I had few, if any, preconceived notions about Buffalo; in all honesty, until relatively recently I didn’t even know where it was. If I had been asked to guess, I would have fallen into the obvious trap of assuming it had been named after Bison bison, the American buffalo, and gone for somewhere on the great plains, in Kansas, Dakota or Wyoming. I would never have guessed upper New York state, virtually on the Canadian border. All the authorities agree that the city took its name from Buffalo Creek (now upgraded from 'creek' to 'river' along the majority of its course) but there is still some controversy about how the creek acquired its name. Some say the French originally referred to it as le beau fleuve (the beautiful river) or le rivière au boiblanc, names then corrupted by local non-French speakers to ‘bow-flo’ and ‘bo-blow’ and eventually anglicised to Buffalo. Others believe that it is a corruption of the original name bestowed by the indigenous Seneca people of the area, or a corruption of a mistranslation by Mohawk or Iroquois translators of the Senecan name during the negotiations for the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. No one seems to give much credence to the idea that Buffalo is named after the bison even though it is generally acknowledged that herds of them once roamed the area; in 1718 the Governor General of New France, Philippe de Rigaud, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, noted that ‘Buffaloes abound on the south shore of the Lake Erie, but not on the north.' And in October 1911 the Times & Democrat of Orangeburg, South Carolina reported that ‘a herd of ten thousand buffalo used to visit a lick near Onondaga lake, NY…. Settlers killed 700 there in one year. In 1730 the last buffalo east of the Alleghenies was killed. In 1897 the last wild buffalo in the country, outside the preserves, was killed. Goodbye, bison.’ So why the reluctance to accept the obvious explanation that Buffalo was named after the majestic American bison? Who knows.
Why did we visit a city we knew nothing about? Because of its proximity to Toronto, a city we paid our second visit to a couple of weeks ago. We thought it might make an interesting side trip as it is just a hundred miles or so away; a two-hour journey on the slow GO train from Union Station in Toronto that crawls around the rim of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. From there you can pay a dollar toll in US Mint coins (no debased Canadian dollars allowed) and a $30 dollar I-94 entry fee (and don’t forget to apply in advance for your $40 ESTA) and cross into the United States on foot, across the Rainbow Bridge. There are fine views of the Falls from the bridge and in the middle, you can straddle the border and leave your left limbs in Canada while your right limbs stand in the States. Once you have dealt with the formalities at US Customs and Border Protection, Buffalo is just a short but dispiriting Uber ride away down interstate 1-90, the Niagara Thruway, crossing back over the Niagara River to Grand Island, with its Amusement Park and golf course closed down for the winter, then back over again onto the left bank of the river and down into Buffalo, skirting the shore of Lake Erie. Downtown Buffalo came into view under an overcast sky as we slowed down to exit the freeway; I could see a clutch of interesting looking buildings scattered around the city centre, a hulking art deco red sandstone skyscraper topped by a Moorish dome, a beaux-arts white tower, a neoclassical two towered skyscraper topped by two large brass statues and various neo-gothic spires and turrets.
The Uber drove us away from downtown, up Michigan Avenue to our hotel, through a bleak landscape of shops, lots and religious buildings; tire shops, body shops, used car lots, low rise office blocks with outsize parking lots, endless weed covered vacant lots, converted factories, a boarded-up Baptist church, the concrete spire of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints and the steeply pitched roofs of the Church of St John the Baptist. The gloomy view from our eighth-floor room looked out over the roofs of the Roswell Park Cancer Centre, back towards a now distant downtown. The horizon was a slate grey straight line that it took me a few seconds to realise was Lake Erie. The only sign of activity was a gang of roofers on the flat roof of the hospital manoeuvring rigid 6-foot square grey tiles into place. A sudden fierce cloud burst sent them scurrying for cover from the driving rain. Half an hour later we were again in a taxi heading back down Michigan Avenue when the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, pouring golden light onto downtown. By the time the taxi dropped us off at the bottom of Pearl Street the light was beautiful; we wandered down Pearl Street admiring the Liberty Building in the distance, pausing at the intersection with Church Street to admire the Guaranty building on the corner and the Old Post Office to the east and Old Erie County Hall to the west. On wet pavements, plastered with autumn leaves, reflecting a wounded sky of bruised blacks, greys and yellows, bleeding reds, and scar tissue pinks and whites, we made our way down the diagonal of Niagara Street to Niagara Square, the McKinley monument and the extraordinary Buffalo City Hall.
President
William McKinley was shot in Buffalo on the 6th September 1901 and died of his
infected wound 8 days later. The position of being President was truly
dangerous in the second half of the 19th century, there were 9 of them in the 36
years between Lincoln’s death 1865 and McKinley’s in 1901 and a third of them
were assassinated whilst in office, James A. Garfield being the third man. Whether
this period represents the apogee of political violence in America, or the
nadir of presidential security, is a moot point. McKinley was in Buffalo visiting the Pan-American
Exposition. He was a popular president; in 1898 he had declared war on Spain triggering
a short global conflict between an emerging superpower and an imperial power on
its last legs. In just five months the Spanish army and navy were humiliatingly
routed in the Pacific and the Caribbean and Spain was forced to hand over sovereignty
of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the US and to allow them to
establish a protectorate over Cuba. When the public queued up to greet President
McKinley at a public reception in the Exposition’s Temple of Music, one of those
in line was a 28 wireworker and would be anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was born to Polish parents in Detroit
in 1873. He had been drawn to socialism following the economic crash of 1893 when
living in Cleveland and the rolling he worked for had closed down. He struggled
to make a living in the difficult economic conditions of 1890’s America and in
1898 he went to live with his father on a farm in Ohio and became a recluse. If
he was alive today Czolgosz would be one of those individuals who sleeps in the
day and spends all night in his bedroom surfing the internet and stoking his
resentment at the injustices of the world. When he finally abandoned his self-imposed
exile from the world in early 1901 it was to try and insinuate himself into the
most extreme political activists of the period, the anarchists. He was not
entirely successful in this; his blatant desire to be involved in some sort of political
extremism made him an object of suspicion to the very people he wanted to join.
Ironically, just a few days before he murdered McKinley, the radical newspaper
Free Society issued a warning about Czolgosz to its readers, “The attention
of the comrades is called to another spy,” the paper said, “he is well
dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shoulders, blond and about 25 years of
age… His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in
the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated
violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere the comrades
are warned in advance, and can act accordingly.”
As he stood in line to greet the President, Czolgosz was hiding a .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver beneath a handkerchief. When he reached the front of the line, he slapped away McKinley’s extended hand and shot him twice at point blank range in the stomach. One of the bullets ricocheted off a button and lodged itself in McKinley’s jacket, the other wounded him severely in the lower abdomen. As Czolgosz readied himself to pull the trigger for a third time the man behind him in the queue struck him roughly in the neck and knocked the gun out of his hand. Other members of the crowd surrounded Czolgosz and began punching and kicking him so vigorously that the wounded McKinley felt obliged to step in and ask them to go easy on him. At first McKinley’s doctors thought that the President’s injuries were non-fatal but within a few days he had developed gangrene in the wound and by the 14th September he was dead. A grand jury indicted Czolgosz with first-degree murder on September 16th and he went on trial at the State Courthouse in Buffalo on the 23rd. Czolgosz, who not only refused to co-operate with the prosecution but also with his own defence team, pleaded guilty to the charges against him but was overruled by the Judge who insisted that a not guilty plea be entered to allow the full trial to go ahead. The prosecution case just took two days to deliver, the defence a mere 27 minutes, the time it took Czolgosz’s lawyer to deliver a half-hearted plea for clemency to the jury and judge, claiming that his client was insane. The jury took even less time to deliberate; they were back in the courtroom less than half an hour after being dismissed to consider their verdict. Czolgosz was executed at Mount Auburn penitentiary on October 29th 1901, by being given three shocks of 1800 volts in the electric chair. Before being buried an autopsy revealed that he had had bad teeth and chancroids on his genitals, most likely the result of a sexually transmitted disease. A death mask was taken and his body was buried in the prison cemetery after sulphuric acid had been poured into his coffin to ensure that it decomposed quickly. His clothes and possessions were burnt in the prison incinerator.
The McKinley monument in the centre of Niagara Square is a 69-foot-high obelisk of marble from Italy and Vermont, standing on a 24-foot-high base, which bears an inscription saying ‘this shaft was erected by the State of New York to honor the memory of William McKinley, twenty-fifth President of the United States of America.’ After a list of his political achievements the inscription carries on, ‘William McKinley died in Buffalo September 14, 1901 victim of a treacherous assassin who shot the President as he was extending to him the hand of courtesy.’ There are four lions surrounding the base, each 12 feet long and weighing 12 tons, they were sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor of New York City and based on Sultan, a Barbary lion who, along with a female named Bedouin Maid, was presented to the Bronx Zoological Park by Nelson Robinson in 1903 (just three years before the zoo put the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga on display in the same cage as an orang-utan). The monument cost $190,000 to build and was dedicated on September 6, 1907, the 6th anniversary of the shooting. Over 100,000 people turned out in a heavy downpour to see the dedication service.
The imposing hulk of the City Hall stands in front of the McKinley monument, a 32 storey Art Deco skyscraper completed in 1931 to replace the Old Erie County Hall which stands a few hundred yards away on Franklin Street. The Old County Hall is an impressive building in its own right, designed by Andrew Jackson Warner and completed in 1875, it is pure Victorian Gothic, four storeys with a 270 foot clock tower with a spired roof and louvered belfry sporting four allegorical classical figures representing Commerce, Agriculture, the Mechanical Arts and Justice. The Old County Hall draws its authority from the past but the City Hall was thrillingly modern at the time it was built, like something out of Fritz Laing’s Metropolis. The cost of building the new City Hall, apparently calculated to the last cent, is always given, with suspicious accuracy as $6,851,546.85. The architects were George J. Dietel and John Wade and the builder the John W. Cowper Company. According to Buffalo City Council what the architects aimed for in their design of the building “was to accomplish in stone, steel and glass what the ancient Greeks did in stone and timber.” The building is littered with symbolic art works, inside and out, from the 10 columned portico at ground level with its frieze by Albert T. Stewart showing a central figure based on Michelangelo’s Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel, flanked on either side by figures representing Buffalo’s commercial, industrial and cultural life, right up to the Moorish inspired octagonal drum and glass dome which tops the 398 foot high structure. The glass roof of the dome and the exterior of the tower were illuminated at night, floodlights within the dome turning the tower into a glowing beacon. External floodlights at ground made sure that the building made its presence felt day and night, dominating the skyline and the shoreline of Lake Erie.
There are two buildings which dominate downtown Buffalo, City Hall being one, and the 100-meter-tall Liberty Building being the other. Completed in 1925 for the Liberty Bank (which had been forced to change its name by world events in 1918, it was originally the German American Bank but World War One tarnished the brand name by association with the Hun). The neo-classical office block with its distinctive two towers topped by 36-foot-high states of Liberty facing East and West, enjoyed a short reign as Buffalo’s biggest building until City Hall was completed 6 years later. The architect was English, Alfred Charlkes Bossom, born in 1881 the son of a stationer from Islington who was a pupil at St. Thomas's Charterhouse School, in the City, and studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy of Arts. As a 23-year-old newly qualified architect Bossom decided to seek his fortune in the US and went to work for Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh. He became a very successful architect specialising in the construction of skyscrapers and in 1910 he married the daughter of a New York banker. He returned to England in 1926, determined to educate his sons in the English public school system. He abandoned architecture for politics and was elected MP for Maidstone in 1931. His private life took a tragic turn when his wife and eldest son were killed in an air crash in 1934. He remained in office until 1959, long enough to encounter the conservative candidate for the neighbouring constituency of Dartford in the 1950 and 1951 general elections, Margaret Roberts and her fiancée Denis Thatcher. When the couple married in 1951 the wedding reception was held at Bossom’s Chelsea home. He became something of a mentor to the newly married Mrs Thatcher, supporting her attempt to win the Orpington by-election in 1955 and to win the conservative candidacy for the safe seat of Finchley in 1958. Bossom stood down as an MP for the general election of 1959, in which Mrs Thatcher was finally elected to the Commons, but was a life peer. His son Clive later served as Mrs Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary when she became a junior minister in the Treasury in 1966.
Standing on the corner of the intersection of West Huron Street and Main Street you get a wonderful view of the ‘Goldome’ building, the 1900 Buffalo Savings Bank, and the 1912 Niagara Mohawk Building, now generally known as the Electric Tower.
