The Eagle Park Disaster

EXTRA! EXTRA! EXTRA! 25 DROWN AT EAGLE PARK! 15 BODIES RECOVERED

EXCURSION DOCK AT GRAND ISLAND RESORT COLLAPSES, DROPPING 60 INTO THE WATER

So screamed the headlines of the Buffalo Evening News evening edition on June 24, 1912, the day after the tragedy. It was 90 years ago to the day and date on Sunday, June 23, 2002, when 900 Buffalonians, after a day of music, dancing and picknicking at Grand Island's Eagle Park, found their day ended not with smiles, but with screams, horror, death, drunks and corpses robbed of jewelry and clothing.

To read more of Paul F. Redding's story, see page 44 of the Summer 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

Aviation History on the Niagara Frontier

Pandemonium broke out one fine day in 1906 when a large dark object appeared in the sky. Carriages, wagons, streetcars, automobiles and bicycles halted in their tracks as Buffalonians craned their necks to peer at the cigar-shaped object overhead. The record shows that "Every street car on Main Street was stopped and all the children were let out of school to watch it. For two hours you couldn't get a telephone connection because everybody was at the windows." Thus was Buffalo introduced to the Aviation Age. The Aero Club of Buffalo, oldest such club in America, had arranged the visit of a dirigible to Western New York to stimuate broader interest in aviation. It was most successful. During the first half of the twentieth century the Niagara Frontier would become one of the nation's leading aviation centers.

To read more of John W. Percy's story, see page 52 of the Summer 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!

Watercolor "Historian" Opens Buffalo's "Windows to the Past"

Take a man with a keen appreciation for history, add a city with a colorful past, along with numerous physical reminders of same, and you get Dr. V. Roger Lalli and his ten-year effort to record his stunning "vision" of his hometown.

Add to all this the artist's highly developed discipline and photo-realistic technique, as well as Buffalo's world-class architecture - including buildings, structures and vistas designed by the great American masters - and you have even more: an historic and architectural artistic magnum opus of epic proportions.

On one hand, Dr. Lalli's collection is a representation of Buffalo as it exists today; on the other, it captures a city in flux, at the brink of fate - caught between a spectacular past when it was one of the leading cities in America and its current point, where it will either continue to decline, or spring back into something entirely better, even different perhaps.

To read more of Peter Jehrio's story, see page 60 of the Summer 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!