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.”

As little as fifteen years ago, economic development officials viewed the Hydraulics as a strategic location for new shovel-ready parcels that could act as an extension of the Exchange Street Business Park, located to the west of Hamburg Street, and the notion of repurposing the district’s existing building stock for economic development was not yet appreciated. Today, the idea of a revived, mixed-use neighborhood, with varied economic activities, is now on the table, but unfortunately for pioneering urban investors who may have acted on the untapped potential of the Wagner & Nauland Block, this opportunity was laid waste by the city’s ubiquitous bulldozers. Here is the same site today:

Seventy-five years ago, the corner of Seneca and Emslie was a hotbed of urban activity. The corner had a stop for the yellow #15 streetcar, replaced by buses in 1941. A line-up of commercial structures fronted the street, a setting for a bank, taverns, groceries, barber shops, a post office, a drug store, candy stores, and a movie theater. Many of these commercial structures still exist, holding out potential for new economic activity, but the Wagner & Nauland Block is only a memory, the panoply of activities it once housed a subject for historians: N. A. Carroll’s wholesale liquor, Casper Wagner’s boarding house, the A & P grocery, a Deco restaurant, Frank Trautmann’s meats, Joseph Romanello’s restaurant, Emele Nicholas confectionery, Frederick Nauland’s market, and Oliver Hosterman’s bakery being only a few examples of productive uses the structures housed since their construction around 1880.

The Wagner & Nauland Block was not only a charming pair of buildings worthy of preservation, they were economic development tools in waiting, capable of housing inexpensive, attractive space in which new ideas, providing new jobs, could have been attempted. While the vacant lots that remain could be still be developed, albeit more expensively, the lost opportunity represented by the demolished structures forces one to ponder: What might have been?

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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.

The carriages were manufactured in the blacksmith shop located in the storefront at ground level. (Who knows what may hide behind that corrugated iron sheathing!) The second floor was the printing shop and the third floor was used for storage.

The making of carriages did not last beyond the 1910s, when the Ford Model T heralded a new world. But the business quickly adapted. Founded by a blacksmith who worked with cast iron, the factory turned from carriages to cast iron railings and other decorative elements. The newly dubbed Contractor’s Ornamental Steel Company continued to do a thriving business at the site for decades, a fixture in the neighborhood. The business expanded periodically over time to larger workshops on site, and closed as late at 1981, when the property is listed as vacant in city directories for the first time. A collection of tenants filled the space until the late 1990s, when the property ultimately went dark. Highly adaptable, constructed with enduring quality, this historic carriage factory is ideally suited for future economic reuse.

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The photo above taken by photographer Edward L. Kasprzak (Eddie, are you still out there?) in 1962, and provided to TheHydraulics.com by renowned playwright Tom Dudzick, is a window into these better days. The photo shows some of the Dudzick clan on Emslie Street near Seneca, on their way to St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church (demolished) for a mass celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Joseph & Veronica Dudzick, Tom’s grandparents. Clad in Jackie Onassis and John F. Kennedy early 60s attire, the family is passing Tony Milosta’s grocery on Emslie and Seymour Streets. In the background are some Seneca Street commercial buildings, including the Kamman Building, and behind that the Larkin Terminal Warehouse.

The above photo shows the same view today, a view that communicates hope. The Larkin Terminal Warehouse is now repurposed as Class-A office space housing nearly 2,000 employees. The Kamman Building is being renovated by Chaintreuil Jensen Stark Architecture to house its national headquarters. Things are looking up, projects are happening, and it appears to be only the beginning. Perhaps the happy days will be here again, though there’s still a long road ahead to get there…

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The photos the Wedekindts have provided offer a wonderful glimpse into life (as well as death, an inevitable part of life) in the Hydraulics in the late 1890s, when Adolph Wedekindt plied his trade at of one of the district’s numerous cast iron-fronted storefronts (check out those leafy Corinthian capitals on the iron columns!). The photo above reveals even more insights: a sign in the window written in German, still spoken by many immigrant residents of the Hydraulics at the turn of the century, and reflections of commercial buildings across the street, including that of F. X. Winkler & Sons wholesale grocery, extant at 760 Seneca.

A. Wedekindt’s funeral parlor may have drawn much of its business from the two German-speaking congregations nearby, the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, moved from Seneca Street to Clinton and Emslie streets in 1915, and St. Matthew’s Reformed & Evangelical Church, moved to McKinley Parkway in Hamburg in the 1960s but whose building still exists at Swan and Hagerman streets.

Adolph (portrait below) was the middle son of Henry Wedekindt, a German native born in Hanover who, after spending twenty years making cabinets, moved into the undertaking business, in which caskets, aside from their contents, must not have seemed to him much different from cabinets.

Adolph himself did not survive long, in the undertaking business or otherwise, having had an untimely death at the age of thirty in 1902, only eight years after founding his firm. His wife, Julia, took in a partner, Michael Dirnberger, to continue the business, which continued at 761 Seneca under the name of Dirnberger-Wedekindt until 1915, when it closed. Adolph’s memory, as that of his neighborhood business, goes on in photographs and in the funeral home of his great nephews, Richard and Raymond.

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