The assertion first came to my attention a few months ago in the comment section at a popular Buffalo website. Then some folks expressed it to me in person. We may be witnessing the birth of a brand new urban legend in Buffalo, specifically: “City Hall had a fire and all of the records were destroyed.” We were talking about doing Buffalo house research when this claim was conveyed to me. My informants couldn’t say, or were reluctant to say, who told them this. Let’s start at the beginning. For over a decade now, the City of Buffalo has made…
Author: Cynthia Van Ness
Part of the process of preparing for a major exhibit is to get familiar with the relevant material items in our collection (The Buffalo History Museum). One of the things we did in the Library is to compile a bibliography, called Buffalo in World War I, which gives the researcher a good idea of what we have before planning a visit. You can browse it here. We thought we’d feature a few World War I pieces, as follows: War Exposition, Buffalo In 1918 and 1919, the U.S. Government hosted a series of War Expositions around the country. The show came…
By now, everyone who has ever nibbled on chicken wings prepared in a particular style knows their origin story: in 1964, at the Anchor Bar, Teressa Bellissimo cut some wings in half, deep fried them, tossed them in hot sauce, and served them at the bar with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing. A star was born. Today, Buffalo is not just a city, it is a flavor applied to just about anything: snack foods, cauliflower, shrimp, pasta salad, mac & cheese, hamburgers, stuffed mushrooms, and even pizza. The Buffalo affection for chicken wings is not limited to the Bellissimo…
Every few months, the Library (at the Buffalo History Museum) gets a call from a homeowner who is in the middle of a remodeling project. It usually goes like this: “I was tearing out my kitchen/bathroom/den and I found a page/section of Courier-Express/Buffalo Evening News from [date] in the wall/floor/ceiling. Does it have any value? Would you like to have it?” The newspaper-in-the-wall discovery is surprisingly common. Perhaps it fell in through an opening the attic, a possibility in balloon-framed houses. Perhaps someone working on that wall left it there on purpose. Sometimes I wonder if there was a folk practice among…
“The majority of information lies outside the Internet.” – Jens Redmer, Director of Google Book Search, quoted at Slippery Brick, January 2007 “What’s on the web is extremely ephemeral. Very little of it was written before 1995.” – Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Wayback Machine, quoted in Newsweek, March 29, 2004 p. 58. Anyone with an interest in the past soon realizes that Google does not represent the sum total of all recorded human knowledge. The Buffalo History Museum has been collecting paper-based history for 150 years now, amassing library collections that include 23,000 books, 2,000 manuscript collections, 200,000…
Thousands of Thruway drivers pass it around the clock with a quick glance at best. It has been in service for over 51,000 days, built before the invention of the automobile, airplane, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. It shares a birth year with the first typewriter to have a QWERTY keyboard. It opened for business in 1873 during Ulysses Grant’s administration as the International Railroad Bridge. The need for a rail crossing between Buffalo and Fort Erie became evident after the Suspension Bridge opened in Niagara Falls (1854) and the area was soon overwhelmed by rail traffic. Negotiations between the…
Like most of us, I get hit on by panhandlers. Like most of us, I don’t enjoy it. But I also want to do the right thing. Nowadays, I’ve been donating to the Buffalo City Mission the amount that I would have given to panhandlers in a calendar year had I said yes every time. Nevertheless, I feel guilty when I say no to panhandlers. Maybe there’s a way to provide direct assistance using a mobile app. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that Harry the homeless guy approaches me, saying that he is hungry. If I take him at…
When you can’t use our books in person, you can sometimes connect online. Every Buffalo researcher should get to know these online book sites. Google Books We LIVE at Google Books. For historical researchers, Google Books is the most important part of the Google empire. For several years, Google has partnered with several major libraries, including Harvard, Cornell, and the New York Public Library, to digitize millions of books and periodicals. The results are full-text searchable for names of individuals, places, specific phrases, businesses, organizations, events, anything you’d look for the regular Google home page. Fortunately for us, many of the participating libraries…
When it comes to architectural history, Buffalo is an unusually sophisticated community. Decades of architectural journalism, tours, talks, and books have produced a lot of ordinary people who know much more than just the names Richardson, Wright, Sullivan, Olmsted, Green, and Bethune. Everyone with an old house wants to know who the first owner was and if it is associated with a prominent architect. This strong interest in the built environment inspired us to start an indexing project. We identified multiple items in our collection that reliably identified an architect’s works, such as a thesis, dissertation, or promotional publication released…
Originally published in Buffalo Spree, July-August 2006, p. 150 (Updated 18 March 2010) Most architecturally-aware Buffalonians know how the Darwin Martin-Frank Lloyd Wright friendship led to commissions for the now-demolished Larkin Administration building and homes for the top Larkin Company officers. Demolished portions of the Martin House complex are being rebuilt as the site undergoes a complete restoration. Martin also commissioned Wright’s only cemetery monument, the Blue Sky Mausoleum, which was constructed in Forest Lawn in 2004, decades after the passing of the Martins. Additional executions of unbuilt Wright designs are underway in Buffalo. James and Mary Ann Sandoro of…