If Buildings Could Talk
Number 462 Genesee Street, circa 1900. Collection of the author.
If only old buildings could talk, the stories they might tell!
Here’s one I’d love to sit down and have a chat with—462 Genesee Street, at the corner of Mortimer, in case you’d like to stop by. Here’s a photo (with colors recovered) of Number 462 circa about 1900.
It’s a good example of 19th century mixed commercial (on ground floor) and residential (on the upper floors) space, and there are quite a few similar buildings still standing in Buffalo. Erected in 1884 by John Marx, Number 462 was originally opened as a saloon downstairs and lodging upstairs.
Buffalo liked its saloons. In the 1900 street directory, there were more than 1,600 licensed saloons operating in the city, or one for about every fifty adult males. And there were many more unlicensed grog shops, the so-called ‘blind pigs’ which sold cheap liquor in any place sufficiently tucked away from the prying eyes of the police.
In the period, saloons were more than spots where one could buy a drink: They were the center of male social culture. After work, men would congregate in their favorite bars and do what men have always done in such places: drink, talk, gamble, and sometimes get themselves in trouble.
A Gilded Age watering hole. Public domain.
You probably know that voluntary ‘temperance’ (abstinence from intoxicating beverages) was a very hot-button topic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and one of two major political movements—along with acquiring the right to vote—that were spearheaded by Gilded Age women.
By 1920, they’d won both battles: in 1919 with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (aka ‘Prohibition’, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic beverages) and the following year with the passage of the Nineteenth, which granted suffrage to women.
Women sounded the alarm early on saloon culture—too many of their husbands spent too much time in the bars and too little at home, and of course an intoxicated spouse isn’t ‘present’ even if he is at home. In a more general sense, though, there was a real terror that alcohol would ultimately shred the fabric of society if its consumption—mostly by men, and mostly in saloons—weren’t stopped. Temperance had been voluntary, and ‘voluntary’ had failed. If men couldn’t restrain themselves, the logic went, then it must be the duty of government to do it for them. Hence Prohibition and compulsory abstinence.
What is a wee bit peculiar is that, according to US government data, per capita consumption of ethanol (pure alcohol) in 1905 was 2.4 gallons. The big caveat, though, is that in 1905 that 2.4 gallons were accounted for almost entirely by the male half of the population. No respectable woman at that time would drink in a saloon, and the majority did not drink at all. So really if almost a hundred percent of the alcohol was consumed by half the population, let’s say that the real number was about 4.8 gallons per male per year. This may be overstating it, but if so only slightly.
Today, 68% of American men and 64% of American women regularly consume alcohol; men consume just over five gallons per capita per year (more than in 1905, when temperance panic gripped the nation), and women just shy of two gallons per year. I suppose if Prohibition achieved anything, it was to get millions of women to take up the demon rum. Men seem to have continued to drink at least as much as ever.
But back to Number 462 Genesee. Saloonkeeper John Marx Sr. died in 1899, and his son John Jr. turned the building into a grocery and hardware store, as it is shown in our image.
In 1920 John Jr. retired and sold the place to Jacob Siegel, a merchant who opened a combination clothing and plumbing supply store (odd, but true) on the ground floor. That same year a major fire—said to have been caused by rats gnawing on matches—nearly claimed the structure.
Number 462 Genesee Street today. (c) Google.
A succession of dry cleaners took over occupancy after that, and as late as 1972 Valet Dry Cleaners was still operating out of Number 462. The building was then vacant for a decade, and in February of 1983, arsonists set three separate fires in the building.
But tough old 462 withstood this second fire, too. In 1991 Habitat for Humanity turned the residential part of the building into four apartments. Three years later, a cocaine-trafficking ring operating from one of the new apartments was busted, and today I believe the place is again unoccupied, but don’t know for sure. Thankfully, it still stands as a silent reminder of a hundred and forty years of hustle and bustle: from pre-Prohibition male saloon culture, to hardware, to dry cleaning, and now to silent watchfulness over the corner of Genesee and Mortimer.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.