North and South Buffalo. The East and West Sides. But how many neighborhoods can you name that don’t fit any of those descriptions?
From the biggest geographical sections, to the dozens of micro-neighborhoods and hundreds of great intersections, each little bit of Buffalo has it’s own unique story, and many of those stories are right here.
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Especially during the days when more families had six or eight or 10 kids, the feet of many Buffalo children never knew any shoes other than ones that came from Liberty Shoes.
Main Street looking north from Genesee, 1950s. Liberty Shoes is in the building with the blue neon sign.
David and Hyman Abrams founded Buffalo’s Liberty Shoe Co. in 1919. David took over as president and treasurer the next year and continued for the next four decades or so.
Hubert Holloway told Abrams’ story as a part of his series of Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories on WBEN Radio in 1957.
“He liked selling and people, but the stock-taking and bookkeeping failed to meet his ideas of the romance of business. So his boss told him that he would never make a success of the shoe business. He is David Abrams, president and treasurer of the Liberty Shoe Stores Inc., operating a chain of retail shoe stores in Western New York.
“Mr. Abrams said that when a man has only a money-making objective in business, and fails to see the service and human side, he is doomed to failure. Maybe here’s a short story: Seller of soles urges souls in business.”
a 1946 ad for “Liberty specials,” as my dad called them.
When Liberty opened its 10th Western New York store in 1940, seven of those stores were located around the City of Buffalo, which meant that boys and girls didn’t even have to leave their neighborhood for a pair of “Liberty specials,” although the flagship store was on Main Street just north of Genesee downtown. Offices were at the Broadway/Fillmore location for most of the chain’s existence.
Liberty made it into the early ’80s before the corporation was bought out by Endicott-Johnson.
When the brand-new Nu-Way supermarket opened in Niagara Falls Boulevard in 1955, the part of the “The Boulevard” just north of Sheridan Drive was still mostly farmland.
Niagara Falls Boulevard from Sheridan Drive to Ridge Lea, 1951
The map that accompanied the Nu-Way ad announcing the grand opening isn’t to scale, but it shows the landmarks on the rural stretch between Sheridan Drive and Ellicott Creek Road. The only highlights they could come up with were the drive-in and a radio tower.
Nu-Way Super Market grand opening on Niagara Falls Boulevard, 1955.
The Niagara Drive-In, which is visible on the 1951 overhead photo, was torn down to make way for Kmart, which was in turn torn down to make way for the strip mall featuring Old Navy and the Christmas Tree Store.
The WXRA radio tower was closer to the plaza with Burlington Coat Factory, JoAnn Fabrics and Outback Steakhouse. The small station was licensed to Kenmore and is probably best remembered as the place where Tommy Shannon’s Buffalo radio career began.
If we were trying to describe the plaza where Nu-Way opened today, we might say across from the Boulevard Mall – but then, the mall wasn’t opened for another seven years. OK, then, you might say, “The Boulevard between Sheridan and Maple,” but Maple wasn’t extended from Sweet Home Road to Niagara Falls Boulevard until the early ’60s.
Nu-Way was the futuristic brand name for the 1950s-style supermarkets operated by longtime Buffalo grocer Danahy-Faxon.
Among the features at the new store were register receipts that listed your exact change and the “new convenient food-o-mat,” which was called “the latest in shopping convenience” as shelves restocked themselves as ladies shopped.
Shopping the modern way inside a Nu-Way, 1955.
The Nu-Way brand name was eventually absorbed into Acme Markets, and in the mid ’70s, local Acme stores were bought out by Bells.
Recently there has been renewed excitement on the possibility of a Braymiller Market on Washington Street downtown, but the market won’t be the first ever to grace Washington Street.
For more than a century, the Washington Market – also known as the Chippewa Market – stood at Washington and Chippewa, several blocks north of the current proposed development, and just south of still-standing St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church.
Shopping at the Washington Street side of the Washington Market, with St. Michael’s Church in the background. (Buffalo Stories archives)
The city-owned market was not only the biggest market in Buffalo, but also one of the largest municipal public markets in the United States.
When it was opened in 1856, the area around Chippewa and Washington was on the outer edge of the city, and was a residential neighborhood with mostly German immigrants living there.
1880.
One hundred years later, changing demographics in the city and the dawning of the supermarket era made the market obsolete.
The last-surviving buildings of the 109-year-old Washington Market were torn down in 1965 when the city sold the block to Buffalo Savings Bank for $184,000 to be used as a parking lot. Today, M&T Bank owns the parking lot where the market once stood.
The site of the former 101 plant on Van Rensselaer Street is now a parking lot for the Larkin Complex. (Buffalo Stories archives)
The phrase was well-known around Buffalo from radio, newspapers and billboards: “Stains run from 101.”
“101” was a bottled bleach sold by the Gardiner Manufacturing Co. starting in 1920, first from a small plant in Niagara Falls, where J.A. Gardiner bottled the stuff himself. After opening a larger factory on South Park Avenue in 1922, Gardiner opened the 35,000-a-day plant on Van Rensselaer Street pictured above.
The site of the plant is now a parking lot for the Larkin Complex.
By the mid-1930s, Gardiner claimed to have sold more than 100 million bottles of 101 and that the sodium hypochlorite-based, color-safe bleach had more than 101 household uses.
Cleaning the bathroom and “whitening and disinfecting clothes without boiling” still sound like great uses for bleach. Disinfecting your coffee pot sounds questionable, but the list written in a company-produced pamphlet goes downhill from there.
All of the personal hygiene uses promoted by the company 80 years ago are now specifically warned against on today’s labels.
But then, the reader is advised that gargling a teaspoonful of 101 mixed in a glass of water will ward off colds, sore throats and influenza, plus whiten teeth.
To relieve a cold, the 1930s reader is encouraged to pour a full bottle of 101 in a warm basin, then cover their head with a towel, and breathe in the fumes from the bleach.
Perhaps the most alarming suggested use was for feminine hygiene, saying 101 “makes a good douche solution which is not only a germ killer but also a healer.”
The name and formula for 101 was sold to out-of-town companies long ago, but the name still lives on – with pretty much the same product inside the bottle.
The toxicology report from the James Austin Company, the current makers of 101, certainly makes more sense than that old pamphlet. It says in part that 101 causes skin irritation and may cause burns; that vapors and mist may irritate the throat and respiratory system; and that prolonged or repeated overexposure may cause lung damage.
Buffalo was incorporated as a city in 1832. The next year, John Moffat opened a brewery at the corner of what was then Mohawk and Morgan streets – Morgan was later renamed South Elmwood Avenue.
Moffat was known for producing ale and was the only brewery so close to the core of Buffalo’s downtown – only a block north of Niagara Square. On the small plot of land was all the infrastructure necessary to brew beer – from a grain elevator, to a malt house, to a small bottling works.
Moffat’s Brewery, located at Mohawk Street and Morgan Street, which is now South Elmwood Avenue.
Simple ingredients in their product made for a simple brew. Moffat used only malt and barley in the brewing of their ales. They used the simplicity as a necessary selling point, because by around 1900, Moffat was the only brewery in Buffalo that didn’t own taverns where its beer was sold.
Unlike many of the more financially successful taverns which controlled exclusive pouring rights at many neighborhood gin mills, Moffat relied on being the second or third option at independent bars, as well as on sales in grocery stores and home delivery.
“If you never experienced the independence feeling that comes over one who draws his own ale from his own barrel just as he wants it, our advice for you is to try it,” reads one ad for Moffat’s Cream and Old Mellow ales. A Moffat’s barrel could be delivered to your home for $2 when that ad was published in 1903.
Moffat operated as Buffalo’s longest continuously operating brewery until Prohibition, when it closed up shop. The buildings were used for storage until they were torn down to make way for the Statler Hotel’s 1,000-car parking ramp.
The brewery never reopened after Prohibition was lifted, but Buffalo’s Phoenix Brewery sold ale under the Moffat name through the 1930s.
Last week’s Torn-Down Tuesday looked at SUNY Buffalo State art professor D.K. Winebrenner’s uppity takedown of fast food architecture.
This week, we look back at the time Winebrenner — who was also the Courier-Express art critic — talked about “visual pollution” hurting Buffalo’s image and postulated that the city’s too many billboards and signs were creating psychological illness in people.
A 1964 photo showing Eagle Street, looking toward Main Street (with AM&A’s visible) from Pearl Street. This part of Eagle Street is now covered by the Main Place Mall.
“While no practical inquest can establish the causes for a diseased spirit with the same objectivity as physicians can pinpoint the reasons for a damaged lung (or a dead fish), what happens to us aesthetically can neutralize or even destroy our visual sensitivities,” wrote Winebrenner.
The story was accompanied by the two photos on this page, both showing signs and buildings that gave way for the Main Place Mall and tower.
“Any given sign may be harmless in itself, and may even be well designed, but the clutter and confusion of crowded, screaming advertisements, each seeking to be heard above all others — results in no one being heard effectively,” wrote Winebrenner, who was excited for future development without signs.
This photo was taken standing at the corner of Niagara and Main– two streets which once intersected across Main from M&T Plaza. What was then “Niagara Street between Main and Pearl” is now covered by the Main Place Mall.
“As we greet the dawn of a new day in downtown Buffalo, let us take one last, quick look at the overhead jungle as it appeared in August 1964, being replaced by the new buildings in Main Place. May this long be remembered as the spot where a greater, more beautiful Buffalo was born.”
Winebrenner couldn’t have known that the new development was ushering in an era spanning several generations where 150 years of life and vitality were stripped from Main Street, signs and all.
It seems like just about every Buffalonian has a story about being nearly frostbitten at a St. Patrick’s Day parade, and Bill and Mildred Miller – the longtime hosts of Channel 4’s “Meet the Millers” – are no different.
“Meet the Millers” was seen live, weekdays at 1 on Channel 4 for more than 20 years. (Buffalo Stories archives)
As they shared a recipe for Irish Soda Bread, they talked about lining up for the parade behind Memorial Auditorium getting ready to march up Main Street.
Karen Maloney’s family has used this recipe clipped from The News for more than 50 years to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
After two hours of waiting as the wind whipped right off the lake and into their faces, it was the coldest they’d ever been for a St. Paddy’s parade.
“Our eyes were so full of tears from the wind that we saw people along the parade route as if they were under water; our smiles were literally frozen to our faces.”
The Millers standing next to the Aud getting ready to join the parade in the late ’50s marks the halfway point in the parade’s long migration from its original route along what is now South Park Avenue up to Main Street, then over to Delaware Avenue in 1981.
Buffalo’s first St. Patrick’s Day Parade happened in 1913. Two years later, more than 3,000 Irishmen lined the route.
The 1915 parade route. Parts of Elk Street and Abbott Road became South Park Avenue in 1939.
“Not in 25 years have Buffalo Irishmen exhibited the same degree of enthusiasm for a parade, but this year, the spirit of the green seems to have gotten into their blood and all have put their hands to the plough with the intention of making the celebration one to be remembered,” reported the Buffalo Times in 1915.
The Times also made several mentions about the fact that the 1915 parade was bringing together “all sorts and classes of Irishmen.” It was particularly alarming that “the boys from County Cork” and “the boys from County Clare” would be able to hold an event together peacefully.
“It is now possible for the Clare boys to go any place in ‘The Ward,’ ” reported the Buffalo Times, “including the district of the Corkonians. They’re all working together this year with St. Patrick as the toast, and no one is denying them the joy and pleasure they’ll obtain from the celebration.”
Entry in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, 1915.
As for Bill and Mildred Miller, their idea of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day had more to do with the food, and revolved around corned beef, cabbage and Irish soda bread – all of which they would make on their daily show on Channel 4 during the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day.
They started in show business as a Vaudeville dancing act. After settling down on a turkey farm in Colden, they began their daily cooking and interview show on Channel 4 in 1950.
Watching the Millers, especially in the kitchen, reminded most of a favorite aunt and uncle – loving, dedicated to one another, and forever bickering. Mildred was clearly in charge.
“That’s the way with those Millers,” wrote Sturgis Hedrick in the TV Topics in 1959. “Subtle. Blissfully naive, you might better say. Honest, sometimes we wonder if Bill and Mildred Miller actually realize there are people watching.
“They interrupt one another in their anecdotes and often work at cross purposes in their commercials.
“And yet they sail serenely along afternoon after afternoon, happy as any husband and wife, looked in on by an unseen audience. That audience is not only huge, but fiercely loyal. The curiosity lure of ‘what’s going to happen next’ makes ‘Meet the Millers’ a viewing must with the average housewife on the Niagara Frontier.”
They were seen every day at 1 o’clock through the early 1970s. After their retirement from television, Bill served as supervisor of the Town of Colden.
For years, on and off, I’ve been looking for a Buffalo travel poster, any Buffalo travel poster.
Honestly, I kind of assumed that there never was one. I mean why waste precious wall space with (my beloved) Buffalo when there have always been far more exotic, colorful, and warm places which might be more gerenally appealing to the traveling public.
Then I came across this beauty from the late 50s or early 60s.
Courier-Express art critic and SUNY Buffalo State art professor D.K. Winebrenner had a weekly column in the Sunday paper where he opined not just on art, but on the state of aesthetic in Buffalo.
In a December 1967 piece, Winebrenner railed against the “commercial invasion” of Allentown.
Neba Roast Beef, Main Street, 1967
“The Chairman of artistic rehabilitation in the area, artist Virginia Tillou, has expressed alarm that stands, restaurants and taverns along this dignified thoroughfare may result in a ‘honky-tonk’ appearance and destroy the efforts of the Allentown Association to upgrade the surrounding area,” wrote Winebrenner.
Red flags went up when Burger Chef opened in the spot now occupied by Tim Hortons on Delaware Avenue near Allen Street. The fear was that Allentown would begin to fill with “garish establishments” like those found in suburbia – especially around Sheridan Drive and Niagara Falls Boulevard.
Mister Donut, Sheridan Drive at Longmeadow, 1967
Winebrenner wrote a scathing commentary on what is now, 50 years later, ubiquitous fast-food architecture.
“There is a new kind of pop architecture that is as audacious (and as annoying) as pop art. It is characterized by a general indifference toward standards and tastes of the past, borrows from dada and art nouveau (past and present), and flaunts architectural precepts (past and present) without batting an eye.
“Referred to casually as ‘hot dog stands,’ these culinary emporiums often specialize in less prosaic edibles such as hamburgers and other sandwiches, doughnuts and coffee, or the gastronomical delight of fried chicken. Some of these pop stands even sell pop.
McDonald’s, Niagara Falls Blvd. near Maple, 1967
“They come in many sizes, all small; and in many shapes, all boxes; but with imaginative appendages that conceal their humble concrete block structures, such as sweeping gable roofs that meet the ground, or more sophisticated modified mansards that mask nonexistent garrets. Often they are crowned with exotic spires and cupolas.
“Gone are the simple structures of local entrepreneurs, (albeit covered with a motley assortment of signs provided by distributors of ginger ale and cola) and in their place are standardized replicas of uniform designs which extol corporate images of national chains from coast to coast.
Kentucky Fried Chicken, across the Boulevard from the Boulevard Mall.
“Fortified with the advice of exterior decorators, the universally uniform trade marts come in bright colors and patterns that stand out against the Cape Cod homes in the suburbs and the pathetic patina of old city buildings, giving an aura of great importance to small structures surrounded by ‘black on black’ mats of black top. The effect is heightened when lighted colors, spotlights and neon tubes contrast with enveloping night.”
Carroll’s Drive In, Niagara Falls Blvd. just north of Sheridan, 1967.
Winebrenner, who was one of the founders of the Charles Burchfield Center at SUNY Buffalo State, died in 1975 at the age of 66. While he might have been pleased that his dissertation on garbage fast-food architecture was found and shared 52 years after it was first written, he probably wouldn’t have been pleased that the driving reason behind sharing the story was to share the wonderful photos of late ’60s eateries that accompanied the original piece.
Martin Gressmann came to Buffalo from Germany in 1893, and after two years as an apprentice, opened his own bakery at 1753 Genesee St., a couple blocks west of Bailey.
Mrs. Catherine Daly, Mrs. Anna Roetzer, Mrs. Mary Mahoney and Mrs. Teresa Bartrem – all daughters of Martin Gressmann –working to prepare the family bakery’s famous specialty caramel cake.
His business grew through his involvement in the surrounding tight-knit East Side German community. He was a member of civic and social groups like Maennerchor Bavaria and the Schuhplattler Verein and St. Gerard’s Roman Catholic Church.
He’d been a baker for more than 50 years when he died in 1946, and his daughters took over the shop.
Long after Gressmann’s death, people came from all over Western New York for what one Williamsville restaurant owner called Buffalo’s best coffee cake.
The pastry with the caramel topping originated in the shop remained in demand well into the 1970s.
By Steve Cichon
