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.”

What it looked like Wednesday: Your Host, inside and out

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

At its height in the mid-’60s, there were 31 Your Host restaurants across Western New York. These were generally cleaner, newer and brighter than the older Buffalo chain restaurants like Deco they were slowly replacing.

Buffalo News archives

Your Host started with a hot dog stand on Delaware Avenue in Kenmore in 1944 by Alfred J. Durrenberger Jr. and Ross T. Wesson. Durrenberger built the company into the large restaurant chain generations of Western New Yorkers remember. A sign of the restaurants popularity and success: When Durrenberger died in 1968, he left an estate valued at $4.5 million.

But after 49 years in business, just as Your Host had replaced Deco, Your Host was being replaced by more convenience-based coffee shops and fast-food restaurants.  The last 11 stores closed and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1993.

As Your Host liquidated, several locations were sold intact and continue to operate as restaurants similar in manner and menu to Your Host, including one on Delaware Avenue near Sheridan Drive, where the biggest change was taking the “Y” off the sign. The place operated as “Our Host” for years.

Buffalo News archives

The others were opened up to the auction block. A few weeks after its griddle was turned off for the last time, Cash Cunningham visited this Your Host location at Main and Tupper, to auction off kitchen equipment, classic diner booth seating, and even the cash register.

 

Buffalo News archives

 

Torn-Down Tuesday: Seneca at Washington, 1890

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Just a block away from Main Street, Washington Street has been the backbone of Buffalo’s backbone for parts of three centuries.

Buffalo News archives

This photo offers a real flavor for what Buffalo was like leading up to the Pan-American Exposition. Tightly packed buildings and tightly packed sidewalks with plenty of people rushing around one of America’s great modern metropolitan spaces.

The photo also shows a bit of presidential history. Eighteen years before this photo was snapped, Grover Cleveland — who was between his two nonconsecutive terms as president — got into a fist fight with a political rival who called him a liar.

The fight between Cleveland and Mike Falvey, it was said, started in the gutter at Washington and Seneca — the intersection pictured — and wound up at Gillig’s Wine Merchants for a makeup session of drinking. Gillig’s was right next door to St. John’s Episcopal Church, which can be seen in the distance to the right.

Today, the corner looks a bit different, to say the least.

First, Seneca Street now ends at Washington. There’s the complication of a ballpark having been built there. Gillig’s – where President Cleveland made peace after his pugilist exploits — stood about where the Mayor Griffin statue now stands at Washington near Swan.

The original Glenny Building — visible to the left — burned down in 1905, but was then rebuilt. That building has recently been the site of $6.9 million in renovations  with plans for 36 downtown apartments to open there soon.

Buffalo in the ’50s: The state’s first McDonald’s on Niagara Falls Boulevard

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

When New York State’s first McDonald’s opened on Niagara Falls Boulevard just north of Maple Road in 1959, that part of Maple Road wasn’t even built yet. It was mostly open farm land.

New York State’s first McDonald’s, as seen in the lower left corner, was built in 1959. This photo was taken in 1962, and shows the progress of building the Boulevard Mall. A photo from the same vantage point today would show Wegmans, Walmart, and the site for the forthcoming Whole Foods as well as the mall… and McDonald’s. (Buffalo News archives)

That part of Amherst and Tonawanda quickly developed around the McDonald’s Drive-In, with the completion of the Boulevard Mall — Western New York’s first covered shopping mall — in 1962, the area has been in a constant state of development ever since.

McDonald’s was a hit the moment Jerry Brownrout opened the franchise in 1959.

1962 ad. Buffalo Stories archives

Over the first few months in business, the self-service drive-in was frying up 70,000 hamburgers, 30,000 bags of fries, and blending 20,000 shakes a month, and McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming a local and international phenomenon. The location was selling more 15 cent hamburgers than any other in the country.

Over the first five years, 250 tons of hamburger was cooked in that Niagara Falls Boulevard location — enough for five million hamburgers. By 1964, there were nine McDonald’s locations in the Buffalo area.

 

Buffalo in the ’50s: West Side Italian radio with Mama and Papa Rico

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

They were the heart and the voice of Buffalo’s Italian-American community. For 50 years, Emelino Rico — known to listeners of “Neapolitan Serenade” as “Papa Rico” and the head of “Casa Rico” — broadcast Italian music, in Italian, for Italians, from his home on Seventh Street on Buffalo’s Italian West Side.

Mama & Papa Rico in their studio at their Seventh Street home on Buffalo’s West Side. (Buffalo Stories archives)

For most of five decades, come 10:30am, the Liberty Bell March would open another program of cultural pride, personal warmth and a taste of the old country. While he was heard on many stations through the years, often two or three stations at the same time, for 45 years the Ricos were heard on WHLD 1270-AM.

Emelino came to America as a movie producer in 1922. Ten years later, on a stop in Buffalo, he met Mary Pinieri, who was destined to become the West Side’s beloved Mama Rico.

Their lives, Mama Rico told listeners to their 50th anniversary celebration on WHLD in 1985, were spent highlighting the best in Italian music and culture, “helping others, and doing charitable work.”

Heavily edited publicity photos of Mary and Emelino Rico, from the Buffalo News archives.

The Ricos worked to bring some of Italy to Buffalo, and some of Buffalo to Italy, with many trips and exchanges. Papa liked to tell the story of a 1967 audience with Pope Paul VI, when His Holiness greeted him immediately by saying, “You run the Italian program in Buffalo.”

Many of Buffalo’s most famous Italian-Americans said the time spent at Casa Rico helped jump start their career — those like Tony Award-winning choreographer Michael Bennett and pianist Leonard Pennario.

Papa Rico died in 1985, Mama Rico in 1993, but the Rico name has continued on — sons Lenny and Joe Rico have continued the family tradition of broadcasting in Buffalo.

 

What it looked like Wednesday: Main and Delavan

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

There has been a nearly complete transformation of this portion of Main Street in the days since these Depression-era WPA workers finished working on the sewer and drain lines in 1935.

Buffalo News archives

The best clue to offer some sense of the location of the photo is the heavily ornamented iron gate, which still stands surrounding Forest Lawn Cemetery.

The building to the left, with the ornate roof, is the longtime location of Sisters Hospital at the corner of Main and Delavan. The building gave way for the Canisius College sports complex now occupying the corner.

Though the very tops of the spires are now gone, the Trinity Methodist Church building — visible off in the distance — still stands on Masten Avenue at Main, though it’s been known as Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church since the early 1950s.

Finally, Horey’s Lunch, the restaurant owned by George N. Horey, in later years may have been one of the locations of “Main Lunch,” which operated lunch counters up and down Main Street for most of the first half of the 20th century. The building has long since been replaced by a strip mall.