Dec. 7, 1979 Gusto cover story: The Old First Ward

 

Today’s announcement of the closing of an Old First Ward fixture – the Swannie House – brought me back to this Gusto cover story from 45 years ago.

Dec. 7, 1979

The Neglected Neighborhood

The Old First Ward is where it all began

         Venture down beyond the foot of Main Street and you come to where Buffalo began. Look closely and you’ll see the traces. Past the decaying grandeur of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad station are the antique streets which once surrounded the rollicking junction of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. Several of them are still paved with bricks.

         Market Street, home of the Buffalo Sewer Authority, is where the city’s old farmers’ market used to stand. Not far away is an abandoned structure that was the headquarters for the Larkin Company before Larkin hired Frank Lloyd Wright to draw them up a new warehouse and office building on Seneca Street.

         Other grand old companies still thrive here behind their Victorian-vintage brick walls and Washington Iron Works facades. E. and B. Holmes Machinery Co. has been in the same Chicago Street location for more than a century. A bright yellow building at Louisiana and South Park is the home of Heintz and Weber Co., the mustard and pickle people.

         Then there are the sprawling truck depots. This is still a transportation center. And a milling center too. The tall, brooding grain elevators along the Buffalo River stand like sentries over the incoming lake freighters. The truck drivers talk politics and dig into bowls of chili in little lunch counters like Fran and Mary’s Truck Stop on Ohio Street. The elevator workers exchange loud jokes and camaraderie over beers and sandwiches in rudimentary bar-and-a-back-room taverns like Carmen’s at the triangular corner where Ohio and Louisiana intersect.

         This is the First Ward. Five minutes from City Hall, it seems to be worlds away from the rest of the city. The Niagara Thruway sets its northern boundary. Its industrial and warehouse area between Michigan and Louisiana streets separates it from downtown. The big factory and milling operations along the Buffalo River cut it off on the south. Railroad viaducts impose their barriers to the east.

         In its broadest definition, the First Ward includes an adjoining residential district know as The Valley. Historically, the First Ward germinated in the section now occupied by the 772-unit Commodore Perry Homes project, which was built in the late 1940s. But when people want to be specific, when they talk about the Old First Ward, they mean a 12-block area of cottages and duplexes south of South Park Avenue that comprise the Roman Catholic parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church.

         The lore of the First Ward is as basic to Buffalo as beef on weck sandwiches. It was the proud home of the working-class Irish, immigrants and children of immigrants who labored on the docks and the railroads, in the mills and the factories. It gave the city its St. Patrick’s Day Parade and a century-long succession of notable citizens, from Blue-Eyed Bill Sheehan, who became lieutenant governor, through Gen. Wild Bill Donovan to Mayor Griffin, whose father still resides on South Park Avenue.

         The First Ward is “down home” to countless other Buffalonians, though they may have migrated to South Buffalo, the West Side or the suburbs. Christmas finds many of them returning to the old neighborhood to celebrate. One household has hosted its clan for the holidays for 50 continuous years.

         Combined population of the city-operated Perry Homes and the Old First Ward adds up to about 5,000. Though they’re adjacent, the two areas have little in common. They have different church parishes, different demographics, different ethnic mixes and different crime statistics. One thing they share is South Park Avenue, the ailing commercial heart of the neighborhood. At one time the street was thriving. It even had its own movie theater, the Masque.

         “South Park was a haven,” says Cyril Bouquard, a boat rental operator whose family has lived in the Old First Ward for more than 100 years. “Everything you’d want was there. You never really had to go out of the neighborhood, except to the Broadway Market maybe once a month.”

         During the past decade, however, it’s been hard hit by the twin diseases of disvestment and decay. What remains are a drug store, a bank, a few small shops and a pizza parlor. The only supermarket closed several years ago. For anything beyond delicatessen items, food shoppers are obliged to drive to South Buffalo or the West Side. Many First Warders would just as soon walk to where they have to go. They variously walk to work, to church, to school, to the taverns and downtown to Memorial Auditorium for the hockey games.

         What jolted the Old First Ward even harder than the departure of the supermarket was the closing of Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s parochial school in the early ‘70s. Residents are still angry about it. That the demolition of the nuns’ residence next to the church. The school, built by the parishioners between 1906 and 1908, had been the center of the community. Generations of youngsters had gone there for basketball games and Friday night dances. Their parents came for socials and meetings and card parties.

         “Everything stemmed from ‘Pets,’” says Bouquard. Pets is the local nickname for the parish. “When the school closed, it fragmented the neighborhood.”

         Lately, First Warders have been picking up the pieces. The pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Rev. Claude Bicheler, has deeded over the old school building to the Old First Ward Association, a citizens’ group which has reopened it as a community center. It’s continually alive with basketball, ping pong and billiards games, scout meetings, ceramics makers and dozens of other pursuits. The Old First Ward Association is much like the First Warders themselves – proud, active, independent and devoted.

         “More people attend their monthly community meetings there than anywhere else in the city,” says Jay Duderwick, a neighborhood project manager in the city’s Office of Neighborhood Revitalization. “I was kind of surprised until I found out what the makeup of the neighborhood is. It’s one of the friendliest places to go. They set up the kitchen and serve coffee. There’s lots of cooperation. They raise a lot of their own funds.

         “Their crime figures,” Duderwick continues, “are the lowest in the city, which I think is reflective of the action in the community center. On any given night, there are 150 to 200 people in the center. The kids are pretty aware of what’s going on too. One kid about 10, 11 years old came up to me and said: ‘You’re not going to close this place down, are ya?’”

         This spirit has prompted Neighborhood Revitalization officials to take a fresh look at the Old First Ward. Urban block grant money will be used to set up senior citizens’ programs, a legal assistance service and a well-baby clinic, among other things.

         Last year free paint was given to homeowners. The effects are visible on every street. Building code enforcement also has been beefed up. City building inspector Ronald Magrum, assigned to the area last summer, sees code enforcement as one of the best means of preserving what’s good about the community.

         But home repairs and renovation are not always simple matters. One Hamburg Street housewife tells Magrum her husband plans to throw some temporary tarpaper over a leaky part of the roof, but a full-fledged roofing job can’t be done until they get funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 312 Program. “They put us on the list,” she says, “but they said it’s going to take two or three years.”

         Compared with real estate in other parts of the city, the 60- to 80-year-old cottages and duplexes in the ward are beginning to look like bargains. Young Mike Mullaney, a Grand Island native, bought a duplex with a double garage in the low teens after he took the job of directing the Old First Ward Association’s community center. The house, he says, has the original wainscoting, oak floors and hand-carved woodwork.

         “When I moved into the ward,” Mullaney says, “that changed a lot of things. People who gave me an occasional wave before now are stopping to talk. People in the ward take care of people in the ward. If you play square with people down here, they’ll go all out for you.”

         The combination of Old First Ward spirit and the city’s sentimental attachment for the place showed spectacular results last March in the first Shamrock Run, a foot race through the ward. Though only a handful of First Warders ran in it, almost 1,000 others turned out to run and then celebrate in the community center.

         “Old timers say there used to be big parades here, but this was the biggest thing that’s happened in years,” says Officer Earl Wells Jr., community relations officer in Police Precinct 7, the Louisiana Street station. He helped organize the race.

         “That like almost put us on the map again,” he says. “This area has been neglected for too long. We feel this is going to be a prime area someday.”

         It seems as if just about everyone in the Old First Ward has a vision of how it might change. Some propose playgrounds. Some talk of using neighborhood development money to bring a supermarket back to South Park Avenue. Others suggest the Perry Homes be turned into private housing, like the Marine Drive Apartments downtown. Some consider turning the abandoned railroad viaducts and trackbeds (known as “The Dell”) into parkland.

         “It’s just a nice area in which to live,” says Father Bicheler in the living room of the huge Victorian parsonage next to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. “It’s very protected. We get a lot of lake breezes. The flowers here didn’t freeze until a couple weeks ago. If I had a billion dollars, I’d like to buy that whole area down by the river and the grain elevators, turn it into a model community and then live there and watch the ships come in.”

         “I’m sure the waterfront development and all the activity downtown is going to reach us someday,” says one sprightly octogenarian resident of O’Connell Street. “I’m not going to be around to see it, but I think in 25 years this place will be different.”

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IN THE PHOTO: A classic Old First Ward scene – the row of homes in front of the grain elevator on Louisiana Street.

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FOOTNOTE: The Old First Ward is vastly different now, although it took longer than 25 years for things to start happening. Occupying the gateway at South Park and Michigan avenues is the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino. The Perry Homes are finally coming down and there’s development all along the river, residential and recreational.

These days there are lots of reasons to wend your way into the ward. Most famously, there’s RiverWorks, a huge sports and recreation complex complete with a giant Ferris wheel in the shadow of a former grain elevator painted up to look like a six-pack of Labatts Blue. There’s Tewksbury Lodge (scene of my 80th birthday party a couple years ago) and Buffalo River Fest Park, both created by the Valley Community Association. And Resurgence Brewing Co. at that triangular intersection of Chicago and Ohio streets, there’s Resurgence Brewing Co., site of more than one Buffalo News after-hour gathering.

Miraculously, despite all the Diocese of Buffalo church closings, Our Lady of Perpetual Help has survived. So has another pillar of the community, Gene McCarthy's on Hamburg Street, given new life with the addition of a beer-making operation, the Old First Ward Brewing Co.