Western New York Heritage Magazine

Joseph Lyman Silsbee opened his first architectural office in Syracuse, New York in 1874. Soon after, at the age of 27, he completed work on the Syracuse Savings Bank office building. The young architect won this, his first major commission, over competition from Syracuse, Boston and New York. The significance of this was twofold. It gave Silsbee excellent exposure, as it was the largest office building to be constructed in Syracuse at the time. It also launched him as a fashionable architect designing homes for bankers and investors.

The Syracuse Savings Bank commission also placed Silsbee at the forefront of architectural practice in upstate New York, and he was soon busy designing buildings in Albany, Peekskill, and Utica. By 1881, he had commissions in Buffalo and Chicago and had set up offices in each of those cities. One of the more intriguing aspects of Silsbee's career is that from 1882 to the end of 1884, he had three simultaneously operating offices. These included his own office in Syracuse, a partnership with Edward Kent in Chicago, and a partnership with James Marling in Buffalo.

Residential work dominated Silsbee's practice, particularly in Buffalo. His proficiency in domestic architecture was carried on by several of his employees. Frank Lloyd Wright and George Washington Maher, who both worked in Silsbee's Chicago office, were pioneers in the development of inventive and carefully designed residential architecture. Former partners Edward Kent and James Marling followed suit by setting up offices in Buffalo and creating artistic residential designs here. By the time Silsbee closed his Buffalo office, he had completed twenty-six known designs in the city. Twenty-one of these were domestic in nature.

To read more of Christopher Payne's story, see page 8 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

Souls that are not at peace often bring turmoil to the living. For the last year, the spirit of James B. Parker has possessed me. It happened easily enough - a friend at work mentioned he had read that an African American knocked President McKinley's assassin down to the ground at the PanAmerican Exposition. I was intrigued that this was unknown to me and to so many other people in Buffalo. After a cursory review on the Internet, I found it was true.

Now, this is where the spirit part came in. It seemed I could not rest once I knew that James B. Parker did exist.

The search for Parker led me to a greater understanding of a period that I had generally overlooked. Between 1865, when the Civil War ended, and 1914, when World War I began, African Americans saw legal segregation come into full force. Two of the most dynamic of African American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, emerged on opposite ends of the political spectrum. In 1898, Ida B. Wells led a delegation to President William McKinley to protest lynching. In 1901, Congressman George White was the last African American to serve in Congress for almost twenty years.

Imagine struggling with the forces that African Americans found in their environment at the turn of the century. Why did James Parker want to shake McKinley's hand in the first place? He was a waiter working at the Exposition, not a spectator reveling in its wonders.

To read more of Daryl Rasuli's story, see page 22 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

There are no buildings surviving from the once densely populated waterfront area of Buffalo's "canal district" There is even some confusion about the physical definition of that infamous place. It was a five-sided area, almost completely surrounded by water between the Commercial Slip and the Evans Ship Canal, stretching from the Buffalo River to the Erie Canal. Beginning in the 1930s and through the next 15 years, the entire district was demolished as an intolerable slum, erasing the scenes of over a century of its turbulent history from the establishment of the western terminus of the Erie Canal, through the heyday of the streaming throngs of immigrant passage to the west, to the notorious days of lawless debauchery and vicious ethnic rivalry. The slums were cleared for the construction of the multiple high-rise Dante Project apartment buildings which are known today as the Marine Drive Apartments. The Commercial Slip had already been filled in in the 1920s. In the late 1930s, the Memorial Auditorium was constructed on the site of Spaulding's Exchange. It was at the edge of the canal district with part of its foundation covering the historic juncture of the Erie Canal and the Commercial Slip. There was historically a flight of steps at this juncture leading up from the water level to Commercial Street. It was the debarkation point for the hundreds of thousands of bewildered and adventurous immigrants that had come west on the Erie Canal. The abandoned bed of the Erie Canal became the right-of-way for the N.Y.S.Thruway's Niagara Expressway. A photo taken in 1936 of the rear wall of an anonymous dilapidated wooden building at 44-50 Commercial Street, just before its demolition, has spurred intensive research into the history of that building and its relationship to the whole story of the canal district - with surprising results.

To read more of John Conlin's story, see page 24 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

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