Rum returns to the Historic Pan Am District

By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo

prizes
Rum making Pan Am medal winners, as printed in The Buffalo Courier.

In 1901, there were few things more important to the economies and livelihoods of the Caribbean and parts of Central America than the export of rum. It would stand to reason, then, that when all of the Western Hemisphere’s countries got together in Buffalo for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, that rum would be a showcased product… and it was.

Exhibitors from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Honduras all won medals for rum.

Cuba had as many as 13 different rum (ron, in Spanish) exhibitors, including one still famous gold medal winner– Bacardi & Sons of Santiago. The gold medal showing in Buffalo was one of the primary forces in launching Bacardi to international renoun.

cubalist

Both Mexico and Cuba had their own large buildings at the Pan Am, and both had large displays for liquors and rums.

cuban rum display
One of Cuba’s rum displays at the 1901 Pan American Exposition
cuban building
The Cuban Building, 1901 Pan American Exposition, Buffalo, NY
American printer and lithographer
Pan Am Map, Buffalo 1901. “M” marks Mexico, “C” marks Cuba, “Squirrel” marks squirrel. Click to enlarge.

This map shows the Pan Am grounds between Elmwood and Delaware as they looked in 1901. If you were to try to find the site of the Mexican building today (marked M on the map), you’d look near Great Arrow Street towards the back of the old Pierce-Arrow complex. The Cuban building (marked C) was probably in the vicinity of where the Statue of David now stands near the Scajaquada Expressway.

Today, The Black Squirrel Distillery stands near the West Amherst gate on the old 1901 map, about where the hospital was during the Expo, right between Mexico and Cuba.

For more than half a century, the address was a drive-in restaurant and sandwich shop known by names like “Daddy Don’s Drive-In” and “Karen’s Restaurant.” Today, 1595 Elmwood Avenue is home to the copper still where Black Squirrel craft rum begins it’s life in small batches, bringing a bit of the Pan-Am back as the City of Light seems to be finding new light in new places these days.

And while most of Buffalo seems happy with having Black Squirrel in the neighborhood, it might not have been the case for the rum makers here in 1901… especially when the infamous Carrie Nation was in town.

carrie nation

 

“The Hatchetwoman from Kansas,” best remembered as the temperance champion who was arrested several times for smashing apart liquor bottles– and entire saloons– with her hatchet, told Buffalo reporters on one of her two trips to the Expo that “all rum sellers should be electrocuted and their shops destroyed.”

The best part is, she likely said those words as she boarded a streetcar downtown  to catch her train out of Buffalo… on the tracks directly across Elmwood Avenue from what is now Black Squirrel Distillery.

Buffalo in the ’70s: Supermarket beverage deals for the 4th of July

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Both Super Duper and B-Kwik were offering great savings on discount pop and beer 40 years ago this week for Independence Day 1975. So what beverages would have been stocked up for the upcoming holiday celebrations?

Koehler Beer six-packs were less than a buck at B-Kwik. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Koehler was produced in Erie, Pa., and became a local cheapo favorite after the closure of Buffalo’s Simon Pure and Iroquois plants in the early ’70s. Koehler was last produced in 1978.

Also at B-kwik, Hy-Top pop was eight cans for a buck. 

Another longtime favorite of Buffalo cheapskates– RC Cola– was also on sale: eight 16-ounce glass bottles for $1.

Over at all 30 Super Duper locations across WNY, it was Schaefer Beer six-packs for a buck and eight cans of Red and White pop for $1.


Buffalo in the ’70s: Get your Fun*N*Games Park tickets at B-Kwik

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Fun*N*Games Park was a small amusement park just off I-290 on Colvin, right behind the whale carwash.

B-Kwik Markets were owned by Tops as a mid-sized grocery store between a full-sized Tops Market and the Tops-owned Wilson Farms convenient stores.

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A big hunk of baloney

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

My dad was a great storyteller, and most of the stories revolved around some kind of villain cramping his style.

They were fun, but you could see that 30 or 40 or 50 years later, he was still POed at Hawkeye Hayden, one of his grammar school teachers who apparently had been sent to PS 33 by Satan himself.

But the best, warmest, aggression-free memories for the ol’man usually revolved around food– especially free food.

His Grandma Scurr would give him a quarter for the show and he’d be able to get 5 or 6 candy bars and watch cartoons all day at the Shea’s Seneca.

The meat packing plant near his house on Fulton Street once had a neighborhood cookout with all the hot dogs and hamburgers you could eat.

His dad was a night watchman at Paul’s Pies for a while… and he would bring home enough day old pies that everyone would get full.

He was always so happy telling and remembering these vivid all-you-can-eat tales, and the stories of great face-stuffings into adulthood were always part of his repertoire as well. He wasn’t a connoisseur of good food, he was a connoisseur of food.

“Man, I love soup.” “Man, I love eggs.” “At Manny’s, they give ya a hamburger this big!” “That was a really good fish fry, REALLY good.”

Before moving to The Valley and Fulton Street near my Grandpa’s family (Down the street from the Swift Meat Plant) when he was five, the Cichons lived at 28 S. Elmwood Avenue, Apartment 3, almost directly behind City Hall.

Dad’s favorite food story from that era involved “Good ol’Joe the Butcher.” His shop was right around the corner from where dad lived, and he’d “always give ya a big hunk of baloney.” The memory would fade to black with a smile, and a final, “Yep. Good ol’Joe the Butcher.”

Joe the butcher 1957 Buffalo Stories versionJoe the Butcher was Joe Battaglia. He came to Buffalo from Italy at the age of 5 in the 1890s. He ran his shop at the corner of Elmwood and Genesee (nearest landmark now would be the post office near Channel 7) from 1901 until he died in 1957. In finally tracking down his location and name, and then this death notice, I found his only son died a few years later and had no heirs. My ol’man may have been the last living person talking about this kindhearted man.

I’m happy to have finally dug up the full story of good ol’Joe the Butcher. He reminds me that doing something as simple and almost meaningless as ripping off a hunk of baloney can brighten someone’s day and possibly even brighten the rest of a person’s life.

Here’s to good ol’Joe the Butcher and to us all finding ways to rip off hunks of baloney.

Buffalo in the 70s: Meet Snoopy and Dave Thomas at Hengerer’s

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

All the youngsters were invited to Hengerer’s to meet Rocketship 7’s Dave Thomas and Snoopy to promote the upcoming Peanuts film “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.”

No word on whether the Sweetlys, Mr. Beeper or Promo the Robot would be attending.

Piles of Existential Crises (or as you see it, books and junk)

By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo

It’s never been a conscious effort to replicate the junk piles of my ancestors, but even when I was young, I was fascinated by the grandparents who surrounded themselves with interesting stuff.

Grandpa Wargo’s house was a packed menagerie of wonderment, made even more special by the fact that everything was at least 30 years old and in like new condition. It was very neatly kept, but there was a lot of it, and much of it very exotic to my eyes. It was also the smell, which was something akin to, but not quite, anise-like. When we’d visit, he’d make me sit on the newspapers that he would pile up on the springy couch so that I could “flatten them out.” My dad and I painted his front railing once, and the can of black paint he procured from the basement looked like something he smuggled out of his job at Pratt & Letchworth in the 1930s.

For as tidy, new, and organized as Grandpa Wargo’s stuff felt, Grandpa Coyle’s was just as messy, piled, and chaotic. The 1880’s basement on Hayden Street was filled with old dishwashers, a ringer wash machine, my uncles’ old sporting equipment, and hundreds of scraps of wood, door knobs, bits of glass plate, and rusty tools. It really would have been a childhood paradise were it not for the healthy dose of fear created by the medieval looking rat traps hiding around most corners.

The moment you walked into Grandma Cichon’s front door, there was an overloaded, wall-to-ceiling bookshelf. It was in the little foyer between the screen door and the heavy door in the Seneca Street Victorian– in the place where most people might put coat hooks. It was an eclectic haphazard collection– one of many eclectic haphazard collections spewn throughout the old South Buffalo house. Our coats would go on the carved oak newel post.

Even though I admired the gargantuan clutter clatches of my grandparents, I fostered no plan to replicate them. Yet here I am.

Having lived in our own big old house for 15 years, I’ve collected enough rubble and detritus to make the junk-accumulating pioneers in my life proud. I don’t think the pride would come from the stuff, though– it’s the type of thinking the stuff represents.

How am I supposed to fix something when it breaks, if I don’t have a basement crushed to the gills with useless bric-a-brac which could one day be the missing piece in making sure the door knob stops falling off the front door? I’m sure people do it– fix without junk– but I learned how to fix stuff by watching Grandpa Wargo and Grandpa Coyle. Step one was always go stare at your junk for a while, and hope a solution jumps out at you.

basementjunk
A small portion of my basement work bench.

I would love a clean, sanitized basement without frankly embarrassing piles of mad-scientist/Rube-Goldberg-looking junk everywhere… But I’m afraid– and it’s a real fear– that I’ll lose some part of who I am without the stuff. How do I move onto step two in the repair process without step one?

 

I’ve been thinking about how to fix the door knob for weeks, and the answer is not in the basement junk. Both grandpas would be happy with my solution, I think… It’s going to start with the same long stare– not in the cellar, but on the “nut and bolt” aisle at Home Depot.

It seems to work more and more like that these days, with my rusty old stuff in the basement acting as more of a security blanket than as useful things. If I can continue to think this way, the upcoming basement clean out should be easier. (LOL.)

What started me writing today, though, is my books. I’ve always had books and always had a bookshelf. For as long as I can remember. When we bought our house, I built and stained immense wooden bookshelves on both sides of the exposed brick of the chimney in our office. I loved idea of being surrounded by books, and that one day I’d have those shelves filled.

Of course, now it looks like a ladies guild buck-a-bag sale in there. Books are piled on the floor and on the desk and, in a trick I learned in Grandma Cichon’s front hall, sideways on top of books properly upright on the shelves.

Most of the books I buy these days are Buffalo and Western New York histories and reference volumes. These are all keepers– Both old and new– all filled with information you can’t find online. Online. There’s the rub.

The first quarter-century of my book collecting came before the Internet and the e-Book. I have half a shelf of really great dictionaries, thesauruses (thesauri?), and wonderful language resource and reference books which have gone untouched for at least a decade. Wonderful history texts, too. Spine literally not exercised in ten years.

There are also the paperbacks which for decades I so vigorously foraged. Classics, interesting old biographies, best sellers of decades’ past– anything that might make for a good vacation or rainy weekend read down the line. Most are now dust-covered and more forlorn-looking than when I plucked them from a yard sale or library fundraising pile.

grandmatodad
A gift from Grandma to Dad… the inside cover of a hardcover bound collection of Superman comic books.

The most complicated group of books are the ones that mean something to me. Not the stories; the actual books. Some are transplanted from that mythical shelf at Grandma’s… Some even have her writing in them. Plenty were Dad’s, annotated in his very heavy handed, unintelligible scrawl. With still others, holding the book takes me to the place where I read it. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

The problem with all these books are they are as much bricks as books. They are of little tangible use to me, and they actually take space away from my Buffalo book collection which I use quite vigorously and enthusiastically.

I know I won’t be using them as books– well, only insofar as anyone uses books as window dressing to look learned when their bookshelves are examined.

I’m not exactly happy with myself over this, but I’ve completely forsaken the smelly paperbacks with degrading paper for the tablet. A piece of me has died just writing that sentence, but it’s true. And there isn’t likely any going back.

And while I have warm memories of dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) in every room of my house, for better or worse, the World Wide Web is really a remarkable resource in these areas. I’m not sure what Grandma Cichon would have thought of this, but it’s the cold truth.

I sat down to write this tonight as I was having an existential crisis while trying to cull out the jetsam and flotsam of book collection. I don’t want to be someone without great books, but I don’t want to be a phony, either.

There will certainly be room for the Buffalo books and most of the meaningful ones, too– although I may have to find a less reflective day to decide where that meaningful line is drawn.

bookjunk
Each of these silly paperbacks are a tangible reminder of many things– including that I probably need some sort of therapy.

Maybe a box or two might make it to the attic for further reflection, but those smelly paperbacks (which believe me, I still love!) will likely be boxed up and shipped out for their next rescue. I’ll drop them off with the same hope that people have when they drop off dogs and cats at a shelter, but the reality will probably be the same.

I hope my paperbacks– some of which have made 4 or 5 moves with me– will find a good home on a good bookshelf somewhere. Maybe they’ll even be read on the MetroRail on the way home from work… or maybe they’ll be read as the big raindrops hit the window and the smell of percolated coffee wafts through the air inside the slightly muggy-but-now-cooling-off state park cabin.

But we know the truth. Anyone who wants to read Huckleberry Finn can either download it– or at least find a copy where the pages don’t disintegrate and break from the binding with each advance in the book.

I always loved that struggle, and felt somehow more high-brow in the low-brow of it all. Now I feel high-brow when I read great novels on my phone instead of cruising on Facebook.

It’s not better or worse. It’s the same and it’s different. It’s a soul crushing crisis.

June 2, 1930: Remembering ‘Deco’-ration Day

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Before there was Memorial Day on the last Monday of May, there was Decoration Day on May 30.

Perhaps more true to the meaning of Memorial Day, Americans would take to cemeteries and care for, maintain, and decorate the graves of those who died in service to our country.

While social media is filled each year with the laments of those who are disgusted by the commercialization of Memorial Day, the concept, sadly, is nothing new.

As far back as 85 years ago, the Deco Restaurant chain — a Buffalo institution — was playing off the name Deco and Decoration Day.

New tours show Parkside neighborhood in different lights

By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo

I’m really excited to be offering the first of four new walking tours of the Parkside neighborhood this summer.  George Stock, who has been guiding neighborhood tours for over 30 years, continues with three new tours this summer as well.

Steve Cichon is the author of The Complete History of Parkside and four other books.
Steve Cichon is the author of The Complete History of Parkside and four other books.

At the start of the 20th century, Buffalo was one of America’s most exciting, fastest growing cities. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the Parkside neighborhood, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as a buffer between his Delaware Park and Main Street.

The wealth and new ideas that poured into Buffalo found a home and flourished in Parkside. The a wide sampling of the avant garde in architecture, art, and culture from Buffalo’s most exciting era remains mostly intact in what remains one of Buffalo’s finest neighborhoods.

The Parkside Community Association, in conjunction with the Martin House Restoration Corporation, have turned to historians and story tellers who live in the neighborhood to share the tale evolution from farmland to National Register of Historic Places.

The monthly tours, revamped and brand new for the summer of 2015, offer a series of unique glimpses into the elements that, more than a century later, continue to make Parkside one of Buffalo’s most sought after addresses. While each tour has a different focus, participants on any tour will get a more full understanding of Parkside and Buffalo.

June 13, 2015:    Parkside, The Park, and The Zoo | starts at 10am at Parkside & Russell outside the New Parkside Meadow Restaurant

Before there was Parkside, there was “The Park”– Frederick Law Olmsted’s original name for Delaware Park. Docent Steve Cichon offers a brief multimedia lecture before guiding a tour focused on how the park and the zoo helped shape the neighborhood while acting as the communal front lawn, as well as how both institutions were shaped by the neighborhood.

Tickets are on sale now at http://parksidebuffalo.org/walking-tours/

 

July 11, 2015:      FLW & Beyond: Arts & Crafts in Parkside | starts at 10am at Jewett Pkwy & Summit Ave

The aesthetic of the Arts & Crafts Movement is unmistakable, and Parkside was unmistakably one of Buffalo’s Arts & Crafts hotbeds. Docent George Stock guides a tour of architecture, architects, and art which have gained worldwide attention for Parkside, including the neighborhood’s two Frank Lloyd Wright designed homes.

Aug. 8, 2015:      The Parksiders Who Built Buffalo | starts at 10am at Jewett Pkwy & Summit Ave

As the 1800s begat the 1900s, the homes of Parkside were being built by the wealthy industrialists who were also building Buffalo. Docent George Stock introduces you to the printers, retailers, milliners, brewers, and other wealthy bon vivants who created the original sense of joie de vivre which remains part life in Parkside to this day.

Sep. 12, 2014:    Modern Conveniences: Home Life & Culture at the turn of the century | starts at  10am at Jewett Pkwy & Summit Ave

The homes of Parkside were built as oil lamps gave way to the light bulb and the horse and buggy gave way to the motor car. To this day, many Parkside homes remain a vestige of a world that had one foot in pre-industrial times and the other in the midst of the City of Light.  Docent George Stock highlights the manifestations of culture at the turn of the century in Parkside.

Each tour is approximately two hours. Admission is $20, $15 for Martin House and Parkside Community Association members. Complete ticket information at http://parksidebuffalo.org/walking-tours/ or 838-1240.

Hoping to better honor Buffalo’s Tomb of Unknown Soldiers

By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo

During the War of 1812, about 300-400 soldiers died on what is now the Delaware Park golf course.

an 1895 account of what happened at The Mound in the Meadow, and the scuttled plans of Elam Jewett for a memorial

There was no battle there, though the men were in Buffalo in defense of our nation’s borders. The soldiers, mostly from southern states like Maryland and Virginia, died as they wintered on the large open area that would become “the park meadow” and the golf course.

These soldiers came to Western New York to defend our nation wearing light summer uniforms and open ended tents. They took on the worst of Buffalo winter with few blankets, fewer boots, and very little food. Most of the food that did make it this far out to the American frontier was rancid.

“Camp Disease,” probably cholera or dysentery or a combination of both fueled by starvation and frost bite, killed this men in an unimaginable way.

Burial explanation, 1895

The ground was frozen, so the dead were buried in either shallow graves or simply piled in tents. When spring came, a large hole was dug… the dead buried in a mass grave.

Buffalo’s Tomb of the Unknowns.

If you don’t know about this, you’re not alone. Through the years, many attempts have been made to call attention to this sacred site— the very reason for Memorial Day.

mound 1896 memory

 

If this were a Civil War mass grave from 50 years later, Delaware Park would be a National Park and it’s story known around the world. The War of 1812 isn’t as sexy historically speaking, so these men lie mostly forgotten.

 

Mound 1895 account-2A large boulder, placed in 1896, marks the spot of the grave. The fact that its in the middle of the golf course means, again, it’s forgotten.

It was hoped the monument could be dedicated on Remembrance Day in 1896, but it wasn’t ready– and was dedicated on July 4, 1896 instead.

Old Newspapers
Old Newspapers

Sadly, through the years, the site– and therefore the memory of the sacrifice it represents– has been stripped of more attention raising features.

A flagpole disappeared in the first half of the 20th century.

This 1955 article from the Courier-Express shows a pair of Civil War parrott rifles on either side of the stone marker and a historical marker pointing to the site from Ring Road. The cannon disappeared in the 80s, the marker some time before then.

More needs to be done to honor the sacrifice of these men who gave their lives and now are spending eternity in the midst of our city.

Can the historical marker be replaced? Can we as a community build awareness and try to bring more honor to this many times over forgotten sacred site?

Read more about the history of The Mound in the Meadow and our 2011 commemoration at the site: http://www.staffannouncer.com/meadow.htm