Category: Buffalo Neighborhoods

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Niagara Falls Motel, 8710 Niagara Falls Blvd., Niagara Falls

At the beginning of the automobile age, “The Buffalo-Niagara Falls Boulevard” was created out of already existing streets and a handful of new connections to make it easier for motorists to travel north from Buffalo and south from Niagara Falls without getting lost.

Planners might not have realized it, and it might not have been their intention, but they were creating one of Western New York’s first planned highways.

In 1913, when the last segment — the still-brick portion from Main Street to Kenmore Avenue— was completed, Buffalonians looking to make a buck began promoting how it was to “automobile” between downtown Buffalo and the cataract.

Built with Western New Yorkers in mind, Niagara Falls Boulevard helped make the daytrip from Buffalo far easier and more pleasurable. Buffalo’s Hotel Lenox was taking out ads in Central New York newspapers, offering travel information for “the Boulevard” in 1919.

Buffalo’s AAA Club painstakingly marked the road to make it ready to drive, but for most of the trip in those earliest days, farm lands were the only scenery. But with an easier means to travel there and more people doing so, development sprouted — from housing developments like Delawanda Park in Tonawanda, to the restaurants, lodging and amusements used by motorists.

Map of Delawanda Park development, between Delaware Avenue and Niagara Falls Boulevard, 1912.

As Niagara Falls became “the mecca of American tourism,” the Boulevard and the attempt to lure cash through hospitality grew.

At first, it was places like the Blue Star or Quinn’s Motor Court, which offered drivers a place to stay in individual cabins.

Quinn’s Motor Court, US-62, mid-1940s.

By the 1950s, the trip from downtown Buffalo to Niagara Falls on Niagara Falls Boulevard and Pine Avenue included more motels with more neon signs than almost anywhere else in the country — “the largest motel area outside of Miami Beach,” according to one promoter of the strip.

All the trappings of a now lost era of roadside Americana thrived through Amherst, the Tonawandas, Wheatfield, Niagara and into the City of Niagara Falls. The flash of neon seemed endless between the motels, drive-in theaters, miniature golf parks and gleaming glass-enclosed hot dog and hamburger stands.

While appealing to sightseers and travelers, they also existed for the locals and mixed with brand-new post-war trappings of suburbia like shiny new NuWay and A&P supermarkets and mind-boggling huge discount stores like Twin Fair and Two Guys.

It was a spectacular ride, sitting wide-eyed in the back seat of a station wagon, taking in the kind of Atomic Age glitz you might not have back home.

The lodging evolved as the tourists did. The longtime “Honeymoon Capital of the World” was rapidly becoming a family destination, which meant fewer “Lover’s Suites” and more swimming pools.

But as quickly as it came, it started to falter. Even in the early ’60s, the decline of Niagara Falls Boulevard and Pine Avenue as the main gateway to the Falls was evident.

Some motel owners thought they had caught a break when the New York Central ended the “Honeymoon Express” train to the Falls in 1961 — meaning more people might drive the Boulevard to get there — but it didn’t happen.

Changes in accessibility and parking at the state parks in 1959 and 1960 were bringing in more than three times the visitors in 1961, but at the same time, business at Niagara Falls Boulevard motels was down 44%.

Both the increases and the decreases were blamed on the newly completed Thruway.

“We feel that the main reason for the decline in our business is actually the progress of the century — that is, the superhighway,” said George Kocsis, a director of the Niagara Frontier Businessmen’s Association.

But what seemed good for Niagara Falls seemed bad for Niagara Falls Boulevard.

Motel owners asked that signs pointing to the Peace Bridge and Rainbow Bridge be replaced with signs pointing motorists to U.S. shopping and motel areas.

A few years later, Falls tourism officials asked for the signs to be changed again, “so that tourists don’t get the idea that Niagara Falls Blvd. is the fastest way to the falls.” They also asked that the 15-cent toll at Black Rock and the 25-cent toll on the Grand Island Bridge be scuttled so that visitors could zip right into Niagara Falls.

The owner of the Boathouse Restaurant on Pine Avenue in the Falls told the Niagara Gazette his business peaked in 1957, and had dropped 20% over the next four years.

“For a while, nobody put a nickel in this place,” one businessman told the Gazette in 1961, speaking of Niagara Falls in general. “People were coming anyway and businessmen just took in the money, not doing anything to improve the area or their facilities,” he said. “Now they’re paying the price.”

Year by year, the old motels along Niagara Falls Boulevard and their old neon signs fade into memory, with little pause for reflection on the flashy excitement the tired and broken landmarks once represented.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The John L. Schwartz Brewery was one of 29 breweries operating in Buffalo when Prohibition shut off the tap on Western New York’s taste for beer. The brewery stood on a no longer existing portion of Bennett Street between William and Clinton on the East Side.

A one-time president of the state brewers association, Schwartz was born in Buffalo near the corner of Washington and Chippewa in 1859 to German immigrant parents. He was a member of the first graduating class of Canisius College in 1870.

1911 ad.

Starting in 1893, he was a partner in the Star Brewery, which stood at Spring and Cherry Streets, having bought out the old Queen City Brewing Company. He bought out his partners and merged with the Clinton Cooperative Brewery, renaming the new beer works the John L. Schwartz Brewery in 1902.

Schwartz brewed beer, ale and porter. The most heavily marketed of Schwartz’ products was Alma Beer.

“Schwartz Alma Beer,” read a 1918 ad, “is the standard by which other beers are judged. Nothing goes into it but the purest ingredients. Nobody has a hand in making it but the men who have been making beer for years. If care and knowledge and the best barley and hops can produce a good beer then you need to taste Alma beer, for ‘the proof of the pudding in there.’ Unlike other beers, Alma beer is matured and given that finished flavor that convinces the man ‘who knows’ that there is no other beer just like it. It is popular because it is good.”

Schwartz lived at a home at 12 N. Pearl St. until his death in 1929. His son Karl lived in the home until 1960, when it was torn down to make way for a parking lot.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

A 1910 Buffalo Forge ad for Carrier’s air conditioning unit.

Buffalo’s extraordinary June heat this year has been made tolerable by the ingenuity of a Buffalonian.

Born and raised on a farm in Angola, Willis Carrier was a member of the Angola High School Class of 1894. After studying engineering at Cornell, in 1901 he moved to Buffalo, living on Vermont Street in the shadow of the Connecticut Street Armory and worked for $10 a week at Buffalo Forge.

The following year, from his desk at Buffalo Forge, he invented air conditioning – although at the time he would have explained it just as a methodical, well-engineered solution for a humidity problem at a Brooklyn paper factory.

Buffalo Forge created a special division to explore the possibilities of this new engineering concept, tapping the young engineer to head up “Carrier Air Conditioning.”

In 1903, Carrier moved to Buffalo’s Parkside neighborhood, living in two houses on Woodward Avenue, before building a mansion – “an artistic brick residence” – at 1350 Amherst St. between Parkside and Colvin.

A 1910 ad mentions that the Buffalo Forge/Carrier Air Conditioning “air washer” unit was recently installed in Buffalo’s new Lafayette Hotel. While also touting the cooling effects of the units, early marketing was centered on cleaning the air.

“Five buckets of dirt” were collected from the air of one school every week with Carrier’s system.

“The washing of air may sound like a physical impossibility but it is being done and done right here in Buffalo, too,” boasted a story in the Buffalo Commercial in 1912.

Buffalo Forge Plant photo, 1905. The arrow points at a man who strongly resembles Willis Carrier.

Below: close up of the man in the photo above, and a photo of Carrier

As Buffalo Forge geared up for World War I, the company dropped Carrier’s program. He, in turn, formed his own company, Carrier Engineering, which ushered in the age of air conditioning – first in industry settings, and then movie theaters. Starting in 1929, the “Carrier Weathermaker” home air conditioning unit was first made available for private homes.

1929 ad.

In 1960, 12% of American homes had air conditioning. By 2002, the 100th anniversary of Carrier’s invention, more than 80% of American households were using the technology that revolutionized human life.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Call it a sign of hope in these troubled times, something akin to Ford building a Chevy or McDonald’s putting beef to griddle for Burger King.

If Buffalo’s longtime morning paper, the Buffalo Courier-Express, could churn tens of thousands of copies of the paper of its crosstown archrival – The Buffalo Evening News – off its presses, can we all get along?

Buffalo Evening News trucks roll up Goodell Street to the Courier-Express building, where papers were printed during a power failure at The News in 1967.

At 9:46 a.m. on May 10, 1967, construction crews on Lower Terrace cut through an underground bundle of eight cables that carried power to 11,000 customers from the waterfront to downtown to Riverside.

The five 2,000-ton presses of The Buffalo Evening News were about to start printing seven editions of the paper for a total of 300,000 papers.

“But suddenly, it fell silent,” wrote News reporter Dick Christian, “and remained silent the rest of the day – unlit and ghostly.”

The day wore on and editions were combined. The promise of power restoration by 3 p.m. came and went with the presses still cold. All seven editions of the day’s News were combined into one city edition.

It didn’t look like power would be restored along the waterfront before 7 p.m., but the lights were bright and the juice was flowing at Main and Goodell, the home of the Courier-Express. Around 3:30 p.m., an offer came into News headquarters – the Courier had offered use of its presses.

A plan sprang into action for a limited combo edition of The News.

News mailroom personnel moved up Main Street to the Courier to help facilitate moving the printed papers first across the city and then to the suburbs.

Buffalo police blocked traffic as trucks moved immense rolls of newsprint from The News press to the Courier-Express press.

The blinking lights of The News switchboard “looked like the fireworks finale at the state fair.” Customers, newsboys, corner stores – thousands of calls flooded The News.

Production started around 5 p.m. and ended by 7:15 p.m., with 130,000 copies of the Courier-Express-printed Buffalo Evening News being distributed around Western New York.

As the papers came flying off the presses, the final step was a big adjustment for the men at the end of the production line.

“The Courier’s sling chute is different than we have at The News – more like a ski slope.”

The News handlers looked like “fledgling Mickey Mantles, catching the bundled papers in midair and getting them into the proper trucks.”

News salesmen were stuffing bundles into their cars, getting them to the “key commercial distribution points” of the suburbs while the familiar blue trucks spread out over the city.

Tens of thousands of Western New Yorkers were relaxing at home reading the paper by the time the power came back on at The News plant, close to 9 p.m. that night.

Kay Derwin, Mary Reilly, Gylda Hart, and Jane Schad answer phones “lit up like a pinball machine” at The News.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

The Kenmore Avenue side of the Wheel Chair Home in 1926

The twin Eberhardt mansions on Delaware Avenue in Kenmore. The building in the foreground, on the corner of Kenmore Avenue, still stands. The building next door, at the corner of West Hazeltine, was torn down 1977-78.

“Many invalids are just happy to be alive,” says the story subhead as the Buffalo Times extols the praises of the Wheel Chair Home in 1926.

The “Wheel Chair Home for the Incurables” was established in 1910 to “maintain a home for incurables and chronic invalids and to provide wheel chairs for invalids among the worthy poor of Buffalo.”

A Wheel Chair Home “inmate,” 1922. All residents were women.

After opening at 93 17th St. and then 344 Hudson St., the home moved to the former Eberhardt Mansion on the corner of Delaware and Kenmore in 1915.

Kenmore visionaries and real estate tycoon brothers L.P.A and Fred Eberhardt built twin mansions in 1893-94 on the border of Kenmore and Buffalo on Delaware Avenue, with the hope of starting the same sort of mansion development that was famous on the Buffalo stretch of Delaware further south.

While that development didn’t happen, the side-by-side stately mansions did serve as the entryway for the village for just over 80 years.

The Wheel Chair Home organization bought the other “twin” mansion, which had been the longtime home of Kenmore’s YWCA, in 1976.

Plans to tear down the former YWCA were put into motion the following year. When asked why, the administrator of the Wheel Chair Home told reporters that if the building were to catch fire, the smoke would negatively impact the home.

“We fear an arsonist might burn down the building,” said administrator Edward Gray, failing to describe any impending danger other than someone might try to burn it down. Others pointed to developers looking to build an office building and restaurant on the site as the likely driving motive – but either way, the home of LPA Eberhardt at the corner of Delaware and West Hazeltine was demolished in 1977.

In 1979, the Wheel Chair Home broke ground on a new facility on Elmwood Avenue between Sheridan and I-290. When the new building opened in 1980, it was officially renamed the Schofield Residence, in honor of the first president of the old Wheel Chair Home Association.

The same year, and perhaps reflective of the motivation of the earlier demolition, the now-empty, but still-surviving Fred Eberhardt mansion was in danger of being torn down with the offer of $350,000 on the table to clear the property for a Perkins Pancake House. Cooler heads prevailed, and the property has been owned by coin and metals dealer Jack Hunt since 1981.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Summertime in Western New York means many different things to different people, but for many of us who grew up in the ’80s, it meant our grandmas, moms and aunts heading to Fay’s to buy everything needed for a great summer get-together.

The first Fay’s Drugs opened in Syracuse by father-and-son pharmacists Henry Panasci Sr. and Henry Panasci Jr. in 1958. The son’s wife’s name was Faye – the story goes that they left the “e” off the store name to save money on the signs.

Fay’s entered the Buffalo market in 1977 with five stores. By the end of the ’70s, Fay’s was the Northeast’s largest drugstore chain with 105 stores and a private line of more than 600 house label products.

Between 1980 and 1986, another 14 Fay’s opened in Buffalo for a total of 20.

The “drug store” with the yellow and black signs pioneered the expansion of the pharmacy from retailer offering medications, greeting cards and a few novelties, to what they called a “super drug store.”

At a time when Fay’s largest upstate New York rival, Rite Aid, sold mostly pharmaceutical items and health and beauty aids in stores averaging 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, Fay’s was selling 256,000 cans of motor oil every year – half of it Fay’s Brand – in stores that averaged about twice the size of the average Rite Aid.

It all meant in Buffalo, there wasn’t much you couldn’t get for a trip to the beach at Fay’s.

Fays used three different logos in the 80s, each seen on the 2-liter bottles here. Name brand pop was often on sale at Fay’s but the store brand was always the go-to for the price conscious shopper.

Fays used three different logos in the ’80s, each seen on the 2-liter bottles here. Name-brand pop was often on sale at Fay’s but the store brand was always the go-to for the price-conscious shopper. Fay’s also branched out with another of Buffalo’s favorite stores in the ’80s – the Paper Cutter.

There were 272 Fay’s stores when the company sold out to J.C. Penney in 1996. The following year, Penney’s also bought Eckerd, and began changing Fay’s stores to Eckerd. Eckerd was bought out by Rite Aid in 2007. Most of the former Fay’s locations still in operation in Western New York are now Rite Aid locations.

You can’t have Fay’s paper plates without the Fay’s wicker paper-plate holders!

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shakes hands from the stage at Kleinhans Music Hall, 1967.

The memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been evoked as a universally admired figure amidst the unrest in Buffalo and around the country over the last several days.

But as King was actively working to promote equity and justice, people’s opinions of him and his tactics varied greatly – as evidenced in a review of Buffalo Courier-Express editorials and letters to the editor during the height of King’s activism, from 1963 until his death in 1968.

The opinions of everyday Western New Yorkers during that tumultuous era are eerily reflected in any quick scroll through a social media feed more than 50 years later.

Most reminiscent of an exchange in social media today is the back-and-forth between Lancaster’s Arthur Ryan and Buffalo’s McKinley Sims in the “Morning Mail” in the Courier-Express in late 1964 and early 1965.

During the civil unrest of the 1960s, there were writers to the Courier-Express who blamed the media in “covering up the crimes of negroes,” blamed politicians like Republican New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller who supported King, and challenged the audacity of King to challenge President Johnson.

Western New Yorkers also wrote to the Courier-Express to call King “a sick joke,” to accuse him of fomenting communist subversion, and to tell him to go to Russia if he doesn’t like it here. Another writer described his followers as “hoodlums, hippies, and bums.”

They were far fewer, but there were also letters in support of King. One Chafee woman was never more proud to be an American. Another was impressed by the courage of King and his compatriots. One more letter was sent after King was assassinated in 1968. The letter writer called on the white community to be moved enough to do something for “our Negro brothers.”

One can’t help but wonder what a review of thought and opinions of this current day will look like a half-century from now.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Check out the drive-thru lines and amount of paper cup litter in every corner of Western New York, and it’s proof enough that Buffalo loves a coffee break.

Tim Horton inside the warehouse of his coffee and doughnut empire

More than 60 years ago, the coffee break was already a well-established ritual in Buffalo plants and office buildings.

“Promptly at 10:30 each weekday morning and again at 3:30 in the afternoon, Buffalo business comes to a virtual standstill as thousands of peons drop their chores and head for the nearest coffee pot,” wrote Bob Williams in a 1959 Buffalo Evening News Magazine piece.

“Buffalo workers – office and factory – enjoy the boon of the coffee break twice a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year.

“ ‘Let the boss worry about the time it takes,’ chortled one happy clerk, shoveling sugar into a cup of steaming brew. ‘This is a fringe benefit.’ ”

Maybe it’s worth noting, however, that the thousand-word story – all about Buffalo coffee breaks – doesn’t mention that the practice came to be here in Buffalo. So, should we be posting signs at our city limits that Buffalo is “The Home of the Coffee Break?”

Through the years, claims have been made that two different Buffalo companies were “the first” to offer employees some coffee and/or time to drink it, giving birth to a phenomenon that has become an American tradition.

Taking a look at the documentation that survives from more than a century ago proves, at a minimum, that workers at both the Larkin and Barcalo plants in Buffalo were the beneficiaries of progressive employers who cared about the safety and well-being of their workforce in the form of steaming cups of joe.

Half a century before the famous Barcalounger bore his name, Edward Barcalo was a leader in creating a more hospitable work environment for the workers producing metal beds, cribs and hand tools at his plants on Chandler Street in Black Rock and on Louisiana Street in the First Ward.

The abandoned Barcalo plant on Louisiana Street in 1968, shortly before the company moved south and began making the iconic Barcolounger chairs in North Carolina.

Other industrialists from around the country sought his advice on creating better conditions for employees. In 1910, Barcalo wrote about his company’s “Pantry Department,” essentially an employee lunchroom– a new concept at the time.

More than 150 workers ate “good, big and hearty meals” at lunchtime at Barcalo’s plant.

The businessman was also concerned with the plight of families and children in the city outside of working hours. He was a vocal proponent of creating play areas outside of every city school and making them open to the public when school wasn’t in session, especially over summer.

“We are facing the fact that places must be provided for playgrounds,” said Barcalo in 1909. “The rapid and natural growth of our city has driven a large proportion of the children into the streets, from where they are driven by teams (of horses), automobiles, and the police. It’s no wonder that they want to fight back and throw stones. They are simply obeying a natural impulse to fight for their rights to live and enjoy themselves. But we, too, are to blame for failing to provide them with a chance to grow up healthy. This is not a matter of charity, but one of dollars and cents, for immediate consideration and future benefit.”

Barcalo’s benevolence is well-recorded, but it’s not until the 1960s that the first claim of “the first coffee break” surfaces.

A 1965 article from United Press International was printed in dozens of newspapers around the country, many with the unambiguous title, “The coffee break originated in Buffalo.”

UPI Financial Editor William Laffler quotes “Associated Industries of New York State” in reporting that “the coffee break originated at the Barcalo Manufacturing Co. in Buffalo in 1902.”

The article – which is the ultimate source for each of the dozens of mentions of Barcalo and Baraclounger as the originator of the coffee break found online – also quoted longtime Barcalo executive Alban W. Kirton.

He worked for the company for 52 years, starting as a courier in 1902, where he remembered those early coffee breaks.

“We nominated a volunteer, the assistant bookkeeper and the only woman in the plant. We installed her in the boiler room with a hot plate heated by kerosene and everybody chipped in for coffee,” said Kirton.

The recorded facts about Edward J. Barcalo certainly bolster the claim made 63 years later that he offered his employees a coffee break, but there are question marks as well.

The trade group quoted as having given Barcalo the title “first,” was founded and led for decades by Edward Barcalo and later by Kirton.

Kirton was also quoted on several occasions making dubious claims about Barcalo “being first.”

In 1952, he told the Courier-Express that his company was the first to have a fully electrical plant and also the first to switch from horse-drawn to motorized trucks – claims only found in the one article.

There’s little doubt that Barcalo Manufacturing was an early adopter of these practices, but the problem comes with the definitive “first,” which just isn’t true.

That takes us to The Larkin Company, Buffalo’s other claimant to the title of “America’s First Coffee Break.”

The proof there is a bit more definitive – but leaves room for discussion.

Research done by Sharon Osgood and Jerry Puma for the Larkin Gallery at The Larkin Center of Commerce shows that John D. Larkin’s workers were enjoying coffee breaks as early as 1900 – two years before the Barcalo claim.

A 1901 Larkin newsletter not only makes reference to the coffee breaks that had started a year earlier, the newsletter even published a photo of the coffee break room, with a 15-gallon boiler to serve 600 employees on their break.

The Coffee Room of the Larkin Soap Co., 1901

Two years later, the State Department of Labor wrote about the coffee breaks in greater detail.

The coffee was free during Larkin’s 1901 coffee break, but it came in the noon hour. Barcalo’s employees paid for their coffee in 1902, but the break came around 10am, the more traditional “coffee break” time.

Each likely has room for at least a partial claim, but regardless of which company was “first,” the whole notion was likely borne of a discussion between friends.

Edward Barcalo and John Larkin were good friends, involved in industry and politics together, and when Larkin died in 1926, Barcalo was a pallbearer.

Either way, until someone shows otherwise, there’s little doubt that whether it was on Louisiana Street in the First Ward or on Exchange Street in the Hydraulics, Buffalo is the first place folks first had time away from their toil with a steaming cup of joe.

“Buffalo’s Best Cup of Coffee,” including to-go coffee in small glass jars, came from Deco Restaurants starting in the 1920s until the last store closed in the late 70s.

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Before there were dollar stores, there were stores like Murphy’s.

Murphy’s at Central Park Plaza, 1957

George Murphy opened his first store in McKeesport, Pa., in 1900 after several years of working in the store of his cousin, John McCrory, whose name also lived on in a chain of stores that reached into Western New York.

G.C. Murphy & Co. called its locations “variety stores,” perhaps to differentiate from its biggest competitor, F.W. Woolworth’s “five and dime” stores. They both sold a variety of relatively inexpensive items, many locations of both had lunch counters, and in many places, they even operated on the same block.

The first G.C. Murphy & Co. store in Buffalo opened at 978 Broadway in 1923 – and spent decades next door to Woolworth’s near the corner of Fillmore Avenue.

The first floor was devoted to 5- to 25-cent merchandise, along with “a sanitary soda fountain and luncheonette department.”

In North Tonawanda, the former Schulmeister’s on Webster Street became a Murphy’s in the 1930s and spent decades serving Tonawandans from the location next door to Tully’s Hardware.

Lunch counter at Murphy’s in North Tonawanda, 1975

The Central Park Plaza’s G.C. Murphy store was the company’s first plaza store in the area, and became one of the final original stores to hang in through the plaza’s decline into the 1980s. Now bulldozed, replaced with the Highland Park Apartments, and mostly forgotten, when the Central Park Plaza opened in 1957 – built on a 17.5-acre ruin of an old quarry just east of Main and Fillmore – the 29-store plaza was Buffalo’s largest shopping center and a regional retail destination.

By the mid-’60s, there were nine Murphy’s 5 & 10 stores in the greater Buffalo area, including Broadway-Fillmore, Central Park Plaza, North Tonawanda, Lancaster, Fredonia, Leroy, Medina, Jamestown and Dansville.

Murphy’s in the Village of Lancaster, 1975

Murphy’s was bought out by Ames in 1985, but then spun the stores off to McCrory in 1989. Most of the Murphy stores were shuttered with the Ames buyout, but the last of the G.C. Murphy & Co. locations closed when McCrory folded in 2001.