The Scrap Heap of History
Beginning in 1842, the Genesee House—one of Buffalo’s early inns—occupied the corner of Genesee and Main Streets (a major stage coach stop at the time).
Forty years later, the building was enlarged and renamed the Genesee Hotel. The 1882 version is shown here in an original photo from my collection. In a slightly weird coincidence, this incarnation of the Genesee also lasted only forty years until its demolition in 1922.
But we are not here today to lament the passing of the Genesee Hotel, but rather to revisit it one final time–just prior to its destruction. First of all, let’s recover the original colors of our photograph (see my first post for details on how this feat is accomplished) so that you can better picture our little journey into the past.
Taken on a sun-washed morning in August 1895, our photo discloses a few interesting details: the warm rose brick, George Hale’s Florist on the ground floor (interestingly, Mr. Hale was one of the first aquarists in Buffalo, and sold both flowers and tropical fish from his Main and Genesee corner location), the hotel’s Ladies’ Entrance, and the rather peculiar sight of white-coated staff scaling the hotel’s fire escapes. Presumably they used them for access to guest rooms, although the hotel was well-provided with both stairs and elevators. So it’s a little odd, and there’s a story in it, for sure.
But it’s inside the hotel that we are going today (written descriptors, as follows.)
We pop under the main entrance portico and into the cool marble of the lobby. To our left is the cavernous restaurant, its tables now empty but recently groaning with some of Buffalo’s best cooking.
Ahead the long desk remains, with its hundreds of empty cubby holes behind it–although its enormous brass cash registers have already been removed; they are both highly portable and quite valuable. There aren’t any guests or staff coming or going, of course, but we do encounter several larger-than-life-size statues rescued from the Pan-American Exposition twenty years before. Apollo, Socrates, Plato, and Helen of Troy had all stood watch over the Court of Fountains at the foot of the Pan’s Electric Tower.
From here we take the broad central staircase to the second floor rotunda. This grand space—still fully furnished with lounging couches and postcard desks and hung with crystal chandeliers—opens onto a spacious balcony overlooking Genesee Street. Here in 1882, Buffalo mayor Grover Cleveland presided over the dedication of the new hotel. Mr. Cleveland’s favorite room, too, is nearby—and still fully furnished, left mainly as it was when the former president died in 1908.
We continue up the stairs to take in the view from the roof. To our west is the new Statler Hotel, which is beginning to define the modern Buffalo streetscape. The old Central Presbyterian Church’s tall steeple was toppled a decade ago and replaced by the rather pedestrian Majestic Theatre. And rising up to our point of view is the hubbub of downtown, the scent of smoke and horses, and the comings and goings of wagons and automobiles, trolleys and autobuses—for Buffalo is now a city of more than half-a-million people, compared to 150,000 or so when the hotel opened in 1882.
Now we return to the quiet lobby for a parting look around. Within two weeks of our visit, everything here and in this entire hotel, including Grover Cleveland’s furnishings and the Pan-American statuary, will be sold as salvage—so much scrap to be hauled away by the piece or by the pound.
We fight a sudden urge to flee this dying place and return to the bustling street life outside. Before we go, though, we yield to the temptation to ascend that grand staircase one more time and return to the second floor rotunda. There, we step out onto Grover Cleveland’s balcony atop the hotel’s entrance portico. We take a seat on the stone railing and look out over the teeming street just below—as the Genesee’s 1895 porter, Clem, was captured doing by the same photographer who took our first image.
I can’t help but wonder what is running through Clem’s mind in that blink of the shutter’s eye. What are they all thinking—the pedestrians running their errands, the trolley passengers rumbling by, and the hundreds of people sleeping, eating, or making love in the cool depths of the grand hotel? Probably a lot of the same things we think, of course—though I’ll bet not one of them imagined that in only a little more than twenty-five years, the hotel that was at that moment so central to every one of their lives would be gone for good.
Clem looks to have been a young man in 1895, so who knows—in May of 1922 he may have stood along Genesee Street and watched his former place of employment collapse in an avalanche of brick and dust. If he did, I wonder if he remembered the bright August morning when he sat for his portrait on Mr. Cleveland’s balcony—a fine summer day, on which both Clem and the Genesee Hotel seemed still to have their whole lives ahead of them.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising. All images copyright Robert Brighton.