In some cynical Western New York circles, when the announced crowd seems to be a bit higher than the actual attendance figure, someone is bound to ask, “Did Mike Billoni do the counting?”
Buffalo News archives
It’s probably not what talk show host Larry King was talking over with Bisons Skipper Rocky Bridges in the dugout, but Billoni’s magic played no small part in the meeting in the first place.
It was Bisons executive Billoni’s marketing and public relations prowess which helped whip Western New York into a baseball frenzy in the late ’80s. Triple-A level ball was back for the first time in 25 years, seats at the brand new Pilot Field were the hottest ticket in town, and the you-could-almost-taste-it hope of Major League Baseball coming to the new ballpark were amplified by the former Courier-Express reporter’s panache for promotion.
Ten-thousand tickets sold within an hour-and-a-half of the first Pilot Field passes going on sale. The nationally televised old timers’ game and the Triple-A All Star game, both seen on ESPN that year, were also sellouts. With 22 sellouts for The Herd in the 1988 season, Buffalo shattered the all-time minor league baseball attendance record with just shy of 1.2 million through the turnstiles in Pilot Field’s first season.
So, when Larry King — whose national radio show had been heard overnights on WBEN in Buffalo for a decade and was becoming more famous for the CNN talk show he’d been hosting since 1985 — came to Buffalo to throw out the opening pitch, it wasn’t good enough that it just be a random Friday night at the ballpark.
Billoni was pitching King’s appearance as the “formal dedication” of Pilot Field on May 19, 1988. That’s not to be confused with the first game, which was played a month earlier, when Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor Jim Griffin, and the whole cadre of politicians wanting to claim some credit for the erection of the ballpark showed up to be a part of the ribbon cutting.
There’s no doubt that was alright with Billoni — who three decades later, remains one of Buffalo’s great molders and shapers of public opinion.
Spine-tingling. Quirky. Explosive. Imaginative. These are all words that have been printed in The News over the last 45 years to describe Rick Jeanneret’s colorful Buffalo Sabres play-by-play style. Rick, in comparing himself to another wild and exciting play-by-play man said, “I don’t think he’s quite as nuts as I am.”
Buffalo News archives, 1989
Like most of us who have grown up with Jeanneret as an inseparable part of what the Sabres are to us, it was easy to take his style and personality for granted. “This is how hockey—how Sabres hockey—sounds, right?”
The new announcers who have taken some of the load off Rick’s schedule over the last few years do the job well. They describe the play in a knowledgeable, exciting, fun, and professional manner. But Rick is, well, in his word, “nuts.” There’s nothing forced about him talking about how tough a “lady is for taking a puck off the coconut” and “not even spilling her beer.”
Rick Jeanneret and the late Voice of the Bills Van Miller are different in almost every conceivable way, but the one way they were exactly the same is the same way they honest-to-goodness lose their minds when their team—our team—does the extraordinary. There’s nothing fake in the shouting. Rick’s goal calls mix perfectly with the explosion of screaming at taverns and gin mills and in living rooms and in cars all over the place—because it’s the same excitement.
We all remember “May Day” and “LalalalalalaFontaine” and “Hasek robbed him blind!,” but there was also, “whooooa, he really PUNCHED him,” and “HERE COMES SHIELDS,” as goalie Steve Shields skated the length of the ice to make sure his teammates weren’t outnumbered in a fight. There was also the infamous question for a Quebec Nordiques goalie shouted in the course of impassioned play-by-play, “Richard Sevingy– Where’s your jockstrap!?!?”
Our guy RJ, inseparable from our love for Sabres hockey, watches the game and says the things we wish we were smart and cool enough to say. If he were only one of us, he’d be the funniest, most excitable, best-informed guy watching the game with us at the tavern. Instead, for 45 years, he’s been the funniest, most excitable, best-informed guy in every tavern in Western New York.
When News reporter Lee Coppola visited Jeanneret in the Memorial Auditorium press box in 1979, he wrote that when watching Rick work behind the mic high above the Aud ice, “it’s his feet that catch the eye … a cup of beer to his right and a filter cigarette in the ashtray to his left.”
Buffalo News archives, 1979
His feet never stopped tapping while he was telling us what he saw on the ice, but he says he limited himself to one beer per period to “help loosen his tonsils” while calling the game the way he’d want to hear it. By 1989, the beer drinking during the games had dried up—mostly because, Jeanneret told The News in 1992, new arenas were being built without thinking of a play-by-play man’s washroom needs.
It all started one day in 1963, when Jeanneret was a disc jockey at CJRN Radio in Niagara Falls. He went to a junior game as a fan. Despite the fact that he’d never done hockey play-by-play before, folks from the station came to find him when the guy who was supposed to announce the game on the radio called in sick. He’s been a hockey announcer ever since, including for some time with the American Hockey League Buffalo Bisons, and living inside our radios and TVs as one of the voices of Sabres hockey since 1971.
“I’ve got a better job than Wayne Gretzky,” RJ told The News in 1992. “I just don’t make as much money.”
In the year of the big blizzard, the iconic Buffalo News tavern and music critic Dale Anderson counted 17 bars on Seneca Street between Elk Street and the city line.
Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon collection
He visited or at least talked about 10 different gin mills along Seneca Street and Abbott Road, including four within a block of where this photo was snapped at Seneca and Cazenovia streets. Here are a few of the places talked about, with a more current status:
Terry & Wilbur’s — 1944 Seneca St. at Mineral Springs. Across Seneca Street from Rite-Aid in the large building on the corner.
JP McMurphy’s — 2126 Seneca St. Formerly Maloney’s — an old railroad man bar. Recently D-Bird’s and Brandy’s Pub.
Early Times — 2134 Seneca St. Now the Blackthorn Pub.
Falcon Eddie’s — formerly Jack & Ester’s Schuper House—2143 Seneca St. Now the site of Dollar General. (I also have to mention that my great-grandparents lived upstairs.)
The Sky Room — on the top floor of the old Shea’s Seneca building. You’d drive into it if you drove straight through the Cazenovia Street intersection.
Fibber Magee’s — 2340 Seneca St. Recently Mr. Sports Bar, near Duerstein.
Klavoon’s — 81 Abbott Road, currently Griffin’s Irish Bar
Stankey’s Café — 107 Abbott Road, now Jordan’s Ale House
Smitty’s — 474 Abbott Road, now Doc Sullivan’s. Smitty’s was famous for the unique tangy wing recipe created by Carol O’Neill at the bar. You can still order Smitty-style wings at Doc’s and many other South Buffalo taverns.
Now armed with a better sense of where these places were, here’s Dale’s original tale of three nights of drinking in South Buffalo 39 years ago.
The summer of 1965 brought much excitement for the area we’ve come to know as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. While at least a half-dozen current projects are combining to make the area a bastion of hope for what is to come for our city and our region, then it was only one big project — the expansion of Buffalo General Hospital — that was making people excited.
Buffalo News archives
The new high-rise structure was offering new vistas like this one, looking north from near the corner of Main and High.
Two churches jump out of the photo.
In the foreground at Main and Best, the former Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church is currently owned by Ellicott Development, and along with recently purchased surrounding property, was slated for some manner of mixed business and residential space.
The larger church in the distance is St. Joseph’s New Cathedral at Delaware and West Utica. From 1912 until 1976, the church was the Cathedral of the Diocese of Buffalo. The poorly designed church deteriorated before the eyes of the diocesan faithful, and Bishop Edward Head ordered it razed in 1976. The Timon Towers apartment complex now fills the site.
Buffalo’s love of Swiss Chalet can be seen with a stroll through the parking lot of the Canadian rotisserie chicken chain’s restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ont. At any given moment, half of the license plates in the parking lot read “NEW YORK” across the top.
Buffalo News archives
After great success with three restaurants in Montreal and Toronto, a storefront next door to the Town Casino and across the street from Shea’s Buffalo became the home of the fourth Swiss Chalet Restaurant in 1957.
With all the hustle and bustle of Buffalo’s glitzy theater district and late-night hours for folks leaving shows and clubs hungry, Swiss Chalet, with its charcoal-roasted chicken, became an instant Western New York classic.
By 1965, Western New York’s second Swiss Chalet restaurant had opened on Niagara Falls Boulevard, followed through the years by a handful of other locations serving quarter- and half-chicken dinners with what former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin called the city’s best French fries in a radio ad in 1996.
One of the new locations was right across the street from the one in the photo. After a 1984 fire at the 643 Main St. building — which for decades has now been the home of the Bijou Grille — Swiss Chalet opened across Main Street into the former Laube’s Old Spain building.
Swiss Chalet left downtown Buffalo after 39 years in 1996; the space eventually became Shea’s Smith Theatre.
The chain’s remaining Western New York stores — including the Niagara Falls Boulevard location — closed to packed seats in 2010, but the lingering taste of 53 years of chalet sauce has made international dinner travelers out of the hundreds of Buffalonians who are seen every week at the Swiss Chalet restaurants closest to the U.S. border.
The Swiss Chalet closest to the Peace Bridge is at 6666 Lundy’s Lane, Niagara Falls, Ont.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, Hertel Avenue has cemented a reputation as the slightly less-crazy-but-still-just-as-fun older brother of the Elmwood strip.
Spending an afternoon or evening on Hertel drops you in the center of the cosmopolitan “New Buffalo,” showcasing a perfect example of a diverse neighborhood that has retained the flavor and feel of its heritage, keeping bits of the old while the vibrant and new evolves.
The result is a strong, proud, urban neighborhood filled with residents and entrepreneurs of every age and experience — all combining to reflect the best of our uniquely Buffalo character.
While history is certainly a part of the mosaic that is the Hertel Strip, the street’s great vibe doesn’t rely on cheap nostalgia. Longtime venerable institutions have been rebuilt and reconfigured to fit our modern needs and make the past a living, breathing part of what’s next.
Here, in the first of a biweekly series about the history of our city that the citizens of Western New York should know, Chronicles takes a look at what makes Hertel Avenue special.
The North Park Theatre
The most obvious and stunning example of Hertel Avenue’s renaissance is the North Park Theatre, built by Buffalo movie house magnate Michael Shea as Shea’s North Park when the neighborhood was new. As the cinema opened in 1920, you could still pick a plot of land and have a house built to your specifications on many of Hertel’s side streets.
Houses were still being built around Hertel when the North Park Theatre was built. These ads are from 1917. (Buffalo Stories archives/Steve Cichon)
Buffalo Stories archives, 1964
The bright lights of the North Park have shined through plenty of history — bright during Buffalo’s Golden Age, they were still lit as “the last person to leave Buffalo” was asked to turn out the lights by the famous downtown billboard in the late ’70s. The theater was there for neighborhood kids to spend their spare nickels and their entire Saturdays watching Tarzan and Popeye. Later, after those kids started spending Saturdays at home in front of their own screens, the theater was there showing dirty movies.
As an institution, the single-screen “neighborhood show” was decimated by the 1980s, but the North Park hung on. In the ’90s, the North Park was the last man standing, showing mostly foreign and art films, until the digital age caught up with the dinosaur. The North Park was open for business before talkies in an era when films didn’t even have sound. It seemed financially implausible to update the old house with the cinematic workings of the 21st century, but somehow, unlike dozens of other community movie theaters, the North Park lived on to become the focal point of the renaissance of a neighborhood and a city.
The millions of dollars pumped into the landmark excited an already-burgeoning scene on Hertel, doing what Buffalo seems to do best — using our history as a foundation for our future.
Hertel’s Jewish background
The North Park hung on long enough to become an anachronism worth saving, but that wasn’t the case at the home of Hertel’s other famous neon sign. When Jack Shapiro served his last pastrami on rye with a side of gruff and slightly agitated at his beloved Mastman’s in 2005, an era ended as the city’s last kosher deli closed. It followed a handful of other institutions that had been a part of the vibrant Jewish community on Hertel.
Buffalo Stories archive/Steve Cichon
When Shapiro bought Mastman’s in the late 1970s, the matzo ball competition with other delis — like the vaunted Ralph’s — was fierce. Go back to when Max Mastman opened his door at Hertel and Colvin in 1945, and there was even more competition — even from the family of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, which owned Blitzer’s Delicatessen in the storefront that later became Ralph’s.
Of course, it wasn’t just the delis or the synagogues that eventually left — it was the people who populated them.
The epicenter of Buffalo’s Jewish culture, which had moved from William Street on Buffalo’s East Side in the ’20s and ’30s to Hertel, moved on to Amherst in the ’50s and ’60s. Meanwhile, larger and larger segments of Buffalo’s Italian population began drifting north from West Side Catholic parishes to North Buffalo’s Holy Spirit, St. Margaret’s and St. Rose of Lima.
It was back on the West Side on Connecticut Street where a group of proud Italians tried to revive the old traditions of the St. Anthony’s festival in the mid-1970s. They succeeded, reviving it to the point where “The Italian Festival” outgrew Connecticut Street. It expanded even further once it hit Hertel in 1989, and it was in North Buffalo where the festival became a regional event.
Where you went to have a good time
Part of Hertel’s modern-day appeal is the nightlife, and the handful of taverns, gin mills and night spots where patrons have the feeling like they could run into just about anyone who is in Buffalo and looking for a good time.
Along Hertel in the 1970s, one place in particular had that feel, and that place was was where the powerful and elite went to have a good time: Mulligan’s. Mulligan’s was the regular night-out home of Buffalo’s great stars, such as OJ Simpson, and Buffalo’s great visitors, such as Cher.
Mulligan’s was even the scene of an underworld execution: Career burglar Frank D’Angelo was ambushed and shot dead leaving Mulligan’s on Oct. 5, 1974. It’s long been assumed he was killed after not offering mob bosses their expected portion of the profits after a big jewelry heist.
The 1970s also gave rise to what is likely Hertel’s greatest contribution to Buffalo’s pop culture DNA. Accounts differ of the exact details, but most stories involve a bottle of tequila, a few Vietnam vets and a hankering for the tacos they’d grown up with in Chicago. Four guys scraped together $6,000, and “The Mighty Taco” was born at 1247 Hertel Ave. in 1973.
At first, Buffalo didn’t know what a taco was.
“We’d have old North Buffalo Italian ladies come in and ask what they were,” co-founder Andy Gerovac told The News in 1997. “We’d tell them they were Mexican sandwiches and they’d say ‘Thank you,’ and leave.”
photo from Mighty Taco Facebook page
It was with the late-night college student crowd that those “Mexican sandwiches” first caught on, and by the end of the ’70s, Mighty Taco had four locations.
The original Mighty Taco location moved off Hertel to nearby Delaware in 1994. But, just as we remember the Anchor Bar’s Main and North location as the first place chicken wings, hot sauce and butter were mixed, we should remember the original Mighty Taco storefront on Hertel near Commonwealth.
Some things change; others remain the same
Perhaps the most wonderful part of the evolution of Hertel Avenue is the fact that it has been a true evolution. Many of Buffalo’s most exciting places have undergone more harsh makeovers to become the places we enjoy today.
Hertel & Norwalk, 1930s
A walk through Larkin Square or along Chippewa, for example, would be an entirely foreign journey for someone familiar with the place half a century ago. Maybe just the buildings would be familiar. Not even the buildings give any clues to the past at the Medical Campus or Canalside, which have been rendered completed unidentifiable from past incarnations of those neighborhoods.
Not so on Hertel. For all that’s new and exciting there, it’s pretty much the same place, though some changes do jump out.
For example, the Sample Shop, which for decades brought more people to Hertel than perhaps everything else on the strip combined.
The Sample’s first dresses were sold in the living room of a still-standing house just east of the Sample department store we all remember. That was in 1928. For decades afterward, thousands of women from all over Buffalo, attracted by the high fashion and unusual late evening hours, were seen stepping off the streetcar or bus at the corner of Parkside and Hertel in front of Sunshine’s Market (another victim of “progress”) to walk up the block to the Sample.
On the corner of Hertel and Parker, an entirely different business operates today, but the feeling is the same as it ever was. In the ’50s and ’60s, friends and neighbors gathered at the old Parker Pharmacy for a phosphate or an ice cream sundae. Today, people gather in the same building at what might be this decade’s version of the soda fountain: a coffee shop. It’s the same fellowship and conversation — we’ve just switched out the soda jerk for the barista and the 5-cent pop for a $5 latte.
Some things just haven’t changed at all. There are plenty of restaurants and small shops where the faces behind the counter have been familiar ones for decades. A handful of bars have been in the same spot for generations, remaining real neighborhood joints as trends like disco and chocolate martinis come and go.
For just one example, look to a place North Buffalonians have been doing their banking on the corner of Hertel and Norwalk for more than 80 years.
Hertel is a microcosm of the best version of “what’s next” for Buffalo — an eclectic, evolving, welcoming place characterized by the very best of what’s new woven into the fabric of what has always made our city great.
BUFFALO, NY – Spelled Cichoń in its original form, my last name is Polish.
John & Mary Cichon with daughter-in-law Mary
My great-grandfather, Jan Cichon, came to Buffalo from what is now Milczany, Świętokrzyskie, Poland in 1913. He soon changed his first name to John, but never changed the way he pronounced his last name.
He said “CHEE-hoyn” as a little boy in the tiny villages he grew up in near Sandomierz in southeast Poland, and said “CHEE-hoyn” as a railyard laborer for National Aniline in South Buffalo’s Valley neighborhood.
Before John’s son– my grandfather– died in 2015, one of the many hours of conversation I had with him was how CHEE-hoyn became SY-chon (which is how Gramps said it) became SEE-shon (which is how my dad and most of my family says it.)
So, here is Eddie (SYchon) explaining how CHEEhoyn became SEEshon.
Gramps says that his mother and father– both from Poland– always said CHEEhoyn. He says when he and his nine brothers and sisters starting going to school, SYchon– the generally accepted German pronunciation– was introduced to them, and it stuck.
“You say SEEshon, right?” Gramps asked me. I told him that’s how my dad says it.
“Well, your dad’s partly French,” Gramps said, cracking himself up so hard he started coughing.
I can’t find the audio– I recorded dozens of conversations with Gramps– but he also once explained that it was one of his sisters-in-law who started saying SEEshon. My grandma also said SEEshon, as did my dad, and now most if not all of the Cichons who are left in my family say SEEshon.
So that’s how my family has come to say SEEshon, although I answer to any other pronunciation from telemarketers who are just plain confused or from little old ladies wearing babushkas (or my Fair friend Jim!) telling me I say my name wrong.
Gramps tells the ol’man and me his full Polish name: Edward Valentego Wojtek Stasiu Cichoń!
At first glance, the back of this photo offers no clues to the precise location where this photo was taken.
Buffalo News archives
The only information offered is the names of the men in the car and the date (plus a stern reminder to put the photo back in The News archives.)
Dr. Dewitt Sherman was the president of the Erie County Medical Society. Edward C. Bull was an executive with Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co. and the longtime president of the Buffalo Automobile Dealers Association — not much help there.
The date, however, proves useful. Nov. 16, 1929, was the opening day of the Pierce-Arrow showroom at Main and Jewett.
While useful in placing this image, the date is also somewhat irony-filled. After spending decades as the preferred motorcar of the elite from New York City to Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, Pierce-Arrow’s new Art Deco showcase palace opened within days of the 1929 stock market crash. The crash helped precipitate the Great Depression and ended the good times and free flow of cash that helped usher the Pierce-Arrow brand to the top.
By the time the last of the Pierce-Arrows rolled off of Buffalo assembly lines in the mid-’30s, the building was a Cadilliac showroom. In fact, for parts of eight decades, the building was home to a Cadillac dealership— first Maxson Cadillac-LaSalle, then Tinney Cadillac and finally Braun Cadillac, before finding new life as a bank branch for Buffalo Savings Bank and now First Niagara.
Kitty-corner from the old Pierce-Arrow showroom, both then and now, is the English Gothic Central Presbyterian Church, which today is the home of the Aloma D. Johnson Charter School. The Main Street windows — which took the place of the building’s original front door — are seen in the photo as well as on the linked image below.
You can tell this is an old photo of foreign tourists at Niagara Falls because there are no selfie sticks.
Buffalo News archives
King George VI (third man from the right) and Queen Elizabeth (with hat) didn’t need to take their own photos — thousands of images were snapped of their visit to North America in 1939. The man standing next to the queen is Mackenzie King, who spent most of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s as Canada’s prime minister.
This woman in the hat, known later to us as the “Queen Mum,” is the Queen Elizabeth whose name we invoke when talking about how to drive to Toronto or Niagara-on-the-Lake. The parents of the current Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the highway and dedicated the stone pillar entranceway in St. Catharines on this trip.
In Niagara Falls, the king and queen dedicated the Rainbow Bridge even though it wasn’t quite finished.
The Royal Tour continued from the Niagara Region through Western Canada, before George and Elizabeth’s North American trip ended with a visit to New York City and Washington, D.C., and a visit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A journey filled with firsts, it wasn’t only the first time a British monarch had visited the United States — it was also the first time a king or queen had visited Canada.
Back when living along the Tonawanda/Amherst border was like living in a real-life version of “American Graffiti,” Henry’s Hamburgers at Sheridan and Niagara Falls Boulevard was one of the many places a cruise down the strip could have landed.
Buffalo News archives
By the time the photo was snapped about a year into the operation of Henry’s in 1960, the Western New York version of guys like Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss and gals like Mackenzie Phillips and Cindy Williams had already eaten 720,000 hamburgers and 33 tons of French fries. The numbers were easy to hit when hamburgers were 15 cents each — or a bag of ten for a buck.
Within a year, there were three Henry’s locations — this one, another on McKinley Parkway in South Buffalo across the street from Park Edge (later Bells) Supermarket, and another across Union Road from Airport Plaza — right about where the Kensington Expressway eventually cut through.
Through the ’60s and ’70s, at least a dozen different Henry’s locations came and went around Western New York — most notably, the two (one at Main and Dewey and one on Jefferson) owned by Bills great and Channel 2 sportscaster Ernie Warlick.
The Main and Dewey location is the only one that survives as a restaurant. It’s now Tony’s Ranch House.
As far as the Sheridan Drive location, the area has obviously lost the rural feel of this photo. The gas station selling 26¢ gas at its two pumps was soon replaced by a Firestone shop. The Henry’s lot has been filled in with a small strip plaza and a former Denny’s restaurant.
By Steve Cichon
