Buffalo in the ’70s: New NFT buses arrive at the Aud

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

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.

Buffalo in the ’90s: $3 beer, no waiting at Rich Stadium

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Answers abound and imaginations run wild when Bills fans are asked what they’d most like to have about the 1990 Bills for today.

Buffalo News archives

Jim Kelly? Thurman Thomas? The hope and expectation of great things about to happen with the team?

Before you get too far ahead of yourselves, think about stadium prices. The best seats at Rich Stadium in 1990 were $35, but you could get into the game for $20. Parking was $4, and an 18-ounce beer was $3.

Sure, Hall of Fame owner, Hall of Fame general manager, Hall of Fame coach, five Hall of Fame players — but think about walking into the stadium with a 20, buying six beers, and still having enough for a $2 tip for the beer guy.

Buffalo in the ’80s: Inside Bells Markets at the checkout

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

A quick glance at this 1984 shot of Western New Yorkers in a supermarket checkout line might offer the warm reassurance that some things never change. Upon closer examination, however, we can find a few changes over the last 31 years.

Buffalo News archives

The first one that pops out was the accessibility of cigarettes, right next to the checkout conveyor belt. Three decades later, many supermarkets no longer carry cigarettes, and the ones that do have them behind the customer service counter or at a single designated lane.

Of course the photo is different because this is a Bells Market. All Bells stores closed when the company filed for bankruptcy in 1993, and many former Bells locations were gobbled up by Quality Markets, among others.

While the photo is black and white, it’s easy to imagine the cashier’s neckerchief being either the orange and brown or later green and yellow color scheme Bells used through the ’70s and ’80s.

Plenty is different, but the closer examination also shows that some things really don’t ever change — like Michael Jackson being featured in the tabloid rack. When this photo was taken he was still at the height of his Thriller and King of Pop fame … but despite the fact that Jackson died six years ago, would anyone be surprised to see him featured on a tabloid cover on your next shopping trip?

Buffalo in the ’80s: Commissioner and sheriff are bicycle cops for a day

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

I

t’s the kind of photo op we don’t see as much anymore.

To promote a statewide bicycle safety campaign, Buffalo’s two top cops — City Police Commissioner James Cunningham (white belt) and Erie County Sheriff Kenneth Braun — hopped on a customized bike built for two and rode around Niagara Square.

Buffalo News archives

Torn-down Tuesday: Bethlehem Steel from the air

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

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.

Buffalo in the ’60s: Rocket belting around Lafayette Square

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

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.

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 ’70s: Up in the Oranges, hanging on for dear life

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

As hockey season gets underway in Buffalo, inevitably someone will wax poetic about the great old days of watching the Sabres at Memorial Auditorium.

Buffalo News archives

While the memories might be sweet, the modern hockey fan might not last even one period without complaint.

This 1973 photo shows the extreme pitch of seats in the Orange section of the Aud as compared to the grade in the Upper Blue section just below.  Even the most thrilling fights on the ice were often outmatched by the hundreds of people fighting vertigo after standing up too quickly from their perch in the Orange section after a beer or three.

The photo also shows one of The Aud’s features which even the most nostalgic fan has a hard time recalling with warmth. Look at the legs underneath the lighted sign, and remember the obstructed Upper Blue seats, from which fans watched a good portion of the hockey action on ancient television sets dangling from the underside of the Oranges.

The plastic-backed orange seats date to the 1971 expansion of The Aud, when the roof was raised to make room for the upper level.

The wooden blue seats—which before the expansion were gray—dated back to the original construction of Memorial Auditorium in 1940.

The Aud closed in 1996 as the Sabres (as well as the Bandits and Blizzard) moved into Marine Midland Arena (now First Niagara Center.)

Memorial Auditorium was slowly dismantled in 2009, and the site is now covered with canals replicating the original Erie Canal. The canals are open for paddle boats in warmer weather, and ice skating when frozen. A marker in the canal points to where The Aud’s center ice faceoff dot once was.

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.