Mark Goldman - Table of
Contents
EXCERPT - Chapter 3: "Creating the First Tours of
Buffalo in 1974"
City of
My
Heart: Buffalo, 1967-2020
By Mark Goldman
|
City of My Heart: Buffalo,
1967-2020
Forward: by
Karen Brady(Published in October 2021) AVAILABLE IN LOCAL BOOKSTORES. Introduction: A New York State of Mind Chapter 1: A Brand New World - Buffalo, 1967 Chapter 2: An Italian Hill Town in Buffalo? How the neighborhood of Black Rock changed my way of thinking about life in the city Chapter 3: Into the ‘Seventies - How people stared down decline and, with faith in themselves in the future of their community, rolled up their sleeves, went to work and got it done Chapter 4: Into the ‘Eighties - How a teacher and his students discovered their city… together Chapter 5: Judge John T. Curtin - Struggling with the challenges of a changing city, helped restore my faith in Buffalo Chapter 6: The Calumet Arts Café - The arts as a tonic for an ailing downtown Chapter 7: What Would Grandma Rosie Do? - How everyday wisdom brought sanity to downtown development plans Chapter 8: The Buffalo Story - History and heritage as the building blocks of community Chapter 9: Next year in Jerusalem - What? A New Yorker finds his Jewish identity in, where? Buffalo? Chapter 10: Discovering the Power of Faith, Family and Friendship - In South Buffalo, I learned, you are never alone. Chapter 11: In the End - The enchanted landscape of North Buffalo and Central Park Epilogue: A healing heart: Buffalo, 2020 |
| Bus tours of Buffalo?
In depth looks at the city’s history? Its neighborhoods? It’s
architecture? When? In 1974 when people were bailing on Buffalo,
leaving the city in droves? You think people will want to go on a bus
tour of Buffalo? Well, I thought after spending days driving around the
nooks and crannies of the city on my own, fascinated by what I, a
transplanted New Yorker discovered, perhaps the people of Buffalo might
indeed be interested in such a tour. I had taken my students at UB on
what I called Mark Goldman’s Rubberneck Tour of Buffalo. There was no
better way to learn about the city, we quickly discovered than by
driving around and through it and on a Saturday morning in October
1974, I and my thirty-odd students left the parking lot in front
of Hayes Hall on UB’s Main Street Campus and off we went.
Getting off and back on at carefully planned stops all along the way,
we covered the city, the skeptical and reluctant driver making hair-pin
turns around tight corners into the hidden corners of the Fruit Belt,
Black Rock and the First Ward. Stopping only for lunch at the
Broadway Market, my tour covered the West Side driving down Niagara and
onto Hudson and Allen, up Delaware Avenue past rows of
magnificent mansions so recently inhabited by Buffalo’s elite, and then
across to the East Side where at the corner of Michigan and E. Ferry I
pointed out the site of the long demolished Offerman Stadium. It is
hard today, when bus tours of the city have become a fixture, to
exaggerate the conceit of my bus tour. Conceived at a time when
the arc of the city’s history was at its lowest, a time when people
could not leave the city fast enough, here I was, this kid from New
York, doing what? Taking people on bus tours of Buffalo? You’ve
got to be kidding, right? As much as the tour itself I liked the story and the idea behind it and so I pitched it to a friend of mine, a woman named Karen Brady whose column “Karen’s Korner” in The Buffalo News, not unlike Sean Kirst’s today, covered local human interest stories. Might she be interested, I asked her, in writing about my tour, something that I was now calling “Mark Goldman’s Rubberneck Bus Tour of Buffalo.” Well, indeed she was and in an article that appeared in the late winter of 1974 she told the story of “the New York kid who came to Buffalo.” Mark has found a home here, she wrote, and he’s raising his family here too. (The article was illustrated with a photograph of me holding up my two year old son Charlie.) He’s been studying Buffalo’s history and he wants to share it with the people of his adopted city. With that in mind, she continued, he’s offering weekly bus tours of Buffalo: for ten dollars, with lunch at the Broadway Market thrown in, he will lead you on a bus up and down and all around the highways and by-ways of Buffalo. Karen put my phone number at the end of the column and encouraged people to call me. The response was overwhelming. The notion of exploring Buffalo had tapped a well of deep-seeded, but seemingly long-repressed interest in the city’s history. Dozens of people called and soon, I told my businessman brother in New York, I too had “a business”. The logistics were difficult and complicated but with the help of my wife Kitty’s excellent organizational skills—keeping track of ticket sales, deposits, bus rentals and restaurant reservations—it worked. And so it went, every Saturday for three months I, with microphone in hand and memorized script in my head, led no fewer than forty Buffalonians on a tour up, down, around and all over the city. Few of the passengers , and certainly not the bus drivers, had been down any of the totally off-the-beaten-paths that I took them on, in, on and around the ancient streets of the city’s neighborhoods, stopping to look at the empty and abandoned Prudential Building, the moth-balled Shea’s Theater and shabby, past Frank Lloyd Wright’s run-down and deserted Darwin D Martin House, “Mark Goldman’s Rubberneck Bus Tour of Buffalo” penetrated the hidden high-ways and by-ways of Buffalo. The people were thrilled and I was having a ball. Word spread, the phones rang off the hook. I was making a little money from the tours (as was the Blue Bird Bus Company from whom I was renting the busses), but by the Spring of 1975 it finally became too much for me. I decided to bring my long-running hit to an end. In the meantime, however, I’d gotten a phone call from a man named John Montana, the president of Blue Bird Bus Company. He wanted to take me out for lunch. Montana, I’d heard, was the son of John Montana, the legendary local mob boss who, it was said, had once controlled private taxi and bus service in Buffalo going back to the 1920s. Montana seemed nice on the phone, saying that he had something he wanted to talk to me about. Could I meet him for lunch at the Statler Hotel? Excited, I joined him there and shortly after we sat down he told me that he liked “my operation” and that his people at Blue Bird enjoyed working with me. He said that he saw a future in Buffalo tourism; someday soon, he felt, people would realize what we’ve got here in Buffalo, “all that architecture and those neighborhoods,” he said. He grew up in one of them, he said, the old Italian neighborhood on Busti Avenue. He was open about his family and talked freely about his father’s origins in Montedoro, Sicily and how, by the 1920s, he’d become the first Italian elected official in Buffalo. It was his father, John said, who built a large taxi and bus business that their family still owned. Anyway, he said, he wanted to talk to me about my “tour business”. He was interested, he said, in “buying” my “operation.” Caught completely off guard and unprepared for what was quickly turning into a business meeting, I nervously responded that in fact I had no operation. All that I had was “an idea” and I wasn’t sure how, I said, I could sell that. I was tired of the “tour business” anyway and was ready to “retire”. He was as befuddled as I was. Our lunch quickly broke up and as we left I thanked him for lunch and reminding him that I was done with the bus business, I told him: “You go for it. It’s yours now.” I recognized that what people most liked about my tour was that I was able to offer them an historical context which helped them to understand why and how their city developed the way it did. I could sense their excitement and their eagerness to share their growing understanding of their city’s history. By pointing out the connection between specific places and specific events, by pointing out, for example, a parking lot in downtown Buffalo where there was once a thriving public market; or a tavern in the First Ward where the great Fenian Raid was launched, I was able to directly connect the Buffalonians of today with the people, the places and the events of the past. In the process, they, like me, were becoming more attached to the city that we all called home. They too, I sensed, were beginning to feel that they too could “fix this place.” Over the protests of many, in the spring of 1975, I had indeed “retired” and began to focus instead on other activities, some academic, some entrepreneurial, that would continue to keep me intensely and excitedly engaged in the work of learning about Buffalo. I am immensely proud of this short but most interesting chapter of my life’s work. Mr. Montana was right. There was a future in Buffalo tours. But my tours of Buffalo—“Mark Goldman’s Rubberneck Bus Tours of Buffalo”—were there first, long before those who followed in my wake and have, as a result, made bus tours of Buffalo the popular attraction that they are today. Tim Tielman, who has been leading tours on an ingeniously designed open bus, reports that over 3,000 people, rode with him in 2020. And Chuck LaChiusa who founded “Explore Buffalo” in 2006 reports that he, and a full staff of volunteer guides, are now operating over 80 tours, some on foot, some on boats and some in kayaks. In 2018 alone, over 20,000 went on his tours. But I was there first! The seed that I planted in the early 1970s may have been small but it certainly was fertile. Long after I “retired”, people remembered my tours and every once in a while I’d get a call and a request. “My daughter’s getting married,” one man said. “Dozens of people are coming from out of town to the wedding. Would you take them on one of your tours?” Once, one of my favorite Buffalonians, Dr. Lydia Wright, one of the city’s all-time great leaders, called. Her family was having a reunion, she said, coming in from all parts of the county. Would I, she wondered, take twenty of them on a tour? |
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