a man who watched Germain’s blue 1958 Chevrolet scrape along several parked cars on Buffalo’s Lower West Side. The car was moving slowly enough that the man could run alongside and offer to help, but the man behind the wheel — who appeared to be the 69-year-old Germain — seemed to be in some sort of trance and unable to stop or move.

Another less-certain report told of a car like Germain’s traveling the wrong way on a I-190 offramp.

When this was all the investigation netted, one doctor supposed that Germain could have had a stroke, but those who knew him said that he was as healthy as a man going on 50 even though he was going on 70.  Germain’s family seemed to think the wealthy man, who lived on Nottingham Terrace, was robbed. They feared they wouldn’t find him alive.

Germain’s Nottingham Terrace home. (Buffalo News archives)

Police seemed hung up on the fact that the car hadn’t been found. Divers searched the Niagara River but found nothing, and the case went cold for four years.

Then in 1963, kids playing in the Black Rock Canal found the decomposed remains which were matched to Germain by the still-intact clipping of his sister’s obituary in his pocket. Robbery didn’t seem to be a motive. Along with the newspaper article, his wallet also was filled with cash.

Buffalo News archives

Divers searched the river again — this time north of the Peace Bridge, instead of south near where his car was last seen.

Buffalo News archives

After 365 search hours, the mangled remains of Germain’s car were found, with the key still in the on position, and a shoe with bone fragments in it near the accelerator.

Buffalo News archives

Once the car and car were found, the case was closed. No further reporting was done on any investigation after the accident. The final mentions of the incident came with the probate of Germain’s $740,000 estate.

Buffalo in the ’80s: Smiling Ted’s Used Cars (and community service)

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

He smiled when he could put you in one of his “quality used cars,” and he smiled when he could find some way to help those who needed it. From 1961 until his death in 1996, Thaddeus Sawicki lived up to the name “Smiling Ted” in just about every way imaginable.

Buffalo News archives

He was the king of the stretch of Bailey Avenue that was known for decades as a sort of shopping mall for used cars.

Cigar-chomping, gold-jewelry-wearing Sawicki embraced the happy-yet-no-nonsense persona he created, but not the shady, high-pressure, corner cutting notion of what some thought every used car dealer was.

Sawicki, the youngest of 12, grew up in Lackawanna, and he opened the dealership near Bailey and Walden when he was 28. Over the next 35 years, he became a fixture in the community. Twice he helped police collar thieves trying to sell stolen cars.

He also remembered growing up wearing hand-me-downs and putting cardboard in his shoes. It made it easy for him to help the community’s neediest.

Buffalo News archives

Smiling Ted’s story is a prequel to the Russell Salvatore story: Both were self-made businessmen from humble beginnings, and both believed in giving back to the community that built them up.

In 1987, Sawicki (pictured above with his grandson Ted Jr.) spent around $45,000 buying Christmas gifts for 1,500 of Buffalo’s poorest kids. The same year, he bought dinner for 800 at the City Mission, “including real butter and sugar on the table” for Christmas.

Part of it was wanting to help, part of it was wanting to defeat the attitude towards used car dealers which lead to some banks not working with him or his customers, especially in the earliest days of his business.

Sawicki told News Reporter Ray Hill that he’d seen used car dealers come and go — and that the fly-by-night ones always made his honest work more difficult.

“One of those who came, and happily for Smiling Ted, has gone, was the late Dan ‘Shame on you’ Creed,” wrote Hill in 1987. “(The) Canadian who affected a southern accent moved to Buffalo in the mid-1960s, and huckstered jalopies with the not-so-subtle flair of a snake oil salesman who left town in a hurry after someone beat him with a baseball bat, leaving many people feeling like they didn’t like the taste of his snake oil.”

“It was the Dan Creeds of the world that made my life difficult,” Smiling Ted told Ray Hill.

But Smiling Ted was definitely one of Buffalo’s all-time great characters.

Buffalo News archives

“I’m miserable, but I have a heart of gold,” he told The News’ Jane Kwiatkowski in 1988. “People are jealous of me, but I work hard. I’m here in the wintertime. My wife and daughter and I are outside shoveling the snow and wiping the cars off.”

But why “Smiling” Ted?

“’Cause I always smile,” Sawicki told Kwiatkowski. “I see the color of money, and I got to smile.”