I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map…
In talking with my boss yesterday about brewing in Buffalo, she reminded me that the Erie County website has a map of Buffalo from 1894. You can click on the red numebrs in each section to zoom in, and there’s a surprising amount of detail provided: the type of building, number of floors, business name, etc. I think I was most surprised that the city has been essentially unchanged in the past 114 years… there’s just so much more stuff! My street had one house on it, and my mom’s had none. Some street names are different, and some had alternate names (Colvin was also ‘Niagara Falls Boulevard’? Really?)
To keep this slightly brewery related, we followed some of the directions on Peter Jablonski’s Edifices of Buffalo Breweries and found quite a few on Plate 34 (a little over halfway down on the lefthand side, by Washington and Burton).
(Don’t care about Buffalo? St Louis has a similar map from 1875)
July 20th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
In 1875 St. Louis was a vast town and dwarfed Erie or wherever it is you live, Conley. The detail from the map linked above reveals history once precious and still active in the theme. St. Louis had that year lost a game of Hide And Go Seek to perennial intrastate rivals Kansas City and for our twitting they had told the entire City of St. Louis to go jump in the river. Of course those hearty and robust souls obliged and while they were getting their dunking hooligans from KC slipped in and burned down the newspapers.
Image: An entire city goes for a swim while across town freedom of the press is mocked by Kansas City.
Despite the exquisiteness of the joke the newspaper burnings failed to elicit much laughter from St. Louisans and in 1876 the two cities agreed to give up their twitting competitions after a final murky incident. While Kansas Citians took a day of rest and met in rolling parks to remember The Civil War on April 15 with art and science, some 20,000 of last year’s dunked men women and children slipped into the KC stockyard area, bribed or otherwise silenced the few Kansas Citians working there, and slaughtered and roasted every animal and had a picnic. It was no violent thing for St. Louis had sent the Corp of Kosher Butchers, assembled for the occasion, and chamber orchestras and singers touched the animals and the audience with sentimental music. The blood was frozen with a device invented for the occasion and sent on to Europe for blood sausage as a twit of them. Kansas Citians would have admired it had they ever learned of it but all they ever observed was that after their Memorial all the stockyard animals had disappeared, and that there were opened barrels of potato salad and stands of pumpernickel left in their stockyard buildings. Fearing a twitting they never mentioned it and both cities agreed to declare the competition over and a draw, the stories becoming in the middle 20th century the private lore of Kansas City and St. Louis librarians and their drinking companions.