FRIENDS OF THE BUFFALO STORY
Buffalo People: Past, Present & Future
The Early Days of Ferry Street...
COLD SPRINGS NEIGHBORHOOD
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It’s a water story, really.. The whole area, the whole Ferry Street Corridor had its origins on and around water. Most obviously there is the foot of Ferry, where Ferry Street ends in the Niagara River. You know as early at 1804…the same year that Joseph Ellicott laid out his historic street plan for Buffalo..there was a ferry, that’s right, at the foot of Ferry Street, where travelers crossed between what was then the Village of Black Rock and the shores of Canada. The first ferry was owned and operated by a man named William Miller. Miller, like so many of the area’s earliest settlers, came to Buffalo, following a daunting journey. His trip, like many, started in western New England. He, along with this wife and two children, started overland on a wagon. At Utica they transferred their belongings to a small river boat as they began their journey up the Mohawk to its outlet near Lewiston on Lake Ontario. Here the Miller Family began a long and arduous portage around Niagara Falls, finally, putting back in the Niagara River at a place called Fort Schlosser. Then, back they went into a river boat, sailing downstream until they came to the foot of Ferry Street in what would soon become the Village of Black Rock. All that by 1804. Miller was a successful and a restless entrepreneur. He quickly built a small inn and by the end of the year owned and operated the first ferry that ran from the foot of Ferry across the rough and fast-moving waters of the Niagara River, to Canada.
Transcription of a roundtable conversation dealing with life in the Cold Springs neighborhood, c. 1940-c., 1970
WE: Purdy Street? Forget about Purdy Street. The best looking girls in Cold Springs lived on Purdy Street. Can’t say their names now….they’re all church ladies. But the girls on Purdy…they were fine…real fine.
RS: You know what else was great about Purdy? About Waverly, Otis, Verplanck and the others? People today don’t know this….but what was great about all those streets, at least when I was growing up in the late forties and fifties, was the elm trees.
WB:. Your’re right man. Couldn’t see the sky for the trees on Purdy. Dutch Elm killed them….killed trees all over Buffalo starting in the fifties. Terrible blight, terrible….wrecked all our streets.
WE: Yeah, that was almost like a sign of something to come. I can remember those trees to this day. Still have ‘em all on Timon , in the Fruit Belt.
BR: Not Jefferson though… You couldn’t wreck Jefferson. Are you kidding? That was the best kept secret in Buffalo during the fifties. Couldn’t walk down that street on a Saturday, and I’m not only talking about the Saturday before Easter.
City Directory of Jefferson Ave, 1960
WE: That’s right…. there wasn’t a thing you couldn’t buy on Jefferson.
PR: Remember……man…The Busy Bee at Ferry….Who didn’t hang out there!? Gigi’s, couple of shoe stores, beauty parlors..you name it. Don’t forget the Apollo Theater…and all those pool rooms too.
WB: wish I could find me picture from those days. Looked everywhere….can’t turn up anything.
PR: I got one of Willie Evans standing in front of Tillman’s on Ferry.
WE: What about the picture of Mike Morgulis?
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You know, the artist? His family had an outdoor fruit market on Jefferson. There’s a picture of him as a kid working at it. They’ve got one on the NFTA walls across from Offermann Stadiun. (laughing…..)I mean the school… Performing Arts
WB: That family was Jewish right?
WE: Yeah, they lived on Butler…or maybe Goulding. I see Mike every once in a while. Man, that boy is a good artist….Has a shop up on Hertel.
RS: Yeah, but in that day, right up till the late 1950s, most all of the Jewish people they lived right here in Cold Spring. There was some up on Hertel but most all of ‘em were here.
WB: He’s right….Look at this…..I’m reading from the City Directory in 1950….Silverstein’s Poultry, Segal’s Kosher Chicken’s, Morgulis’ Market; Harry Joskowitz…remember Harry, the tailor? And Goldman’s Shoes?
GC : You know, when I was at UB, in the early ‘fifties, I worked for Silverstein’s Kosher chicken place on Jefferson and Ferry. Not what was old school….Izzie Silverstein spoke mostly Yiddish….he’d come to Buffalo from a DP camp right after the war and opened his shop… Slaughtered the chickens right there, gave them to me and I put them on the truck and delivered them all over the neighborhood…Goulding, Butler, Brunswick….those streets were filled with first generation Jewish immigrants. That was a nice neighborhood, really nice.
DG: It was great,man.. the Jews and the blacks, we always got along great. You know all those jazz clubs---all of em were owned by Jewish people. Sam Fox and Maury Kalnitz owned the Pine Grill on Jefferson.
WB: Yea, you know, Will, yer right. What was his name…the guy who owned Mandy’s on Ferry…
DG: You mean Irving Mandelcorn? How ‘bout the Zanzibar? You know who owned that? The Glazer Brothers. They were great guys. They took my brother under his wing; helped him start his own business too.
BL: What about the Aloha? I don’t think that was.
JG: No, No…lemme remind you about the Aloha. Remember it was a white club…..no blacks could get in there. Played I don’t know what but anything to keep us folks out. Wasn’t like that at the Jewish joints.
RS: Right….then…..who bought it? Changed the name and the whole décor. Turned in into The Bon Ton., I think it was. Now that was a great club.
DG: I heard Miles there is ’58.
WE: Blakey came there too.. I saw him a bunch a times at the Bon Ton.
JG: There wasn’t anybody who couldn’t hear in Buffalo in those days….six nights a week
DG: He’s right about that…..there was music everywhere…..a horn around every corner. You could hear it walking down Ferry Street, coming out of the windows of the flats on Purdy, on Waverly, Woodlawn and the others. Remember all the clubs? I know some: The Bon Ton, The Pine Grill, The Revillot, Bafo’s, The Royal Arms…..and there were more.
JG: You know the black newspaper the New York Age? They wrote an article about night life in Buffalo in 1941. It was hot even then
WE: You know what else you could hear?
RS. What’s that?
WE Opera…..You could hear opera.
RS. Don’t remember that.
WE. Oh yeah, you don’t remember Dominic, the little Italian mail-man.?
RS. Oh yeah, Dominic,,,,I do remember him now that you mention it. Little, short guy, right.
BL. Sang opera, idn’that right?
WE: Sure did… Everywhere he’d stop he’d have a different aria ready. People had their favorites they’d ask him to sing. My Mother loved that tenor duet from The Pearlfishers…Dom could only sing one part though…..She tried the other.
BL: ‘Member how the kids loved Dominic? They’d follow him down the street listening to him sing. Dogs followed him too. I remember when Dominic was getting a little older he asked a bunch of his to carry his mail for him….Bought us bottles of pop from Tillman’s
WE: It was a sad day on E. Ferry when they took Dominic off the beat. He was a part of the whole neighborhood scene. My Dad tried to get him back on the route but it was too late…he was gone, like them elm trees.
WE: You gentlemen know there weren’t any black churches in Cold Springs till the ‘fifties. All those years we all used to go back downtown to church. That started to change too.
RS: It was Bethel AME that moved first.
BL: No, I think it was Lincoln Memorial.
RS: I tell you what though…I remember when Bethel moved up. All you need to do is look rat that picture they got on the wall. That’s how it happened, to the “T”. We walked right up Michigan…the whole group of us. Right past the entrance—the box office at Offermann Stadium . They’ve got that in one of those pictures too. We made a right on Ferry and right into that front door. July, 1956.
RM:. Yeah, I do remember that. . there was a game going on at Offermann. I forgot who the Bisons were playing—but the place was jammed. When they saw us walking by a whole bunch of the fans they came out to the gates and cheered us on….you know, congratulatin’ us on the move and all.
WE: That move was a long time in coming. We’d been downtown for years. We’d been on Hickory street since the 1920’s I think it was….long before my time. That neighborhood it was changing fast; our building was falling apart…we had to get out. We got lucky too. Our realtor….what’s her name, Charlie Fisher’s mother…she was the first Black realtor in town--- found this church, an old Presbyterian church….Norwegian or Swedish I think it was…they were moving too. The black migration to Cold Springs was in full force
RS: You all know where Bethel started don’t you?
BL: Sure do….on Vine Alley. It opened in the 1830s, you know,….it’s the oldest black church in Buffalo. The old colored school was there too.
RS: My old man told me about Vine Alley….Big time red light district by the 1920s….the whole street was torn down then when they extended William St.
RE: The church moved to Eagle Street…stayed there till ’56 when we moved on up to Ferry St.
WE: Ferry Street was mixed, man. There was as many white folks as there were blacks. I was born in ’37. The neighborhood I grew up in----Ferry, Waverly, Purdy---that was a hodge-podge. People got along pretty good, too.
RS: People don’t know this now, but there was lots of black owned businesses too. Some of them are still around….you know Doris Records? Mack Luchey’s owned that place since 1962.
WE: How about Cold Springs Cab….Goes back to the ‘forties..Reverend Brown was the real driver in that family. He had a church and owned and ice and coal company. He and his son “Buzzy”---I forgot exactly when---they started the Cold Springs Cab Company.
RE: Don’t forget the Brown Bombers. I think you have a picture of them too. That was started by Charley Fischer’s father, you know, the former councilman…..Alot of them boys were veterans…. They got the entrepreneurial spirt in the Army.
WE: It was a great neighborhood… You guys remember Tillman’s Ice cream parlor. And his pool hall across the street on Ferry. Black guy----damn, I forgot his name—he owned that, We all met up there after school.
RM: What about the Busy Bee in Jefferson and Ferry. A Greek guy owned that place…best phosphate I ever had. Still looking around for one like it.
MM: Hey, don’t forget my father’s fresh fruits stand….Fresh Fruit twelve months a year—Morgulis’ Fruits, the corner of Jefferson and Ferry.
RS: Yeah but that all changed in ’67…the riots killed it. Jefferson got a bad rap. People stopped coming back.
WE: Whole place began to change.
RS: Yeah, then when the plants all began to close in the ‘70s….well that was the nail in the coffin.
RE: We had a good ride though for a while.
RS: Nuthin lasts for ever.
WE: I guess, but it sure was nice….once.