Out of the past: Hamburg Taxi

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

For more than 80 years, whether you needed a lift getting somewhere, or whether you were just reading through the pages of the Hamburg Sun, you’ve seen the name Hamburg Taxi.

Hamburg Taxi’s earliest ads in The Sun, back in 1934, mention that the Packard Limousine cabs were sent around town from the Hotel Hamburg.

Not only is the car in this 1938 ad a classic, so is the phone number. There were so few phones in the Hamburg exchange, phone numbers only needed to be three numbers long.

The 1965 ad shows a pair of classic Checker Cabs serving as Hamburg’s taxis.

And in 1999, Hamburg Taxi’s Chrysler and Oldsmobile cabs were photographed when the company was included as a Sun “business of the week.” 

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Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.