I grew up first in Buffalo and then Grand Island, and yet as a kid I barely put a toe in the Lake Erie or, God forbid, the Niagara River.
Before I was born, my parents had been very nearly swept to their doom over the Falls while out on a neighbor’s boat, and they put a scare in me very early about that water.
The name of ‘Cheektowaga’ is incised upon the Robert Brighton Wall of Fame for many things: its major international airport . . . world-renowned Cheektowagyu™ Beef . . . the irresistible Walden Galleria.
But in Buffalo’s Gilded Age, the town was known mostly for its special brand of ‘perfume’, which some period wags called ‘Essence de Cheektowaga’. Namely, the sweet smell of garbage—raw and cooked.
I remember back in school that most of my classmates thought that history was boring . . . nothing but names and dates and places. Memorize it all for the test and then forget it . . .
The Inuit are said to have dozens of words for snow, and if you are from Buffalo you’ll know just how handy that kind of vocabulary could be.
Growing up, I remember soft, powdery stuff as light as duvet feathers, sharp sandpapery crystals that hurt my face when the wind whipped them up, and the soppy, slushy, grey oobleck that got my parents’ car stuck in the Jet Donuts* parking lot one Easter Sunday morning after church.
First allow me to make a somewhat heretical confession: I don’t much care for the look of the poured-concrete grain elevators—the ones whose tubular silos remind me of a giant version of the coin-changer the paperboy used to carry when I was a kid.
Beginning in 1842, the Genesee House—one of Buffalo’s early inns—occupied the corner of Genesee and Main Streets (a major stage coach stop at the time).
Forty years later, the building was enlarged and renamed the Genesee Hotel. The 1882 version is shown here in an original photo from my collection. In a slightly weird coincidence, this incarnation of the Genesee also lasted only forty years until its demolition in 1922.
What do you think of when you hear the term ‘patent medicine’? Nostrums, snake oil, or quack medicine, probably.
These days, it’s easy to throw shade on the old-time patent medicines, but in this article we shall give them their due: for laying the foundation for what we know today as ‘Big Pharma’—the giant drug manufacturers that loom so large in daily life.
Recently I acquired a large-format original photograph of the central hub of old downtown Buffalo—where Main, Pearl, and Commercial Streets intersected with the Terrace.
In the later Gilded Age, this area would be home to Police Headquarters, the Erie County Morgue, Bath House Number One (see my previous post), and a host of business and entertainment venues.
But this image was clearly of a much older Buffalo. Take a closer look.
It’s true! Recently I acquired the original duty ledger of Buffalo’s Eighth Police Precinct from 1889-1890—a serious rarity—and, even better, I dug it up without making Swiss cheese of poor old Oak Island.
In the 19th century, Canal Street—epicenter of The Hooks, a hard-bitten section of the city sandwiched between the Erie Canal and Lake Erie—had earned a rightly skeevy reputation as a hive of vice.
Thirsty sailors and scoopers (men who unloaded grain ships into grain elevators) could find cheap beer and liquor at any hour, and concert houses, gambling parlors, and brothels were lined cheek-by-jowl along every street—as you can see in this very famous 1893 map.
Hotels play host not only to guests, but also to stories, scenes, and the occasional mystery. The Moeller House, which graced the corner of Main and Scott Streets for nearly forty years, boasted a full complement of each.
I’ve been fascinated by Michigan Avenue for a very long time, and recently I ‘met’ one of its most prominent one-time residents—James Alexander Ross, Esquire.
In the 1890s, Buffalo was a thriving manufacturing city, the world’s largest grain port—and very, very dirty. In fact, Gilded Age cities were dirty in ways we can scarcely imagine.
Today we may have to dodge the occasional pothole (ha ha), but before automobiles came along, streets were minefields of horse manure—fresh tons of it each and every day.
Hello all—I’m Robert Brighton. I’m a novelist and native Buffalonian—born on a full-moon night at Buffalo General—and I grew up in Tonawanda and Grand Island. Then, much to my dismay, I had to leave Western New York—though, as Tony Bennett ought to have sung, ‘I left my heart in Erie County’. Even if there aren’t a lot of hills.
But now (thanks to Buffalo Rising) I will be back in my beloved hometown every week, sharing with you some very obscure and very fascinating findings from my years of research into Buffalo’s past. And I will bet you a Paula’s donut or a Ted’s hot dog that these are people, places, and things that even Buffalo Rising’s very knowledgeable readers have never seen or heard of before.
A number of readers have asked me about the haunting score that accompanies the new Theatrical Trailer for The Phantom of Forest Lawn.
Well, it's part of the 'Introitus: Requiem Aeternam' movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's great Requiem in D Minor, K.626, the master's final work. It's a magnificent piece of music, and the thought that Mozart wrote a Requiem Mass for the Dead while on his own deathbed makes it especially moving.
We all grow accustomed to seeing the past (at least pre-1950) in black and white. I don’t mean this (only) metaphorically—I’m referring to the monochromatic and chiaroscuro tints of black-and-white photography.
Of course we all know that the world of the past wasn’t black and white—it was as colorful as today is. And there is a marked difference in our emotional reaction to the somewhat cold images of black-and-white film than there is to the more ‘realistic’ images taken with color film. Black-and-white images seem somehow distant and very still, while color images seem immediate and brimming with life.
When I was in college, I worked summers at National Car Rental—cleaning up cars, changing oil, whatever needed doing. It was a great job, and taught me to be handy with tools and such. And it also taught me that people are hard—really hard—on rental cars.
A friend of mine in those days told me that the car renter’s motto should be ‘drive it like you stole it’.
It’s true of rental cars, and—yep, you guessed it—it’s true of life too.
