The turkey selection was grand at the Elk Street Market a few days before Christmas in 1905.
“Turkeys are plentiful but rather high in price,” reported The Buffalo Times.
The Shriners were there 113 years ago, loading up their automobiles to help make Christmas dinner better for more than 1,000 families.
At the time, the Elk Street Market was “the largest fruit and garden truck market in the United States.” The traffic in commodities sold rivaled any similar market on the continent.
The Elk Street Market stood on a site that is now mostly covered by the Buffalo Creek Casino.
The part of Elk Street where the market stood is now South Park Avenue. Elk Street once ran from Seneca Street almost to the foot of Main Street. In her blog about Buffalo Streets, Angela Keppel writes that in 1939, South Buffalo businessmen thought it would be a good idea to have a street that runs from South Buffalo to downtown. Elk Street was one of five streets that was carved up to create South Park Avenue.
The same photo essay shows Christmas dinner in the jail, with carolers entertaining from above, and children at the West Side’s School 3 decorating a Christmas tree.
Like so many of our great cultural traditions in Buffalo, trying to pin down the concise history of our collective amber-hued fuzzy memories of Downtown Christmas shopping is difficult and can even get combative.
For many of us, all those warm recollections seem to get lumped into a generic category of “AM&A’s Christmas windows,” and to imply anything else is often met with side eye looks, and sometimes with outright hostility.
Through the decades, some stores moved, some changed names, all eventually closed. Taking the fuzz off memories and bringing them into focus with the actual names and dates can be dangerous business, but that’s the dangerous business we’re in. So here we go.
The tradition of decorating downtown stores for Christmas dates back before anyone reading this can remember. Downtown’s department stores were fully decorated, for example, for Christmas 1910.
Since those stores—some with familiar names—decorated their windows more than a century ago, plenty has changed along Buffalo’s Main Street, especially in the areas where generations did their Christmas shopping.
The most tumultuous change came between 1965 and 1985, the time when most of our memories were forged and influenced. The buildings we shopped in for decades came down, new buildings were put in their place, and traffic was shut down with a train installed in place of the cars.
The one constant through all of that, our collective memory tells us, is those wonderful AM&A’s windows.
Adam, Meldrum, and Anderson was a Buffalo institution between 1869 and 1994, when the Adam family sold the chain to Bon-Ton. That being the case, for as long as anyone can remember, people off all ages would line up along the east side of Main Street, looking in those big AM&A’s windows, before going inside and taking the escalators up to AM&A’s Toyland starring Santa himself.
Well, here’s where the hostility sometimes comes in.
If you remember looking at windows in that spot before 1960—you weren’t looking at AM&A’s windows, you were looking at the windows of JN Adam & Co.
What, what?
For more than 90 years, AM&A’s was located directly across Main Street from the location where the store’s flagship downtown location was for the final 34 years of the chain’s existence.
JN’s closed up in 1959, so AM&A’s moved into the larger, newer building. Soon thereafter, the original AM&A’s was torn down to make way for the Main Place Mall.
Adding to confusion is the similar name of the two stores. JN Adam and Robert Adam—the Adam of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson—were Scottish-born brothers who founded department stores which would eventually compete with each other across Main Street from each other.
Both stores also took their window decorating—especially Christmas window decorating seriously. But so did all the Main Street Department stores. On the same block as JN’s and AM&A’s, Kobacher’s, which had a location in a spot now occupied by the Main Place Mall, had a memorable giant animated, talking Santa in its window. Hengerer’s, a bit further north, always had well decorated windows.
Still, AM&A’s and JN’s made the spot just south of Lafayette Square the epicenter of Christmas décor in Buffalo. As early as 1949, JN Adam was promoting “animated Christmas windows.”
AM&A’s decorating team, eventually headed by Joseph Nelson, started adding animated displays as well, although it wasn’t until the 1960s—after AM&A’s moved into JN Adam’s old space—that AM&A’s made the presence of the windows a part of their Christmas advertising.
It’s tough to tell even if the “AM&A’s window displays” which have popped up around Western New York over the last couple of decades were originally created for and by AM&A’s. AM&A’s took over not only JN’s building, but also many of its traditions, and quite possibility the actual displays and accoutrements of those traditions.
Another JN Adam yuletide tradition which also became an AM&A’s tradition after the move was the full-floor Toyland.
All this is to say, if you walked down Main Street in mid-December 1955, the magic and wonder you were filled with was only partially Adam, Meldrum, and Anderson-inspired.
But AM&A’s was the survivor—which is why we remember. But just keep in mind– it’s very likely that 1955 window you remember was a JN Adam’s window.
But no matter which store displayed these windows when, they have always been a universally beloved Buffalo institution, right?
Well, once again… not exactly. As traditional Main Street retailing was gasping its last breaths in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Christmas windows were often derided as a part of the larger problem—rehashing the same ideas instead of trying to appeal to a new generation. The dated, tired animatronic scenes seemed out of place and woefully out of date in the Nintendo age.
When this snarky review of AM&A’s holiday decorating efforts appeared in The Buffalo News in 1993, the writer probably didn’t realize he was looking at the penultimate effort of a nearly-dead Buffalo institution.
In the AM & A’s window downtown, the same (manger scene) figures are placed in front of a set of free-standing Baroque pillars, all marbleized in green and gold. Lofty, that. If Gianlorenzo Bernini were around today, that’s what he’d be doing for a living: AM & A’s window displays…
(And) at AM & A’s downtown, the other holiday windows display a charming mixture of images, though if any community actually tried to build like this, folks would be petitioning for a design review board before the developers knew what hit them: New England covered bridge here, rough-hewn alpine furnishings there. One window features a frilly pink Victorian cottage that looks as if it could have been plucked off a side street in Allentown.
Since AM&A’s flagship downtown store was closed shortly after selling to Bon-Ton in 1995, the legend of the window displays—and the actual displays themselves—have spread far and wide.
In the mid-90s, Buffalo Place refurbished and displayed the most-recently-used scenes along Main Street. Some of those, along with older scenes as well, have appeared around Western New York in holiday displays in the Village of Lancaster and in Niagara Falls, as well as around Rotary Rink near Main and Chippewa.
The actual displays are interesting, but seeing them out of context—or even worse, trying to pry an iPad out of the hand of a toddler so she can appreciate them—seems to miss a bit of the point.
A Victorian man carving a turkey or a big white bear handing another bear a present isn’t what make those memories so wonderful—it’s the way the memory swells your heart.
Here’s to whatever makes your heart swell this Christmas season.
As the BN Chronicles staff celebrates Christmas, we’re taking a look back at some of the Christmas memories we’ve collected through the years.
Dec. 8, 1969: A Christmas full of masculine scents at Rite Aid
In the less-complicated world of 45 years ago, buying dad a gift from Rite Aid may have seemed far more appropriate than it may today.
With the choice of several distinct men’s fragrance sets by Aqua Velva, Skin Bracer, Hai Karate and Black Belt, the only reason to shop elsewhere for your dad would have been if he were an Old Spice guy.
Nov. 28, 1974: Buffalo’s great Christmas catalog stores
Shopping from home is easier than ever these days. You’re a web search, a few clicks and a credit card number from just about any product ever created.
That same searchability makes creating Christmas wishlists much easier, too. But remember when you had to write down the page number instead of emailing a weblink?
For decades, the wants, needs, hopes and desires of Buffalonians fit not into the vastness of the World Wide Web, but into the 180 pages of the Century and Brand Names catalogs.
Buffalo in the ’60s: Mom’s Christmas perfume at AM&A’s
Looking at the clip art and the premise behind this December 1962 ad for the AM&A’s toiletries department, one can quite easily picture, say, Ward Cleaver showing up in one of the six Adam, Meldrum and Anderson locations with this ad in hand.
Buffalo Stories archives
The perfume counter was on the main floor at the downtown location. Other locations were on Sheridan Drive, University Plaza, Thruway Plaza, Abbott Road and Airport.
Dec. 24, 1969: Fir boughs or fake? A look at Buffalo’s Christmas tree tastes
Christmas tree farmers in Amherst and Tonawanda were noting declines in sales of real trees 45 years ago this week, while the Sears store at Main and Jefferson noted robust sales of the fakes.
While the headline indicates some 1969 folks thought that real trees might go the way of lighting trees with real candles, the truth is, the farmers knew there would always be a place for a spruce or a fir in some Western New York living rooms come the end of December.
“The artificial tree: One day soon that’s all Yule see”
“The men who stand watch over Christmas tree lots in and around Buffalo concede that artificial trees are making inroads on their sales.
“But they steadfastly predict real trees, now known as ‘natural,’ will be around for countless Christmases to come.”
Dec. 25, 1969: Christmas in jail
The News didn’t print a Christmas Day paper in 1969, but on Christmas Eve, this photo of an inmate at the Erie County jail was at the top of the front page, just below the day’s headline.
Dec. 23, 1969: The Harlem Globetrotters play at the Aud on Christmas Day
“Abe Saperstein’s Fabulous Harlem Globetrotters” found their way to Buffalo 45 years ago this week, when they played Christmas night at Memorial Auditorium.
No word on how many of tickets were sold, but every seat was a good one. While the “Oranges” would be the cheap seats for more than two decades, in 1969, the roof had not yet raised and the steep, high orange seats had not yet been added.
Dec. 23, 1969: Buffalo’s AHL Bisons celebrate Christmas on ice
Buffalo Bisons Terry Crisp and Bill Plager join their families on the ice of the Fort Erie Arena for a holiday skating party.
Crisp later won two Stanley Cups with the Philadelphia Flyers, including in 1975 when the Flyers defeated the Sabres in the finals. He played for head coach Fred Shero in Philadelphia, the same man who coached him here with the Bisons. Crisp became an assistant coach under Shero and eventually went on to be head coach of the Calgary Flames and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Plager played for the Minnesota North Stars, the St. Louis Blues and the Atlanta Flames before retiring from hockey in 1976.