For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
- John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller,” 1856
The Wagner & Nauland Block, a composition of two Italianate commercial structures at 742-748 Seneca Street, was demolished in the late 1990s. Was it necessary?

This photograph, taken at about 1979 by Black Rock activist Scott Glasgow, shows the block in its final iteration as Mindy’s Home Service, a used appliance store that occupied the site into the mid-1990s. The heritage structures, which would have finely complemented the streetscape of any city, were reportedly in good repair at the time of their demolition, only a few years before the 2002 rehabilitation of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse, 500 feet away, shattered misconceptions about the potential marriage of preservation and economic development in Buffalo’s “near downtown.” Read the rest of this entry »

The commercial building at 860 Seneca Street is a stand-out, a real keeper. It was built circa 1890 to house Jacob Duchmann’s Carriage Manufactory, a building use that was unusually prevalent on Seneca Street in the Hydraulics.

Carriage factories (“factory,” by the way, is the linguistic stub of “manufactory” and derives from the Latin factor, meaning doer or maker) dotted Seneca Street for a very good reason. Seneca Street, dubbed the Buffalo & Aurora Road, was a veritable highway for carriage traffic from the farming country of southern Erie County into the city. Farmers destined for wholesale groceries and food markets of Buffalo would find convenient respite in taverns, barns, harness stores, and carriage factory and repair shops along Seneca Street. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hydraulics was a vibrant neighborhood in 1962. The neighborhood had two schools, five bars, two churches, a bank, seven restaurants, a drug store, a liquor store, three groceries, a hardware store, a furniture store, a post office, a railroad watch store, a laundry, a bowling alley, two service stations, two beauty salons, a cigar store, and two barber shops. Seneca Street was a lively commercial district. People were on the streets. Things were active. Read the rest of this entry »

Suburban Amherst’s Harry A. Wedekindt Funeral Home, operated by twin brothers Raymond and Richard Wedekindt, has far-flung German ethnic origins in the East Side undertaking businesses started by their great-grandfather and great uncle, respectively, in the 1880s and 90s. Raymond and Richard’s great uncle, Adolph Wedekindt, opened his funeral home in the Hydraulics at 750 Seneca Street in 1894, expanding three years later to 761 Seneca. The Wedekindts, in the funeral business since 1887 (the year their grandfather Henry Wedekindt opened the first of several funeral homes on High Street), have done much to preserve the story of the family’s links to the Hydraulics. Read the rest of this entry »