Buffalo Rising Online

Oct 25th 2005, 11:56am By Mark Goldman

Thereis always been a special buzz about Allentown, this little warren of small streets lined with densely packed homes, some single family, some multiple dwellings, almost all built in the late 19th century. The side-streets are narrow and they are all one way so Allentown is not a place to cut through looking for short-cuts. The area was developed during the late 19th century and it absolutely retains the look and the feel of that era. Unlike similar neighborhoods in cities throughout the country Allentown has not been gentrified and therefore remains a real Bohemia, a funky and gritty place where artists, gays, street people and others are always and ever rubbing elbows. Rents are cheap on Allen Street and it is a great place to start a new business. The street boasts chill hotspots like College Street Art Gallery and the Allentown Music Store and the always revered Nietzscheis, which is as gritty as the neighborhood itself but hands down the best live music room in Buffalo.

In the summer the sun sets very slowly over the low buildings of Allentown casting long and beautiful shadows on the ancient brick buildings of Allen Street. Itis a great place to be at sunset and two summers ago I went often to sit at the local cafes at this time of day, taking a small wooden chair and table outside and, drinking a beer that I bought at Mugaliis deli on the street, eating locally made delights while pleasurably enjoying the most interesting ballet of this most interesting street. Across from College Street Gallery, in an old fashioned wooden building with a store downstairs and apartments above, was a large empty storefront. For years it had been a hardware store, the Allen Street Hardware Store and long before that, I saw from photographs taken years ago that showed the building with the long, low-lying awnings of that era, it had been a butcher shop and a well-loved ice cream store called iUnterreckeris.i But now, I knew from my evenings on Allen, it was empty and, a small hand-written note in the window said, iFor Rent.i What a corner. What a building. And, above all, what a wonderful neighborhood. In this great Bohemia of Allentown, I would open, I thought, a wine bar; a cafe that respected the historic and artistic tradition of the neighborhood while at the same time both symbolized and strengthened the neighborhood as the creative center of the whole city. With that in mind I opened the Allen Street Hardware CafE in the Spring of 2004. Quickly I came to learn more about my new neighborhood.

The buzz that I felt in Allentown had been there since the mid-1950s when artists and other likeminded people discovered this wonderful, funky neighborhood filled with hundreds of aging but still fabulous Victorian homes. Allentown, a short walk to downtown and to all the major bus routes and its main street, Allen, filled with a cozy mix of groceries, cleaners, a hardware store, ice cream shops and many bars, was a cheap and very popular place for those in Buffalo priding themselves as being iBohemiani. At bars and coffee shops-- Laughlinis, the CafE Encore, The Limelight and The Blacksmith Shop, all within a few blocks of each other on Delaware and Franklin between Tupper and Edward--artists, writers, beatniks and a small contingent of gays--created a vibrant, if somewhat subterranean Bohemian culture that embraced and encouraged all that was modern in music, the arts and dance. Local artists like Martha Visserit hooft and Wesley Olmsted exhibited at the CafE Encore, at the Stratford Gallery upstairs from the Blacksmith Shop and at Jack Hummeris iStablei behind it while local actors, led by Joe Krysiak, mounted what those who saw it remember as an unforgettable performances by the Program Players of iWaiting for Godoti at The Limelight and Elliotis Murder in the Cathedral at the Unitarian Church on Elmwood. And everywhere there was jazz and plenty of places for groups, local as well as touring, to play at The Royal Arms on nearby Bryant Street, The Pine Grill and The Revillot across town on Jefferson.

Wes Olmsted who lived and worked in Allentown at that time remembers that ithose were exciting times. Jazz people, beats, all got along. There was a looseness in the street in those times. We were not academic, we were not mainstream, we were not moneyed, we were not collectors, but we were comfortable.i Oe. (iArt as Revelation: sculptures and altars by Wes Olmstedi the catalogue of a show held at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, January-March 2004). Artists thrived in the heady, yet casual atmosphere of late 1950s Allentown. iThere was this restaurant on the corner of Allen and Wadsworth, Kissis where weid all meeti: Larry Calcagno, Peter Loewer, Don Lazeski and Ben Pirrone. iPretty soon,i Olmsted remembers, I was hanging out at Coffee Encore, the Paralume Coffee House, Laughlinis Bar, the Limelight, those places.i

The bohemian atmosphere of Allentown created an ambience of liveliness and spontaneity, which encouraged the creation in the city of alternative galleries and artist-run exhibition spaces. In 1963, one of them, The Zuni Gallery, owned by local painters Adele Cohen and Ben Perrone and located in a small, tightly packed underground space at Potomac and Elmwood , mounted a spectacular exhibition of contemporary art featuring abstract expressionist artists Robert Motherwell, Nasso Daphnis and LarryCalcagno and Pop artists Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg. (Albert L. Michaels, et al. Martha Visserithooft Suny at Buffalo, 1991)

Soon the people of Allentown began to recognize that there was value in the emergence of their neighborhood as a place where artists could both live and work and in 1958 a few of the merchants on Allen Street created the Allentown Village Society. Their primary purpose, they said, was to sponsor an annual show of local artists which would not only help the artists but would, in a process that has come to characterize all successful cities, strengthen at the same time the neighborhood and the city they lived in. It was, said Jason Natowitz, the first president of the Society, iart as urban renewal.i In the summer of 2005, forty seven years after it was founded, over 200,000 people flocked to the Allentown Art Festival, now one of the biggest out-door art festivals in the country. there was a buzz about Allentown that went beyond the small but vibrant group of artists who had begun to define the area as Buffalois iGreenwich Villagei several years before. Even the Chamber of Commerce, which had been so enthusiastic about the sweeping renewal of downtown, picked up on Allentown and in 1964, pointing to the neighborhood, suggested that the city should think less about iredevelopment and more about rehabilitation and conservation.i Allentown, they said, would be the perfect place to start. Pointing to the activity of residents there, the Chamber, referring to the isubstantial increase in real estate values and the dramatic improvement in the appearance of the area, said that the ithey have brought about a prime example of the work that can be done to renew the city.i (Buffalo Business, April, 1964)

Their efforts to organize the neighborhood were not limited to the arts. Indeed, throughout the 1950is, residents of the area, particularly on Irving Place, increasingly concerned about the growing commercialization of adjacent Delaware Avenue, were meeting regularly at the home of Olive Williams at 54 Irving, watching, waiting and wondering while wily developers cast their eyes around the neighborhood. Throughout the late 1950is century old homes and institutions up an down Delaware were being bought up and demolished, replaced sometimes by parking lots, sometimes by new, glass office buildings that were fast becoming the rage even on staid, still-Victorian Delaware Avenue. The Benderson Company, which was fast becoming one of the areais largest and most aggressive development companies, was buying up key corners on Delaware Avenue, all of them sites for large, single family homes built in the 19th century. In 1958 Benderson bought and demolished three of them at the corner of Delaware and Allen including the hundred year old Sidway Mansion on the northwest corner. Buffalo Business blandly reported the development: iThe Benderson Company plans to demolish the buildings to make room for a modern hotel and office building.i (BB Jan 1958, p.21) Two years later, the Buffalo Club, located in a sumptuous Victorian town house on Delaware near Edward, worried like everybody else, about parking, in 1960 acquired St. Maryis Infant Asylum and Maternity Hospital, a Byzantine warren of connected brick structures built in 1878 and tore it down. The Evening News reported that iIt took just twelve hours on Saturday for the three Schwab boys (The Schwabis were one of the areais biggest demolition contractors) to bring down the brick and wood buildings.i (BEN 8/l/1960. City Planning Scrapbook citation)

Olive Williamsi Irving Place was a one block street that runs north-south between North and Allen, just one block west of Delaware. First developed, like the other streets of Allentown, in the 1850is and e60is, by the turn of the century Irving, had become a street of stylish, single family homes. Originally named iBoweryi, indicating a place where trees bowered overhead, the new, tony residents of the street, uncomfortable with the association to Manhattansi Bowery section, changed it to iIrvingi in honor of the author Washington Irving. By then the Fitzgerald family had moved onto the street and F. Scott spent his early childhood here at 29 Irving. The street was lined with rich, fanciful, beautifully decorated Victorian houses, none more attractive nor interesting than 54 Irving, the life-time home of Allentown activist Olive Williams, born here in 1890. iPassionately dedicatedi, one chronicler of Allentown wrote, ito preserving the old and comprehending the new.i (Louise McMillan, iField Guide to the History and Architecture of Allentowni, published by the Allentown Association, 1985) Williams, angered and appalled by the impact of the Benderson demolitions and sensing that the future of her neighborhood was intertwined with the strength, continuity and integrity of its historic fabric, Williams and her neighbors organized the North Street Association in 1960. Three years later it was formally incorporated as The Allentown Association.

By the mid-sixties their work had begun to bear fruit. The Association had crafted its own plan for the conservation and preservation of the neighborhood and more and more people, attracted to this artsy community filled with block after block of wonderful, however run-down Victorian buildings, found their way to the side streets of Allentown. Writing about the area in 1970, the Courier Express, noted that ithe suburban exodus has drawn people away form many neighborhoods in the city during the last thirty years. But in Allentowni, they said, ithepopulation trend is in reverse.i In what was one of the rare public recognitions of the value of historic preservation, the article said that it was ithe historic, preserved aura of Allentownis buildings that give its residents a sense of deeper roots.i By that year there were, according to Max Clarkson, the president of the Allentown Association, imore than three thousand people here, representing the most complete mix and cross-section of people of any neighborhood in Buffalo. Three things stand out for usi, Clarkson said: ithe diversity of the fascinating people, the historic and unique architecture and the life stylei. (Courier Express 11/30/1970, p. 19)

Meanwhile, the Association continued to work towards its primary goal: the creation in Allentown of the cityis first historic preservation district. A quick ride around the areaofrom Dayis Park and Arlington Park in the west, to College, Park, Mariner, Irving in the middle and Virginia Place in the eastois all that it takes to convince even the most skeptical that Allentown was clearly worthy of the designation. Work on the designation process began in 1972. It was critical, Association president Carole Holcberg said at the time for ihistoric preservation is the most effective tool for neighborhood revitalization and should be used throughout the whole city.i Finally, in 1978, six years after the long and arduous application process had begun, Buffalois first historic district, the Allentown Historic District, over fifty square blocks in the heart of the city, was approved. Now, more than thirty years later, Holcberg, like so many of the people who were there from there from beginning, still lives in this most deliciously rich and juicy neighborhood.

In many ways, Allentownis focal pointoindeed, something of a magnet for people from all over the area, even some suburbanites are willing to venture down hereois the Towne Restaurant. Owned for years by Dino Skouras and his family for years, the Town is open twenty-four hours a day and serve the whole rainbow of people who make up the neighborhood. The Towne, like Allentown itself, thrives on diversity. Dusty, paint-splattered contractors on break, business people meeting for breakfast and lunch, neighborhood street-people, gays, musicians from the nearby Philharmonic, iladies who lunchi from the Allentown Association, neighborhood artists and shopkeepers and well-dressed couples on their way to a concert at Kleinhans, all seem comfortable in the no-questions-asked ambience of the Towne, where the food is good, the portions large, the service excellent and the price right. The crowded community bulletin board in the vestibule proclaims that the Towne, like the agora in an ancient Greek city, belongs to everyone. In this polyglot restaurant that is the Towne in this polyglot community that is Allentown, everyone is a neighbor.