Matsaaruti and May Day
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.
(Do you know how hard it is for an eight-year-old boy in his Sunday best to sit in the back seat, holding on his lap a box of fresh, fragrant donuts, while his father tries every trick in the book to unstick the car? Well, I do. And let me tell you—it’s hard.)
If you believe Wikipedia, the Inuit word for the kind of atmospheric paste that stranded my family is matsaaruti. What a nifty word—it even sounds a bit like the muttered curses I overheard as my father tried to ‘rock’ the car out of the gunk.
But we are here to talk about the Gilded Age, not my gilded age. So . . .
On the morning of April 21, 1901, Buffalo awoke to nine full inches of matsaaruti—an overnight rainstorm had congealed into countless tons of the heaviest, stickiest, slushiest snow imaginable. The goo paralyzed the city, clogging streets so thoroughly that William J. Hillery, Buffalo’s Superintendent of Streets, threw up his hands and told everyone to stay home. There was no prospect of clearing the streets until the stuff melted.
The problem facing Buffalo, though, was much bigger than a snow day. Opening Day of the great Pan-American Exposition was only ten short days away, on May 1st. With nine inches of greasy slush halting travel and suffocating the fairgrounds, one can imagine the emotions of anyone involved. However frustrating, there wasn’t much to be done about the slop but to let it melt, and so organizers decided to delay the Pan’s now-renamed Grand Opening Day until May 20th.
While they reassured the public (and investors) that the Exposition would still ‘officially’ open as originally scheduled, albeit without much fanfare, the Pan directors were probably secretly relieved about the stay of execution. They had long known that—weather or no weather—the Exposition would be far from complete by May Day. Many exhibit buildings were still under construction, their aisles blocked by as-yet unopened packing crates. Scaffolding and cranes sprouted up around the fairgrounds. The papers reported that any surface not yet asphalted was paved in mud.
Then—adding insult to injury—during the night of April 30, another torrential rain fell, and Opening Day dawned dull and overcast. But in the spirit of ‘the show must go on’, organizers gave the command to open the gates, if probably with a certain degree of trepidation. You’ve likely heard it said that 99% of the things we worry about never happen. In this case, the Pan got the 1%, because everything that could go wrong on Opening Day did.
These images from my collection were captured by a professional photographer dispatched from New York City to document Opening Day. Colors have been recovered and will appear slightly muted or attenuated due to the limited spectral response of the original B&W film.
If you examine this shot, taken looking south from the top of the Electric Tower, you’ll notice a few things. Although the Exposition is clearly open, the crowds are thin. This is confirmed by Opening Day’s final gate receipts, which tallied only 9,900 paying guests in attendance—far fewer than even the most conservative projections. Exposition management expected at least twelve million guests to visit the Pan over its six months of life, or more than 65,000 people per day on average. Ninety-nine hundred on Opening Day wasn’t an auspicious beginning.
But back to our photograph. You’ll notice a few workmen standing in the (still waterless) fountain at the tower’s base, and that there are temporary ‘corduroy’ sidewalks made of planking laid over what must have been sloppy muck. Note, too, that there’s quite a bit of snow, both on the ground and wedged in crevices of the buildings—presumably the remains of the April 21st matsaaruti.
Now here’s another shot from the same day, this time of the Electricity Building.
(For readers of my book The Buffalo Butcher, this building is where Helen Crosby meets Dr. George Grant for the first time.)
Asphalting the hard surfaces at the Pan had been halted by the April blizzard and by persistent rain afterward—asphalt needs a dry substrate—so you can see what appears to be a temporary gravel (or more probably cinder) pathway alongside the Court of Fountains. A line of snow fencing teeters alongside the Electricity Building. Scaffolding is still up in front of one of the big windows. Women are wearing winter coats.
Proving that cursing the weather was as great a sport in 1901 as it is today, concessionaires at the not-quite-ready-for-primetime Exposition did their fair share.
Even so great a booster as the Buffalo Courier noted that it seemed at first as though Opening Day might conclude in ‘a general air of dejectment’. But as evening gathered, the weather cleared and warmed, and the Exposition still had one last great trick up its sleeve—its first-ever Grand Illumination. Hopes rose as the sun set. At ten o’clock the power at last flickered on . . . two hundred thousand eight-candlepower electric lights glowed into life . . . and as one, the crowd gasped. A moment later, they gasped again—when the power went out. For a long, dark hour electricians and engineers grappled to get the balky things lit again (one only hopes they weren’t like the old Christmas lights, where if one bulb failed you had to check one by one to find the offender). But at last they got them working, and although the weather had tried hard to dampen enthusiasm, Opening Day concluded with wild cheers as the Rainbow City blazed into glittering, glorious life.
Now tell me . . . what’s a little matsaaruti compared to that?
*Note: Robert Brighton is compensated neither by Jet Donuts nor by its equally delicious successor, Paula’s Donuts. Every man has his price, though, and operators are standing by.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.
The Buffalo Butcher is Robert’s chart-topping novel, ready to read now and follow along the Pan-American.