The Buffalo You Should Know: Big names of Buffalo’s tumultuous banking past

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

“It doesn’t take very long for a newcomer to become acquainted with Buffalo’s banks,” wrote News Reporter Robert J. Summers in 1980. “Stand at a corner like Main and Court, and you can see most of the big buildings where they are headquartered.”

Of the five bank headquarters Summers listed as visible from that intersection, only one remains in business 36 years later.

As the names involved in Buffalo’s banking scene are changing once again, BN Chronicles looks back at the names that might have been stamped on the front of your first savings account passbook or at the top of your first paycheck.

1979 ad. Buffalo Stories archives

Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company was founded in Buffalo in 1856. M&T was and is headquartered in the 318-foot, 21-floor building at One M&T Plaza that opened in 1966. That block has seen plenty of history.

M&T branch on Abbott Road at Stevenson, South Buffalo. (Buffalo News archives)

In 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s body laid in state at the St. James Hotel on the site. The Hotel Iroquois, and then the Bond Men’s store, occupied the north part of the site until 1964. M&T’s headquarters was first built on the southern half of the block now occupied by the headquarters building in 1916.

1964, just before the demolition of the circa-1916 M&T headquarters and Bond Menswear. AM&A’s is in the background. The block with H. Seeberg and the Palace Burlesk was torn down and is now green space. (Buffalo News archives)

In 1980, Marine Midland Bank was Buffalo’s oldest bank and headquartered in Buffalo’s tallest building.

Marine Trust’s Main & Seneca office, 1951 (Buffalo News archives)

Founded in 1850, Marine Midland was the nation’s 12th largest bank with $12 billion in assets in 1980. It was acquired by HSBC Bank in 1999. HSBC sold off its Buffalo-area branches to First Niagara in 2011. By the end of the summer, it’s expected that First Niagara will be acquired by KeyBank. The former Marine Midland Center is now known as One Seneca Tower.

Marine Midland ad for a “groovy Bills bank,” 1969. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Western Savings Bank’s headquarters was right on the corner that Summers chose as his 1980 vantage point for financial institutions. It’s the building with CVS Pharmacy currently occupying the ground floor space that was once Western’s main office.

Western Savings Bank ad, 1979. (Buffalo Stories archives)

While Western joined other area banks in demolishing decades-old Roman-inspired headquarters buildings for flashy new high-rise towers in the 1960s, by the early 1980s, deposits were falling and Western was losing money. In 1981, Western merged with longtime rival Buffalo Savings Bank.

Buffalo Savings Bank opened a temporary branch serving skiers at Kissing Bridge in 1980. Buffalo News archives

Buffalo Savings Bank’s famous gold-domed headquarters, designed by E.B. Green, is the rare survivor of our city’s magnificent bank buildings. As it expanded and acquired outside of Buffalo, Buffalo Savings Bank changed its name to Goldome — as a nod to its great headquarters with a name a bit less parochial sounding.

The Buffalo Savings Bank building with its famous gold dome, photographed in 2009. (Buffalo News file photo)

Like many banking institutions around the country, Goldome grew too quickly and went under during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. In 1991, Goldome’s assets were split between KeyBank — which entered the Buffalo market after Empire of America succumbed to the S&L crisis — and another bank in 1989.

Buffalo Stories archives, 1960

For the same reasons Buffalo Savings Bank became Goldome, “The Big E” changed its name from Erie County Savings Bank to Empire of America in 1981. After nearly a decade of borrowing to acquire other banks around the country, in 1989 Empire told regulators it was insolvent and posted a $158 million loss in the third quarter.

Big E celebrated 125 years in business in 1979. Ten years later, the federal government assumed control of the bank. (Buffalo Stories archives)

As longtime Buffalo banks Buffalo Savings and Big E were busy buying up other deposit bases, longtime Buffalo institution Liberty Bank instead was bought up.

Liberty Bank’s branch at Bailey & Kensington, 1930s. (Buffalo News Archives)

While the twin Lady Liberties atop the bank’s headquarters still stand proudly on Buffalo’s skyline, in 1985 Liberty Bank became Liberty Norstar. Boston’s Fleet Bank bought Norstar in 1987, and in 2004, all Fleet branches became Bank of America branches after those two institutions had merged.

Buffalo Trust, previously known as Buffalo German Bank, was headquartered in a Victorian Italianate structure that was torn down in 1957 to make way for the Tishman building, the longtime headquarters of National Fuel. Today the site is home to a Hilton Garden Inn.  (1924 ad, Buffalo Stories archives.)

 

Buffalo in the ’50s: Chiavetta’s chicken becoming a Buffalo tradition

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The Chiavetta family has been sending plumes of delicious chicken barbecue smoke across Western New York since 1951.

Family patriarch Thomas Chiavetta, who died in 1988, is seen in this 1959 photo manning the grill in much the same way his family still does today, although judging by the headline, the idea of a Chiavetta’s barbecue was novel 57 years ago today.

For decades, lawn fetes, fundraisers, and, since 1958, a visit to the Erie County Fair were the only way to get that unique flavor that just tastes like summer in Western New York.

1958 ad (Buffalo Stories archives)

In 1982, after years of being asked over and over for a quart or a gallon of the special sauce that made that special flavor, Tom and Eleanor Chiavetta started bottling Chiavetta’s sauce — and another “must buy” product was added to the arsenal of any ex-pat Western New Yorker trying to take a taste of Buffalo back home.

Paul Chiavetta shows off his family’s wares, 1990. (Buffalo News archives)

By 1990, Chiavetta’s was grilling 150,000 half chickens a year, and had just opened a brand new 8,000 square-foot facility to bottle their sauce in Brant.

As of 2010, there were new facilities in Pendleton, 300,000 chicken dinners were coming off the charcoal annually, and the sauce was being sent all over the world — including to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clearly, chicken is the family business with the Chiavettas, and has been for a long time. It’s even the way the Chiavetta boys would torture one another in that special brotherly way.

“When I was a little boy, there was a chilling tank we used during processing to cool the chickens,” Peter Chiavetta told News Reporter Jane Kwiatkowski in 2010, “and my brother Tom would pick me up and threaten to throw me inside the tank. I would be screaming for my mother. I was about 5.”

Of course, the best way to enjoy Chiavetta’s is the original way — follow your nose any evening in the summertime. But if you’re going to try to replicate the taste at home? Peter Chiavetta has one word for you.

“Slow. If you can’t enjoy a cocktail (while it’s cooking), you’re cooking it too fast. Have a nice, easy fire so you won’t have to turn the chicken often. Sit and talk and have a few beers.”

What it looked like Wednesday: Guercio’s, Grant Street, 1985

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Any of us who have spent time away from Buffalo have our rituals when we return to Western New York. Loganberry. Wings. Super Mighty. Hot dogs (Texas hots). Hot dogs (Char-broiled). Hot dogs (so long as it’s a Sahlens).

Guercio & Sons’ Grocery during a construction project on Grant Street in 1985. (Buffalo News archives)

Aside from — you know — seeing mom, many of our immediate “musts” revolve around food. One stop for many who grew up in or have roots on Buffalo’s West Side, one stop combines food and family.

The mention of Guercio’s can fill a West Sider with a yearning for the pungent aromas of cheese and pickles and cured meats. It’s the type of old-world store which barely exists anymore, making a visit to Grant Street special whether you’re coming from Amherst or the Carolinas.

Guercio’s was known as the Grant Street Market in the days before Vincent and Nancy Guercio came to Buffalo from Sicily in 1954. They bought the place in 1961, and in 1967, the name was officially changed to Guercio & Sons.

Guercio & Sons has been a bastion for the ingredients that make food Italian, and for generations the shop has made the experience of buying those ingredients part of the experience of being an Italian in Buffalo or a West Sider or just someone who appreciates great food and great service.

From the fruit and vegetables displayed on the sidewalk to the cheese and meat counter inside, Guercio’s is a throwback without feeling like an anachronism. Even if you’ve never been there before, somehow walking in, it feels like it’s already etched in your DNA. It’s one of those places you can take your grandkids to.

While it’s the nonnas and bambinos who are mostly likely to wax poetic about Guerico & Sons, it’s the newer Buffalonians hailing from Africa, Asia and Latin America who make up more and more of the everyday neighborhood shoppers there. This is the wonderful little store for current West Siders, just like it was for a previous generation or two.

Neither Grant Street nor the entire West Side have too many institutions that help bridge the gap between yesterday’s West Side and today’s West Side. At Guerico’s, there really hasn’t been a yesterday and today, just a long-standing commitment to being the kind of place that feels right for anyone who walks in.

Torn-Down Tuesday: The Lehigh Train Terminal, 1959

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

When the new Lehigh Valley passenger terminal opened in 1916, it was “a cause for civic celebration,” and “the dreams of years fulfilled.” Its erection gave Buffalo the passenger terminal that for a generation people had been wishing and hoping to see built.

Postcard image, Buffalo Stories archives

Called “the most portentous” passenger terminal in “this section of the country,” the four-story structure was built of gray Indiana limestone.

Buffalo News archives

By 1959, rail passenger service was becoming a thing of the past in Buffalo. In fact, many of the Lehigh Valley right-of-ways were sold to New York State to build the I-190. The mammoth structure had become unnecessary, and had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

Buffalo News archives

The station was demolished in 1960 to make way for the Donovan State Office Building, which was refurbished and is now the home of Phillips Lytle, Courtyard by Marriott and Pizza Plant.

Buffalo in the ’50s: Sharkey Ehrenreich, ‘Buffalo’s Betting Commissioner’

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Nominally, he ran Sharkey’s Smoke Shop at Eagle and Washington, and later Bison Toy & Novelty on North Division Street as a small businessman. He later admitted to the State Crime Commission that he’d been using those places as a front to take bets since the early 1940s.

Jack “Sharkey” Ehrenreich (Buffalo News archives)

The toy store made about $3,000 a year. Bookmaking was taking in $4,000 a weekend.

It wasn’t that Jack “Sharkey” Ehrenreich was a bookie that made him such an interesting character in the fabric of Buffalo life in the ’50s and ’60s, it was his grandiose style which made it all so memorable.

When he was accused of having help staying in business from inside the police department, Sharkey told his state questioners that he was good at “out drifting” the police. “When I see the (police) car, I just move onto the next block,” he testified in 1960.

He also testified that day that he was planning on leaving the bookmaking business behind, and that he could easily live on the small amount of money made by his legitimate businesses because after all, he said, “I have no vices. I don’t place bets.”

The last time Sharkey had promised to leave the world of gambling was 1953, when he told an assistant district attorney, “I’m out of the business. I’m planning to move out of town.”

That was partially true in that he did leave his home base of Buffalo for Hamburg. Buffalo News wordsmith Ray Hill called it “the highlight of his betting career,” when, in 1954, Buffalo Raceway banished Sharkey from the track because the book he was running there was putting a sizable dent in the take at the track’s own parimutuel betting windows.

The law caught up with him a few times. In 1947, he was arrested amidst five telephones and baseball betting slips. Charges of taking bets on horses were dropped in 1950. A year later, police assigned a patrolman to stand guard outside Sharkey’s cigar store to make sure recently disappeared trappings of betting — like a giant chalkboard with constantly updated baseball scores and stats — didn’t reappear.

A family man and a good guy around town, Sharkey Ehrenreich was the sort of colorful figure who used to live in everyone’s neighborhood, and added to the variety and vibrancy of life in our city, even if from just on the other side of the law. But just how terrible was the crime he was committing?

In our day and age, instead of a guy like Sharkey — with one eye on ball scores and another for approaching cops — hanging out at a cigar shop or by a corner payphone, these days Buffalonians with a basic yearning for action can now enjoy scratch-offs and Quick Draw, fully legalized and institutionalized by the New York State Lottery.

Just like with Sharkey, all you need is a dollar and a dream.

Buffalo in the 1880s: Western New York’s first opiate crisis

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

If we haven’t been personally touched by it, most of us have at least read about the fact that Buffalo, Western New York and the entire country are in the throes of an opioid addiction crisis.

The word “opioid” is a relatively new word used to describe the synthetic versions of opiates that are used clinically as pain relievers — but are often abused like their naturally derived cousins.

Synthetic opioids include drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone. Poppy-derived opiates include heroin and opium.

Around 1890, Buffalo was one of America’s top 10 largest cities. With that came the problems of larger cities — namely, in this instance, opium.

“Buffalo is a progressive town,” it was written in the Buffalo Courier. “The inhabitants endeavor to keep pace with the rest of the world, and a little thing like opium smoking is not to be omitted from the calendar of accomplishments.”

That year’s headlines were filled with average Joes succumbing to an opium habit — like the bookkeeper who’d been drinking heavily and “when taking his usual dose of opium accidentally took too much” and the doctor who slit his own throat with a razor to “escape the thralldom of opium.”  There were also arrests, like the one at the foot of Hertel Avenue, when three Chinese men were arrested after rowing over from Canada with “a considerable amount of opium.”


Laundryman Wong Sing was wearing a linen belt lined with 21 eggs filled with opium, along with several opium cakes and smaller vials. Wung Hai had two boxes and Mack Fung Gung had six eggs. In court, the men said each egg cost about 2 cents in China, but all they had could sell for up to $30 here. The men also asked a judge if they could take some of the opium themselves, a request denied for the addicts.

By 1895, it was known that “opium smokers can find every opportunity to indulge their appetites in Buffalo.”

One typical opium joint was in the basement of an old building at the southwest corner of Swan and Ellicott — today, that’s Coca-Cola Field. Then, it was “the principal resort for dope fiends,” where “anyone properly introduced and possessing $1 in American money may go there, smoke himself into insensibility, sleep it off, and go away.”

A knock at the door would bring out old Wah Kee — himself an addict — who emerged from what looked like the office of any Chinese laundry. But as described in the Courier, “when the money has been placed in the Chinaman’s clammy, shaking hand, the visitor is led back of the counter into a dark room, and thence through another passage to a doorway which admits him to the apartment devoted to the real business of the place.”

The 10×20 room was as “unattractive as filth could make it,” yet it was frequented by boys and men of all ages, and even the occasional woman.

At the corner of Michigan and William, in the neighborhood where Buffalo’s Chinese immigrants lived and worked, the laundry kept by Quong Hing was also said to be a resort for opium smokers.

A few blocks south, on the west side of Michigan and Seneca, Hop Loy kept a laundry he vehemently denied was an opium front. However, the parade of white men and intermittent white women streaming into the small frame building for several hours at a stretch told a different story.

Even out at Gardenville, at the corner of Clinton and Union, the Chinese Temple (joss house) and the nearby laundry run by Fat Wong Yen — “the most educated Mongolian in Buffalo” — were known for opium smoke wafting through the air as illicit bets were collected over the Chinese game Fan.

And while more difficult, a white man need not commingle with the Chinese for an opium fix. One addict told of his time at “a house of ill-repute” on Elm Street in the Tenderloin District, where rooms were set aside for smoking opium.

In reading through dozens of accounts of opium smoking in Buffalo in the 1890s, the papers didn’t seem to care much if the Chinese used opium — in fact, it seemed to add to the charm and mystique of the Eastern culture embedded within the writers’ own culture.

The line was drawn and the alarm raised when white men — and especially white women — seemed to be lining up in large numbers to hand their lives over to the intoxicating effects of the drug.

Vamping: The forgotten film shot in Buffalo in 1983

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

BUFFALO, NY – Buffalo welcomed plenty of Hollywood in the early 1980s.

Welcome to Buffalo, 1980s style. Still from the film Vamping (Buffalo Stories archives)
Welcome to Buffalo, 1980s style. Still from the film Vamping (Buffalo Stories archives)

“Hide in Plain Sight,” starring James Caan, was shot here in 1979 and released in 1980. In 1982, Goldie Hahn and Burt Reynolds spent some time in Buffalo’s Parkside neighborhood shooting “Best Friends,” and also watching history at the Aud — both were in attendance the night Wayne Gretzky scored a hat trick shattering the NHL record for goals in a season.

The most celebrated film ever shot in Buffalo, ‘The Natural,” was shot with much fanfare during the summer of 1983 and released the following year. Buffalonians celebrated that film’s 30th anniversary with the same level of hoopla a few years back.

But while Redford, Close, Brimley and the crew were here shooting a baseball flick, an actor just as well known in 1983 — “Dallas” star Patrick Duffy — was in town shooting a music flick.

Buffalo scenery in “The Natural” is much celebrated. War Memorial and All-High Stadiums, the old Parkside Candy at Main and West Oakwood, The Central Terminal, The Ellicott Square Building, and a handful of other locations are seen and immediately recognized by millions of fans of that epic picture.

But you might consider the Buffalo scenery in “Vamping” even better. It’s a look at every day Buffalo. It reflects the grittiness of a city in the throes of factory shut downs, economic crisis, and an identity crisis as well.

In the same way the driving scenes and beauty shots on Kojak show New York City as it was in the mid-70’s, and the same sort of shots show us Los Angeles in the mid-60’s on Dragnet, Vamping’s scenes are a great snapshot in time in Buffalo.

The Buffalo Stories studios recently dug up an old VHS copy of Vamping in our archives and digitally remastered it as best we could. Here are some stills showing some of the great Buffalo scenery in Vamping. We’ve also loaded this entire film onto YouTube, only because as far as I can tell, the film is not available for purchase anywhere… And I think many folks would enjoy seeing our city as it was in 1983.

Watch the film:


While now it seems to be the film that time has forgotten, Buffalo News Critic Jeff Simon filled the front page of “Life & Arts” with a look at “Vamping,” starring Duffy supported by a large contingent of Buffalo talent on the screen and on the crew.

“While Robert Redford and one of the finest assemblages of acting talent in current film were all over the city and environs filming the $25 million film “The Natural,” (local film director Frederick King) Keller and star Patrick Duffy … were scrambling around filming on a budget that wouldn’t pay for the gasoline in Redford & Co.’s Winnebagos.”

4-30-1984-vamping-edit1

4-30-1984-vamping-2-edit

 

Buffalo in the ’80s: Peller & Mure, one of downtown’s great men’s stores

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Roy Peller and Paul Mure worked at Kleinhans Men’s Store when they decided to open their own haberdashery a few blocks away on Court Street in 1948.

Peller & Mure became one of downtown’s great men’s stores, outfitting mayors from Frank Sedita to Jimmy Griffin. Their offerings expanded to include a women’s business line in 1981.

Over five decades, P & M’s retail space was in several locations through the years, including two on Court Street, as well as Delaware Avenue and Pearl Street.

Investors took over the upscale clothier in 1995 and gave a fight, but after 51 years, Peller & Mure closed its doors in early 2000.

AM&A’s was right around the corner on Main Street, until it moved across Main in 1960.

 

The Ol’man’s still pulling one over on the VA

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

BUFFALO, NY –Been thinking about the ol’man today, so I’m wearing a pair of his pajamas… PROPERTY OF THE VA.

SteveVApajamas

He made dozens of emergency trips to the VA Hospital over the last decade of his life, and was admitted for many of those times, and when he was admitted, there was often a conversation that went like this.

“Hey dad, so I’m going to bring you a Diet Spin (he loved the Tops generic diet cola) and an Autotrader… Do you want me to bring  you some clothes to go home in?”

“Nah,” he’d say, “They’ll gimme a new pair of pajamas.”

My ol’man loved getting one over on the VA, and loved leaving that place with another pair of pajamas hanging on his back.

He’d make a half-hearted promise to bring the pajamas back to an orderly who couldn’t have cared any less. “These babies are the best around,” he’d say climbing into my car, tugging on his new NOT FOR SALE emblazoned loungewear.

He had a pretty decent collection when he died– unbeknownst to one another, my brother and I both kept a pair.

“The VA is the best hospital around,” he’d usually say on the trip from Bailey Avenue to Orchard Park.

“Man, this car rides great,” he’d mention, inevitably followed by, “but I do hate riding on this 33. I don’t know how people do it every day.”

Dad had another saying that I think meant something different depending on his mood.

“I wish him well,” started the ol’man’s classic phrase, “but wish him well away from me.”

When he was ambivalent, it sounded like he was saying he has no ill will towards this person, he just doesn’t want to see them.

If it was said with a touch of the caustic rage my ol’man always seemed to have bubbling just below the surface in case he needed it– well then, it sounded like an empty felicitation and a hope that you get the eff away and stay as far away as possible.

I had one of each of those well wishes today, and I avoided driving on the 33 (although I did have to take that damn 290 during rush hour.) Somewhere,  Dad is smiling.

What It Looked Like Wednesday: Main & Ferry in the late 1980s

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The character of the Main and Ferry intersection has changed dramatically over the last decade after years of neglect.

Buffalo News archives

The building with the whited-out windows was left in dire condition after a fire in the 1970s. It was left dormant and unoccupied until Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) conducted a six-year, $2.9 million project to use the structure as its headquarters. The 1884 building designed by George J. Metzger was rededicated in 2012.

The building that was home to M&G Food Market in the late ’80s, and later to Elwassem’s Food Market, is now home to Nick Sinatra’s redeveloped Fenton Village. 

Buffalo News file

And across Main Street, the latest development proposed for the corner is the $26 million Willoughby Exchange. It will replace, in part, the longstanding Willoughby Insurance building.

Derek Gee/News file photo

Famous for the motorcycle on the roof and the “Willoughby Will When Nobody Will” slogan painted on the side, the insurance company headquarters building started its life as an H. Salt Fish and Chips restaurant.