I was recently introduced to Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Last Fine Time (1990). Really amazing read if you're interested in post-war Buffalo social history and the decline of once thriving neighborhoods and cities. Klinkenborg focuses on the lives of the people who made 'George & Eddies' an everyday destination at 722 Sycamore Street, corner of Herman.
Here's the corner today.
Seven twenty-two Sycamore Street looks like a patch where the very idea of property has been voided. Its vacancy is the sign of something larger than deeds. It resembles a Midwestern field where the stand of crops shows odd variations: the sign of a buried well or a bulldozed farmhouse or soil where there once grew a border of crabapple trees. This lot was Indian territory. It was part of the Great Northwest, a wheat growing region, the breadbasket of a very young nation. It was part of the rise of Buffalo. It was all the things it has been since those long ago days. Now 722 Sycamore Street lies fallow. - The Last Fine Time, p. 202
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"The Last Fine Time" is one of the best books ever written about Buffalo. Nice to have the map & pix of the site.
Just wondering: Where were you able to obtain such a clear image of that 1940 Sanborn map? Did you just take a photograph of the maps at the library?
Anon,
Buffalo's Central Library has a fine collection of these maps in the Grosvenor Room. Really worth checking out...