The Johnnie B. Wiley Sports Pavilion features restored gates of the former War Memorial Stadium, at foreground and top right.
A News staffer since 1987, I'm a Baseball Hall of Fame voter, a 2013 inductee into the Buffalo Baseball HOF and the Buffalo chapter chair of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. And I insist only Chicago & New York can come close to Buffalo pizza.
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Perhaps you recall a lot about the history of War Memorial Stadium and KeyBank Center. Maybe you're familiar with the worldwide impact of companies such as New Era and Delaware North.
But there's plenty of did-you-knows revolving around Buffalo sports that aren't nearly common knowledge. To wit, did you know that pro football games once were played on the quad at Canisius College? Or that the nation's largest manufacturer of team pennants once was on Main Street a half-mile north of the Anchor Bar? Or that a professional football league was born at the Hotel Lafayette on Washington Street?
It's nuggets such as these that will come to light in upcoming editions of the Buffalo Sports Heritage Bus Tour. I got a sneak peek at a dry run of the tour last week and can vouch you will have a lot of I-didn't-know-that moments.
The Buffalo History Museum is running the tours in conjunction with Explore Buffalo, a nonprofit organization specializing in tours of Buffalo’s architecture, history and neighborhoods. Two tours are currently scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 18 and Saturday, Nov. 12. Both start at 1 p.m. and leave from the parking lot of the history museum off Elmwood Avenue. The tour will last three to four hours and costs $42, or $37 for Explorer pass members. Tickets can be purchased at ExploreBuffalo.org.
The tour is the brainchild of Greg Tranter, president of the history museum's board of managers and owner of one of the most voluminous collections of Bills memorabilia in the area. His 108,000 pieces were donated to the museum and are the backbone of the "Icons: The Makers and Moments of Buffalo Sports" exhibit that closes the tour.
Tranter said the genesis of the idea came in 2016, when he went on a Professional Football Researchers Association convention in Green Bay, Wis. As part of the convention, attendees were invited on the Packers Heritage Trail tour, which features 25 bronze commemorative plaques located at sites where the history of the Packers and their fans unfolded. (An aside: I did a self-guided portion of the Packers tour in 2019, including the home of Vince Lombardi, the gravesite of Curly Lambeau and many other other sites. It was fascinating.)
"I was so taken by it that I came back to Buffalo with the idea that I should do something like that," Tranter said. "I started out with Bills and Bills history but plotted it out, and it's not really going to work because you can't really go from War Memorial Stadium and then out to what was Rich Stadium. And there's really not much in between. As I started to research more history around Buffalo sports, broader than the Bills, you realized the amount of things right in downtown, really researched it, and turned up all kinds of stuff."
The tour starts with a brief history of the Pan-American Exposition, which included the museum grounds and is most remembered for the assassination of President William McKinley. But for sports, the Pan-Am is most known for the Buffalo Germans, the Hall of Fame basketball team that won the 1901 Pan-Am title before winning the demonstration sport at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics.
From there, it was a drive past Canisius College on the way to the sites of Offermann and War Memorial stadiums. On the current site of Canisius' Christ the King Chapel, the school once had its football stadium known as the Villa. It was also the home field of the Buffalo All-Americans of the American Professional Football Association – the forerunner to the NFL.
In this 1951 view of the Canisius College quadrangle, the newly constructed Christ the King Chapel is visible in the middle of the photo. It was the site of the Villa, the college's football stadium that also hosted pro football games. The large white structure at top is Old Main. At the right is Loyola Hall, the home of the Jesuit priests. At left is Horan-O'Donnell Science Building. All of the buildings remain today.
That team was famously robbed of a league championship in 1921 by longtime Chicago Bears legend George Halas in an incident known as the Staley Swindle, where the Staleys beat the All-Americans in a game the Buffalo team believed to be an exhibition, but the Chicago club counted in the standings and used tiebreakers to claim the championship at a time when there were no playoffs.
"It's too bad. We should have won a championship in 1921," Tranter joked to laughter on the tour, referring to the Bills' continued quest of a Super Bowl crown.
The Buffalo All-Americans were among the original 14 NFL teams in 1920. They posted an 18-2-3 record over their first two seasons and led the league in scoring both
A visit behind the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts revealed the plaque installed in 2011 by historian John Boutet of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame to mark the site of Offermann Stadium, the home of Bisons baseball and many other events through 1960. And then it was on to the Johnnie B. Wiley Sports Pavilion. If you're of the right age like me, you know the War Memorial site as the "Rockpile."
"The tour will be a good mix of things that people know and can relate to," Tranter said. "You think of the history of War Memorial, going back to when it was Roesch Memorial Stadium. Lots of people equate that stadium to the Bills and then, of course, the Bisons playing there in the '80s. But many people don't know that 27 neutral-site NFL games were played there in the '30s, '40s and '50s. There's a bunch of tidbits that I can throw out as part of the tour that even pretty hardcore Buffalo sports fans won't necessarily know."
On Sept. 17, 2010 — the 50th anniversary of the final Buffalo Bisons game at Offermann Stadium — John Boutet headed to the site of the old ballpark at Michigan and East Ferry. Boutet, site exhibit director of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame and curator of Buffalosportsmuseum.com, looked around and took a few pictures with some old
Some examples were that the Rockpile was built at a cost of $2.6 million and opened in 1937 with more than 32,000 on hand for a college football game between Colgate and Tulane. The neutral-site games included big names such as the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Backers; Pete Gogolak became the first soccer-style kicker in football history there; and former Bills kicker Booth Lusteg was mugged walking home after missing a key field goal in a 1966 tie with San Diego.
The tour and discussion continues downtown with sites you'd expect such as the Tim Horton statue at Canalside, KeyBank Center and the Sabres' Alumni Plaza (when are we ever getting the Rick Jeanneret and Dominik Hasek statues to join the French Connection?). But there are other discussions you would not have otherwise known.
The current St. Vincent de Paul Society building on Main Street used to house Trench Manufacturing, which went bankrupt in 1996 after spending most of the previous 30 years as the nation's largest maker of sports pennants. The Hotel Lafayette on Washington Street was the site of the formation of the original American Football League in 1940. The Buffalo team was known as the Indians, then played in 1941 as the Tigers before the league folded in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Hotel at the Lafayette was where the original American Football League, including the "Buffalo Indians," was born in 1940.
The Ellicott Square Building on Washington Street opened in 1896 as the world's largest office building at 447,000 square feet. Perhaps today its most notable connection to sports was as the Ellicott Hotel in the 1984 Robert Redford classic "The Natural." But it also served as the team offices for the city's entry in the All-America Football Conference from 1946-49, first known as the Bisons and then the Bills. The Hotel Statler on Niagara Square was the site of the Bills' original ticket office and the home of Ralph C. Wilson Jr.'s office after the club's 1960 birth.
"That's part of the reason I tried to pick out some sites like the Ellicott Square Building that have a much bigger history than sports," he said. "Sports is a very small part of it, so I can talk about the architecture of the building and the importance of the building and the significance when it was built, but also put in the piece of sports history part of it."
Tranter regaled his guests with those tales and many more, and was pleased at the memories they had of the Aud. He had his own, including the bitterness around the Braves' last-second playoff loss to Boston in 1974.
And he made sure to remind us of another trivia gem: The Los Angeles Clippers aren't the only NBA team that can trace its roots to the Aud. The Atlanta Hawks can as well, after playing six games over 38 days as the "Buffalo Bisons" at the Aud in 1946 before moving to Moline, Ill. They eventually became the powerful St. Louis Hawks, winning the NBA title in 1958, before moving to Atlanta for good in 1968.
"There's a nostalgia still to the arena even after all these years," Tranter said of the Aud. "Everybody has a story to tell."
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A News staffer since 1987, I'm a Baseball Hall of Fame voter, a 2013 inductee into the Buffalo Baseball HOF and the Buffalo chapter chair of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. And I insist only Chicago & New York can come close to Buffalo pizza.
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
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The Johnnie B. Wiley Sports Pavilion features restored gates of the former War Memorial Stadium, at foreground and top right.
The Hotel at the Lafayette was where the original American Football League, including the "Buffalo Indians," was born in 1940.
In this 1951 view of the Canisius College quadrangle, the newly constructed Christ the King Chapel is visible in the middle of the photo. It was the site of the Villa, the college's football stadium that also hosted pro football games. The large white structure at top is Old Main. At the right is Loyola Hall, the home of the Jesuit priests. At left is Horan-O'Donnell Science Building. All of the buildings remain today.
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