All my life I have loved trains. I received my first train for Christmas in 1929 - a Lionel 248 with a 427 and 430 in red. Each year around October, I would look in the paper for the ten cent coupon to send for a Lionel train catalog, and then watch eagerly for the mailman. When I finally received my catalog, I would go through every page, dreaming about all the trains I wished I could have. Unfortunately, during the big depression my dad was just about making ends meet. But somehow my parents had managed to give me my first train.
As I got older, I started to buy my own trains. I remember a 238 E Torpedo, a bullet-shaped streamlined steam engine based on a revolutionary Raymond Loewy design, with three blue and silver passenger cars, including an observation deck. Then there was the blunt-nosed zephyr-type Commodore Vanderbilt 265E with freight cars. I built my first layout up in our attic. My friends and I had a lot of enjoyment running that layout.
To read more of Robert Shuh's story, see page 36 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!
The Honeymoon Bridge, as it came to be known by millions
of visitors to Niagara Falls, was officially called the Upper Steel Arch Bridge,
also known as the Falls View Bridge. The first Falls View Suspension Bridge
opened in 1869; it was destroyed in a January storm in 1889 and replaced that
May, taking a mere 38 days to rebuild. In 1897, when the bridge proved inadequate
to carry the new electric street car trolleys, the new steel arch bridge was
designed by Leffert E. Buck and built by the Pencoyd Bridge Company of Philadelphia.
Work on the abutments had already begun. The Niagara Falls Gazette reported:
"The stone bases for the new structure are already completed so that there will
be nothing to delay the construction of the bridge when the steel arrives."
The Niagara Falls Power Company's tailrace (lower millrace) tunnel was located directly under the Upper Suspension Bridge. The extreme velocity of water coming from this tunnel made it necessary to locate the new bridge's abutments 14 feet upstream, closer to the American Falls. On the Canadian side, the abutments were located immediately below the existing bridge. The abutments were 67 feet apart and placed only a few feet from the river's edge. Since there were ice jams every winter, this placement so close to the river's edge would be the cause of the bridge's destruction.
To read more of Paul Redding and Denise O'Meara's story, see page 42 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!
We Buffalonians tend to stop asking why the great decisions that shaped our city were made. This is a defect, especially in cases where the local citizenry had considerable say and could affect the outcome. Such was the 1967 decision to place the new campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo in the suburban town of Amherst. That event set a powerful pattern for the future. Many subsequent decisions about Buffalo's built environment, by civic bodies and private citizens, hark back to it.
It should be easy to write about a subject engendering such crystal clarity as the placement of U.B. It isn't, because the more you learn, the more each discovery gets caught in the undertow of the last, and space is brief here. A succinct way to fix upon the story is to develop a point of view through one character, and whether my choice is just or not I leave to the reader to decide. The protagonist is Robert Traynham Coles, Chair of the Committee for an Urban University (CUU), the side that represented the underdog.
To read more of Linda Levine's story, see page 50 of the Winter 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!
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