Theatre District - Buffalo Stories Archives & Blog

What It Looked Like Wednesday: Main Street in transition, 1981

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

This photo of Main Street was snapped just before a handful of 1980s projects would change the thoroughfare’s look and feel forever.

Absent are the MetroRail, the Hyatt, the TGI Friday’s/Comfort Suites building, the former KeyTower and the former Goldome Headquarters (now used by M&T.)

Buffalo News archives

In the very foreground of this section of the larger photo, there’s the two-floor Burger King at Main and Mohawk, and the Century Theatre next door. You can also see some of the storefronts in the ground level of what is now the Hyatt.

This photo shows more of what is now the Hyatt and the beginning of the clearing of buildings for Fountain Plaza on the west side of Main. On the east side, the buildings soon to be cleared for the Goldome headquarters are still intact, as are the buildings which would make way for TGI Friday’s north of Chippewa Street.

The area known for a generation now as the Theatre District was a block more or less in disrepair.

MORE: Buffalo in the ’80s: Pre MetroRail Buffalo

This first appeared at history.buffalonews.com.

What it looked like Wednesday: Buffalo’s Greyhound Terminal, 1948

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

With the ability to load and unload up to 11 buses simultaneously, Buffalo’s new Greyhound Bus Terminal opened at 664 Main Street in 1941. By 1948, it was a well-established terminus of travel to, from, and through Western New York.

Buffalo News archives

Buffalo was among the most important stops on the entire Greyhound system, according to one executive, who called Buffalo the Gateway to Canada and the major transfer point for the tens of thousands visiting Niagara Falls by bus every year.

1941 ad. Buffalo Stories archives

Among those there for the ribbon cutting was Greyhound President CE Wickman, who was greatly responsible for the growth of and manner by which modern bus travel developed.

Postcard image, Buffalo Stories archives

The terminal was a backdrop for the film “Hide in Plain Sight,” and was a Buffalo Police Substation for several years. It has been the home of the Alleyway Theatre since 1985.

What it looked like Wednesday: City Centre/Nemmer Furniture

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

By 1975, the Main Street building that was the longtime home to Buffalo’s long-vaunted Nemmer Furniture had fallen on hard times. Years’ worth of back taxes were owed on the building. Once “the home of nine floors of furniture,” the building just north of Chippewa was mostly vacant save “Smiley’s Adult Books, Films & Magazines.”

Nemmer Furniture began selling the upholstered items it manufactured at its Genesee Street factory in 1924, but didn’t move its showroom to the 600 block of Main Street until 1957. Before that, the building was the home to Select Furniture.

After Nemmer closed in the early ’70s, the building sat mostly vacant until the late ’80s when plans emerged for the addition of several floors and it the new condo development was dubbed “City Centre.” Work began in 1991, but ground to a halt in 1995 when the project wound up in bankruptcy.

After a decade of stops and starts, by the early 2000s, City Centre was acknowledged as Buffalo’s first successful downtown condominium project.

A 1992 News editorial summed up the building’s story quite well. “As the Nemmer building, it would have hurt downtown. As a vacant lot, it would have marred the street vista. As City Centre, it can sparkle as a gift to better days in downtown Buffalo.”

What It Looked Like Wednesday: Main approaching Chippewa, 1950

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

A glistening nighttime shot of Buffalo’s “Great White Way,” better known now as the Main Street Theater District.

Buffalo News archives

The most famous lights of the strip would have been captured had the photographer turned around. Behind him are the neon and incandescent glows of Shea’s Buffalo, Laube’s Old Spain, the Hippodrome, the Town Casino and more.

All of the signs and most of the buildings visible near the corner of Main and Chippewa in this photo from 66 years ago were replaced by banking high rises in the ’80s and ’90s.

Buffalo in the ’70s: Swiss Chalet downtown

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

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.

Buffalo in the ’80s: From sandwich board to restaurateur

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Tucker Curtin now owns four successful Buffalo restaurants and has even been mentioned as a candidate for mayor. However, The Buffalo News was there in 1984 when, as a 14-year-old, he took his first steps into Buffalo business:

April 24, 1984: Young man sells self as sandwich board, plugs gala at Shea’s

“Tucker Curtin was a half-century in the future when the Wurlitzer at Shea’s made its 1925 debut, and the restoration work alone has spanned his entire elementary school career. But Shea’s just days before the gala return concert didn’t need another historian or music buff — it needed someone willing to walk in the rain.

“When Tucker stepped out this morning, it was all business — and the business, it turns out, is his own.”