Inexplicable, Rash, & Irreversible
Friends, feast your eyes on what the newspapers called ‘the Jewel of Buffalo’—the Erie County Savings Bank building in Shelton Square. Here she is in a large original B&W gelatin photo in my collection.
Now, with the original colors recovered (see my first post for details), you’ll notice its rose granite walls, the crazy lightning rods or finials (architecture enthusiasts may clarify my term here) atop its turrets, and the piles of empty barrels and other construction waste.
The building opened officially in January of 1893, so I’m going to estimate this image was captured in the final months of construction. The horses are blanketed, although the men don’t seem to be wearing particularly heavy coats. A crisp autumn morning in 1892, perhaps?
As you study the photograph, you’ll find a hundred interesting details. And if you’re like me, you’ll be drawn especially into the deep background. I tend to think photography is a kind of magic trick, a sleight of hand in which the subject of the photo may be only a distraction from what’s really going on behind and around it. Everything else is just there, being whatever it was before the shutter clicked, and not trying to make a good impression. So I always examine the background first.
Behind the men and the horses and the empty barrels, over the left shoulder of the great bank building, we can make out a ghostly sign. Here it is enlarged.
I ran this through my image-processing software and learned that it advertises ‘Caton’s National Business College’—a name I didn’t recognize and which enticed me to look even deeper.
Only three years after this photograph was taken, the first ‘front-strike’ (visible writing) typewriter, the Underwood 1, would be introduced. Other typewriter manufacturers of the time (notably Remington, which later became part of Remington-Rand) quickly copied their design. The typewriter revolutionized the world of the office in a way that would not be seen again until the first personal computing and word processing devices appeared eighty years later.
My own venerable 1896 Underwood 1–one of only a dozen known survivors.
A simultaneous revolution was going on in stenography—or ‘shorthand’, which uses phonetics to record speech. Four years before our photograph, John Gregg’s new shorthand system began to supersede earlier systems, and dictated speech could now be accurately taken down with a pencil or pen at a rate exceeding two hundred words a minute. The typewriter then made it possible to transcribe all those sounds back into words, pop them into an envelope, and do business with anyone with a mail address.
In the 1890s, if one could learn stenography, typewriting, telegraphy, and bookkeeping, there was a world of opportunity waiting. Although with a few shocks along the way—the Panic of 1893 being the worst—the economy was booming. Young women and men could now find more ‘modern’ work in a clean, safe, and quiet office setting—instead of the hard and dirty labor of factories. Just perhaps, a few of them would become managers and even executives. (Andrew Carnegie’s first office job was as a telegraph operator—and the rest is history.)
Demand for these early ‘knowledge workers’ far outstripped supply. Accordingly, schools of business sprouted up nationwide—a few of which, like Bryant & Stratton (founded in 1854 in Buffalo), are still going strong. Most, though, were flashes in a very rich pan.
A full course in business office skills—lasting a year—cost about $100, or nearly $5,000 today. So while it wasn’t cheap, it was within reach of many aspiring working-class people. At $5,000 a head in today’s money, and with more eager students than there were seats, business schools also presented a lucrative opportunity for entrepreneurs.
So in 1890 Ohioan Martin Jennings Caton and his wife Myrtilla, a teacher, pulled up stakes for the Queen City to establish Caton’s National Business College.
He’s shown here the year he arrived in Buffalo, complete with a truly marvelous mustache. His penmanship was equally admirable–that is his actual signature, which I’ve seen on any number of documents.
To compete against schools that were already well-established, Caton came up with a brilliant idea: raise $200K (about $10 million today) of capital from private investors. With that kind of money in hand, Mr. Caton was able to purchase the best typewriting machines, calculating machines, and cash registers–and could hire about ten staff. In the 1899 Buffalo City Directory, two men and four women are listed as teachers for Caton’s Business School, and three more in management positions.
There was probably still one vacancy then, too. On December 2, 1898–126 years to the day I write this, by strange coincidence–Caton instructor Willis Bissell dressed himself neatly, took a trolley to Niagara Falls, and for no apparent known reason—depression, financial trouble, incurable disease—calmly walked out to the center of the new Suspension Bridge’s span and jumped.
The papers consulted Martin Caton about the suicide, and (perhaps still in denial about the tragedy) he opined that he, for one, didn’t believe that Mr. Bissell had killed himself at all—in fact, he said, the man was known as ‘a great practical joker’ and the suspected suicide was probably ‘another of his pieces of grim humor’. Mr. Caton predicted that they’d all have a good laugh when the supposed victim walked back through the door.
But the laughter never came, because Willis Bissell had disappeared more completely than a teenager asked to clean up his room. The only subsequent clue to his fate turned up when the mail posthumously delivered the man’s final piece of correspondence: a letter of farewell to his Caton students, advising them to ‘copy his virtues and avoid his vices’. One can’t help wondering what those were, but like so many things, the details have been lost to history.
Mr. Caton himself never let go of the belief that his protégé had gone off to Cuba, the Philippines, or Puerto Rico to establish his own business college. I suppose it was the only way he could make sense of something so inexplicable, rash, and irreversible.
In the decade following this personal tragedy, Caton’s Business College grew and prospered, despite a rather remarkable string of smallish lawsuits, $100 here and $200 there, and persistent whispers of fraud. Business schools of the early 1900s were somewhat notorious for popping up in this city or that, fleecing investors and students for a while, and then moving on to the next geography. And in 1908, Mr. Caton followed suit. He sold his Buffalo college and moved to Pittsburgh to do it all over again—where in 1924, aged only 60, a stroke claimed his life.
And what of the Erie County Savings Bank building, which started us down this rabbit hole? In 1967, it succumbed to the pitiless wrecking ball, aged only 74. It took wreckers three full months of pummeling to force the capitulation of the nine-foot-thick masonry walls and steel superstructure. No one had ever before seen such resistance mounted by a mere building to its demolition, but the outcome was inevitable. As the grand dame slowly crumpled beneath the blows, though, at least one man working a crane was observed weeping.
One wonders how the stewards of such a magnificent edifice, and one still in the prime of life, could bear to see it methodically, mercilessly battered into rubble. As the stunned Mr. Caton said about Willis Bissell’s unaccountable act of self-destruction, I too sometimes hope that the obliteration of the Erie County Savings Bank was merely a kind of grim practical joke—that such a tragedy couldn’t really have happened. Surely we’ll all have a good laugh about it one day when we round the corner to see the Jewel of Buffalo still standing proudly in Shelton Square.
But I suspect the laugh’s on me.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.