A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [26]
Buffalo’s streets were filthy. At the rear of the horse stables on Erie Street, manure was piled forty feet high, alive with swarms of flies and mosquitoes and the movement of a million maggots feeding on it.
The Fourth of July was a day the city went a little crazy. The festivities would begin on the second and not end until the fifth. Revelers would get so drop-dead drunk they would have to be hauled by their feet into the back rooms of saloons and laid out side by side until they sobered up. And it wasn’t just on the waterfront. During one July 4 fireworks celebration, a rocket hit the steeple at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Maria now worshipped, and set it ablaze. Fortunately, the loss was covered by insurance, and St. John’s was rebuilt.
When Maria and her son settled in Buffalo, its population had more than doubled since Grover Cleveland had arrived as a teenager two decades earlier. It was the third largest city in the state, after New York City and Albany and, nationally, ranked below San Francisco, then the tenth largest city in America.
Buffalo simmered with tension. Protestants dominated the legal, medical, and business professions. Their newspaper of record was the Commercial Advertiser, which once conveyed concern about the city’s immigrant poor, whether they could survive the harsh Buffalo winter to come, with the words, “What shall be done with these poor creatures,” before condescendingly pointing out that after all, immigrants required plenty of help because their “reasoning and moral faculties are limited.” The paternalism and arrogance of the ruling class was also communicated by that other mouthpiece of the Protestant establishment, the Buffalo Express, which disdainfully suggested that Catholics might want to consider spending less money on their churches, for if they did, perhaps they could manage to feed their hungry.
The Irish who were employed as unskilled laborers on the waterfront lived mainly in the first ward, on the city’s south side, close to the terminus of the Erie Canal. Their voices were heard in the pages of the Catholic Sentinel, which proclaimed the Irish American’s respect for law and order while noting that an empty stomach can sometimes drive reason away. German immigrants resided in small-framed houses on the east side, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh wards, where the principal language spoken was the mother tongue. These German Americans were the tradesmen of the city—shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, butchers, clockmakers, and bakers. Racially, Buffalo was strictly segregated: A small community of black people lived east of Main Street; there were two black churches, and prior to the Civil War, blacks were required to send their children to a special “African School.”
Severe winter weather made Buffalo an uninviting place for many newcomers. In the summer, the daily struggle of life eased up. For relaxation, families attended church bazaars and cruised Lake Erie or took in the natural splendor of the 350-acre parkland designed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, fresh from his triumph of creating Central Park in New York City. Of course, there was also Niagara Falls, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and already a popular destination for honeymooners. There was no public library system, but the Young Men’s Association maintained a library of twenty thousand volumes available to all.
Entrepreneurs were making fortunes. Jewett and Root’s Stove Factory employed more than two hundred men, the Buffalo Iron and Nail Works manufactured fifteen thousand pounds of nails a day, and Ketchum’s Mowing Machine produced the nation’s first mechanical lawn mower.
Mansion Row along Delaware Avenue was the location of the city’s most magnificent residences. There, shaded by towering elms and great stretches of lawns,