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Severance and Bartlett worked on this project over the course of several years; in periodic presentations to concerned groups of citizens throughout the decade, they shared their somber findings. Bartlett’s wife, Mary, was in attendance at the library in February 1906 when the two men showed, as she noted in her diary, “a set of 125 lantern slides of early Buffalo homes.” There was a newspaper article about their presentation that Mrs. Bartlett later clipped and pasted in her scrapbook. “The slides,” the article says, “are mostly views of old buildings which have been torn down. It is one of the finest sets of views of early Buffalo ever exhibited and it is very valuable.” Like Eugene Atget, his contemporary in Paris, Bartlett used his camera both to “stop time” and to raise the ire of his contemporaries— he captured and presented to a fascinated public the impact of modern life on the traditional landscape of the city.

Inspired by the carefully planned fairgrounds at both the Columbian and the Pan-American Exposition, a new generation of Buffalonians, like civic leaders in other American cities, began, under the rubric of “The City Beautiful Movement,” an effort to bring order and beauty to Buffalo. The year of the Pan-American Exposition witnessed an intense outburst of activity with the formation of four groups dedicated to conservation and beautification: the Niagara Frontier Landmarks Association, whose purpose was to “locate along the Niagara Frontier suitable monuments to commemorate historical events”; the American Institute of Architects Committee on Municipal Art; a local chapter of the National League of Improvement; and, at the end of the year, the Society for the Beautification of Buffalo. Known for sometimes angry, always passionate language, Dr. Matthew Mann, the physician who had operated on President McKinley, was the society’s first president. At its founding, Mann declared “war on all things that tend to deface the beauty of Buffalo.... Doom begins for such eyesores as gaudy billboards, belching smokestacks, unkempt parks and factories in residential areas.”

Mann was deeply troubled by the railroads and the impact they had on the landscapes and streetscapes of the city. The railroads not only “penetrated” the city but they determined land use in neighborhoods and on the waterfront. By 1910, railroad companies owned 42 square miles of railroad yards and 660 miles of track on which moved more than fifteen thousand railroad cars. More than five thousand acres of land in the city were owned by the railroad companies. The size and scale of the railroad companies’ operations were overwhelming, particularly in the heavily industrialized East Side and on the waterfront. Writing in 1907, Mann angrily stated that “Buffalo has maintained the attitude of a suppliant” toward the railroads, turning over to them far too much of the places and spaces in the city that belonged by right, he felt, to the people who lived there:

“We have allowed practically all of our waterfront to be taken by the steam railroads. Scott Street during almost its entire length is a railroad shambles. Prime Street is another dedicated by piracy to the uses of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western.”

Severance and Bartlett were among a growing number of people, most of them well-established white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who, during the early years of the new century, were shaken by the rapid and dramatic changes that were occurring to the form, fabric, and function of Buffalo. Like members of their social class in cities throughout the country, these men and women were appalled at the intrusions of industry and the railroads into the fabric of their city, angered by the losses that had occurred at Johnson Park, distraught at how the waterfront was being turned into a dumping ground for industry, and saddened by the demolition of so many of the private home and churches that had for so long characterized the landscape of the city. They worried not only about Buffalo’s physical landscape but about its social structure as well, particularly the unknown but clearly destabilizing impact and influence of so many immigrants, most of them poor, and most of them Catholic. Worried about the future, they began to work together in an effort to influence, if not control, the forces that were so dramatically altering the nature and quality of daily life. Their efforts to bring order and beauty to the increasingly disturbing and chaotic state of the city led them eventually to take up the cause of city planning.

Mann and his colleagues, like reformers in other cities during the progressive era, were also concerned about vice. In 1905, he organized yet another group, this one called the Citizens Committee of One Hundred. Three years later, the group published what they called the “Expurgated Report on Vice Conditions in Buffalo,” which identified three different types of houses of prostitution, dozens of which were located on streets just east of downtown. There were three on Elm and a half dozen on Ellicott, Seneca, Virginia, Michigan, and Oak Streets. The first types of houses were termed the “Disreputable Houses,” where, the group said, “[T]he girls are kept for hire…. The exterior of these places, in most instances plainly shows their character: heavy lattice doorways, brass rails up the steps, red lights and shades and in most cases each occupies a complete house or building.” The second types of houses were the “Assignation Houses,” which, according to the group, were also “easily known by their canopied and lattice doorways. These are places where rooms are rented for couples and drinks are served…. If the male comes without a companion, the proprietor has a list from which she telephones and secures a companion.” The third category listed in the report was “saloons,” each of which had “rooms [in] which street-walkers and women of the tenderloin assemble and solicit business of the men who come into the saloon.” The report described one of these, located on Ellicott and Genesee, in detail:

The woman proprietor has been running notorious places in Buffalo for the past fifteen years…. [T]he main room is on the second floor, fitted with a hand-operated electric piano. About twenty tables are arranged close to the wall and the center of the room is kept clear for dancing.

It was raucous and fun, a place where those so inclined could listen to provocative music: “Ragtime singing and dancing goes on constantly. At 3 am there were one hundred men and women in the room and everything was full blast.” The report provided an interesting aside as to the growing popularity of automobiles. Most of the patrons, it seems from the report, were driving downtown. They were “young men who came in some of the many autos standing on the street outside.”

Link to more old Buffalo postcards