New Weekly Column - Secrets of the Gilded Age
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.
You may know already that my novels are set in the Gilded Age—a period spanning 1870 to 1905, give or take. And what a time it was for this city and for Western New York! The Pan-American Exposition, the burgeoning grain, lumber, and electrical industries—and the thousands of factories producing everything from the world’s best bicycles to automobiles to kitchenware. Buffalo was, without any exaggeration, both the Silicon Valley and the Panama Canal of the day.
My aim in my work—and in this weekly column—is to bring that period back to life, in all its dimensions, warts and all. So without further ado, here’s a foretaste of what you can expect.
This is a photograph from my personal collection—the Triumphal Bridge at the Pan-American, from a glass negative taken by a New Jersey camera club member in late summer, 1901.
Now here’s the same photograph, after having had its colors recovered by a friend of mine in Ireland who has devised a way to de-encode the colors originally registered by black-and-white film as shades of gray. This image is NOT ‘colorized’, like many photos and movies we see nowadays . . . rather, its colors were teased back out of the original black and white, and are very close to the original colors of that summer afternoon in 1901.
Now you have seen one of the only authentic color images of what Buffalo looked like 123 years ago. And I say ‘one of’ only because I have others . . . so stick around, because there are many more to come.
How did I stumble across this kind of thing, you may ask. Well, when I began researching my first book, The Unsealing, I resolved to get as close to the real history of the time as I could. For me, that meant obtaining and studying primary sources—diaries, photographs, letters, and personal items from the time—and reading, cover to cover, three Buffalo newspapers (and one from New York City for good measure) from 1897-1904. (And I mean cover-to-cover: articles, op-eds, comics, want ads—everything. It was a lot of reading!)
In this process I uncovered a trove of obscure and compelling stories that can never make it into a novel. In coming weeks, I will share with you the truly gobsmacking answers to these and other questions about the Queen City’s amazing history:
- What holds up millions of tons of grain (and the heavy grain elevators themselves) in the reclaimed muck and marsh along the Buffalo River?
- How did Buffalonians keep clean—when so many worked in very dirty occupations—before most had indoor plumbing in their homes?
- What now-forgotten but central figure in African-American history lived in the modest (and now dilapidated) house next to the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church?
While I’m not a historian, per se, I promise that I won’t write anything that I don’t believe is historically factual. If I can’t document it, I won’t make it up—fiction has its place, but not in this weekly column. Ultimately, my goal is to deepen my—and I hope your—understanding and appreciation of our great city and its history. I believe that an understanding of history can help us to develop tolerance, community, kinship, and a clearer sense of how to chart the future.
While I’ll be writing about the past, I must share with you my deep belief that Buffalo’s best days are still ahead. My columns won’t be nostalgic. We can’t—and oughtn’t to—recreate the Gilded Age. But together, we can create a new Golden Age.
I hope you’ll enjoy these glimpses into our shared past, and once again I’d like to thank Newell and everyone at Buffalo Rising—and all of you—for giving me the opportunity to share them here.
(In closing—do come out to see me on October 4th at Forest Lawn’s ‘Fall in the Forest’ evening event. The good people at Forest Lawn are hosting the international premiere of my forthcoming novel, The Phantom of Forest Lawn. I’d love to meet you in person . . . say hello . . . and hear what questions about Buffalo’s past you may have. I’ll try to answer as many as I can in this column.)
Until next time,
Robert Brighton
Robert Brighton is the author of the award-winning Avenging Angel Detective Agency™ Mysteries, The Buffalo Butcher, and other titles. He was born and raised in Buffalo and now resides with his wife and their two cats in Northern Virginia.
Find out more at RobertBrightonAuthor.com, on Instagram @RobertBrightonAuthor, and on YouTube @RobertBrightonAuthor.
This article originally appeared on Buffalo Rising on September 19. Read it and other articles here.