Entertainment and Vice

[00:07.84] In 1825, you would have seen the seeds of a future Canal District in the city of Buffalo, which became a city in 1832. [00:16.81] But the way to understand the Canal District and what it became in terms of entertainment and rough housing and whatever else is to understand that as the trade developed, [00:28.80] Buffalo was the place, and that particular district was the place, where lake sailors were paid off at the end of their voyages from the heartland to Buffalo with cargo. [00:41.00] Canallers got paid off because it was the end of their journey from the East Coast to the terminus here in Buffalo. [00:48.48] So you had a lot of sailors and canalers who didn't like each other with money to spend, and you have this huge flood of immigration coming through, who didn't understand the language, didn't understand the culture, and could be relieved of their money fairly easily. [01:03.43] And you mix in a few soldiers with money from Fort Porter up the river, looking for entertainment, and it started to develop as a very rough, raw waterfront. [01:16.28] It was generally considered one of the three toughest waterfronts in the world, behind Shanghai and San Francisco's Barbary Coast. [01:26.76] After the Civil War, it became known as the Infected District because it was that bad. [01:36.36] Entertainments ranged from the ladies of the evening. [01:40.28] There was a lot of gambling. [01:41.72] There was heavy drinking. [01:43.24] In the early eighteen hundreds, the average consumption of liquor, of whiskey, was measured in the gallons. [01:50.60] The Christian Homestead Association did a map in 1893. [01:54.90] They mapped out 75 houses of ill repute, 76 legitimate businesses, 108 saloons, and 19 free concert saloons, which are basically burlesque houses. [02:07.63] That's in a seven block area. [02:09.94] It is just concentrated vice, and that led to a lot of crime down there. [02:15.31] It was vile. [02:16.27] It stank. [02:17.47] It was noisy and chaotic and dangerous. [02:21.02] And the Christian Homestead Association called it the very nostrils of hell [02:27.00] and called Canal Street the wickedest street in the world, the center of vice and sin and gambling and cock fighting and all kinds of violence. [02:35.26] There were spectacular murders in the 1870s, the 1890s that dominated the press for weeks. [02:42.72] There were dark sides to the district, obviously, and much of it revolved around the entertainment. [02:48.49] The original Christie's minstrels, which were black faced minstrel troops, a very shameful form of entertainment that was a step toward jazz. [02:57.37] We wouldn't stand for that today. [02:59.29] It's demeaning. [03:00.57] But at the time, it was the craze of entertainment. [03:08.01] The waterfront generated great wealth in Buffalo, a population explosion. [03:14.33] We were fewer than 2,500 souls when the village hosted the first canal in 1825. [03:22.64] By the end of that century, seventy five years later, we had 350,000 people, and we were the eighth largest city in the country.