By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Genesee Street up the middle of the photo.
Think of walking out the front door of the gold-domed Buffalo Savings Bank Building on Main Street to look straight up Genesee Street toward City Hall and seeing the open skies over Lake Erie. It wasn’t that long ago that view was still intact.
Genesee Street was one of those streets radiating off Niagara Square as designed by Joseph Ellicott in 1804. The square was designed as a public square and gathering place, and was used in the public execution of the Thayer Brothers in 1825, as well as addresses by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.
For more than a century, Niagara Square was once Buffalo’s most elite address. Millard Fillmore lived where the Statler now stands upon returning to Buffalo from the presidency.
Judge Samuel Wilkeson, “The Father of Buffalo,” lived where City Hall is now.
There were many other homes there as well.
An 1805 map of Buffalo.
Behind City Hall looking toward the water, including “the foot of Genesee Street,” where Genesee Street meets the Erie Canal.
Before the wave of urban renewal of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s blocked off Genesee and Niagara Streets, one could stand on Main Street and look up either of those streets to see the McKinley Monument.
An aerial view of Downtown Buffalo.
Niagara and Main no longer intersect — the first block of Niagara was built over in the construction of the Main Place Mall and Main Place Towers. Genesee has been built over with the Convention Center and the Hyatt.
