Beware of Them!

O this is SO going Direct-to-Twitter. Beware!

Buffalo really did like a European city at one time. Amazing.

I, too, am interested in the derivations of the Buffalo-slander. Weather-related? Second city to NYC?

Clearly, a big "knockers" fetish was afoot in 1932 Buffalo.

BEWARE! Of Those Persons who are narrow-minded enough to try to demolish Buffalo. If they will "knock down" our city, they will likewise "knock down" our great and historic buildings. Beware of them! If they won't "boost" Buffalo, tell them to go back to wherever they came. Supposing those strong and hearty men and women who have worked to preserve Buffalo had instead "knocked down" their city? What would we look like now? Probably a suburb like Cheektowaga or Angola. Let's all start boosting, as they have done, so that our children's children 100 years hence will be able to say the same good things about Our Fair City that we are saying about Our Great City.... Buffalo.

Now I know where ChristieLou gets his source material.

The timing of the ad, 1932 during the great depression, makes me wonder. I recall a conversation with my Grandma about those times (forgive me if this isn't quite accurate as I would have been quite young).

Apparently Buffalo, being 'old money' had weathered the economy better than many other cities, at least for the upper classes. Even the steel and grain industries fared better than the economic collapse in other parts of the nation.

Nonetheless, poverty and unemployment took its toll on the city and Buffalo received somewhat more than its fair share of economic assistance from government programs (which were largely directed toward rural projects like the TVA rather than urban centers).

My family considered themselves to be extremely lucky to be in Buffalo rather than other cities which were crippled by the depression. Work could still be easily found for those willing to travel to the outlaying farms as day laborers. Even our proximity to Canada led to some creative income via bootlegging booze over the border.

I wonder if Buffalo was being knocked because of our relative prosperity during such hard times?

Nonetheless, the comment "our children's children 100 years hence will be able to say the same good things about us that we are saying about our forefathers" is quite prescient!

One big difference between then and now is that the ad tells such people to "go back to where they came from", where today we have more locals knocking our city while visitors are seeing the potential that we can't for ourselves.

Another possibility comes to mind. A century ago, Buffalo was considered somewhat of a liberal hippie town that embraced free-love and moral vice.

Buffalo was one of the few cities in the US where women's education was taken seriously (the Midway on Delaware Ave was built for bachelors who had to delay marriage because women were actually concerned with their education, not simply concerned with finding a husband)

Race relations, while abysmal by today's standards, were also significantly better than many places in the nation. Our placement on the Underground Railroad and relations with Canada gave us a different perspective on different races and cultures. We still segregated ethnic populations into their own neat corners of the city, but few cities save NYC were likely to be as diverse as Buffalo.

The song "Shuffle off to Buffalo" (though not released until 1933) was actually somewhat of a parody of our forward-thinking attitudes toward marriage. Interracial marriage was actually legal here, and couples who would be denied a marriage license in other states flocked here to get hitched. Being next door to the honeymoon capital only helped. Even during the early years of the same-sex marriage debate, it was pointed out that Buffalo had a century-old law on the books that stated the city would recognize ANY marriage which was legal in the place it was performed.

Even our health care system was the subject of debate a century before Obamacare. People with mental illnesses were almost treated humanely, day care was provided for working parents, and our orphanage system was light years ahead of other major cities. Public facilities, sanitation, education and health care were already built into our infrastructure, unlike other cities where such amenities were an afterthought if they existed at all.

Our proximity to Canada led to less severe attitudes toward alcohol during prohibition. Our trade routes no doubt contributed toward the carnival of vices available in the old Canal Street District.

I wouldn't be surprised if travelers from the stuffy east coast saw our relatively liberal society in the same way that people from rural Alabama today think of San Francisco. We'd probably laugh at it all from our perspective in the 21st century, but 80 years ago, Buffalo must have seemed crazy to anyone who was living in other parts of the US.

Newell, of course the book is available to a photographer who would like to turn this into a poster. The book,it is titled "Pictorial Buffalo Niagara Falls and Surroundings", was published by Otto Retter of Buffalo in 1932.It has 300+ pages of photos of Buffalo and the Niagara Frontier.

As the Depression wore on, the fetish for destroying the world built by previous generations became the norm. Most newspaper stories about "the old giving way to Progress" seemed to GLOAT about demolitions, with an occasional, condescending reference to little-old-ladies who wanted to save 'old relics' (most of which were no more than 40-50 years old) ...

I think that the unsaid thought was: Our Victorian parents/grandparents built this stuff, then led us into this disaster of an economy - so hammer it all into the ground!

As for "The Wealthy" weathering the storm better than the masses, that was not so common in Buffalo. Many of the finest mansions in Buffalo (and elsewhere) became rooming houses, tea-rooms, or restaurants, in desperate attempts to keep them. My grandparents rented their first apartment in a mansion on Delaware, before it was ripped down for a gas station. Where? The Schoellkopf mansion, at Allen & Delaware.

ps - More fortunes have been lost due to overoptimistic (and false) "Boosterism" than to "knocking". "Boosters" always want to sell you something.