A City Straddling Two Eras
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, and a host of business and entertainment venues.
But this image was clearly of a much older Buffalo. Take a closer look.
Each one of these stray survivor images opens up a rabbit hole that I happily dive into. But where to begin? One can approximate a starting point, but fortunately there was already a loose thread on this particular sweater. Handwritten on the mount of my photograph were the words ‘Buffalo, New York, 1866—The Terrace’.
Of course one has to verify that sort of inscription, but in this case (as I will show) it’s on the money. And that gives me an excuse to share a little about Buffalo circa 1866, which I see as a city with one foot in two very different eras—a city that could both recall its frontier days and glimpse its coming destiny as an industrial powerhouse.
In 1866, the term ‘Gilded Age’ itself was still seven years away, when Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined it for their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today—which lampooned the rampant greed and graft that followed the conclusion of the Civil War.
Buffalo’s population in 1866—only a year after the end of those hostilities—was about 100,000 and growing fast, yet there were many people still living in the city who could remember when the Erie Canal had opened four decades earlier (and the city’s population had been well under 10,000). Only forty years after this image, though, all that would be a distant memory: In 1906 Buffalo’s population was cresting 400,000, and the city had become a international center of commerce and trade.
But does this photo really show us a snippet of real life as it was in that pivotal year? To find out, you’ll have to join me in the rabbit hole . . . so if you’re ready, let’s recover its original colors and jump in headfirst.
Copyright Robert Brighton
Note first that Buffalo’s streets—even here at the epicenter of the business district—are dirt. Sidewalks are wooden. Horses and hitching posts are everywhere. There are a few streetlamps, but they are human-sized and not the looming carbon-arc lamps that arrived in the 1870s. And just above and to the right of the top of one of these streetlamps, you can see the ghostly image of a horse-drawn carriage in motion . . . reflecting the long exposure time required by the camera that captured this image—even on a bright day like this one.
To our left is Spaulding’s Exchange—a telegraph station and commercial office building owned by Elbridge G. Spaulding, wealthy banker and author of the National Banking Act (which gave us the ‘greenback’ paper note). Four years after this photo’s reputed date, Spaulding would erect River Lawn, a mansion on his large Grand Island estate, which is now Beaver Island State Park.
On the ground floor of Spaulding’s Exchange is the New York Clothing Emporium. You’ll note the racks of clothing blocking the sidewalks. Considering that the streets would often be squelching with mud and manure, this was a pretty good way to entice customers to step inside for a look over the goods.
In the center of our photograph is . . . what? Well, that substantial shaft is the lower part of what used to be called a ‘liberty pole’, and the one shown here was the second one erected in Buffalo. This Liberty Pole was raised on July 4, 1860, and was 125 feet tall, 28 inches in diameter at the base, and above its giant American flag was the gilt eagle salvaged from the earlier pole. (The first pole had been put in place on July 3, 1837 and was cracked by a storm in 1859, rendering it a public hazard. The original eagle was carved by John Weeden, whom the papers enigmatically refer to as ‘The Man of Early Recollections’. How very intriguing!)
Panning right, on the corner of the Terrace, Pearl, and Commercial Streets sits the American Theatre, which played host to plays, concerts, and boxing matches—a kind of early KeyBank Center. In 1866 the theatre hosted a fundraiser for the victims of Portland, Oregon’s, great fire—which destroyed most of the wooden city and left thousands homeless. In helping to date this photograph, I learned that the American Theatre was formerly known as ‘Carr’s Varieties’, and changed names and management in April 1866. So this photo must have been taken after that date—yet as you can still make out the old ‘Varieties’ sign above it, I’m guessing not too long afterward.
With the help of some advanced imaging technology, I enlarged the sign standing on the ground outside the theatre. Among other things, it advertises new farces, new songs, new dances, and ‘Every Thing New’. Given that the theatre changed hands in April 1866, it’s not unreasonable to conjecture that all the ‘new new’ stuff on the placard might be touting that change. That would suggest a date earlier in our probable range.
At the far right edge of our image, fronting Pearl Street, is the Everett House, which until September 1865 was known as the United States Hotel. This structure will provide our final clue.
We already know that our image can be no earlier than April 1866, when the American Theatre opened—but we still don’t know how much later. So I dug up a few items that showed that in early January 1867 the Everett House had again changed its name, this time to ‘Bonney’s United States Hotel’ (Following from the Buffalo Courier-Express, February 20, 1867).
We may now safely conclude that this evocative photograph was indeed taken in 1866, sometime between April and December. Given the open carriages, open windows, and sidewalk displays of merchandise, I’m going to tighten the end of that range to October. (My personal best guess is April or May, soon after Carr’s Varieties changed hands.) In any case, we can now have confidence that we are indeed looking at the central part of a bustling, young city straddling late adolescence and full maturity.
Pretty cool, huh? I hope you enjoyed our little photographic excursion—I liked it so well I set my most recent book, The Phantom of Forest Lawn, in 1867!
This article is part of Robert Brighton’s weekly series on Buffalo Rising, Secrets of Buffalo’s Gilded Age. Although the research is focused on Buffalo, these articles are part of the history of the Gilded Age - the real Gilded Age. Check out Robert’s other articles on the site, and here on his blog.
The Phantom of Forest Lawn, Robert’s most recent novel, is a must-read!